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How Much Tech Can Kids Take?
Barence writes "Are today's children facing technology overload, or simply gearing themselves up for life in a digital world? This article examines the effects of exposing children to technology at a young age. Researchers warn of the potential dangers of too much 'screen time,' pointing to alarming (some say scaremongering) research that suggests over-exposure leads to an increased risk of developing autism and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Educators, meanwhile, highlight how technology can improve interaction between child and parent, and provide essential life skills, such as enhanced communication and multitasking. Parents are left with conflicting messages — but how much technology is too much technology for children?"
It all comes down to common sense. It has never been said that raising children should be easy.
Friends,
Our children are being exposed to the trash on the internet at younger and younger ages, and it is time to stop. Their bodies grow to unhealthy weights while their moral compasses shrivel. We must restrict their access to technology until they are old enough to handle it. Thankfully, our dual-party system has come together to propose government filtering of the internet in the form of SOPA. This will help parents who are too tech-illiterate to shield their kids from the dangers of the internet.
Your Brother,
Jake
How much tech can a tech kid take, if a tech kid can take tech?
Well they would take as much tech as a tech kid takes, if a tech kid can take tech!
I'm not terribly worried. My kid is 8. She's a gamer. She loves getting email from grandma. And if she spends too much time in front of the screen, she eventually will get up and find a friend to play with. She's had her own PC since she was 3. She also plays softball, soccer, and chess. Generally, she only resorts to the tv or computer when she can't find a friend. She's an only child, so this is somewhat of a concern, but so far, hasn't been a problem.
Researchers have known for years that there are certain windows of brain development where learning is best supported, and how other activities aren't so helpful. Language acquisition and music have their sweet spot right around 3-6 years of age. It is likely that the skills that using tech best supports are much later in the development of childrens' minds (like logic, problem solving). It shouldn't be surprising that early childhood subjects only use tech as entertainment, and learn little from it. But children, of age 10 or so, can benefit greatly from having exposure to tech in an interactive manner. This is supported by places like Finland, where they don't teach "hard" subjects or tech in early childhood, but rather stress movement, creative play and social interaction at school, leaving other subjects for when they are most appropriate.
Who says kids have to be either overloaded by technology or wisely preparing for the future? How about a third option, like, kids aren't overloaded, they're fine, but they aren't necessarily "preparing", they're just doing what is fun and what is practical. They're KIDS, relax! Just let them play. Luddites need to calm down.
Does Television cause Autism? Everybody used to be so in arms about letting kids watch too much TV, it'll rot their brains out. Now we grew up and we all watch TV, but ooh, videogames and the internet will rot your brain! Its just society adapting to itself as always, you've got the early-adopters and you've got the naysayers.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Same and I played those violent video games my entire life too... now I'm bald. Must be a correlation.
Made up ailments aside (Yes, I believe ADHD, along with a host of other "new diseases," are totally nonexistent and serve only to fatten the wallets of the healthcare industry fatcats by getting humans hooked on their products as early as possible, thus creating entire generations of addicted "customers"), one would have to weigh the individual pro's and con's, and come up with their own determination.
Personally, I would not let my kids (if I had any) spend their entire existence in front of some sort of screen, allowing corporations to raise my kids for me. Of course, when it comes to education I can see certain advantages over the technology (or lack thereof) used back in my day; kids could be reading the latest history as it is being made, as opposed to textbooks that still refer to Reagan as the sitting President. But again, that goes back to the whole 'corporate control' issue; who decides what goes into a history etextbook? Actual, educated historians, or the salespeople and marketers at Houghton-Mifflin?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Exactly right. You turned your brain on using a computer; some kids turn their brains off.
Kids will take as much tech as they can hide in their baggy pants without being caught
ADHD: The new normal.
What we're seeing are the effects of something that no generation in the history of mankind has ever had to deal with: children who can legitimately depend on other devices to do things that heretofore were the exclusive domain of the well-trained brain. No generation has ever grown up with this level of technology integrated into their daily lives.
