Indulging Them More and Less

Technology has changed the ways in which we control and influence the inputs to our childs development and where kid's thinking is at any given moment. Think about it, our generation, who are parents now, had one primary form of "content" if we weren't allowed to watch TV; our imaginations. This form of content was stored locally inside an individual childs head, or shared among a group of kids minds, as they played together outdoors, largely beyond the direct supervision of any adult. Todays content is digital and can be burned, downloaded, or just purchased in an entertainment/edutainment appliance. There are increasing levels of discretion applied to filtering kids access to content ranging from "I refuse to buy you that on developmental and moral principals" to NetNanny and "we don't allow games (movies/songs/etc.) with violence and sex into our home. As a result, it is possible to delude oneself into thinking that we are shaping or directly controlling our children's emerging values, interestests, and behavior patterns by micro-managing their acquisition and exposure to digital content.

It is odd that we have such a well developed understanding of the potential negative impact of kids spending huge chunks of their lives with digital playmates, yet so little appreciation of the activities that are losing time to computers, iPods and gameBoys. From the age of about 7 to 13 I spent as much time playing world war II, cowboys and indians, colonials against the British, and other imagination games with heavy fighting, combat and weaponry as I did playing football, baseball, kickball, volleyball, etc. We didn't spend all day doing digital stuff, but we did spend all day outside the range of parental censorship, and thus gravitated to:

1. The things we were naturally interested int
2. Things that the current generation of parents think are guaranteed to breed a generation of homicidal maniacs (e.g. guns, knives, spears, shooting, fighting, blowing up)

Many kids I know are so digitally absorbed that they have effectively zero time spent doing unsupervised activities, and occupy all of the downtime that was traditionally filled with imaginary play with tube-time instead. Interestingly, this makes it possible to prevent kids from doing stuff like violent play, but only by treating their natural interests and inclinations as the enemy. It has been my experience that:

• Millions of people who grew up playing Army or whatever, are not homicidal maniacs
• Kids will be interested in whatever they are interested in regardless of how we try to control their influences.

There is, of course, no simple conclusion to take away. It may not be a complete waste of time to try to shape the content your kids are exposed to, and there are certainly some down-sides to the change in how the human species will spend their time, given Moore's law and it's effect in the digital generation(s). Sex is another whole dimension that has clearly been moved front and center by the increasing exposure to produced media. Of the two big bogey-men of modern parenting, violence and sex, I know I spent most of my day doing imaginary violence that my wife would never let my son fantasize about, but I have no memory of being aware that sex existed until I was maybe twelve. Today my 9 year old asked me why someone would want to take Viagra to make their Penis big.

P.S. Last I checked, I am not a homicidal maniac.