A cautionary article in The New York Times describes the important role that parents' use of technology has on their children in a variety of ways. The article cites a study in which caregivers (it wasn't always possible to judge whether they were the parents) with their children were observed in restaurants for their use [...]
As many of you know from my most recent parenting book, Raising Generation Tech: Prepare Your Children for a Media-fueled World, I'm not a big fan of screen time by children. In recent years, I've gotten push back from parents who say that their children learn a lot from so-called educational" media, whether TV shows, [...]
Here's a great article about a school that took a three-day break from technology. Be sure to watch the video that goes along with it. Could you not use technology for even a day? That's my challenge to you!
There was a powerful commentary in The New York Times yesterday about the importance of reading books in this fast-paced, digital world we are immersed in. A worthwhile and cautionary read for anyone who has become "addicted" to the Internet.
In a past post, I described my belief in the Law of Unintended Consequences, which suggests that we can’t predict how innovations will impact us individually or collectively. This law couldn’t be more relevant than in the influence of the Internet, and all of the technological advances that followed, on our lives. What makes the Law [...]
Whether we like it or not, the Internet, social media, and all of the related technology are here to stay. As evidenced every day in so many ways, this new technological landscape brings many wonderful benefits to our family’s lives and relationships. At the same time, as with any new innovations, this impact has a [...]
To give you a sense of the scope of the effect of technology on the psychological and emotional health of young people, I want to describe the results of an international study involving more than 1000 students from ten countries across five continents that asked students to disconnect from technology for 24 hours. The results and insights, [...]
Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It’s what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting. There is also little doubt that all of the new technologies, led by the Internet, are shaping the way we think in ways obvious and subtle, deliberate and unintentional, and advantageous and detrimental The uncertain reality is that, with this new technological frontier in its infancy and developments emerging at a rapid pace, we have neither the benefit of historical hindsight nor the time to ponder or examine the value and cost of these advancements in terms of how it influences our children’s ability to think. There is, however, a growing body of research that technology can be both beneficial and harmful to different ways in which children think. Moreover, this influence isn’t just affecting children on the surface of their thinking. Rather, because their brains are still developing and malleable, frequent exposure by so-called digital natives to technology is actually wiring the brain in ways very different than in previous generations.
Self-identity is one of the trickier contributors to children’s healthy development because you can’t “do” things to your children to give them their self-identity. Rather, you can only create an environment that allows their self-identity to evolve naturally. A part of the environment that supports the emergence of culture and media, that aim to stunt, [...]
The externalization of children’s self-identities caused by the omnipresence of popular culture and social media today, that I discussed in my last post, has resulted in an unhealthy internal focus on the self among young people these days. Do you recall the story of Narcissus? The handsome fellow in Greek mythology who, because of his [...]