SYDNEY – The handwritten letters from our 13-year-old daughter sit on our coffee table in a clear plastic folder.

With their drawings of pink flowers and long paragraphs marked with underlined and crossed-out words, they are an abridged, analogue version of her spirited personality – and a way for my wife, Diana, and me to keep her close as we watch TV and fiddle with our mobile phones.

They would not exist, of course, if Amelia were home with us in Sydney. But she is hundreds of kilometres away at a uniquely Australian school in the bush, where she is spending her whole ninth-grade school year without the Internet, a phone, a computer or even a camera with a screen.

Our friends and relatives in the United States can hardly believe this is even a possibility. There, it is considered bold just to talk about taking smartphones from students during class time.

Here in Australia, a growing number of respected schools lock up smart everything for months. They make tap-and-swipe teens learn, play and communicate only through real-life interaction or words scrawled on the page.

“What a gift this is,” we told Amelia, when she was accepted, hesitated, then decided to go.

What I underestimated was how hard it would be for us at home. Removing the liveliest member of our family, without calls or texts, felt like someone had taken one of my internal organs across state lines without telling me how to heal.

Yet, as we adjust, her correspondence and ours – traveling hundreds of kilometres, as if from one era to another – are teaching us all more than we had imagined. The gift of digital detox that we thought Australia was giving our daughter has also become a revelatory bequest for us – her American parents and her older brother.

Something in the act of writing, sending and waiting days or weeks for a reply, and in the physical and social challenges experienced by our daughter at a distance, is changing all of our personal operating systems. Without the ever-present immediacy of digital connection, even just temporarily, can a family be rewired?

Amelia is at Timbertop, the ninth-grade campus of Geelong Grammar, one of Australia’s oldest private schools, which has made outdoor education a priority since the 1950s.

The idea was to build courage, curiosity and compassion among adolescents, and their ranks have ranged from the children of sheep farmers and diplomats, as well as Britain’s King Charles III. He spent a semester at Timbertop in 1966 and later said it was “by far the best part” of his education.

The year is meant to be difficult.

Before we dropped Amelia off in late January, we received a video from Timbertop showing teachers sitting at picnic tables in the sun, warning that confidence and personal growth would come only with struggles and perseverance.

Within 24 hours, we started to understand what that meant. Not for Amelia. For me and Diana.

A few days in, I also could not avoid tough questions about myself. Was the fact that it was so hard to lose contact a comment on my over-involved parenting? My own ridiculous addiction to tech-fuelled immediacy? Or both?

“Withdrawal” was a word we heard discussed in Timbertop, or “TT”, circles.

In Amelia’s first letter, arriving after a week that felt like a year, we could certainly see the symptoms. She was anxious about friendships, wanting them to form as quickly as they do on Snapchat.

In her Timbertop interview, when asked about homesickness, she had bluntly said “that is the least of my worries”, but, in fact, Amelia missed us – even her brother. Her early letters to us and to him made clear that she found the intensity of her emotions surprising.

Diana and I wrote back right away with encouragement.

The experiences Amelia told us about, including the occasional mention of a class in positive psychology to identify personal strengths, spoke to the importance of play and pushing adolescents into environments where they can learn they are far more capable of managing risks and taking on tough tasks than they (or we) might think.

But I was also starting to find value in the retelling, in the slow sharing of our lives by analogue means – in the letter writing itself.

Seeking more insight, I reached out to John Marsden, former head of the English department at Timbertop and a best-selling young adult novelist who later founded his own experiential learning school north of Melbourne, Australia.

He laughed when I asked about the meaning of letters. “It’s been happening for thousands of years,” he said. “It is just new for this generation.”

He went on to suggest that what I was discovering in our letters might, in fact, be something significant – what he often tells parents they should aim for in their own families, in their own ways.

He called it a “gradual divergence”.

Amelia’s experience involves not just the luxury of removal – the taking away of social media. It also includes an addition, something the letters capture and embody: the gift of agency.

Far from home at 13, in a messed-up world, she has landed where there is intellectual space and the means to practise a method for asserting and exploring who she is and wants to become. She has found a room of one’s own.

I am tempted to send her a letter detailing my discovery. Maybe this time, I will write it by hand. Better yet, maybe I will let her tell me what she thinks when she gets the urge. NYTIMES