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Exposing Children to Technology?
LabelThis asks: "While I'm not a huge fan of immersing children in technology, there is a certain point at which you must expose them to the tools that will help them be successful in the world. Looking back, I distinctly remember my parents making every effort to provide a computer for me and my sibling, early on (they bought an Atari 400 for us when I was 5). Either by accident or on purpose, that single decision (and the continued follow up of purchasing newer computers as needed) shaped my future and the future of my siblings. I now have a daughter, and my wife and I have a number of years to before we worry about equipping her with technology (right now spending time with her and helping her be a happy well adjusted toddler are our primary concerns). In the spirit of my parents choice, what type of tools should parents be equipping their children with, today?"
with or without tech, that away they wont be screwed if they dont have their favorite tech, but make sure they are plenty exposed to tech so they arent screwed in the job market later in life...
in my opinion, definately not the internet. it's not long before they/their friends start getting into AIM and things like that. before you know it, when they're still really small, they'll probably end up loading the computer with spyware and they might even have a myspace or something...teach em how to use a computer, but don't give em the internet until they're older and seem somewhat more responsible.
If you mean "computers" say so. "Technology" is not a synonym for "computers". Hint: cooking is technology.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
what type of tools should parents be equipping their children with, today?
Pencils, pens, paper. Printed books--good, old, classic books. They'll learn computers and all that--you can hardly do anything these days without using one. What they need are the basic skills they won't get through computers, and that is accomplished through reading good ol' books and writing.
When my generation was growing up, our parents did whatever the hell they felt like doing and the kids came along for the ride. Nowadays parents spend all weekend with their kids. School holidays are a "nightmare" because they feel the need to take their annual holidays from work at the same time and take the kids out or away on vacation. That Atari 400 you had, do you remember what time of year you got it? Christmas right? Or maybe your birthday? Or maybe a combined birthday/christmas present? That was because your parents didn't have much money right? Wrong. It's because our parents didn't spend 98% of the salary on buying shit for us kids. They had their own lives. When us kids asked if they could have a new bike, or some other toy, our parents openly laughed at us and told us to save up our pocket money or see if the neighbours wanted any chores done, or wait until our birthday/christmas. These days a kid just has to whine loud enough and parents cave in. So to answer your question, when's the best time to expose kids to technology? After they've begged you for a computer for at least six months or a year. Then buy em a cheap second hand one and tell em to make do. Cause if you don't they'll just get bored with it and next they'll be demanding an xbox and an ipod and a psp.
How we know is more important than what we know.
My dad bought me a few of these as a kid but it never sunk in. I could follow the instructions and put something together, but I was frustrated that I never really understood what the complex circiuits were doing.
Maybe I needed some more fundamentals, maybe I should have asked dad for some more help, maybe I didn't have the math for op-amps or whatever when I was 10. It did not come naturally and the environment was not right to help me really get it.
Maybe the educational materials that go along with those kits are better now. The radio shack stuff from 25 years ago didn't help me much...
One good way to teach critical thinking is to practise it with your child. Ask them questions about how media, especially advertising, makes them feel. Point out to them the tactics that media purveyors use to produce emotional responce.
As your child matures, involve them in your political, economic, and spiritual life. Take them to a political protest and explain why. Engage them in charity and volunteering, perhaps at a local food bank. They will learn humility and also see what it is like to be less prosperous.
It is important for a child to know how to properly express themselves. One great way to teach is to practise it yourself. Take your time when choosing words and sentences, and always be honest.
Morals help us to act rightly, even when no one is watching. The internet provides a great deal of annonymity, and a strong moral sense serves as compass and shield.
...a few suggestions from someone who doesn't have it all right, but gets closer every day...
could it be?
As far as tech goes they'll be inundated from their earliest days although I'd work with them in bits :) and words to ensure they have a conceptual grasp of the how it is that computers work. Too often in education an assumption is made that everyone gets the basics then students are shunted up the ladder where often they can't grasp concepts because the basics learned by rote weren't fundamentaly understood.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
is you. Your time, your attention, and your approval. You appear to know all of that, but sometimes we get caught up in being good little consumers and buying "tools" when we should be focusing on the tool wielder.
With kids aged 18, 15, and 14 I have some experience in this. I can view with 20/20 hindsight the mistakes I made and the triumphs, such as they were. Without exception my failures have involved taking my eyes off of them for just a little while.
Play with them. Make them earn everything but love (and what you're required by law to give them). Don't be afraid to punish bad behavior. Don't reward tantrums, whining, or other manipulation, but do reward reasoned persistence.
Reward honesty, so much that if the has a "cherry tree" moment, give praise and forget the misdeed. Punish dishonesty in every form.
Punishment should fit the misdeed, and should be designed to benefit the family in the long run. Reserve corporal punishment for "you ain't the boss of me!". It will come. Whack 'em. They'll get over it.
If you give them a computer, make it known that you can lock them out of it at your slightest whim.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Yea these kits sucked as they didn't expect you to use any problem solving skills. Lucikly I was curious enough to take the existing plans and attempt to slowly modify them to figure out what each and every part did. I still never quite figured out the chip that was provided, though I had no understanding of gate logic at my time, thats probably something that would have helped! :)
Now, stop and think about the logic of this. First, you're asking a bunch of geeks for parenting advice. Only a few of us have kids. Next, you're asking the kind of question which doesn't provoke the kind of thought that would lend a helpful answer; doubtless you'll toddle off and go do whatever you felt like doing anyway, as you should do anyway. Finally, you're asking what you can do for someone so that by 16+ years from now, they'll be prepared.
