Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There's something about shifting your attention from one "space" to "another" ( game vs. real life ) that kids under 10 seem to particularly struggle with.
And as a parent that they become so aggressive when making that context switch tells me there's something I need to watch closely and control, despite the fact that it's great to have my kids silently occupied and leaving me to get stuff done.
Previous generations had moral panics about novels and then comic books. Parents were warned to not let their kids become "book-worms" (aka reading addicts).
I've come to think the principle of charity is a useful one to apply in arguments, especially online. It's possible you're correct – but that would likely require that the original poster has utterly ignored the evidence of their senses to focus on electronic devices exclusively.
If she's tired, it could be the iPad, Lego, a TV show, a book or anything else - when we tell her it's time to stop using it, she'll have a strop for a few minutes before calming down.
When she's not tired, she'll just as happily put down the iPad as anything else.
The only big difference I see between iPad/computer use and most other toys is that it's easier to be sucked in to spending hours on it if no one intervenes - but I believe that's mostly down to the simple fact that they can do more than one thing.
She'll happily spend half an hour or more playing with her dolls, or reading a book or whatever. But she'd rarely go several hours on any one of them. Eventually she'll get bored and go and do something else. With iPads/computers, when she gets bored with one game she can just switch to another game.
Electronics, however, they're glued to from the second they get their hands on them until they're eventually taken from them because something else must take priority - such as bed time, school or some family engagement (i.e. meal times are always taken together as a family - electronics free).
I find also that their interaction with electronics seem to evoke an attitude of entitlement to do whatever they want. For example, when bed time rolls around, if they've had electronics leading up to bed time, all hell breaks loose when bedtime is announced... despite 30 minute, 15 minute and 5 minute warnings ahead of the call for bed. When the electronics are removed so they can begin the bed time routine, they both have full fledged tantrums which don't happen if they're curbed from having any electronics or TV and if we spend time say reading with them or letting them play independently away from electronics. It's the same if we need to leave the house to go get groceries or visit relatives.
I think given the pervasiveness of electronics and their popularity with youth, this is decently probable.
http://www.essentialmums.co.nz/family-life/health-nutrition/...
Some of the research seems to suggest that parent's beliefs about what causes behaviour are self-rienforcing.
Which is possible when we consider just how strong the effects of bias are.
1. They're right, or 2. There is a very strong bias causing them to ignore their senses
And the OP should have enquired which is the case. I think either is possible, while I edged too strongly towards the former.
I don't know if this can hold (she's almost 6 now), but so far I'm very happy with the results.
Thank you for you comment, I realize perhaps the device itself is not the problem but the number of available content.
This has nothing to do with addiction and everything to do with parental education. You will get the same kind of reaction if you take away a toy that a child is currently having fun with, regardless of whether it's a tablet or not (I bet our parents were having similar concerns decades ago when they turned off the TV on us).
A simple talk such as "You can play with it again tomorrow but if you act like this again when I take it away, they you will never get to play with it again" did wonder with my kids.
I'm not a parent and so I'm really not in a position to speak on this, but it seems plausible to me that the aggression is a byproduct less of transitioning from one space to another and more of having complete control in the digital world vs. having zero control in the real world. They might be lashing out because the digital device gives them the experience, however short and shallow, of basically being you -- being in control of most details of what's going on in your universe. If that's true, one approach might be to find a way to make them feel like they have more power and impact in the real world, without of course actually giving them too much control beyond their ability to wield.
My kid does that too. She also flips and starts screaming if you try to cut up her food instead of letting her try to eat pizza with a fork. I don't think it means what you think it does.
Now my kids are mostly banned from iPads and other electronic gadgets - I allow them enough exposure to familiarize themselves with how to use them if and when they need to and maybe watch the odd TV show on Netflix and that's all.
I understand the attachment it causes, as a computer programmer, it's uncomfortable when someone tells me I cannot have my computer for the weekend. I have to remind myself constantly that this technological wonder I spend 8 hours a day in front of isn't what life is about. Life is what happens when you shut off the computer and go and live it - which is odd, because I can quite happily go camping and leave all my gadgets at home and live primitively for weeks at a time, no cell phone, no computer, no electricity, no running water. Somehow my brain separates the electronic life as part of our culture, which has somehow forgotten how to live without all this technology at our fingertips.
