Consumer Electronics Causing 'Death of Childhood'?

An anonymous reader writes "Top children's authors, including best-seller Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials), have written an open letter to the British Government claiming that consumer electronics have brought about the death of childhood. They say that children desperately need 'real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in'. The letter writers also state that children have lost their imaginations because they are, 'pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.' The article asks, 'is modern life too fast for the supple human mind? Do children have a rev counter we're red-lining by exposing them to so much input?'" So what does Slashdot think? Are kids growing up too fast nowadays because of them new-fangled technologies?

Comments

No real programmers either

[adisakp]

Yes I know this is a troll...

But how many people out there were claiming we wouldn't be having any new low-level programmers because kids these days grow up with Windows and Macs rather than Apple IIe and C64's?

Sad Sight

[StefanJ]

A few months back, I went to a local model rocket launch. It was on a farm in a beautiful chunk of Oregon (See the background of this: http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/hustler_pose .jpg). Dozens of geeks and their families were there, launching model rockets big and small into the sky.

More than a few of the kids present were squatting on the ground, or in car seats, blank expressions on their faces, banging away at portable game machines.

How pathetic.

Someday these kids will need to take special classes to learn how to walk on dirt.

I've seen this first-hand

[morgan_greywolf]

I've seen this problem first-hand in my stepson. He grew up absolutely addicted to video games and he constantly throws himself into the video game world. He has difficulty in coping with the real world. Until we started getting him some help, he was even uncomfortable paying for something at a store counter. His sister, who never shared his video game addiction, grew up to be very okay and completely independent. But now that he's almost 23, coping with real life is a skill he's having to work at. He still lives at home, has had difficulty holding a job. He's starting to turn around -- he's in school and getting A+ certification training (hey, it's a start!) But he's got a long way to go.

Kids MUST watch some TV

[shoolz]

Children must have at least some exposure to the crass and cynical consumer world, with a loving parent at their side to explain what all those fancy commercials are really about.

I had a friend in high school who did not have a TV growing up, and as nice a fellow as he was, he was a hopeless rube that at the age of 18, still believed that wrestling was real and would purchase the bridge you had for sale at the drop of a hat.

I think he could have benifited from a few hours of TV per day, with an audio tape loop in the background repeating "None of this is real... None of this is real..."

Re:Growing up too fast?

[iocat]

Letting your kid outside to play with his friends is un-workable in dangerous, urban environments. I'd much rather my kid get the same kind of exploratory feelings I got from playing in the woods from playing Zelda, versus having him venture, unsupervised, into the dirty, polluted, woody ravines by our home in east Oakland, which are overrun with crack users, and prostitutes.

Henry Jerkins at MIT makes the excellent point that kids playing videogames are basically doing the same thing as kids playing cowboys and indians, and that videogames have become the virtual playspace for a new generation of kids who don't have the opportunity to roam in real environments. (He also makes the point that mom's are only freaked by games because they never saw what kinds of real and imagined violence went on when kids played outside.)

Finally, anyone who thinks kids today have been robbed of their imaginations should drop a box of legos in front of them.

Re:The reason that kids are growing up too quickly

[LWATCDR]

"The reason that kids are growing up too quickly has to do with the parents encouraging kids to just watch TV by placing them in front of it instead of actually paying attention. This behavior becomes habit -"
Often the reasons that happens is both parents work or it is a single parent home. Plus there is so much mind numbing entertainment that our culture now expects to entertained all the time. I can not tell you how many times I have seen kids watching DVDs in the car when they are just driving around town! Adults are no better, we have games and TV on our cell phones, and movies on our IPods. One wonders what we could do with that time if we where not being entertained.

Childhood's End

[brianerst]

While Pullman certainly has a point (my own kids do most of their playing outside, and are only allowed to play XBox on the weekends), he's also fearing the loss of a relatively recent concept - extended childhood.

Up until widespread schooling began in the 17th and 18th centuries, the modern concept of childhoood, as a time of play and learning lasting well into your teens, didn't really exist. "Real" childhood, that period where you are more of a burden than a help to your agrarian family, only lasted until you were old enough to start doing chores around the farm. By the time you were in your teens, you were probably starting to think about starting a family of your own.

