Author: Dr. Jim Taylor

Give Your Children the Gift of an “Unmediated” Life

I want to provide you with a “big picture” sense of the kind of life that I believe your children should lead during their formative years. This life should result in their developing into children who have both the “old-school” values, attitudes, and tools and the “new-school” skills (i.e., technology capabilities) that will enable them to thrive in the 21st century.

Unmediated Life

At the heart of this life that I advocate for is that your children should live a largely unmediated life in which they can have direct access to their experiences. When I talk about unmediated, I intend it in two ways. First, so many children these days are forced to view their world through the “lens” of popular culture, whether the things they eat, wear, or play with that have merchandising tie-ins or simply the presence of popular culture in everything they see, watch, read, and listen to. It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to see how these popular culture filters would have a significant impact on how your children come to view themselves and their world. You want your children to see themselves and their lives unencumbered by these lenses, in which they can experience life in a pure and unbiased way, allowing them to decide for themselves on its meaning and how it might affect them.

Second, as the research on the astonishing amount of time that children spend in front of screens suggests, so much of their day is spent viewing the world through a screen, whether television, computer, video game console, or smartphone. As I will describe shortly, this mediated experience—a screen is always between them and life—has significant limitations with real implications on their development. You want your children to experience most of their life directly without what are really virtual representations of life as rendered through a screen.