I guess what I want for my kids is that they don't form this mental dependency on technology. That they realize it's just a tool to enhance their own natural abilities, which I'm sorry to say, many kids just don't appear to be learning while they're stuck in front of their screens every waking moment.
The genie is out of the bottle: there are more superstimuli [1] in the world than ever. What's most frightening is that even if you create the perfect household dynamic, kids' expectations will be shifted based on what their peers experience. At some level, a tradeoff is made between a healthy relationship with technology, and not ostracizing a child from their peers. There is an age past which it is social death to not have a Facebook account or your own phone, and it keeps shrinking.
When I have kids, part of my strategy will be to have as many intrinsic limitations as possible: for instance, they can spend all the time they like with a non-networked Raspberry Pi, or an offline eBook reader, or a tablet that does nothing besides Wikipedia. I also like the idea of a single family computer in a shared/public space, and time limits will be as much about balance between family members as about trying to enforce healthy habits, at least in the cognitive framing.
But, like most people who don't have kids yet, I'm sure I'm mostly talking out of my ass. :)
Of course, has to be balanced with other things like arts, sports etc. I don't think anyone is capable of correctly identifying the 'calls' of one's kid unless you see their reactions. If that reaction is biased because the kid sees your passion into something a parent is doing, than be it. (s)he will try to overcome the master in an appropriate setup.
I'm not sure I hold this suggestion in that high a regard. It's odd that some of the most highly intelligent people around enjoy consumption of 2 dimensional art forms - graphic novels, comics, xkcd. So I'm not entirely sure that I can see how 2D screens would affect their abilities... and honestly, I didn't even make it out of 1 dimension. Comics never really did it for me. I never really graduated from regular words on a page, maybe a couple of pictures or diagrams thrown in :P
That said, there are some great educational shows on TV that I don't mind them watching every waking moment if they decide they want to (How It's Made, Mythbusters etc.) It's the mindless rubbish (and the advertising!!) that seems to cast a spell on them that I object to.
But granted, computers were not consumers-only devices. I wouldnt give my kids consumer-grade devices anyway, because they only see one side of computing, which is really sad.
I know my mental productivity was much higher with an air-gapped computer. Once the network leaks onto every device, we start blovating on forum boards instead of thinking deeply. ;)
I think those of us who spend a lot of time online/on devices project our consciousness into the machine and it takes more effort to context switch out of that. So we get angry when we're torn out without the chance to context switch at our own pace. For what it's worth, I get the same way when I'm deep into reading a book so I wouldn't project this problem on only high technology.
My brother (who is a wonderful person now), was just a "downright asshole" at that age along many dimensions, not just when pulled out of gaming. ;)
As an aside, I have found that meditating with my son as a young child was beneficial to his development and social control.
I humbly suggest you teach them self control. It's usually better to set an example rather than set the rules.
> despite the fact that it's great to have my kids silently occupied and leaving me to get stuff done.
Television is a drug parents give their children when the parents need to relax. - Unknown
>I humbly suggest you teach them self control. It's usually better to set an example rather than set the rules.
I humbly suggest you attempt teaching self control to four year olds and then come back with that comment. Children are not small adults. Their brains are different. That's why you need parents, to tell the child what to do and what not, set the boundaries and so forth.
They are.
They're not.
Role models.
Chuck Moore's book was enticing for many reasons (I miss the artwork in my orig copy). No error/exception handling was one. People of all ages must push the boundaries.
I was sincere in my use of humbly. Sarcasm has no place here.
>> I did
> If you've managed to teach
I attempted by using enforced time limits. I did not succeed.
My child became addicted. I discovered him sprawled out unconscious like a junkie, with dead batteries littering the floor like so many used syringes, and knew he'd managed to obtain a hand held unit from somewhere.