Don't follow the link, it's another goatse.
We live out in the country and were stuck with satellite internet, we recently got custody of our 2 nieces (6 and 9 then) and they kept asking about online gaming and watching streaming netflix . They just could not understand why that dosent work at our house or what a 350mb daily download limit pr ping times of 1300 mean. They have had broadband their whole life and think the internet is just everywhere and always has been.
On the occasions where my 4 year old is somewhere that he watches TV, the way he looks and acts while doing it just makes my heart sink.
He doesn't move. He is completely fixated on the screen. He needs me to make several attempts before his attention is diverted from the screen. He can look away breifly to talk to you but is trying to glance back at the screen.
We have no TV service and no occasion for him to watch TV. We do have a small handful of movies we let him watch occasionally.
One thing that he enjoys and that we let him do (usually one or two days a week) is watch the "Mighty Machines" movies, some of which you can stream off netflix. These are at least modestly interesting, as he is very interested in machines of all types.
Another thing we do together is watch youtube videos of things hes interested in. Whether its trains or rockets or consturction equipment or car racing -- theres always something your child is interested in and usually a youtube video of it. But that is a two-person activity -- you and your child can ask questions about what you are watching, pause, replay, etc.
The best thing you can do for your kids is read to them constantly, in an interactive way From an early age. Ask them what things are in books they know. Ask them more questions about the world their books create.
Listen to the questions they ask. Never tell them to shut up when they are asking questions.
When you say "I don't know", make sure you control your tone. Your tone should say "I don't know the answer to that, but now that you mention it, I'm curious too!" instead of "your question isn't important enough to answer"
My 4 year old is an excellent reader, quite good at adding, counting by intervals, subtraction, etc. He likes to play "Angry Birds" on my wifes phone, although we limit that quite heavily. He knows how to login to my desktop machine, start up mspaint, start up wordpad, etc. He has some "Jumpstart" edu-games that he can play by himself.
We limit how much computer time he gets --- even when it is educational software.
I don't think anything (Besides normal TV) is intrinsically bad for kids in reasonable amounts. What parents should NOT do is use technology to babysit. What parents and kids benefit from is a variety of different experiences, all in reasonable duration and frequency.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Research done at Duke and in Romania shows that computers or access to broadband can lower study scores. It's not so shocking, really, that games and media can supplant study, reading, and thinking. So I think the question shouldn't be how much (quantity) but of what sort and how (quality). The Duke study was done by . Vigdor and Ladd; there's a gloss of it in a New York Times article called "Computers at Home, Hope vs. Reality." I can attest to the fact that students on college campuses today read books, newspapers, and magazines far less than did students in the 80s. Instead they're generally using social media, texting, or listening to a portable music player. You almost never see students carry around battered paperbacks anymore; in the past the ratty old Stephen King or some similar lite reading was a common time burner between classes. Though it does seem that devices like Nooks and Kindles are becoming a little more common on campus.
I've always thought that "screen time" is a ridiculous metric for kids. As though watching the Disney Channel, writing C++, playing Halo, and Skyping with friends/family are all the same thing. And it only gets worse as LCD panels become cheaper (and thus more prevalent in our lives). Are we going to count sitting in the family minivan playing with the GPS on the way to school as screen time? How about reading textbooks on the family iPad?
What really matters, of course, is the engagement of the parents to set up, support, and reinforce the environment of their children. I have no doubt that many parents simply hand their child their iPhone to distract them when they're busy with other things. Too many parents don't burden themselves with getting involved in the choices their children make, and then usually regret it later or try to fix it in artificial ways (see: "screen time"). At the same time, there are parents who teach or enable their kids to do great things with technology, like film and edit home movies, or write simple iOS/Android apps, or build simple circuits.
The parents matter. More specifically their time, effort, and creativity matters. Friends, other family, choice of school, and other available resources matter. The "amount of screen time" doesn't matter. Stop worrying about it, and start worrying about the choices that do.
