Category: Health

Parenting and creativity

Posted on by Suki

When I was younger, I realized I had no interest in anything that wasn’t creative, and this could be a significant handicap. So if I wanted to learn how to do something, I would assign myself a task. For example, instead of using tutorials and classes to learn about graphic design software, I just started working for my brother and learned on the job.

Once I had kids, I noticed that they behaved similarly. They didn’t want to learn about anything—they wanted to dip their hands in and do things. Just like me, they tend to back into tasks. While other kids learned phonics, my kids refused to sound out words until one day they could read…pretty much anything. When my daughter was homeschooling, it was a duel to the death if I tried to teach her something. But then she’d come up with an idea for a project or a game, and teach herself more than I ever could have in the same amount of time.

Bloom's Taxonomy
Educators often use Bloom’s Taxonomy as a model for how people learn. However, Bloom put “creating” way at the top of the pyramid, which implies to many teachers that it is something to be put off until the other learning is taken care of. The problem is, creative people just don’t learn this way. They need to jump into creation first.

I’m not going to take a stand on nature vs. nurture here (and tend to agree with those who say that it’s not a valid classification of how people learn, anyway). But researchers are finding that when they watch people’s brains work, they see marked differences between people who do “creative” work and people whose work is purely technical or organizational. All of these people may have similar brainpower, but use their brains differently.

One researcher, Nancy Andreasen, studied creative writers and is now doing a wider study of people who are high achievers in creative fields (not only the arts but also science and math).

“For years, I had been asking myself what might be special or unique about the brains of the workshop writers I had studied,” she writes in ‘Secrets of the Creative Brain.’ “In my own version of a eureka moment, the answer finally came to me: creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.”

When I got to this text I stopped and immediately highlighted it. It encapsulates both the joys and frustrations of parenting highly creative children. You parents know who you are: other kids use toy cars to play, well, toy cars. Your kids put their toy cars in a pot and cooked them into “drive soup” on their toy stove. Other kids largely accept that we never go up the slide backwards; your kids asked why and then argued a thousand reasons why the rule was wrong and unfair. Other kids make messes; “mess” is a state of being for your kid.

Last year I went to a talk about how to nurture creativity in children, but the question that pertained to my parenting life was quite the opposite: Is it OK if sometimes I really really want to stop the unbridled creativity that is driving me nuts? Can’t a child just set the darn table without building a case worthy of the Supreme Court for why it’s actually not her job?

The answer I came to is something like “yes” and also like “no.” Every time we nurture that independence of thought and randomness of connection that our young children show, we are supporting brains that will one day be able to apply novel approaches to artistic, engineering, and scientific endeavors. On the other hand, one of the jobs of parents is to help our kids become functional adults. Isn’t it part of good parenting to help a child learn where his “off” switch is? Our kids’ future coworkers and spouses will thank us.

Finding the balance between nurturing that little creative mind and shutting off the seemingly nonstop onslaught of free association is something I’ve always struggled with. My own creative brain definitely needs quiet and contemplation, something I had in excess before I had children. Now, sometimes I admit that I just have to say “please. stop. talking. please. stop. now!” to one or other of my kids. At the same time that I know I’m squashing their brains’ healthy bursts of association and originality, I also know that I need to stay sane.

I guess like every issue we face as parents, there’s no single right answer. I hope that I keep the balance tipped toward the nurturing of creativity, but I also know that sometimes the appropriate answer to a whiny “whyyyyyyyyyyyy do IIIIIII have to set the table?” is simply, “Because I said so.”

 

Focus on the positive

Posted on by Suki

I’ve been thinking lately about one lesson I learned through parenting a child with behavioral and learning differences. When you parent a child who falls somewhere within that wide field we call “typical,” lots of traditional parenting methods with incentives and consequences might work well enough. But it’s not until we have a child who falls far from the center of the field that we might discover the value of parenting—and teaching—to the positive.

