Watching energetic young kids run around, I can see how tempting it is to give them an interactive device which consumes their attention and makes them easier to handle. But phones seem designed to encourage the shortest possible attention spans and rabid multi-tasking, the opposite of deep focus. So what do you do? Is it as simple as banning phones, if you're willing to give them the needed attention? What about friends' phones and the Internet in general? What if they fall in love with web programming at the age of 8? You want them to be familiar with technology and ideally to be able to drift between multi-tasking and deep focus. I haven't read much on how to achieve this from a practical parenting perspective, though.
As much as I am wary of being negative towards children's behaviours that don't match my own, focus related criticism is something that I feel is really valid. I've watched children below the age of 13 Snapchat and watched any number of children aged 2 and above using YouTube. The same behavior shows up where before a video has finished, the children are reaching out to tap to another one. I try not to judge but I do cringe when I see 2 year olds spending 1 minute on a baby rhymes video, then reaching forward, tapping to another one while the first still has 15 minutes to go, and then doing that again and again and again. The older children swiping without fully watching even a Snapchat video is equally bothersome for me. I'm seeing swipes and taps happen in the range of 2 to 3 seconds.
This behaviour is not unique to children though. I watch adults at the hospital using Facebook and it's the same. It's almost like they just want to swipe rather than look at the content for real.
I have no idea what the long term effects of this behaviour are. Perhaps it's nothing and I'm fretting over it needlessly. But I've experienced it myself and it took behaviour similar to rehab to come out of it and be able to slowly enjoy content again. And it always feels easy to slip back into. It's terrifying.
It isn't qualitatively different. I appreciate the term there. Quantitatively however, the abundance of information and the way networks choose to constantly show new content (that is more likely to appeal to you too) makes for a very different scenario from decades ago.
Pick up the news paper, and it's the same thing you have to browse/skim through. Pick up the phone and it's tens of new items every few minutes.
For what it's worth, I recall reading that Bill Gates didn't allow his children to have smartphones until they were like 13. Not that he's a model of perfect parenting but just an interesting example given his relationship to technology. I'm not convinced that an 8 year old who is interested in web development will suffer from not having the device--there's a million other things they could be learning/doing. In fact I would hypothesize that the smartphone would actually cause a young brain to grow into the habit of having a miniscule attention span.
If I wanted to raise my kids to be good with computers, I'd give them machines from the 80s.
For a start, you can program them. (My smartphones make me sad for this reason.) Further, you have to program them to get them to do much of anything. To play a game, you have to type it in! Which means you can type in something different, and make your own games! They always come with a manual. And they are beyond the reach of the tentacles of the attention harvesting monster.
Not from the 80's but I have an X1 Carbon, and I could give this to someone with only the default frame buffer and a POSIX shell, and that would work. Probably would need to install a firmware password at some point... but it's not completely trivial to learn how to install an OS.
If the user can figure out how to install chrome to get to Facebook (or whatever) from just that, well I think they're probably past this line of reasoning.
I can't do this what any mainstream smartphone however, ffs.
I think you would need to go back a little farther than the '80s. The Apple IIe made playing Oregon Trail approximately as easy as inserting the floppy disk. You could also play Microsoft Flight Simulator without much work on your 386 running MS-DOS.
That seems like overkill. Why not just give them a barebones linux box with tty only. No X server, no windows manager, just a cursor blinking at you, daring you to do something. As a christmas present you could install lynx for them.
I just played textual Oregon trail on a working mainframe from the 1970s at the living computer museum in seattle. I think you can teletype in if you want.
To each his own, but I would absolutely not do this. If I were to try to teach my kids car maintenance, I'm not going to insist that they learn to adjust the points under a distributor cap.
Unfortunately this also applies to adults. My parents grew with little more than a radio and a handful of books yet today they're tied into their phones and tablets, constantly checking for FB updates or the latest (irrelevant) news.
My parents and one remaining grandparent have cable TV—mostly news channels—on about 16 hours a day in their house. TV's always on in whichever room one of them's in. The one of them who gets out of the house more than a single-digit count of hours a week spends most of the time driving, which means AM radio (ahem) that entire time.
Practical parenting perspecive: Read them bedtime stories for 30 minutes or longer every evening. (I'm assuming your kids are still young enough for bedtime stories.)
And that's YOU. READ. Not some podcast or audiobook.
It's about time together. It's about you doing voices for the characters. It's about the low visual content of books that activates young imaginations. It's about reading longer books (when they're old enough to be ready for it, of course) that might take a month or longer to read so that they learn about delayed gratification, learn long-term continuity skills.
Banning tech from kids' lives altogether seems unnecessary and is probably impossible (though minimising it seems advisable!) but, above all, it's balance that's wanted.
I don't hold books on the same pedestal, but extended together time I certainly do. Could be building Lego, using a computer, drawing, all of these things help with focus.
I think constructive praise is critical too, so they feel the tangible benefits of putting time into a project. I actually think books are bad in this regard, there is nothing to praise at the end, though it does provoke thought. We switched to comics, they are able to handle much more complex story lines then.
A summer house by the beach with no electricity does the job fine. That's our way of dealing with it. I feel that's more about being able to turn off now and then rather than banning. Learning to control the devices rather than the reverse. Talk about it with the kids, most likely they share the same concern as you and you can find a way forward together.
Not being able to resist is related to how well you resist drugs. So it's important to be aware of.
Yes, a hundred times yes. Addiction is a learned behavior and it is very difficult to unlearn. Once the brain is wired for pleasure seeking, free will is a joke.
Our environment is changing far faster than we can adapt. It will be interesting to see the long-term impact.
Iceland has used a data-driven approach to improve kids health. Youth drug use rates have plummeted. If I had kids, I'd be following their model. This graph[0] is very impressive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21906727
Watching energetic young kids run around, I can see how tempting it is to give them an interactive device which consumes their attention and makes them easier to handle. But phones seem designed to encourage the shortest possible attention spans and rabid multi-tasking, the opposite of deep focus. So what do you do? Is it as simple as banning phones, if you're willing to give them the needed attention? What about friends' phones and the Internet in general? What if they fall in love with web programming at the age of 8? You want them to be familiar with technology and ideally to be able to drift between multi-tasking and deep focus. I haven't read much on how to achieve this from a practical parenting perspective, though.