The Evolution of Childhood Play

The BBC News article “Children ‘give playground games a modern twist,’” discusses the trend of children’s pretend play to incorporate ideas from the media. Long gone are the days where you see children playing mancala and hopscotch on the playground. Nowadays, you are more likely to see children imitating popular television shows like Survivor or American Idol.

Is this transition in childhood play detrimental? Luckily, developmentalists are saying that this shift is just a different type of play. Children are just as inventive as they always have been, they are just experimenting with themes that they are learning from television. In terms of the violent nature of some television shows, researchers are saying that children have always engaged in play fighting as a way of understanding the violence they see around them. Children will imitate the behavior that they see on television, but so long as they are being properly supervised, this type of play is not found to have detrimental effects. If anything, it gives children the opportunity to make sense of the world around them.

Those concerned that more traditional childhood games are being lost can revive them by teaching them games such as four square, jumping rope, marbles, and hopscotch. Children pick up from their environments. If you do not want them imitating violent television, use parental controls.

Online Monitors

With so many online dangers for parents to be worried about such as online predators and cyberbullies, it makes sense that parents want a way to track their children’s online activities. According to the New York Times article "Now Parents Can Hire a Hall Monitor for the Web," new companies such as SafetyWeb, SocialShield, and MyChild now give parents the ability to monitor their children’s activities and even flags suspicious reportings. This provides busy parents and those that may not be computer savvy a way to understand their child and make sure that they are being safe online.

How do these tracking sites work? The companies charge $10 a month for subscriptions which begin with parents filling out a profile. The sites ask for the parents to fill in their child’s e-mail address and the family’s physical address. They then look through social networking sites to see if the child has any accounts. The sites will then monitor what the child writes and what others write about the child. The sites will then report back to the parent with a list of the child’s online activity, marking activities as safe, potentially dangerous, or red-flagged as dangerous. What exactly are they marking as hazardous? The sites look for key words suck as “kill” or “suicide” in postings. They also look for age differences between friends. However, these sites have a lot of loopholes and often mark things as hazardous that aren’t dangerous at all, such as being friends with an uncle or perhaps using language that the sites take out of context such as, “I could kill for a latte this morning.”

Are these sites crossing the line into children’s privacy? What if the parent was monitoring an adult child? What if someone used this site that was not a parent at all? I can see the potential for a lot of dangerous stalking occurring. I can understand the concern that parents have over the Internet and the worry that it draws not knowing how technology works well enough to monitor their children themselves. So in a sense, this could ease a lot of parent’s anxiety and even allow parents to trust their children more. But on the other hand, there are so many loopholes in the technology, that the parents may not be getting all of the information that they think they are paying for. What happens if the child uses another e-mail address to set up a social networking account? Chances are, these sites would never catch that activity and parents could be paying $10 a month to see their children’s “good” account. I for one do not think that these sites are worth what they are charging. I think that if parents are really concerned over their children’s Internet activities, they should learn how to use parental controls or do their own research on how to track their children’s online activity.

The other major concern of these sites is the invasion of privacy of the children. If the child is under 18 and it really is the child’s parents who are trying to use these sites, then I would say they are marginally okay. After all, the sites only inform parents of information that the child puts out online for anyone to see. If anything, this could be a lesson for the child of how what you put online can be accessed by anyone. But on the other hand, when things beyond Facebook statuses make it to reports, questions of privacy are brought up. While Facebook statuses are expected to be viewed publicly, things like e-mail exchanges are not. Concerned parents are not, I think that e-mail exchanges are private. If parents are really that concerned about their children’s Internet activity, then I think that they should be having a conversation with their child about what is and is not appropriate online activity.

iSchool

Thinking back to my childhood, my experience was very different from that of my young cousins. My parents limited the amount of time spent watching television or on the computer to thirty minutes per day, and the only games we played were board games. It's quite obvious that my cousins and the majority of other children are growing up in a world that not only revolves around media but is completely dependent on it. Video games such as Wii and Xbox continue to provide entertainment and distraction for kids. The shocking expansion of media in our education system is a bit worrisome to me. It's as if we are developing the iSchool.

As technology continues growing and supposedly improving our lives, it has found its way into education. The New York Times recently reported on school districts in New York that have elected to change teaching methods in order to parallel technology. In Roslyn Heights, school administrators decided that the iPad and its applications offered great potential for learning, thus they allocated money toward buying iPads for students. English teacher Larry Reiff stated, "It allows us to extend the classroom beyond these four walls." Teachers believe that the iPad provides an efficient form of communication and accessibility to assignments for students and teachers. While I'm sure the iPad is a much more convenient and fun method of interacting and completing homework what happened to the plain old textbook or workbook?