..are living in some sort of F'ing fantasy land!
What I wouldn't have given to have my parents let an Atari 2600, an NES, or an Apple II babysit me. No, instead I had go outside and do chores, do dishes, clean my room, clean everyone else's room, do my homework, finish eating my food, monitor the reactor core, etc. Seriously, In the summer I had to go to bed when it was still light outside (and no, I didn't live in Alaska). Do kids even have bedtimes anymore?
Oh to be left alone by my legal guardians to sit and veg in front of an electronic device... We are chastising these parents?! These parents are heroes!
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
My wife is a vision therapist. She is seeing lots of kids come in who have trouble reading, playing sports that involve catching, and similar issues. When you're young your brain is really malleable but what it sees is what it expects as normal. When kids' eyes are constantly focussing on small high-resolution screens just a short distance from their faces, their brains consider that normal and adapt to that, meaning the kids have trouble, later on, with easily getting distant images to fuse. It's not like their eyes are crossed, but they do have to work harder, in some cases a lot harder, to maintain distance vision. She gets lots of kids who are considered slow learners or who "just hate reading" and after 12 weeks or so of visual training, suddenly they can catch balls easily, are reading at their grade level, and are enjoying reading.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
There is some argument about the overuse of technology, but the bigger issue is how and when it's used. Now, plopping the kid in front of the TV.. generally bad, even if it's so called educational programming. Video games... I'd say so so, as long as the socialization is there. Now, things that make the kid learn more and become engaged in their information and such, not so bad. It's all in the use. Using it as a substitute for something is not going to end well. using it as a supplement for most things, probably ok.
I was programming at a young age, I was also racing dirt bikes and helping dad fix his cars.
If a kid grows up with concerned active parents who spend signifcant time interacting with her, the screen time will probably not hurt too much. If TV and tech are used as a constant babysitter, then the kid will probably have stunted intellect and social skills.
Russel Bank's latest novel "Lost Memory of Skin" (11 reviews here) concerns a guy who grew up with no emotional support, fell in internet porn, and found himself in real trouble.
As a techie and a parent with ADD I am a little more concerned. There are strong reasons to think that TV time is linked to ADD, and I don't see why computers would be different.
Indeed I have been using redshift on my Linux laptop now for a bit over a week and have found my own ADD greatly helped by the software's color shifting, suggesting to me that the color balance (too much blue in particular) may be partly to blame. We already know this affects other parts of the human brain and can affect sleep. However my experience is that at least for those of us with genetic predispositions for ADD (my dad and my grandfather both have or had it), the color balance may in fact be a factor.
The fact is, the pace of change is very high and it takes years or decades to notice the effect. I think we are generally better holding off and exposing kids later, and also drastically reducing the amount of screen time (whether computer or tv) that kids get.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I swear these articles are sometimes just an excuse for people on Slashdot to write posts on how awesome their son or daughter is, how they aren't affected by tech and how amazing their kid is compared to everyone else.
To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
Is it clearly understood how much tech adults can take? It seems to me that the unstated assumption is that adults have a well-tuned self-regulation mechanism for their intake, but is that borne out by the evidence?
Kids are swamped with video games so much that ey think all devices are used for games. I have started greatly limiting my son's exposure knowing he gets free reign when going to other kid's houses and while visiting the local YMCA. It has been an obsession with him since he first started watching me play WOW at age four. I shortly thereafter quit WOW cold turkey and have been trying to instill in him that computers are used for more than video games. I have even had him do some programming with BASIC and Game Maker but he is still more interested in playing than building things. I constantly stress the value of creating things to him and I can only hope it is making an impact. He is only eight now, so it is probably some time before he is able to run with these concepts of programming. I'm interested myself in building games (been programming business software for years) as I need a fun creative outlet aside from my current projects. I have introduced a single board computer and various small electronics/soldering kits which have been a hit with the kids. My daughter who is about four and my son's video game addicted/unregulated cousin (age 11) also took to the electronics kits as well. My wife thought it was boring and protested giving the kits as birthday presents, but she was dead wrong (doing a little victory dance). Now we have robot kits on the horizon where I will once again introduce programming in assembler and other languages. You can get electronics kits by a company named Elenco; their products are sold on Amazon and at other retailers. It is hands-on and gets them away from media consumption. http://www.amazon.com/Elenco-AmeriKit-Learn-Solder-Kit/dp/B0009Z3JJA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321919567&sr=8-1
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I'm sure this says something about programming, just not what...
