With the way information is shared, how far it can travel and the speed at which it disperses, the way we interact has changed, our exposure to experience has changed and even our memories will change. It was not that long ago that our childhood memories were not our own, how we were, first words, our likes, dislikes and toddler talents were held and passed along by our parents with their imperfect memories, their care, their want to believe we are special.
These days we have our children on camera, the smiles and tears, the first steps, the accomplishments that we as parents think that they are worth remembering and with a phone handy, everything is worth a little bit of digital memory space. What I wonder is, how are these things going to affect the children, does seeing themselves do something their parent's thought wonderful going to affect their choices?
I would assume yes. Do you think that if you could see your talents from a young age in video and the smiles on your parent's faces, it might have influenced you to keep pushing, to keep learning, to keep enjoying? Would it have channel our energies into talents that would have become our great loves or, limited the randomness, held us from discovering our talents?
Today my daughter was playing on a piano by herself for the first time. She has sat and watched her godmother and aunty play and it would appear that she is a pretty quick study. This was toward the end of her 'session' but she was happily experimenting with the various sounds for 20-30 minutes while others carried on their conversations. For a 26 month year old, that is quite some time to sit still with focus.
Will this become a 'when they were young' clip in a life biography? That is impossible to tell nor does it matter as her parent, I just want her to find some of those loves in her life, find things that she really enjoys doing.
We don't show her many of these videos of herself and, we don't repeat them very often. When it comes to screen time, she has close to zero and is yet to watch a television show or cartoon. She is full of energy and curiosity without it, what can it add that a book or an imagination can't? Where is the activity in consuming the screen? What effect does it have on the mental development?
As I watch my daughter play I can't help but feel that she is talented, that she has something in her that is special and goes beyond that of parental pride. Not just musically but in her language ability, her willingness and capacity to negotiate, to notice the slightest change in the environment. I don't know if it is us as parents that have nurtured this in some way or if it is all nature at work but, I think that if we had sat her down in front of a screen instead of books, Legos and toys that required activity, she would be much more limited in her range.
I don't know where it leads when we encourage passivity in children or we narrow their experience by reinforcing through pictures and videos the behaviors we find desirable but, I think it must limit opportunity by some degree in their future. Encouraging a child to study for school seems like such a natural parenting action but, does it reduce their chance to find those loves while increasing their chance of feeling disenfranchised by a system unsuitable for their talent?
I spoke yesterday in a post about having talents and personality traits suitable for different environments and the schooling system for the most part is unsuitable for many. It selects based on a narrow set of skills to provide for a life of economic servitude working for others. Is that what we want for our children?
I am hoping that in some future there is more space for them to play, not just as children but as adults who are encouraged to never stop exploring, never stop listening to the notes of life and finding create ways to combine them, to blend them into experience. Why should we ever encourage children to grow up if it what that means is to conform to expectations that lead to a loss of creative drive?
My prediction for the future is that there is going to be a creativity gap in society where there are the children primed for school learning that is becoming ever more irrelevant in an automating world and, those who are explorers, the ones free to roam the recesses of mind and experience. what effect will this have on individual opportunity and society, what side do we want our children to be on? Book smarts or creative force?
I am biased in this respect as I was a terrible student, someone who felt crushed by the subjects considered prerequisites for careers without the support or guidance for me to find my place. But, in a changing world that I see is going to be more favored to the creative contributor than the worker as time goes on, do I want my daughter to be limited by a core set of subjects or do I want her to explore and find her real talents and loves?
Economic hardship is not an enjoyable life experience. Neither is doing it for the money. I feel that we at Steem have a glimpse into what is to come and possibly a head start if we choose to again explore what many had squeezed out through childhood. There is a lot at stake in this world and most of the costs will not be felt by us, but they will affect those to follow.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
I'm totally biased because screen is where I work and what I was going to get into before I settled on doing my own thing, but I don't see any difference whatsoever between books and screens aside from the method of delivery. You can have badly written and completely factually inaccurate books just as easily as you can have atrocious videos. Reading is just as passive activity-level wise as watching a video. You can engage differently with each method, reading can range from looking at the words on the page but not really absorbing them through to concentrating enough to visualise/imagine everything you're reding. Similarly with watching things, you could stare blankly at the images and let the sounds wash over you or you could lhang on every word and study every camera angle, immersing yourself in the universe presented to you.
Not to say that you shouldn't restrict any given thing if it's having a detrimental affect, I have had some friends struggling with screen addiction themselves, or having to try to deal with kids that couldn't or refused to regulate their usage.
All my kids have always been able to from a young age concentrate intensely for long periods on anything that had their interest. Good luck trying to force them to even pay attention to things you couldn't pay them to care about though XD We've never restricted screens even when they were younger, the only loose rule we have now is that after dinner they need to be ready for bed before they get back on. They were all able to eventually regulate and will spend as much time doing things other people consider acceptably active (from playing cards/Lego/toys/whatever all the way through to jumping on the trampoline and running around like loons outside or going to the park etc and this is not even counting the hours spent doing gymnastics) as they are on screens (you can learn a surprising amount from games and movies as well as documentaries, and 11yo who has vague aspirations to be a MUA learned pretty much everything from Youtube).
I did skim the comments and saw that Small's aunty can teach piano, I reckon Small could totally start learning right now if she wanted, none of this waiting for 5 business ;D
My daughter can't read yet. It is not the books, nor the reading, it is the imagination it develops to have it read. The screen can tell the same story but it fills n all of the blanks and when delivered that way from a young age requires no development of imagination.
