Raising Humans in a Digital World

by Diana Graber

  2.When you use Skype (or another videoconferencing tool) to connect with your loved ones, ask them to use their screens to show you and your children where they are, who they are with, or what they may be doing. You and your children can do the same. Explain to your young children that, although your loved ones appear on the screen, they live in another house far away. Your children’s developmental stage will determine how much of this information they will or will not comprehend.

  Explain, Explain, Explain

  Satisfy your young children’s natural curiosity by explaining technology to them every time you use it. Remember, children are mimics. They watch and note every move of the adults around them to learn how to become humans themselves. Think about what they see: adults compulsively grabbing their phones to check text messages, email, the weather, recipes on Pinterest, and who knows what else. Is it any wonder many small children grow into teenagers who can’t put down their own phones?

  Breaking this cycle begins with two steps:

  1.Be mindful of how many times you use your phone in front of your young child.

  2.When you must use your phone or other connected device, explain what you are doing and invite the child to do it with you. You can say:

  •Grandma is calling, and I’m going to answer the phone to see how she is doing. Would you like to talk to her, too?

  •I’m not sure what to make for dinner tonight, so let’s look for a yummy recipe together.

  •We are going to the zoo tomorrow, so I’m going to look at the map to find out how to get there. Do you want to look with me?

  •The zoo is so much fun! Can I take a picture of you, so we can look at it later to remember what a good time we had together?

  This exercise serves an ulterior motive. Explaining technology to your children every time you use it reminds you that you may be using it more than you need to. For example, try explaining this to your child: “Mama is checking her work email for the fifth time in a half hour.” Unless you are expecting to find something urgent, doesn’t that sound a bit ridiculous?

  Explore Interests

  When young children observe adults binge-watching dozens of episodes of a TV show, the message they get is that digital tools are entertainment-only devices. Chances are your little imitators will do the same—binge-watch mindless programming—when and if they are left alone with technology. So make time, especially when your children are young, to demonstrate how to use technology to learn and explore interests.

  1.Do you have a young child with a fixation on trucks, insects, or cooking? Use your screens to explore these topics together. YouTube Kids can be extremely helpful with this. But be forewarned: Whatever you are planning to watch with your child, be sure to watch it by yourself first. In 2015, Google-owned YouTube launched YouTube Kids with the best of intentions. The idea was to offer a kid-friendly version of their platform, which would be full of child-appropriate videos, many supplied by Disney and Nickelodeon. The site was supposed to automatically filter inappropriate content. But in late 2017, the New York Times reported that not-so-child-friendly videos were slipping past YouTube’s filters, and young children were being exposed to inappropriate or even disturbing imagery. One such video showed a claymation Spider-Man urinating on Elsa from Frozen.56 Not the type of thing you want your four-year-old to see. Although YouTube claims it has since remedied this problem, play it safe and pre-screen whatever you plan to watch with your children.

  2.Limit your viewing to a maximum of fifteen-minute increments, and keep screen time limitations in mind. Remember that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time for children under eighteen months of age (other than videoconferencing with loved ones), supervised screen time between eighteen and twenty-four months, and no more than one hour maximum for children up to age five. Never leave your young child unsupervised, and be sure to co-view and explain what you are watching. Remember, young children cannot draw connections between what they see on the screen and real life. It’s your job to do that for them!

  Chapter 2

  Learning to Be Human

  A computer can help you learn to spell hug, but it can never help you know the risk or the joy of actually giving or receiving one.

  — FRED ROGERS1

  When your children head off to school and spend less time under your watchful eye, helping them build a strong foundation will become increasingly difficult. As their friends start getting their own mobile devices, you’ll start hearing about it. “But everyone has one” is likely to become a recurrent refrain aimed at breaking you down. Their school may require that they use technology for various purposes, and as they begin to explore the world beyond your home and their school, they will find it filled with exciting new technologies—ever-new gaming devices, wireless headphones, smartwatches, humanoid robotic toys, virtual-reality playgrounds, augmented-reality apps, and other gadgets. Helping your children develop a healthy relationship with technology will feel like a 24/7 endeavor, so stay strong, my friends! The foundational work you do now will bear its fruit in just a few short years.