While there is some controversy about whether modern childhood was "invented" in the 18th century, it certainly changed quite a lot. The changing standard of childhood is a little better understood in Japan, where the concept of modern childhood was largely introduced by globalization in the 19th century, and was thus studied a little more rigorously than in Europe and America, where it was a more organic process.

What many of us now consider "childhood" (school and play, with hardly any work until late teens) is really a 20th century phenomenon - once the West de-ruralized and mechanized, the amount of work needed to be performed on a daily basis dwindled to the point where child labor, at home or away, wasn't really needed or desired. The Western 1950s-70s were the absolute high-water mark for a childhood of outdoor leisure - not surprisingly, exactly the time when Pullman (and I, and a large chunk of Slashdot) grew up.

As with any nostalgia trip, Pullman (mis)remembers all the highlights of these times, but not the downsides like the often crushing boredom of having absolutely nothing to do on a rainy weekend (unless, like us, your were a geek and read a lot).

Maybe playing Madden 2007 on a rainy day leads to less creative thought than reading "The Mad Scientists Club" for the fifth time, but I don't think Pullman convincingly makes that case.

Parental Involvement # 1

[boristdog]

I have recently acquired stepchildren. Suddenly I'm a parent to two adolescents.

Through trial and error, I have found that what kids NEED is what they crave: Parental attention. These kids love doing nearly anything that involves me helping them out. Whether its schoolwork, some little art activity, building something (I DO have a big box of LEGOs), taking a walk, made-up games, whatever. They are ecstatic that someone will spend time and attention on them.

So if their your kids, your stepkids, your neices and nephews, your friends kids, whatever. Just listen to them, play a game with them (spontaneous made-up games are a favorite), teach them something cool. They'll grow up all right, and you'll be that really cool person who they admire from their childhood.

ADD, ADHD, Asperger's, Autism

[msobkow]

The increase in ADD, ADHD, Asperger's, and Autism would seem to indicate that children are being "revved" beyond their abilities.

I don't think it's the "fault" of electronic entertainment, but rather the incessant push to not merely succeed, but to excel. Those children with a variety of educational/entertainment/sport activities end up more balanced, but are still stressed.

Another part of the problem is that parents and authorities would rather push pills for ADD/ADHD than punish a child. When we twitched around in our seats in school, we got punished and learned to pay attention (sort of.) Now they flag a "problem" and stuff the kid full of pills.

The truly scary thing is that statistics are now showing that the ADD/ADHD "patients" grow up to suffer an increase in cocaine and meth addiction problems. Not surprising when you realize that ADD/ADHD medications are speed, so they're just trying to maintain the addiction developed by the educational and medical systems that would rather drug children than deal with the problems.

Re:The reason that kids are growing up too quickly

[CDarklock]

I struggle with this. Raising kids is hard. The hardest part is figuring out how exactly you fit this whole other person into your life.

I think most people have trouble fitting themselves into their lives. They just don't have enough time to work, socialise, and relax to their own satisfaction. When you add a child on top of that, all kinds of mess comes out of it - and ultimately, your own self-interest carries more weight, so the children often end up on the losing end.

At some point, things need to be reduced and removed to make room. What screws that up is the general inability of most people to make real sacrifices... it's one thing to say you put your child first, but it's quite another to actually do it when you're down to your last few dollars. Even though this level of desperation is rarely an issue for most parents, there are innumerable little ways that parents deprive their children in ways mom and dad might not even notice: you can't afford the $4 bag of cookies your child wants, but you buy an $18 bottle of wine later in the same trip. Could you have perhaps gotten a $12 bottle of wine instead, and used the savings to buy cookies? Of course. The child sees and understands this, even if you don't, and by adolescence there's a massive buildup of frustration from it.

The message we give our children is that as adults, we get to do what we want, and children have to shut up and make do with what we deign to provide them. This doesn't just make our family lives difficult when the kids hit their teenage years, it also raises essentially infantile adults - they've been trained to be selfishly indulgent their whole lives.

