Dang kids and their confounded digital whatchamacallits! I mean, it’s exgasperating when they’re out there all the time Chirping, Twitching, Facenoting on the old InterWeb. It’s even dangerous, as this kids-go-bump-in-the day story about cellphone-using Penn zombies [1]shows.
[1]But O Ho! Wait a minute! Adults, we’ve looked into the mirror, or, really, we’ve looked at the 1,500 selfies we’ve posted, and we realize the enemy is us! We’re as obsessed with our devices as our progeny, and we’re in danger of cultivating a generation of disconnected, emotionally callous, babbling fools as a result.
Those annoying screen-absorbed kids?: They are learning their behaviors directly from adults. How many parents have set up their kitchens or living rooms as electronic parlors where they sit and scroll through Facebook? (I might know someone like that…) How many adults have been electronically absent during big chunks of a family vacation? How many parents have never actually seen their kids’ games/recitals except through the eye of a camera?
In an interview in the June 2013 [2]Atlantic [2], Linda Stone says, “We may think that kids have a natural fascination with phones. Really, children have a fascination with whatever Mom and Dad find fascinating. If they are fascinated by the flowers coming up in the yard, that’s what the children are going to find fascinating. And if Mom and Dad can’t put down the device with the screen, the child is going to think, That’s where it’s all at, that’s where I need to be!”
Stone interviewed kids between the ages of 7 and 12, and she reported their saying things such as “My mom should make eye contact with me when she talks to me” and “I used to watch TV with my dad, but now he has his iPad, and I watch by myself.” Stone says kids will miss out on learning empathy, which is partly learned through eye contact, if their parents’ eyes are constantly staring at a device.
Before you have kids, you might drive by a playground and think about how great it will be taking your kid out on a nice autumn day to play. Then you have kids and you take them to the playground some 200 times. It’s not that warm and fuzzy any more. In fact, look more closely and you see hollow-eyed parents trying to keep their offspring from eating woodchips while trying engage in the noble goal of quality time — that unique look should have a name (it’s deep in the eyes, a kind of glassy, dog-in-the-crate helplessness.) Now, though, parents are at the playground thinking they are getting that sweet little morsel for the soul but instead spending the whole time looking at a cellphone (and, yes, their kids are eating the woodchips).
We are not only teaching them bad technological hygiene, we are stunting their social skills too. But adult tech absorption may have an even more direct and troubling developmental consequence. We may be robbing our kids of a key time of language development. Instead of talking to their young kids, which is a crucial part of linguistic acquisition, parents are instead texting.
The Atlantic has been on top of these topics lately. A month after the piece above, Deborah Fallows in “Papa, Don’t Text” [3] said, “But how ironic is it that, in this era when child-rearing is the focus of unprecedented imagination, invention, sophistication, and expense, something as simple and pleasurable as conversing with our children can be overlooked?” Fallows quotes Dimitri Christakis [4], author of a Pediatrics study about linguistic development: “You can only do one thing at a time: talk to the baby or talk on the phone.”
It’s all part of a multitasking culture, part of I’m-here-with-you-but-truly interacting with others mindset. You can be a good parent, taking junior out for the day while still having a few work meetings and keeping your fantasy football team updated — except you really can’t.
We have these splendid devices, that’s for sure, that connect us and open up an incredible world of information, knowledge, and interaction. But if we feel these devices are being used in an addictive, socially challenged way by the whippersnapper generation, perhaps we should take a look at what we’re teaching them through our own habits of digital absorption.
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[7]Scott Warnock [8]
[7]Latest posts by Scott Warnock (Posts [9])
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