Other comments made light of addiction, yet it's very real for some people. The slingshot response to control, overindulgence, seems to be common. Success stories about alcohol, drugs, pornography, and other adult subjects usually involve teaching self discipline early on with things such as sweets.
Try not to get too frustrated. The challenges of parenting don't last much more than three, maybe four decades.
If you've ever know anyone that does hard drugs the most dangerous time to be around them is when the stupefying effects wear off.
The topic of the article was screen time for children. It quoted examples of many technologists who limit screen time. Steve Jobs was just "click bait".
At HN, we should be beyond merely commenting on headlines. I would far prefer the top comment to be a discussion of the merits of the article and the issues raised.
All of the "amazing" ideas I've heard of that Apple implemented were things that Steve Jobs A) didn't come up with himself but also B) actively fought against (but eventually conceded on some only after those around him made strong cases). Probably the best of those examples is the existence of 3rd party apps on the iPhone. Wasn't Jobs' idea, and he had to be convinced it was a good idea worth pursuing. In retrospect, if you had to point to one single decision that made the iPhone the market leader that it is today, it would be the app ecosystem.
On the one hand, giving entertainment screens to children has the potential to create all kinds of bad habits.
On the other, I spent hours upon hours teaching myself to program on my Atari ST, plus learning about how computers work from it, and nowadays I've made a pretty good living from my passion for IT.
(That's not to say that I didn't also spend many, many hours gaming, or generally wasting time.)
As with most things in life, I think we can only say that the extreme ends are unlikely to be good, and the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Tablets and similar items, including Gameboys and the like, are consumption devices. Playing games, watching Netflix, reading Facebook. It's all passive entertainment.
Teaching yourself to code on a home PC, that's way different.
I threw up a little bit while reading this. Prohibiting rather than engaging in meaningful discussion is a surefire way to cause harm (it's the same thing with alcohol, for instance); bullying is a fact of life, and learning to deal with it is a valuable life lesson. And yes, you can spend too much time on your device. Calling it addiction, with all it entails, is a step I wouldn't make. It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not.
It's never going to be over, as long as young children have access to technology.
HN seems to preach a perverse gospel about this subject: that you should never limit a child's technology access, because not only will nothing bad come out of, but in fact, it will make them more capable. It will turn them into developers and engineers!
I'm guessing the reason HN thinks this way is because they themselves got into technology in the first place through such avenues: dicking around as a kid, sometimes with the help of their parents, sometimes contrary to their wishes. If THEY had been restricted, they wouldn't be where they are today.
But this reason suffers from selection bias. While people like yourself (unless I'm misreading you. In which case, substitute the stereotypical HN user for yourself) may have used videogames and computer access as a spring board for your career, I'm willing to wager that you are minority among videogame and computer-saavy youth.* You are a bigger majority, however, on HN, and in the tech world in general, so such reasoning becomes canon without being subject to enough criticism. Plenty of technologists were gamers, but not all gamers become technologists. It's just that the former dominate here.
*I don't have any statistics on hand to support this. But since the videogame industry is as big (and growing) as it is, where are the rising mountains of developers and engineers that supposedly spring from it? Why aren't girls, who spend comparable time with technology, catching the wave as well?
My little brother has been addicted to Minecraft for the past 2 years. I keep waiting for him to "discover" something else as a result of it. To get into programming, or design, or architecture, or something more constructive. Hell, even building things in Minecraft would be more productive than what he does now: go on PvP servers and throw snowballs at people--for 12 hours a day, if my parents let him. He's tried programming lessons a few times, but he usually gives up, because learning a new skill is harder than playing (even difficult) games. He lacks the trait of perseverance. And he's not going to learn it by playing videogames.
I was a gamer, and didn't become a technologist. I had no idea what a computer program was!
(If that sounds silly, consider all the things you see every day without understanding)
Mostly, my gaming experience was a write-off. It stunted my social development, blocked me from doing more interesting activities, and contributed very little to my well-being.
I may have learned some strategic thinking from games like Starcraft, which I think has carried over to entrepreneurship. But oh, how I wish I could get that time back.
