By LAURA CRANDALL
Some of you may have caught this video when it first came around months
ago. It’s a video of a baby trying ‘use’ a magazine as an ipad. The
baby’s experience has been, simply put, ‘I do this, and this happens’.
She expects the same experience with a magazine that she gets with the
ipad: I swipe, it moves. If you were to search around the internet using
the phrase ‘baby uses magazine as an ipad’, you would find quite a few
blog entries discussing this video.
They range from judgemental, to excitement about a young child using technology, to the opinion that this is a normal response for a young child, and not ‘ipad enduced’. So what thoughts do you have when you watch the video? You may find it hard to watch without judgement. Or not. You may start having a little internal argument with yourself, or with this child’s parents. Or, you may have negative thoughts about this youngster thumbing through Marie Claire magazine at her age.
Whatever your reaction, it is very likely a conversation starter of
some sort. What’s great about that is it opens the door for some
exploration of technology/media and age-appropriateness. If you have a
student in a Waldorf school, you’ve heard about technology and media use
guidelines for students, and maybe you’re about to click out of this
post. Over the past five years, the technology scene has changed rapidly
as smart phones proliferate and ipads abound. It’s not just a game of
minesweeper on your flip phone, it’s Angry Birds, complete with a
marketing plan that includes stuffed characters available in stores. Is
it ‘bad’? No. But in a Waldorf school, we can sometimes give and get the
message that all technology is evil to be avoided. It used to be
referred to primarily as ‘media’, and that meant movies, tv, and
computer use. We can’t really call it ‘media’ these days, and I question
whether we need to define ‘it’. I think a more complete approach is to
focus on how children and their brains and bodies grow and develop and
why certain activities are good for them at different stages. To do
that, we as parents have to commit to informing ourselves about child
development.
By now, the child that appeared in that video is about two years old.
She probably enjoys running, walking, and playing in the dirt. Those
are great things for a two year old to do. Young children want and need
to be active: it’s how their brains and bodies develop in a healthy way.
That’s the simple answer to why, in our school, we think young kids
have a fuller, richer, experience without technology in their lives.
Much about the American human experience has changed in the last one
hundred years. Most of us no longer make music in our homes or dance
regularly. Folk dancing alone puts a child through many important, brain
and body building developmental movements such as crossing the midline,
balancing, and spatial awareness. Yet these activities are, for the
most part, lost to us now. We have to build those movement opportunities
back into our children’s lives.
What can we do as parents? We can do our best to educate ourselves
about our child’s developmental stage and needs. Then we can seek out
experiences that will provide our children with opportunities for
healthy growth. Teachers can often provide good information about
developmental stages and can give parents age-appropriate technology
guidelines for their students. There are many good books available and
our area has relevant, useful parent education presentations throughout
the year.
The technological landscape is ever-changing, and always growing.
What doesn’t change all that much is how humans grow best. If we look at
child development, rather than technology, it becomes easier to discern
what seems best for a two year old or a teen. It’s not about ‘good’ or
‘bad’, it’s about what our kids can engage in that will give them a
rich, full, experience. Informing ourselves about what our child needs
helps us increase supportive activities and form our own family plan for
technology.
Laura Crandall is the School Director at the Bright Water School in Seattle, Washington. To read this article at source, just click here.
