My son is mistaking a smartphone for his mother
slate.com
slate.com
When I was very young, my Dad was in the Navy. Naturally I spent a good deal of time asking where my Daddy was. My mother put a big picture of him on the coffee table, so I could see him all the time, and told me "This is your Daddy." When my dad finally returned from his cruise, and we met him at the docks, I refused to talk to him, saying only "This isn't MY daddy. MY daddy's at home, on the coffee table." I believed that the picture itself was my dad. -- Jupiter
> My 3-year-old nephew in Seattle offers a window into my boy's future. When I sent a video of Luka to my brother, he immediately video-called us on the computer with his son on his lap. My nephew wanted to see us right away; he gets frustrated watching videos of family on the computer because they don't interact with him. Forget videos; Skype is his "normal."
(emphasis mine)
The next generation of internet users are not going to simply be used to an audiovisual experience, but a genuinely interactive one. I say 'genuine' because for years people have tried to sell 'clicking on links' as 'interactive web'; it's not, in the same way that 'switching channels' is not 'interactive TV'.
Books have always been substantially more interactive than radio or TV, because you can go at your own pace, you can skip forward or back at will, you can take notes in the margins and underline important parts. You can set the book down and pick up another, or look up references when they seem interesting.
Reading books and letters never got less interactive with the development of telephones or IMs, which are the long-distance extension of the face-to-face conversation, and they won’t with the adoption of video chat either. The media (conversation vs. reading/writing) have completely different uses. Writing things down (or recording in general) is a way to crystalize knowledge. Talking in real time is inherently ephemeral and driven by instant reactions.
In response to the grandparent post: sitting down around the dinner table has always been an “interactive audiovisual experience” (tactile too!) – the addition of widespread video-chat seems unlikely to transform society nearly as much as the internet already has.
'Maman' is the French equivalent of 'mommy,' but young Luka has yet to acquire his Papa's* bad habit of dividing the world into parts foreign and domestic. I suppose 'My son is learning to speak French faster than I cab learn to understand him' doesn't yield the same level of self-assurance as this ringing denouncement of telephonic inferiority.
* That's French for 'Daddy.' Those cunning froggies, always thinking they're one step ahead of us!
Kids around this age have an extremely limited vocabulary made up of simple sounds and few syllables. As such, they tend to overload certain words. The article noted that, for a child of that age, "mama" doesn't just mean mother, but several things associated with mother. Beyond that, "mama" might also mean something else that starts with an m (like "more"), or it might simply be babbling (my son currently says "da da da" to everything he touches.)
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/where_do_mama2...
And then Georgian does it "backwards". "mama" is father, and "papa" is mother.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa#Caucasian_languag...
Dustin Curtis wrote a fascinating piece a while ago about similar behavior in newborn seagulls: http://dustincurtis.com/how_niko_tinbergen_reverse_engineere...
You need to limit your personal device usage around kids. It is that simple. Taking photos might be the best exception: do it all the time.
I'm considering getting Luka a flip camera. That might be a great device to learn to make digital things at a young age without anything too addictive.
Perhaps I'm just a fuddy-duddy relying instead on talking (stories) and singing lullabies, making sleep sounds, rocking and cuddling.
Seems like the most obvious answer.