Put on a Grey Ribbon for Borg Awareness

He didn’t hear me. I ask again, “Don’t you want to play on the rocks?”

The sun is shining brightly, and there’s a chill in the breeze that reminds me that we’re nearing the end of our warm days. Kids run and play among big grey rocks on our postmodern village green. People talk and laugh over beer at the table next to us. Across the plaza, there’s a steady stream of people in and out of the library, and in still moments, I can make out the sounds of a fountain.

An event is disbanding here in the square. Perhaps a hundred people in running and walking attire mull and scatter after a round of applause and a cheer. Most of the participants have those “awareness” ribbons, though the color is one I haven’t seen before, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be aware of. People are smiling and making the most of a gorgeous day.

Yet, here my son sits, hunched over the tablet that the restaurant had kindly handed the kids to keep them occupied before lunch arrived. He’s engrossed in a video game, oblivious to the world around him. I look at him, and can’t help but think of the Borg.

For those less accomplished in the nerd arts, the Borg were the cyberzombies from the various post-Kirk Star Trek series. They were an intimidatingly vast empire cobbled together from members of Trek’s myriad humanoid peoples. Such unfortunate people were “assimilated”— enslaved into the Borg collective— by means of a hodgepodge of gadgets (and superfluous hoses) that left the victims partially mechanized, soulless drones coldly bent on assimilating everyone else. Introduced into the Trek franchise a bit more than a quarter century ago in The Next Generation, and playing a central role in Voyager and First Contact, the Borg symbolized the dehumanizing potential of technology.

Like the best of science fiction, the Borg were and remain a parable for real issues affecting real people in the real world. While the Borg were introduced in an era when many people still had green screens and were plinking away on command lines (as God intended), they’ve become even more relevant since the advent of the Worldwide Web and the mobile device revolution. We spend more and more time fixated on monitors, and we introduce our kids to this at younger and younger ages.

Kids do need to be technologically literate. That’s the world we live in. There’s legitimate value in some screen time, and parents need to educate kids about technology to help them to be good students, conscientious citizens, and eventually to build careers. Likewise, well-made applications in moderation can contribute to creativity and encourage kids to socialize around common interests. But, when I see kids wasting the last warm day of the season or obsessing about Plants vs. Zombies, it feels like the Borg are winning, assimilating the human race one child at a time.

There are real consequences to this. Not remotely surprisingly, the rise in the prevalence in childhood obesity has been linked to increased screen time, including time spent playing video games, surfing the Internet, and watching television. Among many other issues, this increases the risk of type 2 diabetes and asthma, and carries a greater risk of depression and behavioral problems. Equally unsurprisingly, the more direct access kids have to these devices, the greater the risk. The Harvard School of Public Health describes studies that found, for example, that children with televisions in their bedrooms are “more likely to gain excess weight than children who don’t”. It’s not a huge leap for parents to surmise that our kids’ ready access to tablets and handheld games may have a similar effect.

Kids with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder may encounter other problems with video games. While anycasual relationships between ADHD and screen time is still being researched and debated, there’s evidence thatspending significant time plugged into video games is associated with more and greater symptoms of the disorder. There’s also research that finds an increased risk of video game addiction among boys with autism spectrum disorder and ADHD.

With so many reasons to prevent overuse, why not put on a gray ribbon to remind ourselves to limit our kids screen time? Like many of the other causes and concerns that inspire people to don a ribbon, kids’ overdependence on gadgets for entertainment is a legitimate concern. Unlike most diseases, though, allowing our kids to overuse iPads and PlayStation to their detriment is a choice. As parents, we can choose to create and enforce limits.

We can instead choose to spend time playing outside, socializing, being artistic, or playing with tangible toys. Young minds and bodies are going to develop more by actually cobbling together makeshift tools from rocks and sticks than by digging out another block in Minecraft. (Those blocks, incidentally, are perfect cubes, just like Borg spacecraft. Coincidence?)

Unplugging to play outside is particularly important. Time spent outside can carry some of the same physical and psychological benefits as meditation. In describing recent brain research related to time spent in natural settings that include water, Wallace J. Nichols goes so far as to write, “You don’t need to meditate to take advantage of [water’s] healing effects, because [water] meditates you.” For those parents unfamiliar with how to introduce kids to nature in a way that they’ll find engaging, Joseph Bharat Cornell’s book Sharing Nature with Children offers a variety of nature games that can be adapted to city parks, suburbs, beaches, or deep woods.

Today, sipping my iced tea at a sunny table, I decide that the line must be drawn here. I’m putting a stop to the Borg. I could give up Tuvok and Torres, hack their sleep system, blow up the Enterprise, or hose the enemy with plasma coolant. If any of those options were immediately available to me, I might take advantage of one of them. Since, alas, these are the province of Janeway and Picard, I opt for the comparatively tame alternative of taking away the tablet, observing that it’s a beautiful fall day, and insisting that my son should go play.

This article previously appeared on The Good Men Project.