Comments about ‘Michelle Lehnardt: Turn off your cellphone/iPad/Kindle and listen’

I agree with this totally. We are raising a generation who do not know how to communicate face to face and it's getting worse not better. I think texting is fine for short messages, but not iPhone in hand 24/7 (and especially not in Church!) Same goes for iPads. They are incredible to use but not all the time. We have theatre tickets and go to ball games and ballroom dance programs regularly. I have heard of a family who checks the cell phones in at 7 PM and lets them back out the next day. There are probably many ways a family could monitor all of the social media stuff in a way they decide is best for them.

I have heard from several sources that texting "withdrawl" is a huge problem for young missionaries at the MTC. Just a thought to begin now to curtail some usage in some way.

What do you expect? Schools feel technology is the way to teach, and now we have a generation of addicts.

Keep it simple,---pencil, paper, glue, scissors, and books.

Kudos to that conductor! I would love to have a Smartphone or an Ipad loaded with useful, if not entertaining apps, but I know myself well enough to know that I would be on it ALL THE TIME. Over the past several months I've tried to limit the amount of time my kids see me in front of a screen (difficult, since I'm a writer, a news reader, and keep all my recipe books and other frequently needed information on the computer). I've cut my Facebook news feed down to the dozen or so people whose lives I actually care about. I only let my kids play their computer games (which are mostly educational) after they've done extra school worksheets and chores, and even then, they only get an hour a day, max.

We've been enforcing no phones or devices at the dinner table, and that's worked out pretty well, too. Texts can wait. Virtual fantasies can wait. Housework can usually wait, too. But kids don't keep, and after hearing of many accidents and illness among friends and family, I'm reminded that we never know how short life will be.