While waiting for an elevator at the
Fair Oaks Mall near her home in Virginia recently, Janice Im, who works in
early-childhood development, witnessed a troubling incident between a young boy
and his mother.
The boy, who Im estimates was about 2 1/2 years old,
made repeated attempts to talk to his mother, but she wouldn't look up from her
BlackBerry. "He's like: 'Mama? Mama? Mama?'"
Im recalled. "And then
he starts tapping her leg. And she goes: 'Just wait a second. Just wait a
second'." Finally, he was so frustrated, Im said, that "he goes, 'Ahhh!' and
tries to bite her leg."
Much of the concern about cellphones and
instant messaging and Twitter has been focused on how children who incessantly
use the technology are affected by it. But parents' use of such technology
— and its effect on their offspring — is now becoming an equal
source of concern to some child-development researchers.
Sherry
Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on
Technology and Self, has been studying how parental use of technology affects
children. After five years and 300 interviews, she has found that feelings of
hurt, jealousy and competition are widespread. Her findings will be published in
the book 'Alone Together' early next year.
In her studies, Turkle
said, "Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and
not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead
of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an
extracurricular activity, and during sports events."
Turkle said that
she recognizes the pressure adults feel to make themselves constantly available
for work, but added that she believes there is a greater force compelling them
to keep checking the screen.
Not all child-development experts think
smartphone and laptop use by parents is necessarily a bad thing, of
course.
Frederick Zimmerman, a professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles, who has studied how TV can distract parents noted that
smartphones and laptops may enable some parents to spend more time at home,
which may, in turn, result in more, rather than less, quality time
overall.
There is little research on how parents' constant use of
such technology affects children, but experts say there is no question that
engaged parenting — talking and explaining things to children, and
responding to their questions — remains the bedrock of early childhood
learning.
Betty Hart and Todd Risley's landmark 1995 book,
'Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children',
shows that parents who supply a language-rich environment for their children
help them develop a wide vocabulary, and that helps them learn to
read.
The book connects language use at home with socioeconomic
status. According to its findings, children in higher socioeconomic homes hear
an average of 2,153 words an hour, whereas those in working-class households
hear only about 1,251; children in the study whose parents were on welfare heard
an average of 616 words an hour.
The question is: Will devices like
smartphones change that? Smartphone users tend to have higher incomes. If
increased use of technology encroaches on the time that well-to-do families
spend communicating with their children, some could become the victims of
successes originally thought to help them.
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