Or, I wish someone had shown me a terminal and what it could do. One glimpse would have been enough.
The kids who had high-level characters on Everquest, attended all the game cons, were in line at midnight for new releases, etc.; were mostly not the same people as the kids who were active in the local BBS scene, played around with installing Linux, were making silly LAMP websites, etc. Not zero overlap, but just in terms of social groups and interests they were clearly identifiable as different clusters of people. Overall the gamers were not as correlated with math/science interest either. At least as I remember it, the "computer nerds" tended to be more often the same people who were also in math club, AP science classes, etc., while gamers were less often represented there.
And even if your kids play more than you would like, so what? As long as it does not detract from other aspects, it should be fine. Talk with them about it. It seems to me that the best way to make responsible adults is to treat children like responsible adults to begin with (with some caveats, of course).
If any activity starts to become detrimental, there's the time to start acting... Not on a vaguely defined fear that it might lead to something bad. That's trying to exert a level of control on another being's life that simply cannot be achieved, and it often backfires badly later in life, when the activity becomes available without imposed restrictions.
What makes you say computers are not addictive? Or video games?
If we define addiction as being able to stop despite wanting to, then I've been addicted to both. I went cold turkey on video games.
The computer I need for business, research and connecting to people so I've had to devise ways to minimize it's compulsive powers while still getting the upside of using them.
I run an internet business. I am not a luddite. Computers are wonderfully useful machines, and I'm glad we have them.
But just because something is good doesn't mean it's also bad. You can't dismiss the experience of millions with a trite statement. I once wrote an article on going without internet for a month on my personal blog, and it's by far the most popular. It even hit the top of Hacker News.
From talking with friends, some seem immune to this distraction. Others clearly suffer from it. Perhaps you are one of the fortunate ones who can use computers and the internet without compulsion. That doesn't mean you can blithely ignore the testimony of others.
If computers aren't compulsive, then why was this XKCD popular: http://xkcd.com/1411/
And why did Paul Graham write these essays?
http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
That's not a poor definition for addiction. That's a definition of a habit. Addiction tends to include "drug seeking behaviour"; and tolerance; and perhaps withdrawal too.
Addiction: the fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance, thing, or activity
Wikipedia includes a category for behavioral addiction and computer addiction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Behavioral_addiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_addiction
I say this even if we use the tighter more correct definition of addiction.
Our kids are taking our screens and gadgets for granted as much as we did TV (or whatever is appropriate for your age). It is a mistake to think that the effect of early exposure is going to be the same as it is for people for whom at some point it has been a fascinating novelty.
There are a certain subset of people who can easily throw themselves at things (games, hobbies, etc.) to the point where it negatively affects the rest of their life. I'm not so much a fan of calling all of them addictions, but I can see how some people feel that way.
Is it really sillyness?
I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games. I've however personally heard of the ordeals of many young gamers whose hobby was being prejudiced against because of this silly notion.
I'm ok with games with a small duration, casual games with a completion time of up to 5/10 minutes. I play chess or Carcassonne sometimes and when the game ends I'm done and just fine.
Uhhh, what? There's a reason people called EverQuest 'Evercrack'. There was/is an entire website devoted to people who were addicted to WoW (wow-detox, no idea if it's still around) and had noticeable detrimental effects in their life from it.
There are most definitely games that encourage addiction, and while the vast majority can handle it responsibly there's a sizeable minority who can't (much like gambling).
Is that because video game addiction would remove those peoe from the group of people you come into contact with?
I hadn't met anyone with a severe OCD until I started visiting MH hospitals, and then I met a bunch.
Surely you can get addicted to video games, though I have a nagging feeling that rate of addiction is lower than any of your classical addictions like alcohol or narcotics. Of course I also recall reading an article about some poor kid in Korea dying after constantly playing video games and not sleeping or the case of the parents who neglected their own infant who later died due to their supposed addiction to video games. So then you have nicely packaged stories of "that one kid" or "those parents" in your head to pull up at a moments notice and the wonderful forces of logical fallacies cause some folks to think it's an epidemic of never-before-seen proportions.