I was most recently reminded of this when my daughter spent a week at her favorite summer camp, Santa Cruz Soccer Camp. The first time I brought her to camp, I was very nervous. I explained that there were various behavioral challenges and that I was willing to stay and help. Coach Bill, without hesitation, asked if she was liable to run off.

1406Soccer1“Well, no,” I answered. That was one challenge she’d never presented me with!

“Fine, then,” he said. “We can handle anything else. Go get some time for yourself.”

And that was the end of the idea that I might have to stay and supervise her at soccer camp. The reason Bill was so sure of his camp’s ability to handle my child was simply that they don’t focus on the problems—they focus on success. They call their approach “learning through enjoyment,” but it’s a variation on lots of approaches with different names that stem from one simple idea: kids learn when they enjoy something and are successful at it, not when they are set up to fail and are punished. Lots of kids have learned deep lessons from soccer, drama, writing, and science—I am willing to bet that few have learned from detention.

Kids learn when they feel a reason for learning: they’re having fun, they’re benefiting personally from what they’re doing, or even when they see that someone else is benefiting from what they’re doing. Kids do learn from failure, but only when it’s in the context of a challenge that makes sense to them. Kids don’t learn when they’re scared—or rather, they don’t learn the lesson we think they’ve learned. A student who is afraid of failing history doesn’t learn history because he’s afraid, but he may well learn how to search for plagiarized history papers online. A child who is afraid her parent will punish her if she’s rude doesn’t learn the value of being polite—she learns how to avoid punishment.

Now that my daughter is eleven, one of the things I’m looking forward to in the near future is leadership training at her soccer camp. This year when Bill asked all the coaches who had been through leadership training to step forward, all but one did (and the one who didn’t just simply didn’t grow up in Santa Cruz!). These wonderful people who spend their summers teaching soccer and success to kids are now adults or almost adults, and many of them started in this very camp when they were five or six. Leadership taught them the value of success, not just for themselves but the value of helping others achieve success.

I looked at a number of potential schools for my daughter to attend next year, and one thing that struck me now that I have this awareness of the value of success is how the staff view their jobs. At one school I visited, the staff—from principal on down—talked somewhat like jailers. They focused on the negative aspects of young teens, talked about all the problems that our kids would face, and warned us that our sweet children were about to turn into sullen, uncommunicative teens.

Guess where my daughter is not going?

Now that she’s a tween, she’s gotten past being a “troublemaker” in the classroom. I don’t expect her to have disciplinary problems, so why would I care how the staff treats these problems? The reason is that how we view the people we work with—whether they’re preschoolers or high schoolers—will affect their achievements. Schools with cultures that focus on success will find that they have fewer problems to begin with. They will find that when you focus on students’ positive qualities, those positive qualities will shine brighter. The students’ problems—their negative qualities—will not disappear, but they won’t be always in the spotlight.

Of course, no approach is 100% successful, so sure, you’ll be able to show me students who didn’t succeed in spite of a focus on the positive. But I’ve seen it with so many children—and the people at soccer camp can vouch for the approach with even more authority. Focusing on a student’s strengths and making sure they’re having fun while they’re working hard is a time-tested recipe for success.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I sure do wish there were some way to have summer camp all year round!

Forging new teacher relationships for your twice-exceptional child

Posted on by Suki

Note: This article was originally published in the Winter, 2012 issue of the Gifted Education Communicator.

Parents of gifted children have it hard enough: each time our children interact with a new adult, whether a teacher in school, a camp counselor, or a new violin teacher, we have to be prepared to train yet another adult in how to work with gifted children.

Parents of twice-exceptional gifted children face a much higher barrier: Most teachers have never even heard of the term “twice-exceptional.” Not only will some of them have no training in giftedness, but most of them will believe that a child with learning differences could not possibly be gifted at the same time.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe first hurdle parents face, therefore, is whether to mention the word “gifted” at all.

“Mention giftedness, and be mentally prepared for eye-rolling,” advises J. Marlow Schmauder, founder and executive director of the Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund (asynchronousscholars.org), “although there are definitely teachers out there who will respond with an open mind and intent to help.”