I don't think there's an easy answer to this. I think you have to actually understand what you do and how it looks to your children, which unfortunately requires you to think about how other people view your behavior... and a lot of people just seem incapable of that.

Re:Not only that

[LWATCDR]

I know my sister does a good job so far. She spends time with her little girl and they do craft projects all the time together. She plays with dolls and toy trucks and all sorts of other real toys.
My sister is lucky. Her husband works long hours and they both go with out so she can stay home with their child. She is also a former teacher so she has some major advantages over a lot of people.
I would say that parents don't have to buy PS2s, Gamecubes, or put a TV in every room.
That might be a good start.
When they are little you do have control over what they see and do.

Re:Growing up too fast?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

"It's irrational to create a society wherein good people hide behind walls while the criminals roam free."

it has been like that since the first cities were created. good and honest people who could afford it, would live inside the walls of the city, leaving the open fields to the mobs.

this idea of open cities is recent in human history, and apparently a failed idea. what we see today is a return to the old method off small walled comunities where kids can play outside their homes, for as long as they stay inside the walls of their community.

oh, and about the rational/irrational stuff, who's the crackpot who told you our species is rational ? me and my baseball bat would like to have a little chat with him...

Re:Caligulazation

[ScentCone]

But isn't that the point of technology? If we had machines to do everything for us, replicators to give us anything we wanted, and so on, how is that ruining any generation? We could spend our lives being artists, researching history, or anything else we *want* to do without fear of starving or putting up with a mean old boss. We're so tantalizingly close to this, I can't imagine why anyone would want to go back. Just a few short generations, and humanity will have the means to do essentially whatever it wants.

Unless we also have a way to suppress millions of years of mammalian (in general) and advanced primate (specifically) evolution, some kid born three or four generations from now that still has his pointy eye-teeth, predator's senses and sensibilities, and pack-protecting urges - but who has no outlet for any of that - is going to do exactly what I think a lot of them are doing today: go slightly crazy. You can't take every (or even most) adolescent's nearly superhuman gusto for life and channel it entirely into art, research, or even mountain climbing. I suppose that challenging, competitive sports area good outlet (or would be, if we weren't squashing them into one big "everyone is special, everyone's the best" festival right at the ages when actually striving against some fairly low-risk adversity is hugely helpful, developmentally).

Essentially: unless you change human nature (biologically, I'm talking - behavior and perception as heavily influenced by our DNA), making the world like one big nursery/playground for adults is going to produce ever more sociopathic human BSODs. I wouldn't rant about it, but I think, with a little perspective, now, I actually see it happening. The challenge, in the scenario you describe, is to generate sufficient adventure and adversity to scratch all of those primal itches without needing to fend off religious fanatics or killer luddites in hijacked planes in order to flex that bit of deep-seated programming.

Not fast enough!

[meburke]

Children are the last minority. A child can be tried for murder as an adult at 12, but cannot get a job or a means of taking adult responsibility. In Houston, the schools are already starting to look like prisons; fences, guards, security systems, etc.. With curfew, they are under House Arrest from 10:00PM 'til 6:00AM, thus making their incarceration more complete.

I lied about my age and joined the Army back in the '60's, and two months later had an Army GED. The State of Alaska granted me an actual Diploma when I turned 18. People used to laugh at people with GED's, but now you have to take a GED test before they will let you graduate (in Texas they call it TAKS), and it's not even as hard as the one I took back in the '60's! But if some kid showed up for his Freshman year of High School and passed the TAKS, do you think they'd let him graduate and get a job? NO! He still has to serve the rest of his sentence!

Just wait. The population of the US is getting older. It won't be too long before they lower the age at which young people can go to work to support the old folks on Social Security.

Check this out: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/multimedia/jtgsound _paradox.htm The rest of the site is pretty interesting also.

My $.02 worth of random commentary

[kakapo]

I have two children, one 7 months old and one just starting kindergarten a month or so shy of his 5th birthday. Essentially the only broadcast TV Boy#1 sees is PBS cartoons (we have basic cable plus Netflix), and we often feel like granola eating luddites compared to a lot of our friends. He has seen mainstream cartoons and movies at friends' houses (and we have the usual Pixar crowd plus some movies, which he likes although he usually wants to fast forward the scary parts), along with Playstation and Nintendo, and so far he has accepted that other families do things differently from his own.