While the latest and greatest technology is obviously a more exciting way for children to learn, it honestly seems a bit irresponsible for school administrators to be spending lavish amounts of money on technology, while teachers are being laid off and everyone is under the pressure of budget cuts. Truthfully, there is no way of knowing quite yet if being constantly connected is the best way for our children to learn, or if it is better to do things the old fashioned way. While we gain improvements in technology, we are losing the interpersonal connection between teacher and student. With that, are teachers and administrators losing track of their accountability because technology is simply "easier" than teaching face-to-face?

As technology continues improving it allows us to live easier lifestyles, because we have computers that can do things for us. In another New York Times article from December, the concept of computers taking over the jobs of administrators is brought up. Caveon Test Security is a company that uses computers to detect cheating, by comparing how similar right and wrong answers are between students sitting in close proximity. While the program has seen a 70% reduction in cheating, it allows teachers the flexibility to be less responsible in proctoring tests. So while computer programs can improve our lifestyles, we need to draw a line to avoid the temptation of being less accountable and abusing the opportunities technology provides.

Technology has obviously helped us make huge strides in education. However, there is also the risk of taking the easy road and being less responsible. As the iPad and computer programs begin to influence schools across the nation, I am worried that eventually all we will know is technology, and that education will become the iSchool. It is a common saying that our children are our future. We need to take caution in not sacrificing or losing the interpersonal relationships we have with each other to relationships with computers.

No More Make-Believe: the Death of Healthy Childhoods

When I was a kid, all of my spare time was spent reading or playing. Winters were spent curled up in front of the fire reading every book I could get my hands on and summers were spent running around outside, practically naked, for every moment of daylight. Stories in my head came alive in make-believe games; everything I did came from my imagination and was brought to life with my bare hands and with whatever I could turn into toys or props to enact my stories. My friends and I made hundreds of miniature fairy villages out of stones, twigs, and leaves, dressed ourselves up as pirates, princes and princesses, and romped through the mud until we became brown mud-monsters that were not allowed anywhere near the white furniture. This was my entire childhood; there was no Internet, no television, and no constant input of media. I was always happy, energetic, and, albeit constantly muddy, healthy.

Now, I look at my ten-year-old sister and how she is growing up. She was introduced to the Internet and television when she was about seven years old. I watched her slowly become more and more addicted to online games, social gaming networks for kids, education software, and Disney TV shows on Youtube. It’s as if her entire daily focal point is on the computer in the living room. She tunes the entire world out for hours everyday and her eyes gloss over as her brain hooks into the world of cyberspace. Getting her to just look up and focus on us when we are talking to her is a struggle.

Instead of using and expanding her imagination by reading and playing, my sister spends the majority of her leisure time online. I worry that all of the media is adversely effecting her development. I am not sure to what extent the constant connection is affecting her neurological responses, but I do know that her personality and reactions to social situations are extremely different from my own personality and reactions when I was her age. She is extremely volatile; after being constantly stimulated by media all day, any extraneous stimulation or stress throws her into a completely over-stimulated state. Temper tantrums are frequent and her real-life friendships suffer as she spends less and less time playing in person with her friends; they all have their own online gaming accounts and choose to spend their time together via the computer.

My experience of endless outdoor playtime and make-believe seems to be a foreign concept to my sister’s generation. In the book After the death of Childhood; Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media, David Buckingham explores this idea of the misplacement or loss of healthy childhoods. He explores the argument that electronic media is causing the disappearance or “death” of the type of childhood I had. Buckingham also touches on the idea that there is an ever-growing gap between different generation’s relationships with media and technology. He points out that the lines of what defines "childhood" are getting progressively fuzzy as the constant influence of media catapults children into pre-mature adulthood. 

The thing that is the most disturbing to me is that the amount of time my sister spends online is below the average of all of her friends and other kids her age. Everywhere I look, kids are plugged into their iPads, cell phones, laptops, Wii video games, etc., instead of spending their time actively playing with real-life toys and friends. My question is that is the world of cyberspace forcing healthy, playful childhoods into the backseat, or even destroying them all together? Can children develop properly with the constant stimulation from all of the surrounding media? I worry for the repercussions of this on my sister’s generation. 

~Cherise Glodowski