51–60 of 254 posts
Things change. Once we were nomads, then we became farmers, then we moved into cities and outsourced child rearing to schools because we were at factories or offices 10 hours a day. You can't roll back change. You can try to find ways to adapt to it, to mitigate their bad effects.
sorry but pretending it doesn't exist is not going to teach your children how to deal with it.
I fundamentally disagree with the premise.
The curse of Metcalf's law...
> These devices are quickly changing childhood for children. Playing outdoors, spending time with friends, reading books and hanging out with family is happening a lot less to make room for hours of snap chatting, instagramming, and catching up on You Tube. I feel like this rhetoric also existed when I was in middle school, well before smartphones. The villain then was TV and violent video games, and there were simil…
Just because TV and video games did not lead to total societal collapse does not mean they are free of negative side-effects, nor does it make these technologies necessarily comparable to any other generational-shift technology adoption. TV definitely had and has negative societal side effects. Prolonged and uninhibited video game usage definitely van have negate side effects. Same thing will likely be the case for smartphones.
I also think smartphones are a special breed since they can expose children much more easily to fringe ideology than either video games or mass media ever could thanks to gatekeeping mechanisms.
We'll never get a handle on appropriate, healthy societal relations with media technologies until we stop summarily treating them as purely negative, purely positive, or purely neutral and start doing the work of analyzing each technology and its use and potentialities in their particulars.
> These devices are quickly changing childhood for children. Playing outdoors, spending time with friends, reading books and hanging out with family is happening a lot less to make room for hours of snap chatting, instagramming, and catching up on You Tube. I feel like this rhetoric also existed when I was in middle school, well before smartphones. The villain then was TV and violent video games, and there were simil…
And parents lamented the time spent reading them instead of doing something outside.
Just wait until our kids grow up, and their kids have a VR headset strapped to their face 24x7. They'll bemoan the time lost that was watching youtube.
As an aside, in my day it was TV, and today my kids aren't interested in TV. Not sure my parents see the irony ;)
My 5-year old nephew has access to a smart phone along with social media accounts on the major platforms. Is it healthy? Probably not. Neither was my generation binging on TV and video games. But it also gives them access to an absurd wealth of information richer than any library I had growing up. How can a kid's mind not be absolutely entranced by that sort of thing? Telling a kid that they can't have a phone when t…
This view seems a bit rosy and willfully ignorant of the actual current state of the internet. I think it will spoil most of the batch but the lucky few will come out better for it. Those kids that do have a desire for encyclopedic knowledge may be well served by a smart phone. However, most kids do not have that desire to begin with, and even those that do face problems. Unlike a traditional library, the internet is…
Survivorship bias isn’t a great way to make an argument, but I’m skeptical of the view that the internet is so much worse now. There isn’t even a liveleak anymore.
A family friend was groomed at 9yo. She was pressured into sending nude pics of herself to a 15yo. That kind of thing seems like the real danger for unsuspecting kids, and teaching them from a young age to guard themselves is the strategy I’ll be trying.
My 5-year old nephew has access to a smart phone along with social media accounts on the major platforms. Is it healthy? Probably not. Neither was my generation binging on TV and video games. But it also gives them access to an absurd wealth of information richer than any library I had growing up. How can a kid's mind not be absolutely entranced by that sort of thing? Telling a kid that they can't have a phone when t…
Then paying attention to him, I found out he is a subscriber to a very entertaining young astronomer's channel and that's where he was learning all that stuff. I sit along with him and engaged with him in the content.
On the other hand that are some content producers that are absolute trash, in those cases, I gently persuade my son this is not the best content for him, well, sometimes not so gently, in the worst cases I just lay down the law that he is not to watch that channel anymore. I do it rarely enough that it still works.
It is not magic, you just need to parent, the same way you have to do in every other situation in your kid's life that doesn't necessarily involve a screen.
I don't deny access to the digital world has risks, but I would have lost so much had my parents done a quarter of what some of you are suggesting.
> These devices are quickly changing childhood for children. Playing outdoors, spending time with friends, reading books and hanging out with family is happening a lot less to make room for hours of snap chatting, instagramming, and catching up on You Tube. I feel like this rhetoric also existed when I was in middle school, well before smartphones. The villain then was TV and violent video games, and there were simil…
Correlation is not causation. But some correlations are just too obvious to ignore.