Gadgets for Kids

Most of my friends will talk about their kids being extremely comfortable with smartphones and iPads. Few of us are worried about that though; at most, we are irritated that kids monopolize those gadgets to the extent that we don’t get to use them!

Apart from the obvious benefit of letting kids play with gadgets (the parents get some time off), does Ben Popper’s argument below even make giving the gadgets to kids a good thing?
“We’re born with about 2,500 synapses per neuron, but by age three we’ll have around 15,000. From that point the number of neural connections actually begins to decrease...For me, that’s an argument in favor of giving my son access to technology at an early age. If the paradigm for his budding mind is swiping through apps and playing interactive games, he will be geared to build great digital tools. Why would I emphasize spending time with books when they will likely be dusty artifacts by the time he’s a teenager, relics of another age like the telegraph and the typewriter?”

Others would like to minimize the usage of these gadgets by their kids. Ruth Davis Konigsberg feels such parents are just being digital hypocrites:
“For as much as I forbade them from using electronics, I was awash in them. Two phones (one work, one personal), two laptops (one work, one personal), an iPad and an iPod.”
And while parents may want to enforce the “Do as I say, not as I do” policy, no prizes for guessing whether that would work.

And besides, isn’t every new narrative technology considered bad for kids, asks Popper: from novels (exclude all thought) to radio (too addictive) to comics (too violent) to smartphones and tablets (too mind-sucking). What does the research have to say on this topic? Not much, because as Daniel Anderson, a professor of psychology explains:
“The world of digital media is transforming so rapidly, it’s very hard for researchers to keep up with the effects on children.”
And so, as Konigsberg says:
“At this point, the debate about wired children is a religious one — people have strongly held beliefs about something that can’t yet be proved conclusively one way or another, and as with debates about politics or faith, they rarely result in anyone changing his or her mind.”

In any case, I think most parents would agree with what a researcher, Vicky Rideout, found:
“Parents feel that they’re making the proper judgment for kids, that they’ve found content that they think is appropriate and educational, so they’re not really worried.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more