  SCHOOL IS DIFFERENT TODAY

  Our oldest daughter spent most of her kindergarten career outside. Thanks to the idyllic climate of coastal Southern California, the great outdoors offered her teacher a preferable alternative to their “classroom”—a crappy portable structure with cracked acoustic ceiling tiles and buzzing fluorescent lights. Not uncommon digs for charter schools that usually rent whatever space their sponsoring district has available. After a short “circle time” of singing, followed by dramatic storytelling in softly lit, silk-draped surroundings that camouflaged the portable’s starkness, they’d head outside. Following a bike trail, they’d wander about a mile and a half through historic San Juan Capistrano—thirty children skipping merrily along, stopping to gather small sticks, observing a frog in the riverbed, marveling at a yellow and green monarch caterpillar, or tossing stones into San Juan Creek. Upon reaching their final destination, a grassy, tree-filled park, they’d play to their hearts’ content before making the final trek back to school, arriving just in time for 12:30 p.m. pickup.

  Carefree kindergarten mornings like these are a novelty today. Kindergartners are more commonly found indoors, hard at work learning to read and write or solving math problems. According to Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for kindergarten, students should be writing words, sentences, and paragraphs, and begin constructing mathematical equations. The CCSS for public school students, used in over forty U.S. states, list over ninety standards for kindergartners, and many schools introduce technology early to make sure their students don’t get left behind.

  NO PRESCHOOLER LEFT BEHIND

  A couple of summers ago, I attended an educational technology conference in Los Angeles, where I found myself sharing lunch with three preschool teachers. Surprised to find them at the event, I asked how learning about technology in the classroom was relevant to their three- and four-year-old students.

  “We use interactive whiteboards and iPads,” they told me. “Our students have to be tech ready.”

  With great enthusiasm, they explained how they use technology to show videos and teach basic language and math skills. “We were even able to get rid of our manipulatives,” one of the teachers told me.

  I was pretty sure “manipulatives” was teacher-code for toys. I would have asked, but I was too busy picking my jaw up from the floor. Then lunch ended, and we went our separate ways.

  By the Monday morning following the conference, I had sufficiently recovered my wits but was curious about the use of iPads in a preschool classroom. So I turned to Google to see how commonplace this practice might be. Dozens of websites and articles popped up, from “iPads Work Well for Little Kids in Preschools,” to “15 Must-Have iPad Apps for Preschool Teachers,” and even, “Technology Lesson Plans for Preschool.”

  Across the United States, school district leaders, principals, and teachers have come under increased pressure to ensure th
at all students, even the very youngest, are “tech ready.” By the end of 2016, over half of United States K–12 students had access to a school-issued personal computing device. Globally, the market for devices in K–12 has heated up as well. Futuresource Consulting Ltd., a UK-based research firm that tracks tech trends in forty-six countries, reports that most nations are increasingly investing in school technology to improve the skills of their workforces.2 In the U.S., many school districts are buying into “one-to-one” initiatives. This means they supply one device—usually a Chromebook or iPad—to every student.

  Bloomington School District in Bloomington, Minnesota, is in the process of making all its schools one-to-one. In a television interview, Minnesota Department of Education’s Doug Paulson explained that it’s important to supply every child with a device because “computers are the present and the future.”3 When asked how this was improving educational outcomes, he answered, “Oftentimes we think about technology as our answer, but we haven’t really thought about our question first.”4

  But maybe we should think about our question first. So here’s one: What do children need to learn today to become happy, healthy, and successful tomorrow—online and offline?

  WHAT SKILLS WILL THEY NEED?

  When my husband and I decided to send our daughters to a tech-free school, many well-meaning colleagues, family members, and friends thought we were crazy. They’d ask how our kids would be prepared to succeed in a digital world.

  Before we had a chance to come up with a well-informed answer to this question, the media provided one for us. In a widely circulated New York Times article titled “A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute,” journalist Matt Richtel reported that eBay’s chief technology officer sent his children to a Waldorf school in California’s Bay Area, as did employees of Google, Apple, Yahoo!, and Hewlett-Packard.5 The school profiled in the story—the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos, California (a school that now teaches Cyber Civics)—claimed that three-quarters of its student population had parents with strong high-tech connections, yet wanted their own children shielded from technology for as long as possible. According to a parent who had worked for Intel and Microsoft, “Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers.” Another parent, who worked at Google, was asked if he was worried about his kids’ lack of technology skills. “No,” he answered. “It’s super easy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste. At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

  That’s what my husband and I came to realize as well. Watching our twelve-year-old daughter intuitively navigate my iPhone or block the pop-ups on my computer confirmed our suspicions. One day I was struggling to learn how to use a new presentation software program called Prezi. As is common for most internet users of my generation, I resorted to reading Prezi’s expansive user manual. Meanwhile, my daughter was on her own computer next to mine. She opened Prezi and in about two minutes created a short presentation. “How in the world did you figure out how to use Prezi so fast?” I asked her. “How in the world did you not?” she responded.