“Mentioning my child is gifted has never really helped,” says Linda Hickey, mom of a profoundly gifted six-year-old. “Even a teacher who was a developmental specialist and was the head teacher in a developmental preschool my son attended, and who claimed she has worked with lots of gifted kids, did not truly understand.”

Marté J. Matthews, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who works with families of gifted children in San Jose (martejmatthewsmft.com), suggests that it may be a matter of wording.

“Teachers are less likely to be receptive to parents using terms like ‘gifted’ or ‘twice-exceptional’ or criticizing every fault their child has,” Matthews explains. “’All or nothing’ descriptions tend to be a red flag for teachers that this parent is going to be a handful to deal with all year.”

Lyn Cavanagh-Olson, GATE Coordinator for the Pajaro Valley Unified School District, agrees that the starting place for parents should be to clarify their intent to support the teacher rather than to define their child and appear to predict failure.

“Most teachers welcome insight into their students,” Cavanagh-Olson says. “If parents approach the teacher not with demands but with information and support they will be doing their child a great service.”

Whether or not their training included giftedness, most teachers will likely have little understanding of twice-exceptionality. Linda C. Neumann, editor of 2e: Twice-Exceptional Newsletter (2enewsletter.com), says that parents need to be strong advocates for their 2e students.

“Teachers may not realize that a student’s strengths are helping compensate for the deficits and that this compensation can use up a lot of the child’s energy, making it hard to keep up a consistent level of performance,” Neumann explains. “If a teacher becomes aware of this situation right from the start, it can save the child from embarrassment, discouragement, and even worse, anxiety, depression, and loss of self-esteem.”

Offering information can backfire, however, if the parent implies that she believes that the teacher is inexperienced, or gives an overwhelming amount of information that the teacher will not be able to use. Parents need to draw on the teacher’s previous experience, be good listeners, and offer information in a non-threatening manner.

“Parents need to be respectful of the teacher’s time when sharing information,” Neumann advises. “Instead of saying, ‘You should read this book,’ or ‘You should read this 50-page report about my child,’ it’s better to provide the teacher with a brief summary of the situation and suggestions for accommodations and strategies.”

“Write out a short summary with the highlights of your child’s strengths and needs to share with your child’s teacher,” advises Matthews. “Bring the additional testing, grades and reports, but don’t lead with them.  Ask your teacher about successful approaches they have used with kids who ‘love math but avoid spelling’ or ‘tend to distract others when they need more intellectual challenge’.”

When giving advice about working with a 2e child, try to stay very specific. A generalization like “too many options overwhelm him” will not necessarily result in the teacher changing his strategies, but a specific suggestion like “please assign him to a learning station rather than asking him to choose” will help the teacher adapt in actual classroom situations.

“I will alert teachers of specific things they might want to watch out for with my son like how he gets wound up easy and gets really excited,” Hickey explains.

“Mention strategies you find helpful at home,” Schmauder suggests. “Provide fidgets and such similar assistive things from the start, if not against the rules.”

“Goal setting and organizational strategies are important for all students,” says Cavanagh-Olson. “But most 2e’s need specific instruction and tools, so if parents can share past success in these areas, most teachers will be open to building on what has worked in the past.”

In acting as advocates for their children, parents will benefit from refocusing from the negatives of the past to the positives they hope will come from the new relationship. Lyn Cavanagh-Olson says that parents she works with see greater success when they frame the discussion in the positive.

“The concept of 2e may be foreign to some teachers,” she says. “So stressing the need to focus on the child’s strengths and compensation strategies will keep the conversation constructive.”

“Often, the strengths aren’t easily recognized,” Neumann explains. “2e children can appear to be uninterested, lazy, distracted, or disruptive; and their inconsistency can make it look to others as though they can achieve when they want to, but they don’t always want to.”

Schmauder, who developed “The Healthcare Providers’ Guide to Gifted Children” for the Gifted Homeschoolers’ Forum (giftedhomeschoolers.org/professionalresources.html), is in the process of creating a similar brochure for educators.

