Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Your Computer Doesn't Have Developmental Stages

Your Computer Doesn't Have Developmental Stages
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.