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By Phil Hartstein
We spend a lot of time talking about today’s middle and high schoolers as an “always online” generation. Screens fill nearly every empty space in their lives, from entertainment, conversations with friends, directions to answers, and increasingly, the way they learn and solve problems.
This summer, I had the opportunity to watch 13 Scouts, ages 11 to 16 and roughly half of them girls, experience almost the exact opposite. As one of five adventure trip leaders with Menlo Park’s Scouts BSA Troop 222, I spent seven days with them in California’s Emigrant Wilderness. This was actual wilderness. They hiked more than 50 miles, carrying everything they needed on their backs for a week.
There was nothing simulated about the experience. The mountains were real, the elevation was real and the exhaustion was real. When the day’s route did not go according to plan, there was no app that could solve the problem for them. They had to figure it out using their brains, a physical map and compass skills they had learned along the way.
The group spent months preparing, logging more than 60 cumulative miles of backpacking hikes before we reached the trailhead. Once in the wilderness, they navigated and rerouted, filtered their own water, built camp in imperfect settings, cooked with limited fuel and slept above the tree line at nearly 10,000 feet.
Scouting is intentionally structured so the young people organize and lead themselves. That meant we adults occasionally had to do something that can be surprisingly difficult for parents: stay out of the way. When uncertainty arose, our first instinct was to offer guidance rather than instruction. Sometimes they chose wisely and sometimes they didn’t. Either way, they immediately experienced what happened next. I watched that repeatedly, including with my own son.
When someone was injured, others stepped in to provide first aid, adjust the group’s pace and redistribute weight. When they were tired, they kept moving. That independence seemed empowering in ways that are difficult to replicate in their normal cadence of school, sports, music and homework.
Something else happened that I had not anticipated. With no screen immediately available to fill every quiet moment, they learned what to do with the space. In the afternoons, they explored meadows, climbed rocks and swam in lakes. As the stars came out each night, they talked, joked around and played cards. Sometimes they were bored, and they figured out what to do with that too. They became comfortable with the quiet at the end of the day and got to know one another in a way that is difficult when schedules are full and nearly every part of daily life is only a few finger taps away.
Pictures from a trip like this barely capture it. After enough photographs, even the extraordinary begins to look repetitive: another mountain, another lake, another enormous tree. What they do not show is the uncertainty at the beginning, or how different the same group looked seven days later. In one of our final photographs, they are dirty, exhausted and still smiling. What struck me later was that nobody had bothered to take off their pack. A week earlier those packs were heavy and unfamiliar. By the end, they were simply part of how the group operated, carrying everything they needed to take care of themselves and one another.
On our last night, one Scout told me his favorite part of the trip was getting to know the people around him better and building closer bonds with them. It was a pretty profound observation from a newly minted 12-year-old, but I completely understood why. For seven days, these impressive kids had something increasingly difficult to manufacture: an experience they shared wholly in the real world.
None of this means technology does not have an important place in their lives. It does, and I am certainly not suggesting parents stop worrying about screen time. But limiting screens and digital conveniences may only be half of the equation. We also need to create more opportunities that require effort, responsibility, judgment, uncertainty and real consequences.
A computer can give you an answer, while the wilderness makes you figure it out and live with what happens next. A screen can connect you to someone, while seven days in the backcountry can teach you what it means to truly rely on them. Maybe the answer to screen time is not only limiting the screen, but deliberately building more experiences into their schedules that allow the real world to prove it is interesting enough, demanding enough and meaningful enough that the screen simply cannot compete.
Phil Hartstein is a Menlo Park resident and assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 222.
I love all of this. I would add there is a great book called Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age by Maryanne Wolf. It’s a pretty academic dive into the reading brain and the effects we are already seeing in children and adults on their reading and attention stamina. If we hope to continue being the kind of humans we have been, we should be aware of just how much those addictive apps are changing our brains.