Go to a restaurant and see everyone ignoring each other while staring at their phones.
Good subject, LS, good luck with this project.
Wishing you a happy, healthy, and prosperous year in 2020!
I have two 7 year old boys and an 11 year old girl in the house. Kind of grand kids...
Electronics are ruining them.
iPads, Xbox, computers, YouTube (may be the worse) all together and they are a mess.
Bought one of the boys a bike for Christmas. I might as well have tried to teach him COBOL.
You have a great topic to write about.
Larry,
I say it all started with DVD players in restaurants 20 years ago.
Children used to have to cope with boredom (some cried and had to be taken outside), to learn social etiquette, to learn how to deal with adults in an adult environment.
Then all of a sudden, little ones had their heads down and headphones on. And parents were happy because they didn’t have to deal with their kids.
In 2004 my first was 2 and I started to really notice it. We were the mean parents because we wouldn’t even let our kids watch other kids’ players.
They are teens now and we still have a “no screens” rule in social settings.
I have been saying for 15+ years: WE ARE RAISING A GENERATION OF SOCIOPATHS.
Great twitter feed. Thanks for everything you do
I always haze my kids about it and say” you wanna Spend your entire life staring at a 2 x 3” piece of glass?”
Oh my gosh...there’s this new stuff called printing, and people are going to go crazy reading books...stop it now!
No kidding, this was the attitude of the established world when printing made mass market information possible.
So think again about this one. There’s good and there’s bad. Many people actually have much more contact with their families through modern technology than they ever would have had before.
Input: I think it is very important to look at skills deficiencies too.
Today’s kids can’t write. They can’t speak the proper language and none of them learn to play a musical instrument.
It diminishes all their 3 R’s.
And nobody but Mexicans spends the time to learn a craft anymore.
Maybe robots and AI will bail them out.
But it’s apparent to me that none of them actually DO anything anymore. Sports. Exercise of any kind. Chores.
Even peddling to school or walking to their buddy’s house.
you need to talk first to neuro-physiologist neuro-biologists and neurologists about the structural brain damage the screens do to the developing brain. look up silicon valley’s billionaires and their refusal to allow their kids access to the “screens”. Once you read the stuff in the public domain you’ll be able to zero in on who to talk to. Good luck.
Very cool... Let me share a little story. All my Grandkids have been on their own cell phone since they were 5. I was highly against this idea and concept. Until one day my 6 year old Granddaughter texted her mom at work and told her that the daycare attendant that day “had let some yucky man who did not belong there in, and was making out with him, and the guy was going through all the kids backpacks, and looking in the office desk when she was not looking, and he keeps staring at me”.
“How long has he been there?” my daughter asked. “since lunchtime”, and it was now 3:30 PM. My Daughter jumped in the car and ran over there right away. Turns out this guy was a “boy friend” and was a convicted sex offender. After reviewing the camera recordings they figure he was in the backpacks getting names (backpack ID required), and in the office desk getting addresses. The gal was fired immediately.
So I am tossed about this particular topic. I am against it for kids, but if she had not had a phone and knew how to text well at 6 years old, who knows where that event might have led to. I also realized that the backpack ID and that the address records could be accessed were also huge mistakes.
It started earlier than that. It started with insult sit-com’s. I would not permit those to be viewed in my house. They weren’t humor. I also did not allow the new form of Saturday morning cartoons that fed mush into my kids heads. As a result, my elder daughter limits the time my eight year old granddaughter is permitted to use her iPad to a very short time per day, and even then the apps are curated for educational purposes, such as programming the robot she saved her own money to buy.
Instead my granddaughter takes violin lessons, performs in kids musicals (she’s play Yente the Matchmaker in a kids version of “The Fiddler On The Roof” in a couple of weeks, and last August, at seven, she played the part of the Narrator in “Into The Forrest”, a two-hour children’s version of Sondheim’s “Into The Woods”, both of which required singing and dancing), and plays soccer. She goes to plays and concerts with her parents. Honestly, I don’t know when her parents get time to do any adult things.
My daughter says she attributes a lot of to my requirements that she and her sister do kid things and not sit glued to the “goddamn noisy box” (you likely know the reference) and useless sit-coms her friends were all emulating, slinging put down insults at each other, and hurting each others’ feelings, because they had the examples of what they saw every night on TV, thinking that was the way to be “cool.”
We did projects. We read books. Both of my girls became voracious readers. I was reading to them from the original versions of The Wizard of Oz and Pinocchio, not the Disneyfied versions, before they were reading on their own. They could handle it.
Tons of material out there. I’d look for stats on the number of teens requiring in-patient psychiatric care. I’m a former high school teacher, and I believe the number of students who are too too stressed to attend school is rising (not snowflake stressed but non-functioning stressed). P.S. I homeschooled my kids before “getting legal,” certified.
Tv, computer games, etc., give a new image every 1.5 - 3 seconds, and each time, the body gets an “oh, gee! Look! - just a drop of two of cortisol (stress hormone). Two results: kids get used to the “something new” drug, so that even when they aren’t bombarded with flash bangs, their brain is on alert for what’s missing. Second, their brains and bodies are being flooded drop by drop with stress hormones. They have no time to decompress, to absorb, to chill. They’re so digitally connected so close to bedtime, they don’t get adequate sleep, which is when the brain actually does most of it’s “learning” - processing the events and lessons of the day. This is not to mention the lack of interaction and conversation.
Eye diseases, physical diseases, brain hobbling in young adults - it’s out there. Even Microsoft, having already convinced school systems to spend billions on technology, now recommends that students not use computers in school until 8th grade (I believe). I think they’re trying to get ahead of the lawsuit curve.
I did my master’s thesis on digital vs. print comprehension several years ago, and there was very little research done in the US not sponsored by tech companies. What research there was worse than I anticipated! Computers should be considered an illegal drug.
We now live in a world where they need a phone with at least minimal service so that they can call and talk to someone like Grandma or Grandpa while they walk home from school... Then at least there is an audio or video account and witnessing of any events that might happen. Video chat is what we do, and they know that if anything happens they are to point it at their attacker so that we can identify them. It may even be a deterrent if a perp realizes this before an attempt.
Bookmark
Good luck with your project.
Ironically, it won’t be read by the people who would need to read it, for reasons that you no doubt will describe in the book.
That’s going to be interesting
Jonathan Haidt is not quite conservative, but he has a ton of useful information on exactly that subject. I could not stop watching this lecture:
I’m a professional school bus driver. You may interview me any day.
The worse evil is video games, multitudes being so preoccupied with them that if they did have to go to school they would just stay inside wasting their life for days. As they do when not in school. And with an attention span of about 5 seconds when actually in a conversation.