Popular culture and technology are redefining the meaning of relationships; what relationships are, how they develop and are maintained, and how many relationships we can have. Popular culture, for example, suggests that love can be found in a few weeks on shows like The Bachelor, real family’s lives mirror shows such as Kate Plus 8 [...]
In my previous post, I asked the question: “Is technology making your children mindless instead of mindful?” I think it’s safe to say that it is incredibly difficult for children to be mindful, present, and calm in our culture that is now dominated by the constant flow of information. Yet, if you want your children [...]
I’m no Zen master and I don’t expect you to teach your children to meditate all day. At the same time, the notion of mindfulness has much broader meaning than as an Eastern philosophy or for practitioners of Buddhism. In fact, it has tremendous significance for your children growing up in this crazy new world [...]
Good decision making is one of the most powerful skills your children need to learn to as they progress through childhood and transition into adulthood. But I promise you, it is not a skill that will develop readily on its own, particularly in the digital world in which they are growing up. You should teach your children why popular culture and technology can cause them to make poor decisions and guide them in learning how to make good decisions. Making bad decisions. Whenever I speak to a group of young people, I ask how many of them have ever made a bad decision. With complete unanimity and considerable enthusiasm, they all raise their hands. When I then ask whether they will ever make a poor decision in the future, the response is equally fervent. I also ask children why they make less-than-stellar decisions. Their responses include I didn’t stop to think; It seemed like fun at the time; I was bored; Peer pressure; I didn’t consider the consequences; To get back at my parents. Yet when I ask them if the faulty decision was worth it, most usually say, “Not really.” What this means is that there was glitch in their decision-making “program,” somewhere between input, processing, and output, that caused the bad decision. Because children lack experience and perspective, and, as I noted above in my previous post, their prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed, they tend to make decisions that are egocentric, rash, and short-sighted. This absence of forethought can cause children to not consider all available information, engage in an incomplete cost-benefit analysis, and ignore long-term consequences.
Decision making is another aspect of children’s thinking that seems to be suffering as a result of the latest technology. This poor decision making is illustrated by events over the last few years involving young people making egregiously bad decisions that involve technology (not to mention the frequent examples occurring in the adult world!). For example, teenagers whose “sexting” to a friend is released in cyberspace, embarrassing or illegal behavior that’s recorded on mobile phones and uploaded onto the Web, and the tragic consequences of cyberbullying. In looking at decision making among children, let me begin with a brief lesson in brain anatomy and functioning. Children start off at a severe disadvantage when it comes to decision making because the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop until well past adolescence. The prefrontal cortex is instrumental to so-called executive functioning, namely, determining good from bad, planning, recognizing future consequences, predicting outcomes, and the ability to suppress socially inappropriate behavior. This means that children begin their lives “behind the curve” when it comes to decision making; their default is to make poor decisions. So, anything that makes bad decision making easier for children to act on just adds insult to injury.
Like many digital natives, your children are probably on their way to becoming lifelong multitaskers (or so you think). As the research indicates, children these days spend about seven-and-a-half hours a day interacting with technology unrelated to school and when multitasking is counted, that number jumps to an astonishing ten-and-three-quarter hours. Your children may be [...]
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 [...]
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.
How involved in technology your children are is only half of the equation in its impact on them. The other half, of course, is the degree to which you are savvy in both your understanding and use of technology. The research indicating that children spend, on average, more than 7.5 hours a day in front [...]