The Goatse guy was the inspiration for "Big-O" notation. Truly a pioneer in the field.
I'll second this.
Autism is about someone hyper-focusing on some subset of the world "out of proportion to its value". Notice the sly difference between employable expert and that! If you hyper-focus on tax depreciation theory, you are Employable. If you hyper-focus on the Misfits of Science show and know which actors sadly passed early afterward, you are labeled Autistic.
Wikipedia might just be the single greatest Anti-Autism device, because it tends to "go up levels" as well as answer the questions. So 2 hours on IMDB will answer questions that could become a months-long obsession before, so "once that curiosity itch is scratched", the person can get back to the "bigger picture" that led them there.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
5 year olds can only handle about 6 pounds of tech, any more and they start dropping it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
My cousin is 7. She too has had a computer of her own since she was 3 (a used pink iMac at the time). She too is a young gamer. She has access to an Xbox 360 and a Wii, and has her own DS and Alienware M11x laptop. I take particular pride in that latter device, having come up with the idea and played an instrumental role in convincing the grandparents we share, other cousins, my parents, my own siblings, etc. to contribute. She plays Sims 2 and Sims 3 as could be expected for a girl her age, but she also plays Fable and Portal. In fact at the top of her Christmas list is a plush companion cube. (I kid you not.)
But she also plays soccer and piano. She easily spends just as much playing with plush puppies or dolls with her younger sister as she does playing video games. She does her homework without fail. She has good manners, is in excellent health, etc. She is simultaneously the most ambitious and intelligent child I've ever come across. I expect her to go far, and from what I've seen of Portal, I expect video games to actually help her.
That said, sometimes I must admit I envy her. Her parents also play and she has access to a fiber optic connection. Growing up my family's first computer was a 386 running Windows 3.1 when I was 11. No internet access - that came with a 2400 baud modem on a second family computer years later, clunky CRT with VGA resolution, etc. We had a Nintendo and later a Super Nintendo. My parents' childless coworkers had funny ideas about how much interaction children should have with video games, and sadly, my parents would listen to them. My siblings and I would often have to do crazy things to get a chance at playing a good video game. This doesn't mean we didn't get the opportunity. No! I've got wonderful memories of Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III and Secret of Evermore. Rather, as an adult in my 20s, I can't play any game for more than a few minutes without worrying about overdoing it and I feel this is a lasting effect of that environment. I tend to game vicariously these days.
It's a very different story for the rest of my immediate family. My father has his Xbox 360 and my mother plays that evil Facebook game (Farmville). Now that was something, having my mother of all people leave a voicemail a year or two back asking me to play Farmville. She was always the one most against video games! (I did not play.)
A part of this I think stems from the ideas expressed in the above comments about successive generations of parents being all up in arms about 'the new rock and roll', but I think it might just be that children are just getting stupider and people are latching onto technology as an excuse. I'm a child of the early 90's, (yes, a whippersnapper) and the amount of stupidity displayed by my generation never ceases to amaze and depress. I graduated from high school this year, and I can tell you as a statistical fact that half of the year failed mathematics and English miserably - and in the medium level classes too, not just the hard ones. As I have passed through high school I have assessed it's methods of teaching (because I want to learn dammit) and I judged it to be far below par. The culture amongst the students is of mutual congratulatory failure and the vast majority of the teachers are simply riding it out until they hit retirement. Instead of latching onto technology as a scapegoat, it would be far better to tear down the existing system and restructure education from the ground up.