Teachers in Finland are increasingly having to show children how to play outside as they are not creative enough just to do what used to come naturally to kids. You must remember all of the silly games kids played in the yard at primary school with balls and chalk and rules defined by group consensus. That is being lost, they need the games delivered, the rules provided more and more.
As our daughter gets older, we will introduce other mediums but for a 2 year old, there is very little benefit other than convenience for her. She loves playing with her toys and seeing how things work, she loves making up songs and conversations with her family of characters (who all have names) why sit her down while she is happily running and advancing so fast?
My worry is that when I go to the shops or see kids her age quietly staring at screens, are they advancing for a healthy future? Parents have a responsibility to their children and the way they raise them is going to have much larger social implications in the future. It is going to be very interesting as time progresses what such a massive change in behaviour will bring.
Has no one ever spun off movies or produced fanworks based on movie universes? Or been inspired to go into film making and tell their own stories due to some movie they watched as a kid? (this is me by the way, I was going to be a comic artist, then because I couldn't draw I concentrated on novel writing, and kind of fell into animation by accident but I'm addicted now) Or even just yelled at the screen because they think the character should have done something differently?
Have the teachers in Finland tried just leaving stuff for the kids to use and leaving them to it? I otherwise don't know what goes on in schools, I just know if you do that with a bunch of homeschooled kids they'll find something to do with it, and it just stresses the adults out because they're not doing it "right". I do remember the silly games in schools but I also remember being taught how to play said games by the older kids. When I got to senior high school and had to move to mainland Australia we had age segregated areas to eat lunch in (I don't know either) and then the year groups just tended to clump together and avoid interacting with the other year groups. If the same goes on in primary schools and older kids aren't interacting with younger kids and involving them in play and teaching them these games then not really surprising that they don't play silly school games anymore, but that's as much if not more an institutionalised/society thing than just a screen thing.
And I literally do not understand why you would sit her down to use an ipad (or even read a book for that matter) if she's happily running around doing her own thing. At that age it might be a thing you hand her for 5-10min to play Reading Eggs (or whatever your equivalent is over there) or watch TedEd or crank some music to dance to iff that's what she's feeling inclined to at that point in time.
maybe I just don't understand because I've been unschooling for too long my kids are apparently doomed to failure because they're so used to doing their own thing that they'll struggle to fit into the corporate world
Do you know what the parents with the zombie children at the shops are doing when they're not at the shops? Maybe the kids are pacified by the ipads because some of them find shopping exceedingly boring and will do whatever it takes to get the hell out of that situation, and giving them an ipad so they can get their shopping done and get out makes things that little bit easier. Maybe they're out at a park or building Lego together or doing storytime at the library or going swimming or something afterwards.
I know we're barrelling along a lot faster now than we have previously but I'm pretty sure that every time there's been a major technological upheaval people have thought exactly that :) Kinda reminds me of this xkcd comic:
I think I get where you're coming from and I don't think I'm disgreeing with you, I am aware I tend to have weird viewpoints on things :) It will indeed be interesting (and hopefully not "interesting") but probably something that we'll have to watch develop in our grandkids and possibly great-grandkids if we live long enough or aging is cured.
I don't know how old you are but I am guessing when you were one, your parents didn't give you a mobile screen playing peppa pig in the trolley. The kids have been raised on it, it is going to have an effect, positive or negative is yet to be seen.
Home schooled kids have different parents by definition pretty much but the kids they are talking about are the ones who I speak of above, those who have never known what 'free play' is.
They are more likely to be the corporate world in the future.
There are many factors at play but at least in Finland, childhood depression, emotional issues and loneliness is on the rise.
Nope. And things are going to have some kind of effect for sure. But stuff has been changing for a while.
I don't think it's too dissimilar here though that seems to being attributed specifically to social media.
And small might be many things in the future but being left behind and unable to keep up will absolutely not be among them with the kind of parents she's got.
Oh, it is also possible that these kids raised on screens will be supercharged humans who fit perfectly into the technical world and my daughter will be left behind because her foundational years were devoid of screens and she won't be able to keep up. I am taking the risk that creators will rule as they have always done and the probability that consumers are rarely the creators. There are always exceptions.
She's certainly takes after someone with that focus and curiosity.
I wonder how it all plays out - the way children are brought up so passively. I think it gets worse with every passing year but the results will certainly show when the next generation of adults come up
I see the first waves coming through into the businesses now as I work with their management teams. It is ot looking great and is likely going to get worse in time. There of course will be some positives to it too but I think there is going to be a lot of depressed people in the future.
Hi Taraz. I can't believe how much she is growing. i have been on here 7 months now and you don't realise as we see smallsteps fairly often but she is a little girl now and not really a baby.
She is growing incredibly fast and becoming much more mature in the way she explains things. I have no idea what I am going to do with her when she is 5 :D
I've already told you. Purchase that cool vulture's repellent asap and keep all them at bay. };)
The fact that she can stay focused and show interest is a great sign. I hope you can help her with her music education or find a piano teacher. Mom was and still is a piano teacher so I had it built in. Thanks for sharing @tarazkp
Her aunty can teach piano. She was saying that she would have to wait til 5ish but after today thinks next year she can start learning some basics.
Thanks for sharing such as great experience! I too think that creativity in the future will be challenged as more “paths” are created for future generations. Society forces education down these paths and experiences will suffer I believe. It will be up to parents to fill the gaps for our children which is a challenge given what most of us are responsible for.
I think that things might change so quickly due to automation that no one is really prepared with what to do with the kids. Schools are created to satisfy employment demands but what happens when there are so few jobs?