The Opt-Out Family Quotes

“As it turns out, I needn't be more engaging for my kids. I need only to be engaged with them.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“As it turns out”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“May we never again scroll through someone else’s life without attending to our own.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“What is anxiety if not the overwhelming belief that you cannot handle the world you live in? Kids need the chance to be on their own sometimes: playing”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“Our digital world is preoccupied with capturing moments. But studies suggest that taking too many photos erodes our memories and causes us to miss the moment itself. Before you take a photo”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“We remind ourselves that our babies begin to follow our gaze at three months old—and they never stop. Where we look”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“Mr. Rogers”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“Words matter. Mistakes happen. What do you think? Tell me more. People are more important than things. Many hands make lighter work.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“If your kids aren’t rolling their eyes”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“Children are like rechargeable batteries and can get a recharge only from those they are connected to,” author Pam Leo tells me. The less accessible we are”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“Depending on the stages our children are in”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“Under the guise of funny memes and careless captions, we have outsourced our parental guidance to a platform of people who are unfit for the job. It’s widely acknowledged that a corporation, society, or community is only as healthy as its leaders. So with today’s top influencers reporting crumbling pressure and crippling anxiety, what happens to their followers?”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“Take a cue from Joseph Addison, a seventeenth-century English poet and essayist, who posited that everyone needs “three grand essentials of happiness: something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for” (Cowan, n.d.).”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“The level of cooperation parents get from children is usually equal to the level of connection children feel with their parents. —Pam Leo”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“What sounds good to a child is rarely the same as what looks good to a child. This is why our rote suggestions of activities—Why don’t you play outside? Why don’t you try your new drawing book? Why don’t you play cards?—never truly motivate. Boredom is a sensory feeling that calls for a sensory response. Consider: if you were hungry, which option would you prefer? A friend saying, “Why don’t you make pot roast?” Or a friend placing a fresh-from-the-dutch-oven pot roast right in front of you to eat? Boredom is the same way: we can suggest a hundred different meals, but until we actually eat, we’re still hungry.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“Goal-setting places your child—and your family—squarely in the direction of their dreams. Rather than being co-opted by the plans of a multi-billion-dollar app that profits from your child’s passivity, he or she is walking toward a true, unique, and self-guided passion that points to a more promising future.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“Those shared moments stack up to a familywide bond where you’re not only championing a cause but also championing each other.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“didn’t need to teach my children what to learn. I wanted, instead, to teach them how to learn.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“The question is not, How much does the youth know? when he has finished his education but, How much does he care?”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“Mend the part of the world that is within our reach. —Clarissa Pinkola Estes”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“After all, there’s a reason it’s called social media. It’s media. As MIT professor Sherry Turkle notes in David Sax’s book The Revenge of Analog, “Sociable technology always disappoints, because it promises what it cannot deliver. ‘It promises friendship but can only deliver performance’” (Sax 2016, 240).”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“I couldn’t see beyond my front door, past the mailbox, down the street. I trusted social media, the news pundits, the internet to tell me what lay beyond.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“But when we seek—and gain—certainty in extremes, we get a society that lacks empathy, that fails to envision positive outcomes, that struggles to imagine common ground. We feel confused. Hopeless. Worn. And then we hop back online.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“These clips are fed to our children swiftly and repetitively by an algorithm that favors the shock factor. How swiftly? A recent report from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found that it can take less than three minutes after signing up for a TikTok account before a user is shown content related to suicide and about five more minutes before a user is introduced to a community promoting eating disorder content (Murphy 2022).”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“Do we want to spend the short time we have with our kids managing technology limits, monitoring screen time, battling over parental controls? Do we want to run the likely risk that our child will be exposed to something they can’t—and shouldn’t—yet handle? Do we want to place a wedge between our kids and ourselves, positioning ourselves as tech overlords who grant access to their phones like some sort of behavior-driven candy dispenser? I don’t think we do.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“It's not about fearfully shooing our children away from screens, slamming laptops shut in fits of despair. It is, simply, opening the door wide to something better. It's the quiet recognition that every time we opt out of technology, we opt in to life. . . . After all, the opposite of opting in is not opting out. It's living free.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“I am filled with hope for the generation to come that will once again be given permission to delight in a cloudless ski, a tender playmate, an afternoon of joy to swing upside down among the leaves. For a growing movement of children who will dance without TikTok. Who will live and love without commentary. Who will smile--widely and freely--without a filter. And I am filled with gratitude for the bold, brave, and unapologetic parents who will point their children to the heights of presence and admiration and innocence that Silicon Valley can never scale.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“But we know the truth, you and I. There are many, many tasks in our very human lives that we don't want to carry out. . . . But somewhere along the way, these mundane tasks stack up to a life. Your favorite song comes on in the grocery store and you can't help busting out your karaoke moves with the cashier, and your son laughs and rolls his eyes and you remember what he looked like at every age that has passed--his dimples at three, the tousled hair at six, the tiny chip in his front tooth you never fixed because everyone grew to love it. You forget the cilantro, but my gosh, the sunrise looks so beautiful in the parking lot.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“What is anxiety if not fear that you cannot handle this world?" I tell him how much I want our kids to trust our very real and alive world, but mostly I want our kids to trust their very real and alive selves.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't

“The truth is, today's polarizing platforms, and the information we consume on them, erode many of the values we hold dear. Rapid-fired consumption makes it difficult to pause to ask ourselves whether what we're seeing aligns with what we believe. And before we know it, the lines between truth and the internet become blurred.”
― Erin Loechner, The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't