Simplistic headline of the day
Answer: maybe?
Seriously? The more I pay attention to the news, I swear, the more frustrated it makes me. People are having a hard time deciding when to let their kids have stuff. Welcome to having children, where you have to make decisions on your own about what is best for your individual child without some experts telling you exactly what to do. Don’t worry, though, to make sure the story is balanced, they show the pro-tech side:
“It’s myopic not to get kids into (technology) as soon as they are interested in it,” said James Daly, editorial director of Edutopia, a Web site and magazine run by the George Lucas Education Foundation. “Those gadgets are the tools of their age.”
The anti-tech side:
Kids can use Internet-ready devices – which are becoming increasingly common – to access material parents may not want them to have, such as music with foul words, movies with racy scenes or even pornography. Kids who use them also run the risk of encountering cyberbullies or other online pests and predators.
And the side that has realized that, apparently, the relentless rotation of our planet over a 24-hour period of time limits the number of hours in a day, and people have to choose how they spend their time:
“Technology can take up an extraordinary amount of time,” said Vic Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico. “You get kids that are texting an hour a day, plugged into their iPods an hour a day, watching YouTube. How much time does that leave for the family, for parents, to walk the dog?”
That last one, of course, I favor the most simply because of the sheer obviousness of it all. You could place any number of activities in that first half of that sentence to make them sound terrible. Let’s try!
“You get kids that are reading an hour a day, studying an hour a day, playing musical instruments. How much time does that leave for the family, for parents, to walk the dog?”
Parents, if for some reason you read this blog post, know this: No easy answers exist. technology is neither good nor bad, it just is. Technology has made it possible for me to have friends all around the country and the world. It has also made it easy for me to waste time and be completely unproductive. It has opened up whole new avenues of learning for me, and it has introduced me to banal tripe like the article in discussion. Think for yourself, know your kids, and do what’s best for them.
For the record, I’m pretty sure the majority of the sixth graders at my school have cell phones. Just this morning I was listening to a group in homeroom debate the differences between providers and discussing which phones they have and want.
May 4th, 2008 at 8:32 am
As a parent, my answer to all of this is… I have to be more knowledgeable about technology than my kid is. The majority of the debates out there are full of fear, and, to quote, “fear is the mind-killer.” Fear comes from feeling powerless, because people simply don’t know technology, and knowledge is power. We can /point and /lol in the direction of every particular way fear kills minds of parents and educators, or article writers for that matter, but it almost becomes boring after a while.
A kid may know a particular site or tool her parents never saw before. For example, I first introduced my kid to youtube and twitter, and she first introduced me to deviantart. The point is that parents should be able to comprehend everything going on technologically in their children’s life, and to be, well, parent figures in these tech worlds. Parents need to have the natural authority of more experienced and more advanced people. Then they can help kids get to the state where technology is good for them.
May 4th, 2008 at 8:57 am
While I am not yet a parent, I already know this: parenting is hard. I get that. I understand why they want easy solutions to their problems. But if you’re looking for easy solutions to raising your kids right, you’re deluding yourself a bit.
Honestly, remember all the clamor for the V-Chip 10 years or so ago? How many people actually use that now?
May 4th, 2008 at 9:18 am
I don’t even remember that clamor ^_^ Parenting is the most complicated thing I’ve ever done in my life. It definitely beats getting a PhD, by a wide margin.
A quote I ran into recently:
“Getting a good education for your child is not a spectator sport. – C. Hoff”
Not just my kid’s friends, but their parents often ask my husband and I for advice about tech activities, usually the internet. Yet something as simple as, “If your kid spends twenty hours a week in the World of Warcraft (a multi-player online game), you should consider trying to play it a bit” is rarely followed. “Oh, I don’t understand the first thing about games.” Exactly. You don’t know how to help your kids make it into something meaningful and, well, good.