Low-Tech Parenthood

May 1, 2025

Rediscover the benefits of letting Mother Nature shoulder her share of childrearing

By Eric Brende

May 1, 2025

(Photo by jacoblund/iStock via Getty Images)

Did you know that parenting is a purely modern invention? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “parenting” did not gain usage until the late 19th century — at the peak of the industrial revolution.

What in an earlier time had gone without saying now had to be learned. Experts and books on parenting came on the scene. Why? Rapid technological advances shift the terms of life for every new generation. What worked for your parents won’t work for you.

Perhaps most critically, technology also has pushed Mother Nature to the margins. A helpful co-nurturer, she once steered youthful energies in wholesome directions and aligned family goals.

My wife, Mary, and I chose to live smack in the middle of a major city. And yet, while raising our kids we somehow availed ourselves of the natural world more than many I know who live in the country. More surprisingly, our means of doing so were technological.

Some human inventions screen Mother Nature out; others let her in. Consider the humble bicycle. I remember one May afternoon when I took our youngest child, Evan, age 6 — seated behind me on his “trail-a-bike” (a one-wheeled appendage that turns an adult bike into a tandem for a child) — across town to his music lesson. As we wove through back streets, fresh blooms bursting all around, every new sight for Evan inspired one fresh question after another. Our conversation — and more importantly, our relationship — bloomed along with the pear trees and the tulips.

Our three children were often found indoors, to be sure. Yet, they were most often wrapped up in books, which exercise the brain, as the bike exercises the body. With no computers or televisions, the kids inhaled multi-part volumes like The Lord of the Rings that I, a childhood TV addict, couldn’t hack.

As home-based crafters — Mary, a seamstress and I a soap maker — we created items the kids could see with their own eyes and grasp with their own hands. I hosted a classical chamber group in the living room, and they wrote their own music and practiced their own instruments: violin, flute and trombone.

Going low-tech did not eliminate the need to manage, dictate and discipline. But from the former chore of “parenting,” Mother Nature finessed the joy of common cause and fostered family unity.

*****

ERIC BRENDE, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University, is the author of Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology (2005). He is a member of St. Francis de Sales Council 14067 in St. Louis.

Supper at Emmaus (oil on canvas) by Rembrandt (1606-1669) (Photo Josse / Bridgeman Images)

Low-Tech Parenthood

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