Calvin White: Is helplessness the new normal in protecting our kids?
Credit to Author: Gordon Clark| Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2019 01:00:43 +0000
When did we become so helpless? And more importantly, when and how did we come to accept we are so helpless? I’m referring to our attitudes and actions in regard to personal technology and our kids.
Each year at this time, our kids return to schools across the nation. That they are being educated is taken for granted. And yet our kids are immersed in social media and gaming that we absolutely see is stealing their vitality, their social, emotional and intellectual well-being. We shake our heads in aghast reaction at how pervasive and destructive the tech reality is. Workshops are attended warning us, “training” us, updating us on all the threats and harmful ramifications. And then we go about our own indulgence. We persist in ushering, at times even ordering, our kids to go on their devices to “learn,” to utilize the “tool,” and, in so doing, put the lie to all the urgings and tsk-tsking we display regularly to these same kids about their addiction to gadgets.
We know some of the creators of the tech world prevent or restrict their own kids’ use of the devices. We know there has been admission by the creators that they knew addictiveness was being built into the ever-refining technology. We know how the various social media and on-line sites are designed specifically with algorithms to monitor, understand and capture our proclivities and personalities, and this so as to sell to us and control us. This is all agreed-on public knowledge. There is no dispute of it.
And nothing happens to interfere or address the inundation and wholesale embracing of every new development put at our fingertips.
Crazy-making has never been more illustrated in such a complete and far-reaching scenario. A parallel would be if we understood the danger of alcohol use for our kids, took training on it, and then turned around and bought our kids booze and watched them drink it with a mere shrug of the shoulders. Social workers with the various child protection departments would intervene.
Teachers and school personnel have known for years that there is a serious problem with gadget use by kids yet we persist in helping them engage all the more in the technology under the false premise that speed and immediate access to “knowledge” outweighs the sketchiness of the “knowledge” and its lack of vetting or contextualizing. And despite the consequence of regular school use furthering the free-time habituation and addiction.
But now the research is in on how screen usage atrophies our attention spans, our deep learning, and our critical and discerning retention of what matters. Maryanne Wolf, professor of child study and development at Tufts University and author of, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, details what we now realize about the brain shift from our gadgets. Yet, despite this clear evidence of brain sluggishness, a verifiable atrophying of brain capacity, we carry on as though it doesn’t matter!
This is not to mention the other equally devastating components of screen addiction for our kids. The bullying. The loneliness. The replacement of real life social interaction skills with finger-on-keys skills. The hijacking of our kids’ sexuality by internet pornography. Armstrong, artist and counsellor Reg Kienast observes that if an individual adult approached kids of any age with reams of sexually explicit mages and videos, inviting them to partake in private as often as they want, including all manner of bestiality and other perverse sexual behaviour, the adult would be arrested and convicted.
Such individuals, when they are released from incarceration, are put on police registries and draw neighbourhood protests when they take up residence. Yet, we allow the exact same experience to be perpetrated on our kids in every neighbourhood every minute of every day, absolutely unimpeded. No outcry, no outrage, no protection.
So, the question is, what renders us so helpless? Why do we not want to see the carnage? Our kids have only us, the parents and adults of the world, especially in our schools, to set the guide. The laws that run our society come from us adults. For the most part, we have always tried to live up to that mandate as best we can as we learned of the need. What’s stopping us now?
Calvin White, who holds a graduate degree in counselling psychology and was a high school counsellor for more than 30 years, is the author of The Secret Life of Teenagers.
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