The point is that more "video game addiction" is just sensationalist bullshit. My mother surely thought I was addicted to video games in my teenage years. Of course I spent maybe an hour or two playing video games and the rest programming. In fact, even after I got a job as a software engineer right out of highschool and a full-ride scholarship, she was still convinced I was addicted to "those damn games" and I'm sure half of the folks here will one day be thinking kids are addicted to their Google Glasses or whatever technology we wind up with. It's no different than parents of yore thinking Rock n' Roll was corrupting their children. Parents, as a whole, can be some really sensationalist dumbasses.
If you want to be in denial and not recognize a friend's addiction and mental health issues, that is understandable but a bad path to choose. I've seen addiction time and time again. I don't know your friend, it's possible he was addicted to video games and just drank a Heineken here and there and that the alcohol was purely incidental to his demise. However, I've seen this type of thing happen on several occasions. Someone has an addiction, be it alcohol, cocaine, or heroin. They lock themselves away from everyone and indulge in their habit. As a side-effect of that, they wind up doing something fairly low-energy like watching TV, surfing the internet, or playing video games. Ultimately, their organs start to fail and they wind up dead or near-death in the ER.
I've been to the funerals, I've seen the jaundiced, malnourished bodies, I've had to help clean up the aftermath, both emotional and physical. I'm sure your friend was a good guy who couldn't shake his problems, and I don't mean to make light of anything. I've seen too many otherwise good people die of substance abuse, and I know several members of my family will likely still die in a similar manner. Saying someone died "as a result of playing video games" is a cop-out for not wanting to admit someone had an addiction to other substances, whatever the reason may be. Your liver doesn't fail because you played too much Halo. It's sad, but it's the truth.
"Screen time" on devices is different from screen time on TVs.
You're missing a huge part of tactile development going on when she's playing a puzzle on the floor vs. touching a flat surface. The fine motor skills involved with physically handling a puzzle will come in handy later, not to mention that there is an element of combining tactile response with mental strategy missing on the iPad.
The puzzle is a "natural" form, that encourages "natural" skills. Whereas Angry Birds is an addictive game pattern. Any skills it "teaches" are incidental to its commercial goals.
My point is invalid if the whole entire world turns into a giant commercialized strip mall and recall no longer becomes a valued skill. :<
That said, I'd say Angry Birds has given my son a lot of practice in perseverance, problem solving, and not getting frustrated when something doesn't work first time.
It can go both ways. You can either grow up as psychopath programmer or shallow creative. Either way, I bet that real social interaction is best for kids.
Obviously the key is steering them in the right direction. The challenge is doing in a way, that they do not notice being managed.
Is there any advantage to a kid knowing how to read, or write, one or two years before their peers?
A NY Times hack.
My goals were to provide good exposure so that our kids would view technology in a healthy way: tools to help them create and learn, devices that can bring the world to them, and a healthy understanding that there are dangers beyond our walls. I wanted them to be technologically astute, instead of taking an aversion or negative view.
I wanted them to burn through the "magical" effect of tech early on. We put desktop PCs in our kids' rooms when they were in 3rd grade (twins). I completely controlled any outbound access they had (they knew nothing about web browsers, so I removed those from access). And while we limited their unattended screen time, I also spent a good amount of time introducing them to keyboards, mice, and applications. After a few months, both were up and going with Minecraft. To keep things in the walls, I setup a private Minecraft server to which they attached in the house so they could play with each other.
They've grown into 8th graders, and the desktop PCs have been replaced with Macbooks, iPhones and Kindles. Sure, they use Snapchat and Instagram with their friends, but by far they use the camera for videos and pictures. Those things end up in iMovie or slideshows that they put together and distribute over my Youtube account. They are voracious readers, pushing content through their kindle at an alarming rate. These are now fundamental devices they use in/for school projects and homework. They're good at it, to the point that they often help their friends with troubleshooting.