  So, while technical skills didn’t seem to be what our daughter would be lacking, I did wonder what skills she would need in a newly digital world. I discovered the answer to my question while pursuing my graduate studies in media psychology, in a paper titled “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” by Henry Jenkins, who was the director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jenkins and his team of researchers wrote of the urgency to help youth “develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement” in the emerging media environment.6 That caught my attention. “Cultural competencies” and “social skills” didn’t sound very techy, and they aren’t. They can be acquired, I learned, by engaging with real, live people, and even without using technology at all.

  Jenkins calls these competencies “new media literacies” because collectively they constitute a new literacy—the ability to “read” and “write” in an environment that lets kids not only consume media, but also make it, by shooting and posting videos, taking and sharing photos, responding to social media posts, and other activities.7 To successfully participate in this environment, young people need these “new” literacies: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. All of these capacities are technology neutral, meaning that they are as applicable to today’s smartphone as they will be to any gadget invented tomorrow. Together they answer the question: What skills do kids need in this new digital world?

  THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES

  •Play: the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

  •Performance: the ability to adopt alternative identities for improvisation and discovery

  •Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

  •Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

  •Multitasking: the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus, as needed, to salient details

  •Distributed cognition: the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

  •Collective intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others to work toward a common goal

  •Judgment: the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

  •Transmedia navigation: the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

  •Networking: the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

  •Negotiation: the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms

  As I studied Jenkins’s list, I thought of my own young daughters, who were probably at that moment engaged in some sort of creative, playful, and collaborative activity that to many wouldn’t look like “learning” at all. In fact, I remember exactly what my youngest daughter was doing at the time. In elementary school, she was learning math by building a wooden bench, using hand tools. This is how her class, as is common in Waldorf schools, learned measurement and the rudiments of geometry. It dawned on me that she was also learning new media literacy skills. Her benchmaking partner was Billy, a boy as strong-willed and sure of himself as was my daughter. So these two engaged in a great deal of negotiation. Their task also required visualization (having a mental picture of a finished project), judgment (deciding when to measure and when to cut), collective intelligence (checking and comparing their progress with their teacher and peers), and distributed cognition (using hand tools like hammers, augers, saws, and nails).

  I walk by that well-made bench every time I arrive to teach at Journey School today, and it gives me immeasurable pleasure to be reminded how my daughter learned many of the cultural competencies and social skills she uses today as a college student—whether she’s online or offline.

  LEARNING “DIGITAL LITERACY” WITHOUT THE “DIGITAL”

  Erin Reilly, former research director for Project New Media Literacies, oversaw the resources Jenkins’s group created, including guides to help educators incorporate the new media literacies into their practice. Today, as the CEO and cofounder of ReillyWorks, she sits at the intersection of academia and industry and helps others, like me, understand emergent technologies. Reilly is the person you call when you want to know what kids need to be prepared for next. That’s why I asked her if she thought the skills the MIT team identified over a decade ago are relevant.

  “Absolutely,” she told me. “I think still they are even more relevant today because children are getting more involved and connected to
new media. It’s part of their daily practice, just as much as learning, reading, and writing.” She explained that when we fail to help children learn these social skills, they don’t know how to become active participants online. “And that is when they run into problems.”8

  Reilly reiterated that kids don’t have to be in front of a computer to learn new media literacy skills. In a follow-up report, “Shall We Play?” she provides examples of how each of the literacies can be taught in every type of school, high-tech to no-tech. She also suggests that a hyperfocus on technology alone, especially at the expense of “human” skills, might be counterproductive:

  A mere technology-based solution will simply result in an arms race where each school spends more and more of its budget on tools while stripping bare the human resources (e.g., teachers, librarians) who might help students learn how to use those tools in ethical, safe, and creative ways. . . . In practice, many of the core skills needed to join a networked society can be taught now, even if schools have grossly uneven access to technologies. In fact, for practicing certain skills, low-tech or no-tech contexts often prove just as effective, if not more effective, than high-tech counterparts.9

  While this information often surprises the many parents I have shared it with, it’s no surprise to those who know the most about technology. In the years since Richtel wrote his story about tech insiders sending their offspring to tech-free schools, or raising them in tech-free homes, this practice has become almost a trend among techies.

  In late 2017, Paul Lewis wrote in The Guardian, “It is revealing that many of these younger technologists are weaning themselves off their own products, sending their children to elite Silicon Valley schools where iPhones, iPads, and even laptops are banned. They appear to be abiding by a Biggie Smalls lyric from their own youth about the perils of dealing crack cocaine: Never get high on your own supply.”10