“Tell the teacher you are so happy to have them be able to help your child succeed, and that you’re willing to help in any way, and that you appreciate their support,” Schmauder suggests.

Teachers say that this approach completely changes their ability to work with students. Rebecca Hein, who teaches cello and wrote a memoir about raising her two profoundly gifted children (caseofbrilliance.wordpress.com), offers testimony that learning about a student’s learning disability made a huge difference in how she approached teaching.

“I had a young Suzuki student whose progress was quite slow for her age,” Hein remembers. “I had no idea why until the mother finally told me. It was much easier for me to work with her, knowing that she had this particular issue in her learning. I was grateful to have the information because it helped both me and this little girl.”

Cavanagh-Olson has seen a lot of gifted students in her district suffer from their other exceptionalities. She reminds parents that 2e students need even more support after they have suffered difficulties in school.

“They often feel defeated about school because their deficits have defined them. Focusing on the whole child with the balance tipped toward their strengths is a good vision for parents and students to work toward.”

New teacher checklist:

  • Set up a brief meeting to talk about your child’s learning needs
  • Offer a short summary of your child’s strengths and weaknesses
  • Do not overwhelm with information, but be prepared to offer other resources such as testing/diagnostic results, articles that define your child’s exceptionality, and suggestions for modified teaching strategies
  • Be a good listener, and make it clear that you want to draw on the new teacher’s experience
  • Offer specific advice that has worked in other classrooms
  • Be your child’s advocate, focusing on success
  • Offer strong support to your child

 

 

2e Resource List

Resources regarding twice-exceptional children and adults are changing daily, with new research, treatment options, and understanding of what comprises giftedness and learning disabilities. Hopefully some of the resources below will be helpful as you seek to understand your 2e children and students.

Books:

  • Academic Advocacy for Gifted Children: A Parent’s Complete Guide by Barbara Jackson Gilman MS
    This general guide helps parents navigate advocating for their gifted students in school, and offers advice on homeschooling when advocacy fails.
  • Helping Gifted Children Soar by Carol Strip & Gretchen Hirsch
    This book is a general guide for parents and teachers on the educational needs of gifted children. It offers a basis for understanding the educational and emotional needs of gifted children, with some mentions of issues specific to twice-exceptional students.
  • Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults by James T. Webb et al
    Because giftedness itself often leads to behaviors shared by such disabilities as ADHD and autism, this book is an important guide for parents and educators of the gifted. Misdiagnosis is common in gifted children because so few psychologists and therapists are trained to recognize the traits of giftedness separate from disorders that present similar behaviors.
  • Smart Kids with Learning Difficulties by Rich Weinfeld et al
    This is a straightforward guide to navigating the public and private school experience with a gifted, learning disabled child. The book includes information on a range of disabilities including Asperger’s, ADHD, Dyslexia, and social/emotional difficulties. Each chapter includes tips for educators, parents, and students, and is accompanied by helpful worksheets and guides for identifying and solving problems faced by students in school.
  • Successful Strategies for Twice-Exceptional Students by Frances A. Karnes and Kristin R. Stephens
    This resource book useful for parents, teachers, and homeschoolers, offers focused advice for a variety of learning challenges. Rather than starting with the source of the disability (e.g. autism or ADHD), the book is organized by the educational needs themselves: difficulties with mathematics, writing, reading, spoken language, and social-emotional issues.
  • Teaching Kids with Learning Difficulties in the Regular Classroom by Susan Winebrenner
    This book addresses a wide range of learning difficulties that teachers may encounter in the general education classroom. Winebrenner addresses twice-exceptional students early in the book and emphasizes teaching to the strengths of all children, regardless of ability.
  • Twice-Exceptional Gifted Children by Beverly A. Trail
    This book aimed at educators presents detailed research about the characteristics and learning needs of twice-exceptional students in school. It offers concrete guides for identifying needs, selecting strategies, and developing a comprehensive plan for each student.
  • Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner by Linda Kreger Silverman
    Though the visual-spatial learning style is not defined as a disability, it can manifest itself as one when a VS learner is placed in an inappropriate educational environment. Silverman’s book offers tips for identifying, teaching, and parenting VS learners.