He plays outside, paints, draws, runs, jumps, rides his bike, knows basic math (addition and subtraction with numbers less than 20 or so, and I am not sure how high he can count anymore). He knows his letters, and can recognize a bunch of words and is certainly "ready" to read, as the jargon has it. He loves to help me "build". He designed and I constructed a wooden garage for him out of off-cuts, and he got me to buzz round the edges of the roof with my router to give it a nice edge (he knew what the router was for, and could visualize the finished product), and I am trying to find tools he can safely use -- he constructs huge sculptures from offcuts and glue, which he calls "Star Wars things" and then spends several sessions painting them. He goes sledding, swims, jump off the diving board, eats all kinds of foods, and knows that any good breakfast wil have protein, carbs and some fruit.

He also knows Spiderman's real name is Peter Parker, can identify Batman at about 100 yards (as well as Batcat and Batdog, minor deities he and his preschoolmates include in the pantheon on the same footing as Batman himself), and can hum a passable rendition of the Star Wars theme, despite never having been provided with this information by his parents. And he went off to his first day of school with a Superman backpack -- so far as I can see his room has only one other superman, but about four spidermen and a couple of batmen... He can operate a digital camera (he took a lovely shot of his Mum and Boy#2 the other day -- and she tells me that he carefully asked to her to move as he composed the shot on the screen), and work the DVD player.

Bringing up kids is almost always about flexibility and compromise -- in the end, you have to live in your culture and times, even as you try to give your kids the tools they will need to navigate through the world. But a lot of what my son loves to do would not be a part of his life if he spent too much time in front of a screen -- and in the long run, it is much better to experience the natural world first hand than it is to watch it via some electronic simulacrum, as we learn through touch and smell, as well as just sight and sound.

But what I have seen is this. Kids we know with similar backgrounds to us who watch a lot of TV or spend a lot of screen time, are almost always more "jumpy" than kids who don't -- and I am not implying that Boy#1 is any sort of angel (he threw a fit in the supermarket over the weekend that had people turning and staring from a couple of ailses away, and I explained to him that behaving badly wouldn't get him what he wanted -- namely some sugary cereal with a cartoon character on the box), and more likely to initiate violent play -- which my kid will cheefully join in with, at least until he gets hurt.

And if you want to rail against the corruption of modern life, TV is not the only issue -- avoiding shitty convenience food is a huge part of raising happy and healthy kids. I never expected to be a nutrition nazi, but loading kids with sugar does terrible things to their attention span and plays havoc with their emotions as they come down from the rush...

The other thing I have noticed recently is that Boy #1 is completely unable to make a distrinction between a nature program and a commercial (and he certainly does learn from some of the TV he watches) -- he happily told me that "Peanuts is the best video ever" parroting a trai

Re:A childless adult's observation

[StewedSquirrel]

This is directly related to the fear that parents face.

Fifty years ago, when my father was 9 years old, he and his friends would hop on their bike and ride 3 miles down to the lake. This was along side of an old highway that occassionally saw OTR truckers. They would leave home at noon with instructions "be home before dinner".

Sometimes HIS dad would walk down there to check on them and toss them in the water a few times. Then, they would ride their bikes home when the sun got low.

When I was 11 years old, my father grugingly allowed me to ride my bike 1 mile to a nearby shopping mall with several friends, but gave me a bag of quarters and instructed me to call every hour.

My youngest brother is 13 and is still not allowed out of the "neighborhood" on his own and my mother was horrified at the thought that he "take the bus" to soccer practice, rather than having me drive across town to come pick him up and drive him the 12 blocks over there.

What's the difference?

Statistical rates of violence, bodily harm and child abduction (outside the family) are all at record lows right now. Why are we afraid? Fifty years ago, it was more dangerous to ride your bike down to the lake than it is now.

Why are we afraid?

We, as a society need to ask ourselves this question and come to the conclusion that it is irrational.

Good post.

Stew