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
I think that was NewWorldDan's point at the end, that [technology] hasn't been a problem for his daughter. Perhaps you couldn't self regulate as a child and it's good that your parents' intervened, but that isn't true for everyone.
I must wonder why those other programmers are the way they are and if it really is because of what you assume? For some, sure. They've got their computer and they don't need anything else. For others, perhaps they had no other choice? It does happen. Perhaps their parents pushed them? That happens, in everything and in the era of the dot-com boom I'd imagine it happened to a great many.
I'm only in my 20s and I've seen plenty of social people become social hermits for a myriad of reasons; and I've seen quiet ones bloom in their 20s, 30s, 40s, etc. Then there is the old work life versus home life paradigm. I for one, at school and work am about precision whereas at home, "the remote will turn up".
I grew up in the middle of nowhere - eight miles from anything. I had five things I could do: (1) take a machete into the forest and hack at things (and yet I'm terrified when I see a child walk too fast with scissors, imagine), (2) get on my bicycle and get lost for the day (yet I want to put a GPS device on every child I know), (3) annoy the siblings, (4) build stuff with Lego and (5) fiddle around with the computer. I would do all five, often, but because people are so acutely aware of their technological shortcomings, it was what knowledge I had about computers that would be noticed and shared by strangers.
When I met my fifth grade teacher, she took me aside and asked me that if I was ever mad with her that I please come talk to her and not do anything to her computer. I never had done anything malicious to a computer and still haven't. Yet from then on throughout K-12 it seemed every instructor knew this about me before I met them. It was silly. Still, I come across as quiet and if you had just met me and if someone told you their impressions of my computer knowledge, you might label me as one of those IT people. You wouldn't be the first to assume such a thing and truth be told, I used to work for a software company, but not as a programmer. I was a bookkeeper - who would goof off on the weekends. Nevertheless at first glance, I would seem to fit the stereotype. I'm quiet with a laptop near and a few virtual machines running.
That is, if you met me early in the day or on a day I haven't worked or in a college classroom. You see at the end of my usual day I have chalk, glitter, dirt, etc. all over my clothing. I don't seem very antisocial with glitter, believe me! I've had a day of laughter and smiles. Of craft and Lego projects. Of going to the park or lake, or out for ice cream. I'm a nanny and I've been one for more than five years. Funnier still, what I shall do at the end of my studies won't focus on computers or children. I have and will always encourage less reliance on anecdotal experience and bias observations.
I hope my perspective is of use to you.
Depends on how much room they have in their pockets, backpacks and fanny packs.
True. The sad thing I see is parents who get an educational video, and then play the thing over and over and over for their kid. The video might even be an awesome video that has massive educational value for their kid, but after the third viewing the kid has gotten everything educational out of it that they are going to, and the parent just keeps running it over and over hundreds of times. They pat themselves on the back, and tell themselves how they are "educating" their child. Then you get the exact opposite from other parents, where they will deny their kids the first three showings because some study shows that kids who have only been exposed to 90 minutes of stimulus repeated endlessly for the fist 3 years of their life are stunted.
Sounds like utterly bullcrap to me. The main problem with ADHD is that kids are feed with sugar, sugar, sugar and well more sugar. On top of that all other additives and factory made food that some people put on the table. I mean it's not killing the kids giving them pure water instead of a coke?
Anyway correctly used and not used as cheap baby-sitter, computers are great for kids. The best example is learning kids to read and spell. If you cut away the pen/paper and not force the kids to try to write the letters first but instead let them type the words, sounding etc directly on the computer, they break the reading code much faster. thats because the kids dont need to booth learn to write the letters and sound them at the same time. First understand the letters, then write them by hand.