Websites:

  • Davidson Institute for Talent Development Database: http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/browse_by_topic_articles.aspx
    The Davidson Institute offers this enormous database of articles about all aspects of giftedness. On this page, take a look at the far right column to see the list of twice-exceptional topics that they have categorized: ADHD, Asperger’s/Autism, Asynchrony, Dylexia/Dysgraphia, Learning Disabilities, and Sensory Integration. The breadth of this collection may seem daunting, but you can find unexpected gems here.
  • Gifted Homeschoolers’ Forum: http://www.giftedhomeschoolers.org/2eresources.html
    Whether or not you homeschool your child, this resource page will point you to many organizations, websites, support groups, and books about your child’s specific disability.
  • Hoagies’ Gifted 2e Page: http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/twice_exceptional.htm

Hoagies’ offers their own comprehensive list of 2e resources, with links to websites, books, and magazines with a variety of approaches and target audiences.

An online database of articles, webinars, and speeches on all topics of giftedness.

Specific articles available for download:

  • “The Paradox of Giftedness and Autism,” from the University of Iowa: http://www.education.uiowa.edu/belinblank/pdfs/pip.pdf
    Designed for educators, this detailed discussion of educating gifted children with Autism/Asperger Syndrome will be also helpful for parents who wish to offer specific tips to teachers working with their children.
  • “Strategies for Teaching Twice-Exceptional Students,” by Susan Winebrenner: http://www.2enewsletter.com/article_strategies_winebrenner.html
    This article offers tips for parents and educators that can help students with a variety of exceptionalities succeed in a classroom setting.

Newsletters/magazines:

  • 2e: Twice-Exceptional Newsletter: http://www.2enewsletter.com
    2e offers a free semi-monthly e-mail briefing as well as a fee-based semi-monthly PDF newsletter. The magazine’s accessible articles are written by expert educators, psychologists, and others who work with gifted children with learning challenges. 2e also offers a series of Spotlight on 2e booklets, which cover a variety of issues of concern to parents and educators.
  • Smart Kids with Learning Disabilities Newsletter: http://www.smartkidswithld.org
    This newsletter offers short articles on news, research, and support for parents and teachers of children with learning disabilities.

In person:

SENG groups are run by a facilitator (a parent, teacher, or counselor) who has been trained by SENG. This can be an excellent way to connect with local resources, including learning more about other parents’ experiences with your schools and teachers.

For twice-exceptional kids:

  • Free Spirit Publishing’s books for kids: http://www.freespirit.com/
    Free Spirit offers lively books written for kids on a variety of topics of interest to twice-exceptional learners: ADHD, autism, anxiety & fear, etiquette & manners, social skills, and more.
  • The Gifted Kids’ Survival Guide by Judy Galbraith
    For kids 10 and under, this book helps kids understand giftedness and why they may feel different from other kids.
  • The Gifted Teens’ Survival Guide by Judy Galbraith and Jim Delisle
    This is a general-use manual for gifted teens. It covers what giftedness is, how different gifted children’s lives look, school, homeschool, college, and careers. There is a lot of good advice in the book, which encourages teens to see themselves as a full person rather than an IQ. The book also covers topics such as sexuality and depression.
  • How to Talk to an Autistic Kid by Daniel Stefansky
    This touching book is short and to the point. Written for neuro-typical children who interact with kids with autism, it could also be used to help an autistic child understand better how others perceive him and what he can do to help them understand him. The book is most suitable for adolescents and teens.
  • Neuroscience for Kids website: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html
    This fun, free newsletter features links to interesting articles that help children understand their brains.
  • The Smart Teens’ Guide to Living with Intensity by Lisa Rivero
    Rivero’s book is like an owner’s manual for the teen gifted brain. It presents teens with information on what intensity is and how to manage their emotional and social lives. It also helps teens learn about learning and how to become more self-directed in their studies.