Now, if you were 18 today, what kind of insight would you have gained from your explorations of technology in 1990? Let's see, here: Cell phones would be lost on you. You'd probably have learned to type on an IBM Selectric. You'd have discovered Windows 3.0 running on a 386 PC or a Mac box. With the Windows box, you'd get as far as DOS and the QBasic language and hit the wall after that, and with the Mac you'd be drawing nifty black-and-white bitmaps and learning Hypercard. If you got to tour a workplace of the time on a school field trip, you'd get to learn about how computers are huge blue cabinets in special cold rooms with Halon dumps and running things like VMS. You'd get real handy at copying songs from the radio onto tape cassettes, or at least scoring on CDs if you were pink. Ipod's would never have entered your sphere...
You see where it's going, now? There's almost nothing you can show your kids today that won't be landfill fodder by the time they're getting a job. As a last ditch effort to say I recommended something, I'd say give them Linux to play with, so at least they'd get to see a system that's geared to enable learning from the guts outward. As opposed to proprietary systems which are designed to keep you in the dark and hence dependent on "The Man" like a junkie scoring their fix, endlessly chasing the delusion that you can pay somebody else to do your learning for you. But by now, I suppose you're just sneering in contempt at the audacity to suggest such a thing, even though my kids have had no problem doing everything they want to do on a Linux box, and I'm OK with that, and I'll be OK with your kids working for my kids, too!
At least some good has come of this exchange, this time. I've set the point in concrete once and for all so I can copy and save this reply in a file, the quicker to post the *NEXT* time we get this question.
Cooking is a good introduction to experimentation and elementary chemistry etc. Lego for spatial & basic construction skills. Get a steam engine or a Stirling engine, some magnets,... Fix a bike, brew some ginger beer... Fly a kite, knit some socks... Just whatever you do, do something **real**, not virtual computer simulation crap.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is the silliest recurring post I see on slashdot and here's why: what's the demographic of the average slashdot reader? late-teens to late twenties, male, geeky (but perhaps not in keeping with the dorky sterotype of our predicessors)? So, as a parent, you're going to ask THIS group of guys when you should do something that has potentially long-lasting impact on your child... riiiight. Speaking as the father of three, I won't do it. My kids are too special and too important to risk horsing up on account of taking the advice of a bunch of guys who know as much about children as they do about grammar.
/. crew is the LAST group of people on earth I would turn to for advice on parenting.
No offense, but the
-C
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
Or if you do decide to stick them on the internet, be there while they use it.
That's great, for about 3 hours a week. No person in their right mind could stand to stare at the screen while a kid browses pointless Blues Clues websites for any serious length of time. The thought alone is driving me crazy.
Also, if my parents had stood over my shoulder while I used my long line of computers since 4th grade, I would NOT be a programmer today. In fact, I doubt I'd know much about it at all because I'd be worrying what they thought about what I was doing, rather than just doing it. "What's that?" "It's a Hello World program." "Why'd you write it?" "It's a good first program on a language." -silence- "WHAT!?" "Just watching."
No, that doesn't work at all. -Now- I can work with someone watching what I'm doing, because I'm confident in it. But back when I was first learning, it was just too nerve-wracking.
People (not just children) need room to grow. Smothering them will effectively kill them.
If you want computers and the internet to remaining a barely-useable tool for you child, restrict them from it heavily and that is how it'll be.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Three hours a week (or less) is about right! My son does have access to the internet. The computer is supervised at all times (in the living room). If he is doing somethat that he feels he needs to hide, he probably shouldn't be doing it. In online games, I create parallel accounts to my son and play along side him. His friends think that he has a really cool dad! And I see everything that is happening and can provide instant commentary. I do not try to prevent my son from entering the "real world" -- but I DO try to teach him how to deal with it.
"If everything still worked properly, I'd give my kids some older tech to play on. You know, computers that boot instantly and have a programming language built in. Because today's computers *can* do so much, they insist on doing quite a lot of it all the time for no good reason. That's too much distraction for focusing on the task at hand I'd say."
EXCELLENT point.
When I was in elementary/middle school, my family had a 386 at home. However, the only thing that anyone had showed me to do on it was play games, use Lotus (one of my older brothers is an engineer, and I watched) and look up things on the Encyclopedia Britannica CD. I learned a few basic things about the command line too, but for the most part the computer was used as a tool to teach me non-tech things or for entertainment. We weren't online and wouldn't be until much, much later.
What actually got me started on programming and truly about the inner workings of computers wasn't a PC at all, but a programmable calculator with a form of BASIC built in (I ran into C a few months later when the technology teacher realized I was interested in programming). I spent a large portion of sixth-grade sitting in the back of the class writing simple programs, mostly games and simple unit conversion stuff, gradually learning the basics of procedural programming.
If you want a kid to get interested in technology, don't present the computer as a crystal ball that magically lets them get what they want. Present it as someting that will do what they want IF they're willing to figure out what commands to give it.