As I said, our approach has worked for us. It has been a lot of work as well, ensuring the kids aren't LatchKey 2.0, where the TV has been replaced by something you can hold in your hands. We had to be committed to being attentive and watchful, but we felt that was an investment in time that would help our kids succeed in an increasingly connected world.
Any big learnings you found during the process which you didn't anticipate starting out? I'm always interested in different perspectives and experiences in raising children.
Always big learnings when it comes to rearing children.
Limiting in scope to my previous comment:
- I started with the "basics", which had nothing to do with browsing the internet (which came later.) Ease-of-use in services such as Google is a nightmare when it comes to providing a safe environment for your kids to explore. I think making the online world one of the latter components of exposure is best; otherwise, kids can get lost really fast in it's expanse. For anyone else following this approach, I'd say "keep it local".
- Kids are much more adept at technical adoption than adults. It speeds up conversations very quickly. For anyone else following this approach, I'd say be prepared to see what's coming. It will happen much faster than you might expect.
Technology can be a powerful mental and artistic tool, it can also be mental junk food and socially damaging.
I'd love to hear more about your experiences.
We're 'high tech' parents, and it works great. Our toddler has a 64GB iPad, and uses it to watch Doc McStuffins, Veggie Tales, etc. Our generation grew up in front of the TV, and the iPad is way better. It let's us control her exposure to content and pernicious advertising, for example.
One of the things that pains me a great deal about buying books for the Kindle is that they won't be sitting around the house for my kids to look at one day.
However, given what it costs to order a physical book in English over here in Italy, Kindle books make way more sense economically.
I wonder how the situation would be different if iPads and computers nowadays didn't spoon feed our children an unlimited amount of instant gratification-- entertainment superior to what they could likely create themselves through play and creativity.
Another example of this is that he didn't trust traditional medicine and he decided to fight his then benign cancer with some unproven fruit based diet. One year later, his cancer had progressed to the point of being terminal and even traditional medicine could no longer save him then.
Even if I might agree with this parenting style. I find the perspective here to a bit a condescending - implying that because tech CEO's are doing it, it must be something that others "don't know". What does the qualification of tech CEO have anything to do with parenting?!
So unless you're also that sort of person, they either know something the rest of us don't or they at least have an opinion on the subject that the rest of us don't.
A more likely explanation is that CEOs don't see much of their children so they try to exercise control when they are around. Likewise their kids are probably more prone to being out of control since they are less supervised.
That or the article is just based on his confirmation bias.
Have you been out in the mall lately? How about a restaurant? How about just walking the streets? Un()Believable, yet.
The linked article in the tele doesn't even mention porn. Furthermore since when is it harmful to see people participating in sex acts? What a joke.
I'm no conservative, but kids copy what they see, even before they understand language and responsibility. There are no absolutes, but it's wise to moderate showing sex acts to children until it's likely they won't repeat it responsibly.
Other than that it isn't :)
When you're 13, tech is fun. Dragon Warrior! Final Fantasy! Tales of Phantasia! I'm sure that anyone born before 1965 or after 1990 is going to be taking me on faith, but these games were awesome.
When you're 19, tech is even more fun because you actually learn how things work and discover mind-bending ways of solving problems. Assembly code! C! Lisps! Machine learning! Haskell!
When you're 25, tech is important because it holds the power to solve some of humanity's most pressing issues. We may get to a point where we can prolong life as long as people wish at 1/100 the cost of the current expense-sink we call "health care". We may avert a global warming catastrophe with clean nuclear power (thorium fission? fusion?) We might escape this disgusting arrangement in which one nation being rich requires others to be poor, and arrive at a post-scarcity world in the next few decades. If any of this happens, technology will play a key role.
After 30, you realize that while technology still can be fun and holds promise and importance, the tech industry is run by megalomaniac 21st-century robber barons with the ethical fibre of Zombie Hitler's taint sweat. Technology becomes just work, for most people.
When they see their kids addicted to lit screens and possibly falling into the in-app purchase suckholes that they spent months of their life optimizing for addictiveness and "whale" recruiting, well... they have reasons to be concerned. Stay away from that shit! I helped cook it!