 

What’s a parent to do about health and diet?

Posted on by Suki

I think parents around the Internet responded strongly to the article Puberty Before Age 10: A New Normal?, published in the New York Times, because it hit on how vulnerable we feel when it comes to making decisions about food. It’s extremely hard to decide what to believe on the issue of how to feed our children a healthy diet and avoid dangerous substances in their food. There is so much competing information out there, and so much “evidence” that is cited that really isn’t evidence at all. How can we make decisions when the information we get is so confusing?

First of all, what sort of evidence should be considered “hard” evidence? The difference between “hard evidence” and “evidence” is that hard evidence withstands rigorous inquiry:

  • It’s reproducible
  • It can be seen on a large scale
  • It doesn’t go away in double-blind testing

There’s lots of “evidence” out there that indicates that some things in our environment may be making our kids sick. But how do we know how to react to all this information?

The problem with knowing whether we are “causing” these problems with the chemicals in our environment is that human bodies are so incredibly complex. And the problems we’re seeing are complex. Put those two things together, and designing a strong study becomes nearly impossible. Sometimes scientists can look at epidemiological evidence (longterm evidence, for example, that a certain type of cancer is rising), but that doesn’t answer the important question: Why? What’s causing it? Is only one cause or a combination?

Here’s an example of this complexity: I wrote at one point about the clear evidence, from the experience of many parents and with some evidence from studies, that gifted kids are more likely to have what is called “reactive hypoglycemia” and that they are likely to respond well to adding Omega-3 oils to their diets. Someone wrote back telling me that if my child was acting crazy when he was hungry, then there must be something deeply wrong with my child and he needed a full medical work-up. But no, many parents see that if we keep enough O-3 in our kids’ diets, we see marked improvement. And since that’s an easy, healthy way to fix the problem, and it’s very hard to find “hard” evidence past that, parents have to be satisfied that at least there’s a workaround.

But how would we get “hard” evidence for something as complex as the behavior of certain kids when they are hungry? First of all, they would have to take parents’ opinions out of the mix, because we are unable to be truly objective observers. But next, they’d have to find a way to verify that they have a large sample of kids who have this problem, and since it’s hard to test the problem without living with the kids, you’d have to put parents back into the formula. In other words, there’s no “hard” evidence for this phenomenon or the cure, but that doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist or that the cure doesn’t work.

In the case of what’s causing this “early puberty” and how it can be fixed, we have even greater complexities. Is the onset of puberty really getting earlier in our country? Is early breast development the same as early puberty or does it just have one obvious characteristic in common? And even if we can prove it’s happening, how can we prove that a substance nearly ubiquitous in our food supply is the cause? One of the reasons it took so long to prove that smoking causes lung cancer is that smoking was so ubiquitous, scientists had trouble proving that it could be a factor. (Even one of the lead scientists on the first major study doubted they’d get any clear results… the day they started compiling their data, he quit smoking, but still died of lung cancer a few years later!)

I talked to my kids’ pediatrician about this and he said he believes, as I do, that the influence of diet on our health is the major new frontier in medical science. The way our healthcare and scientific systems are set up, however, it’s really hard to get funding for this type of research: the “cure” doesn’t involve a drug that a company can benefit from. Unfortunately, this leads to a lot of non-MD/scientists getting into this field — people who are into alternative medicine and are seeing marked improvements in patients just by dietary control. But since that field is also rife with charlatans (who just want to make money) and true believers (who are willing suspend rational judgment), the insistence on rigor and sound data goes out the window.

