Many parents will tell you that getting their teenagers away from the screens is harder than sailing around the world in a yacht.
Glenn Filtness of Veteran Mentors, who is leading the group of soldiers in a bid to transform young Australian lives, said the camp helps children learn important life lessons.
“We have kids coming in that are lacking self-confidence and addicted to technology,” Filtness told 7News.
Filtness said that as soon as participants arrive, it’s strictly no technology.
“The second they get on our bus we take their phones and any technology they have off them straight away,” Filtness told the news station.
Most of the former Australian soldiers who are running the camp have come straight from the frontline of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The participants are put through rigorous daily routines and activities such as physical training and nutritional education, making beds, polishing their boots, ironing their uniform, cleaning their barracks, and marching.
According to the Veteran Mentors website, the benefits of a digital detox include: additional sleep and exercise, better personal control, increased positivity and confidence, less instance of behavioural issues, heightened social skills and interactions, and increased productivity.
“If you ask people to report on how often they use their smartphones, they may under report or they may be missing information and consider themselves average users,” she said.
“We see others on smartphones at train stations, bus stops and at work and we think it’s become a normalised activity,” she added.
Michael said young people were spending a cumulative 3.5 hours per day on social media, reported the ABC.
“I think more and more adolescents are considering that the pressures of social media are so vast that it’s best to get off,” she told the news broadcaster.
“[Young people] need to be connected and feel they can’t be disconnected, and a quarter of our teens are constantly connected and send about 150 texts per day,” she added.
The tech detox, which is held on the Gold Coast, isn’t cheap, at more than AU$4,000, however, Filtness said the program is effective.
“It’s very tough for the participants and that’s why it’s effective – if it wasn’t tough it wouldn’t work,” Filtness told the news station.
