Katherine Martinko

How one family handles technology

Welcome to The Family Stack! We interview families about their technology stack. That's not just their devices and apps, but their rules, rituals, and resistance strategies. How do they handle phones at dinner? What's their bedtime protocol? When do kids get devices? How do they preserve attention, presence, and humanity while living in 2025? These aren't the pristine success stories, they're real families figuring it out, sharing what works, what failed spectacularly, and what they're trying next.

I’m thrilled to have Katherine Martinko for our first interview. I’ve been reading her newsletter for years, and it’s packed with tactical tips alongside a bigger vision of childhood.

We'll be releasing interviews regularly, so please share this with other families navigating technology.. which is pretty much everyone!

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Who are you, and what does your family look like?

I’m Katherine. I live in Port Elgin, Ontario, with my husband and three sons, who are 10, 13, and 15. I’m the author of Childhood Unplugged: Practical Advice to Get Kids Off Screens and Find Balance (2023) and a Substack newsletter called The Analog Family, which documents my rather unconventional “digital minimalist” approach to parenting.

I grew up in a remote area of northern Ontario, Canada, with no TV or Internet, and much of my childhood was spent playing outside with siblings. My husband grew up in suburbia with excessive video games and TV, and feels he missed out on childhood. So we decided not to start down that path when we had our own kids, recognizing that it’s always harder to claw back technology than to avoid introducing it in the first place.

I’m not anti-tech. I appreciate the fact that high-speed Internet and a laptop have enabled my entire work-from-home career, and I wouldn’t want to live in a world without it! But I do see it as a powerful tool, not a toy, nor should it be our kids’ primary form of entertainment, so I strive to teach my kids to use it with caution and respect.

I use technology for work, but we have minimal tech for personal purposes. My husband and I each have smartphones, but our kids don’t have smartphones or tablets or video games. There is no TV in our house. We recently got a landline. There is a desktop computer in a common area of our home that the kids use for messaging their friends and doing homework, and my oldest has a laptop that was issued by his public high school.

Walk us through a typical day with technology in your home.

I spend much of my workday on my laptop, in a small accessory building that we built at the back of our property to serve as an office. This creates some nice separation between work and home life, and I try to limit most of my work to that space, leaving my laptop there whenever possible. I start work around 5:30 am, then take a break to see kids during breakfast, before returning to work in my office. I keep my phone on silent all day.

My kids are not on any devices in the mornings. They have breakfast, pack their lunches, practice instruments, do homework, play with their hamster, help with household chores, and then walk themselves to school. When they come home around 3:30, they may spend 1-2 hours doing homework on the desktop computer, but they have chores and sports practices most weeknights that run from dinner time till bedtime. They check iMessage on the computer maybe 1-2x per day to see texts from their friends.

On weekends, they might watch one movie on a laptop using Netflix, more so in the winter than in the summer. They have an old iPhone with Spotify that they use to listen to music when they’re doing dishes in the kitchen or workouts in the garage (but our Wi-Fi doesn’t stretch there, so I know they can only access downloaded playlists).

Downtime is usually spent playing outside, reading books, doing art projects, playing board games, or spending time with friends.

What technology is essential in your home?

Computers are an integral part of our life, necessary for both my job and my husband’s, as well as our sons’ homework and research assignments from school. (I wish technology weren’t as integrated into schoolwork as it is.) Computers are known to be less addictive than touchscreen devices.

They use iMessage (using my Apple ID) to text their friends from the desktop. These messages stay on the computer, while any texts I send from my phone stay on my phone, with no overlap. It’s a good system that lets them have individual and group chats, and receive their fair share of silly memes and videos. They’re still able to connect with their friends, but there’s some friction added to the process; the messages aren’t being carried in their pocket, accessible every minute of the day, so this setup forces them to make plans in advance.

We have a landline that we recently installed, and it’s great. I can call the boys at home when I’m out, and they can make calls to all their friends and to me or their dad. It helps their conversation skills to develop, as well.

I know that some families use parental controls effectively, but that’s not something that ever interested me. It seems like a daunting game of whack-a-mole, trying to stay one step ahead of kids who will always be able to outwit their parents when it comes to the latest apps and platforms! I think it’s best just to avoid devices that are not even necessary to kids’ learning, development, socialization, or well-being.

I accept that I can’t track my kids’ whereabouts or communicate with them when they’re out, but that’s OK. It’s part of growing up, and they need to learn how to be independent, anyway. The important thing is that they know my phone number and can always call or text when needed.

What technology do you actively avoid or limit?

Many! We don’t have a video game console, my kids can’t have smartphones before 16 (at minimum) or social media before 18, and we don’t have a TV. I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about this, and I am deeply concerned about the opportunity cost that screen time represents for kids’ development.

Of course, there are the primary harms posed by phones, which are problems like negative effects on mental health, chronic distraction, shattered focus, impaired sleep, increased sedentariness, and more, but there are also the secondary harms, which is everything individuals miss out on when they devote so many hours to screens, the loss of control people experience when passive scrolling takes over other more productive or rewarding interests, hobbies, or activities.

