In my previous post, I asked the question: “Is technology making your children mindless instead of mindful?” I think it’s safe to say that it is incredibly difficult for children to be mindful, present, and calm in our culture that is now dominated by the constant flow of information. Yet, if you want your children [...]
I’m no Zen master and I don’t expect you to teach your children to meditate all day. At the same time, the notion of mindfulness has much broader meaning than as an Eastern philosophy or for practitioners of Buddhism. In fact, it has tremendous significance for your children growing up in this crazy new world [...]
Good decision making is one of the most powerful skills your children need to learn to as they progress through childhood and transition into adulthood. But I promise you, it is not a skill that will develop readily on its own, particularly in the digital world in which they are growing up. You should teach your children why popular culture and technology can cause them to make poor decisions and guide them in learning how to make good decisions. Making bad decisions. Whenever I speak to a group of young people, I ask how many of them have ever made a bad decision. With complete unanimity and considerable enthusiasm, they all raise their hands. When I then ask whether they will ever make a poor decision in the future, the response is equally fervent. I also ask children why they make less-than-stellar decisions. Their responses include I didn’t stop to think; It seemed like fun at the time; I was bored; Peer pressure; I didn’t consider the consequences; To get back at my parents. Yet when I ask them if the faulty decision was worth it, most usually say, “Not really.” What this means is that there was glitch in their decision-making “program,” somewhere between input, processing, and output, that caused the bad decision. Because children lack experience and perspective, and, as I noted above in my previous post, their prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed, they tend to make decisions that are egocentric, rash, and short-sighted. This absence of forethought can cause children to not consider all available information, engage in an incomplete cost-benefit analysis, and ignore long-term consequences.
Decision making is another aspect of children’s thinking that seems to be suffering as a result of the latest technology. This poor decision making is illustrated by events over the last few years involving young people making egregiously bad decisions that involve technology (not to mention the frequent examples occurring in the adult world!). For example, teenagers whose “sexting” to a friend is released in cyberspace, embarrassing or illegal behavior that’s recorded on mobile phones and uploaded onto the Web, and the tragic consequences of cyberbullying. In looking at decision making among children, let me begin with a brief lesson in brain anatomy and functioning. Children start off at a severe disadvantage when it comes to decision making because the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop until well past adolescence. The prefrontal cortex is instrumental to so-called executive functioning, namely, determining good from bad, planning, recognizing future consequences, predicting outcomes, and the ability to suppress socially inappropriate behavior. This means that children begin their lives “behind the curve” when it comes to decision making; their default is to make poor decisions. So, anything that makes bad decision making easier for children to act on just adds insult to injury.
Like many digital natives, your children are probably on their way to becoming lifelong multitaskers (or so you think). As the research indicates, children these days spend about seven-and-a-half hours a day interacting with technology unrelated to school and when multitasking is counted, that number jumps to an astonishing ten-and-three-quarter hours. Your children may be [...]
The Internet, and all of the new computer and communication technology that has sprung from it, have been a boon to the information age, making information available at children’s fingertips instantaneously. The sheer volume of information now accessible online is staggering; there are around 50 billion pages on the Web. Information continues to become more available [...]
Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It’s what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting. There is also little doubt that all of the new technologies, led by the Internet, are shaping the way we think in ways obvious and subtle, deliberate and unintentional, and advantageous and detrimental The uncertain reality is that, with this new technological frontier in its infancy and developments emerging at a rapid pace, we have neither the benefit of historical hindsight nor the time to ponder or examine the value and cost of these advancements in terms of how it influences our children’s ability to think. There is, however, a growing body of research that technology can be both beneficial and harmful to different ways in which children think. Moreover, this influence isn’t just affecting children on the surface of their thinking. Rather, because their brains are still developing and malleable, frequent exposure by so-called digital natives to technology is actually wiring the brain in ways very different than in previous generations.
Values are a pretty darned touchy subject to bring up these days when it comes to raising children. Values have gotten a bad rap because of how they are discussed in politics and as they relate to religious beliefs. When most people hear the term values used, they often think of the hot-button value issues [...]