Techtonic listeners of a certain age may be in the “sandwich generation,” with responsibilities for aging parents while still raising kids. Big Tech allows or even promotes predation of the elderly and children, but there are ways to resist. Today we’ll cover tech suggestions for both: how to deal with parents’ digital assets, and how to guide kids toward better digital choices.
Ryan Lowe is a child and adolescent psychotherapist and spokesperson for the Association of Child Psychotherapists. . . . “They’re not learning the basic skills of patience and containing themselves long enough to manage something difficult or frustrating.” This can disadvantage kids because “if a device is put in front of a child the minute they start to fret or find things difficult, then that’s the only way they learn to cope with difficult feelings”.• Jonathan Haidt’s suggestions for kids and tech (Jan 18, 2024):
Behavioural and neurodevelopmental optometrist Bhavin Shah says there are a couple of other really important consequences of iPad use. “The first is that more children are becoming short sighted than ever before.” Increased screen time is one of the biggest factors for this. Children under the age of three can also pick up underdeveloped fine motor skills and a difficulty in visual spatial awareness, says Shah, “because children are used to a 2D world instead of the real one”.
1. No Smartphone Before High School (give only flip phones in middle school)• NYC planning a school cellphone ban for February, principals say (Chalkbeat, July 17, 2024): “Schools Chancellor David Banks has been talking with principals across the five boroughs about cellphones, and said that they overwhelmingly want a citywide policy. Gov. Kathy Hochul is also planning to announce a statewide school cellphone policy this year.”
2. No Social Media Before 16
3. Phone-Free Schools (all phones go into phone lockers or Yondr pouches)
4. Far more free play and independence
It’s what I call the phone-based childhood that blocks many developmental pathways. The purpose of childhood is to give the animal time to wire up its brain and learn behaviors that we’ll need in adulthood. And what is it that children need to do to wire up? Play. All mammals play, and play is essential. If you deprive baby rhesus monkeys, mice or any animal of play, they don’t develop proper social skills. They’re much more anxious for the rest of their lives. They don’t explore as much. . . . children need to seek out risk and thrill repeatedly. If you take those away, you don’t get as much growth or overcoming of anxiety.• From Get Tech Out of the Classroom Before It’s Too Late (by Jessica Grose in NYT Opinion, April 10, 2024):
The bad guys, as I see it, are tech companies.P.S. From the reader comments on the NYT site:
One way or another, we’ve allowed Big Tech’s tentacles into absolutely every aspect of our children’s education, with very little oversight and no real proof that their devices or programs improve educational outcomes. Last year Collin Binkley at The Associated Press analyzed public records and found that “many of the largest school systems spent tens of millions of dollars in pandemic money on software and services from tech companies, including licenses for apps, games and tutoring websites.” However, he continued, schools “have little or no evidence the programs helped students.”
. . . We’ve let tech companies and their products set the terms of the argument about what education should be, and too many people, myself included, didn’t initially realize it. Companies never had to prove that devices or software, broadly speaking, helped students learn before those devices had wormed their way into America’s public schools. And now the onus is on parents to marshal arguments about the detriments of tech in schools.
I’m a college professor and I can tell you what I see in this generation of students: they don’t talk to each other, they stare at their phones, they think YouTube is a college-level source, they can’t write by hand or take notes or even read very well. It’s appalling. I’ve been teaching for almost 19 years and what has happened over the last 10 years is nothing short of criminal. Education has sold its soul to big tech and now we are reaping the consequences.