Correlation vs causation
From XKCD.com

As to how we parents should respond to this confusion, it’s clear that each parent has to make her own decision based on principles she believes in. Some parents are willing to make huge, difficult changes in their lives in case the people who espouse radical opinions are correct. My family’s approach involves straightforward lifestyle decisions:

  • Avoid milk/meat raised on hormones and antibiotics
  • Avoid BPA-lined cans and no heating in plastic containers.
  • Mostly organic produce, with an emphasis on all organic for plants that show high residues (root veges, fruits that you eat the skin of)

But I am not going to turn our lives upside-down for this, because I also believe in a balanced, enjoyable life. Thus, yes, sugar is pretty bad for us, but we love desserts and do eat them in moderation. And yes, we would be better off eating only whole grains, but pleasure in food is also part of health and frankly, sometimes a lovely croissant is just what your body and soul needs!

Finally, I think it’s best for parents to avoid reading inflammatory articles if these articles affect them negatively. Definitely don’t go looking at these magazines whose sole purpose, it seems, is to make us fearful of modern life. We are living longer and healthier lives because, in many cases, of the very same advances in applied science that may be making some of us sick. It’s very complicated, but with reasonable people taking reasonable care to sort it all out, things will continue to improve. As parents, we have an obligation to make our concerns known. But we don’t have to torture ourselves about the decisions we make – sometimes we just have to go forward with what we’ve got.

 

iPotty, uPotty, we all scream for iPotty!

Posted on by Suki

Well, the votes have been tallied up and the winner has been decided. The award? The TOADY, given by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood to the toy most deserving of our parental disdain. The competition is really tough out there, but this year the award has again gone to a toy built around a screen, the iPotty.

iPottyWhy, you might wonder, do these parents hate screens so much? Are we all luddites, looking back to the past before technology took over our lives?

That is, perhaps, one explanation. It’s natural for parents to compare their children’s lives with their own and wonder whether they’re doing the right thing. We remember climbing trees when we were kids though now we’re raising our kids in a treeless desert, or we remember how much we loved our public school though we have chosen a private Montessori, or we remember the joy of eating a bologna and American cheese sandwich on Wonder Bread while we’re raising our kids whole grain vegan organic.

But most parents are pretty quick to separate silly nostalgia from serious comparison. We may expound on the delights of eating Ho-ho’s while watching Gilligan’s Island, but that doesn’t mean we think it’s the right choice for our kids. Most of us actually make choices with some amount of thought, and we know that we make compromises each and every day. If we didn’t come to peace with our compromises, parenting would lead directly to a padded cell.

There is nowhere so fraught with compromise than how we parents have allowed screens into our children’s lives. Most of us probably grew up with television, but none of us grew up with cellphones that play high-resolution video games. The change that our society has gone through is extraordinary, with today’s children facing an adult future dominated by jobs that didn’t even exist when we were kids.

My own parenting life has straddled this change. A very useful book I got during my first pregnancy reviewed various brands of baby equipment and noted that some of the companies even had websites! If I were pregnant now, I wouldn’t buy such a book—I’d be reading blogs, consulting reviews submitted by thousands of parents, and subscribing to Facebook pages.

But despite our longing for a past when our kids actually wanted to go outside and play, there’s a much bigger and better reason for parents to reject a product like this: Our small children simply don’t need screens. Every piece of evidence gathered about babies and toddlers is that they learn through human interaction with the real world. Babies who are regularly put in front of screens have measurably lower IQs. They don’t bond as well with the adults in their lives. They don’t get on the business of learning what children their age should be learning. [Read this great piece by Media Mom.]

Apptivity Seat
And hey, how ’bout the “Apptivity Seat” from Fisher-Price? Yet another bad idea to put kids in front of screens.

Yes, I’m sure that some study will come out showing that babies who use iPads have quicker reflexes or learn to track small objects earlier than other babies. But that’s not the point. Babies with screens are hitting the pause button on the business of being babies. In my family, we use technology as useful tools for learning, working, and entertainment. But when technology gets in the way of life, it’s time to turn it off and get back to real life.

And how much more “real” can you get than potty training? Integrating screens into an essential physical learning process is silly at best, psychologically damaging at worst. If I had small children now, this is one compromise I personally wouldn’t be able to come to terms with. Introducing screens into the bathroom is an idea that simply…eh…stinks.

Related posts:

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