Kids desperately need opportunities to play, talk, explore, imagine, create, move, learn, think, and be bored; and if they have access to any kind of devices, it gets in the way of that. It conditions them to want hyperstimulation all the time, and then they’re no longer content just to be in the world. I have actively avoided that with my own kids, instead embracing a very energetic, noisy, chaotic environment at home, but getting in exchange kids who are keenly attuned to the household, have great senses of humour, a good amount of confidence, and impressive practical skills.

I do not limit screen time when they go to friends’ houses; that feels presumptuous. They do binge-watch YouTube and play video games, but then they come home with a sense of relief that we do things differently here. The important goal is to establish a baseline of understanding within them that an offline life is a good one, a valuable one, and that once they eventually own phones and have unlimited access to the Internet (which is inevitable), they’ll recognize what’s important in life and be able to prioritize it themselves. When kids are denied the chance to learn that, I think it creates an enormous amount of difficulty in their lives.

How do you handle Social Media?

No social media for my kids until age 18, so they won’t be on it at all throughout high school. It is important not to let kids use social media until they’ve passed through puberty, at the very least. Social media is known to be most harmful to girls between 11-13 and boys 14-15.

My kids do see reels and posts, of course, on their friends’ phones, and I don’t attempt to limit that; but they cannot have their own profiles. I don’t spend much time actively limiting or blocking or tracking their online searches on our computers, mostly because they don’t spend much time doing it, so I am not all that concerned about what they’re consuming.

I have Instagram, but it is a private account that I periodically deactivate. I find it useful for looking up CrossFit workouts. I post travel and food pictures occasionally, but avoid posting any photos of my kids or husband.

For work, I have LinkedIn and an old Twitter profile. I deleted Facebook last year. Most of my promotional efforts go into my Substack newsletter, which I view as a working portfolio, a far more useful demonstration of what I do than anything I could post on social media.

How do you handle AI?

I talk about it with my kids. They tell me about their teachers’ differing policies on it. Some encourage the use of ChatGPT, others do not. I tell my kids not to use it. I know they’ve been using it in place of search engines, to find answers to questions they’re researching, and I’ve talked to them about the importance of verifying information that comes up. It is an ongoing conversation, and I do need to learn more about it.

What surprises you about raising kids in today's digital world? What would you keep and what would you change?

I am always surprised by how many parents seem to think that device ownership is inevitable for children. It is expected that you’ll buy your toddler an iPad and your preteen a smartphone, and if you don’t, you’re viewed as a weird aberration. I don’t understand this, particularly with the research piling up that these things are not good for your kids!!!!

Similarly, I am baffled by parental reluctance to take a stand against these tools. In some ways it’s hard, yes, but it’s also not that hard—you establish a household norm and then you stick to it. You tell your kid, “This is just what we do here. Yes, we’re different. These are the rules. It’s to keep you safe.” As parents, we decide what’s hard, and I think it’s a far bigger nightmare trying to navigate device safety, cyberbullying, body image issues, violence, and overly mature content than it is just to say no and focus on other, healthier things.

When I talk to my own friends about the horrible things they’ve faced with their own kids’ device use, from extreme social anxiety induced by social media bullying to depression to multiple suicide attempts, I think, “I’d much rather be arguing with my teen about why he can’t have a phone than sitting next to his hospital bed, wondering if he’ll make it.”

I wish more people would say no, would recognize that in doing so they are preserving their child’s chances at having a play-filled childhood and preventing it from being stolen from them by a device. But that requires parents who are willing to examine their own screen-time habits, and possibly have to make some tough decisions about the example they want to set.

Recently, I read Christine Rosen’s wonderful book, The Extinction of Experience, and she talks about how critics accuse her (and writers like me) of unjustified moral panic when it comes to screens. But she points out that, when you consider the research on its effects, we should be in a much bigger panic than we are. This is a BIG deal, and one that should have us parents protesting at full volume.

I have no problem saying no and doing things differently. That’s never been an issue for me. Sometimes I feel bad that my children are the ones who have to carry my unorthodox philosophy out into the world and be different from all their peers, but “fitting in” is not a good enough reason to give them something I know to be bad for them. I was raised in a very unusual way, with a family that was viewed as “weird” by others, but now I look back with tremendous gratitude at my parents’ willingness to do things their own way. It made life far more interesting.

Instead, I focus on trying to fill my kids’ lives with plenty of fun, interesting, compelling experiences so that they have an offline, analog life that fills them with joy, pleasure, and pride. Someday, I hope they will thank me for it.

To other parents, I’d say, “You can say no! It’s never too late to revisit the household rules around tech. You’re not your kid’s friend; you’re their parent. They might say they hate you for taking away their device, but they won’t forever. No one else is coming to save your child from their tech addiction. This is their one and only childhood, so let them enjoy it to the fullest while they can.”

I am cautiously optimistic for the future. I think more parents of young children are delaying access to screens, which is good, but teens are often neglected, despite still being tremendously vulnerable to the negative effects of excessive device use. The well-documented harms are too often overlooked or viewed as less important than “connecting” with friends, even though online connections are much lower quality than in-person, so I do wish parents of older kids would take this issue more seriously. Some older kids are starting to take matters into their own hands, deleting social media and swapping smartphones for basic phones and even accusing their parents of inadequately protecting them when they were young and vulnerable. So who knows, perhaps the tide will change.