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.”