My friend's brother and his partner decided that they were going to keep their baby from seeing any screens for the first two years of her life. That means no TVs, computers, iPads, smart phones or anything else in the house for two years, neither for parents nor child. My friend says the results are amazing. The baby has a daunting vocabulary for a child her age, because everyone reads for entertainment. She's extremely curious and loves to be outdoors. I guess it takes a lot of work to keep up with her, but it sounds like the experiment has been worth it in a lot of ways.
When she is in the presence of a screen now, apparently the change is very noticeable and a little freaky. She immediately zones in on it, and her personality transforms. She stops asking questions. She stops talking altogether. She stops looking for creative ways to entertain herself. It's one of those uncomfortable facts that suggests all of our greatest fears about what we're doing culturally to our kids really isn't in their best interests. So what do we do with this info?
Well, the fact is that while technological overload may end up harming kids' ability to enjoy the world, a good level of technological comfort is also vital to success in so many careers nowadays. The real question for me is how to balance the needs of a kid to be technologically proficient, while still being able to think outside the confines of the screen. When I see videos of two-year-olds zipping through an iPad like they've been doing it for twenty years, I wonder if they'll every be able to delve into the guts of the thing and see it as something that has been built by human hands and thought. I know that I certainly don't marvel at the inner workings of my car every time I go for a drive. As long as it works, I don't care what makes it tick. Is it basically the same thing? If these technologies are essentially our windows to the world, is it important to know how to "open the window", as it were? I wish I had clear answers to these questions, but asking them's a good place to start, I suppose.
I do know that when I see people walking down the street on a beautiful day, fixated on their teeny tiny phones, I think the screenless parents might have a good point about just doing away with all this nonsense or pretending it doesn't exist. There's a question burning through all of this: do screen technologies expand or limit our world? I think when it comes to my kid, I would like to present screen technology as one mere alternative among millions of others. We won't be going screenless, but we also won't be screen-babysitting. I say that with confidence now. I just hope it's still true when the time comes to test it!
When she is in the presence of a screen now, apparently the change is very noticeable and a little freaky. She immediately zones in on it, and her personality transforms. She stops asking questions. She stops talking altogether. She stops looking for creative ways to entertain herself. It's one of those uncomfortable facts that suggests all of our greatest fears about what we're doing culturally to our kids really isn't in their best interests. So what do we do with this info?
Well, the fact is that while technological overload may end up harming kids' ability to enjoy the world, a good level of technological comfort is also vital to success in so many careers nowadays. The real question for me is how to balance the needs of a kid to be technologically proficient, while still being able to think outside the confines of the screen. When I see videos of two-year-olds zipping through an iPad like they've been doing it for twenty years, I wonder if they'll every be able to delve into the guts of the thing and see it as something that has been built by human hands and thought. I know that I certainly don't marvel at the inner workings of my car every time I go for a drive. As long as it works, I don't care what makes it tick. Is it basically the same thing? If these technologies are essentially our windows to the world, is it important to know how to "open the window", as it were? I wish I had clear answers to these questions, but asking them's a good place to start, I suppose.
I do know that when I see people walking down the street on a beautiful day, fixated on their teeny tiny phones, I think the screenless parents might have a good point about just doing away with all this nonsense or pretending it doesn't exist. There's a question burning through all of this: do screen technologies expand or limit our world? I think when it comes to my kid, I would like to present screen technology as one mere alternative among millions of others. We won't be going screenless, but we also won't be screen-babysitting. I say that with confidence now. I just hope it's still true when the time comes to test it!
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