All in all, learn to cook real food on the thing called "STOVE" at home, throw away crisps, candy, coke. Pure meat contains far more Proteins and good fat than a Pizza and tastes way much better. Dont let the kids play video-games unguarded every day. Send them off out in the woods, make them attend to sports or other social activities. Using the computers as baby sitters is just plain stupid.
"Never EVER mess with a jumper you don't know about, even if it's labeled 'sex and free beer'." - Dave Haynie
provide essential life skills, such as enhanced communication and multitasking
It's rather retarded that the summary calls multitasking an "essential life skill". In my opinion, multitasking is one the worse woes in today's work environment. Kills productivity and quality. Forces people to work longer hours to keep up with the mess, disables them to perform meticulous tasks, causes an immense load of errors, destroys team work because everybody is too busy to pay attention to other team members, and makes people miserable in the end.
The fact that so many bosses find it such an important quality is scaring.
It's maybe not. Also, I have no idea whether I have ASD or something else, in my country it's not easy to be a "nutjob" without being completely shunned and recommended to a nuthouse. I can, though, unlike most people, write flawless multithreaded code and debug it in my head, and a few more things that I thought for the longest time that they were quite trivial but had to realize that they're not for most people.
You do not want to hold a discussion with me, I was informed that it is quite annoying to talk to someone who doesn't modulate his voice when speaking, who speaks fairly fast and who can listen while talking due to the fact that he can blend out the frequency he is speaking at (again, something most people cannot for some odd reason), which causes people to assume I'm interrupting or not listening to them. I am, I just didn't find out for the longest time that they cannot do the same. There also was no visible clue for me that they react that way. I thought it's kinda odd that they stopped talking mid sentence while I formulated my reply, but my assumption was that they just realized that my point was more accurate than theirs. Yes, I don't get facial expressions either. And the fact that I started early to create very elaborate and complicated sentences just to keep myself from talking faster than most people would be able to listen, just to keep my mind occupied with something so it doesn't "race ahead" and skip over some parts of my train of thought didn't help a lot either.
Do you know what it's like to try to blend in? When you watch people and spend a good deal of your time in front of a mirror trying to match their facial expressions in various circumstances, to "learn" how to communicate with your body because your body invariably conveys the wrong, if any, message? Every kind of face to face communication is stressful to me. Even with people I know and trust. It was quite a bit of work to do the trick with the "eye contact". Ya know? The things that you probably do by default because it's somehow part of your social package. I didn't. Why? Because there is no inherent benefit of looking at someone when talking to him, at least not for me. I do not get any additional information from his body or face, so why bother looking at him? My eyes can do something sensible in the meantime, like reading something. But it makes people uncomfortable if you do not look at them when you talk to them, so I was told to look the person I'm talking to into the eyes. Which I did. To do this as prescribed, you have to unfocus your eyes and look past him so each of your eyes looks at one of the other person's eyes. Else, if you focus on his face, you invariably only look into ONE of his eyes. Which again was unsettling to them because, as I was told, it makes people uncomfortable if you appear to be looking "through" them.
And that's just ONE aspect of many, many little and big tidbits of "body language" that I had to learn. Learn. Like, say, a foreign language. Now imagine a situation where you are supposed to talk to someone, maybe someone who is important to you, be it your boss, be it someone you like (let's not talk about love, that's an even bigger box made by Pandora), do you have a faint idea what it's like to concentrate on things like his body language, your body language, where to look, how to hold your head, where to put your hands, how to keep your feet and legs in check... at least I can still breath without concentrating on it because at least that is (seems to be... I can't really be entirely sure) normal, all while trying to hold a fairly normal conversation AND make it look like you're NOT acting, like you're behaving normally?
In a nutshell, it rarely works. Even though I tend to think I got fairly good by now. After over two decades of training, I can almost pass for real. It usually takes people a while to notice that something's off, mostly because from time to time I still slip. Try acting a role 24/7 and you will, too. But I guess aspies would make great spies and infiltra
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.