You’ve seen them at the mall, on the street and in restaurants. Kids, sometimes as young as 2 or 3, on cell phones, kids with i-pads, with hand held video games, kids hooked into MP3 players by little white tubes sticking from their ears; texting, watching, playing games, listening to music. Some so focused on the screen they don’t even seem to notice the world going by, others chatting away incessantly to… seemingly no one. Is it really good for them? What will happen to this new generation raised on tech rather than blocks and toy cars and jump rope?
I’ve spoken with a lot of families on this one, both home schooled and not, and on all sides of this issue. I know some who refuse to let their kids anywhere near a computer or video game systems, even when it would be therapeutic. I know some who use it as very very sparing rewards (like a half hour a day), and I know some who rely on it for a lot of their curriculum and in some cases for the child’s only method of communication due to disability. Every parent struggles with the question of how much is too much.
Personally I see tech as a tool, a tool that should be balanced to our child’s needs as carefully as any other tool in our parenting arsenal. For some kids tech has opened entire worlds that they never would have seen 20, 30 years ago, including a world of communication. For kids who are developmentally delayed and do not speak, apps on an I-pad have enabled them to communicate with family and friends, to reach out much more readily while they continue to work on spoken language. Communication technology has existed for these kids for years, yes, but the cost was so prohibitive as to be out of reach for many. A Dynavox unit (one of the more common speech accessibility devices), for example can run $7000-$8000 dollars, sometimes insurance will cover it, and sometimes it will only cover part of it. What if you have no insurance? Compare that with the cost of an I-pad and a $30 app, that’s a huge difference in cost, often less than an insurance deductable. And the I-pad can do much more than the Dynavox can, simply due to versatility.
Even a game system can be an educational tool if used correctly. For example, in Biology we’re studying evolution. Playing the game Spore has given my son some hands on experience with evolution already, but reading about it online and in his text book, he has decided to go through and make an ‘evolution tree’ with Spore creatures, documenting at each step the evolutionary changes he’s made to the species and why. He intends to inhabit a ‘world’ with all the branches of his species once he’s created them and see how they fare. We’ve also used SimCity in the past to teach government and what the government does, and the Wii game Endless Oceans allowed him to swim with the ‘fishes’ while educating him on the many varieties he met.
The therapeutic use of the Wii is well documented by Occupational and Physical Therapists. Playing active Wii games can increase range of motion, improve balance, and increase stamina, and games like Guitar Hero can mimic metronome therapy and with a much higher compliance rate. The Wii can also be used to improve physical fitness and exercise, especially in harsh climates where medical conditions (like asthma) can keep a child inside rather than out playing with friends.
Gaming can also improve social skills. Gaming is no longer a ‘nerds only’ activity. Gaming can give a child something appropriate to talk about with other kids in his or her peer group. Gaming online can open whole new groups of friends with similar interests as well, and of course kids can come over and play ‘head to head’. In some cases the textual speech in games is less threatening and easier to decipher than face to face interactions, and as thus can be used to improve communication skills before adding in the complexities of body language and facial expression. It is, in effect, ABA therapy for communication, because you’re chaining the skills together one at a time instead of expecting the child to deal with all of it at once.
And then of course there’s the internet. There are thousands of educational web sites out there and probably just as many educational I-pad apps. There are books that can be read on the screen, in some cases much easier than print versions (due to text size, weight, etc). With a little ingenuity almost any game can teach a child something useful. Yes, there are a lot of dangers on the net, adult sites, adult predators, overwhelming advertising, malware, hackers, etc. Much like anything else, the important thing here is to educate your child about internet safety and to be aware of what your child is doing. There are just as many dangers lurking outside in the neighborhood, and with the net you have the advantage of your child’s proximity, when you often do not when they’re out playing with friends or at someone else’s house.
Our job as parents is to educate our children and teach them to be responsible. This applies just as much to technology as it does to any other aspect of their lives. There will always be kids who become too obsessive, too over focused on one thing and we will have to step in with those kids and monitor behavior and access. Tech is just a different thing for children prone to such behavior to latch on to. But if Tech didn’t exist, it would just be something else, be it a home phone, the TV, a radio, or legos (or something illegal like alcohol or drugs). There will always be parents who would rather let the tech babysit the kids rather than deal with them themselves. That hasn’t changed either, just the method used has.
If we teach our children balance, if we teach them to use tech as the tool that it is, our tech generation will turn out fine. In many ways they could turn out better; they will need to know how to use tech as adults in the working world, they will open new avenues of education and entertainment, and they will meet people from around the world and learn to think multi-culturally and with less hate and bigotry. After all you can’t tell the color of someone’s skin via text message or twitter (unless someone posts a pic of themselves). And once you get to know someone and become friends, suddenly finding out they look different likely isn’t going to change what you think of them. Online, barring language differences, we all look the same.
So, how much tech is too much? That depends entirely on the child, on the family, and on the circumstance.
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