Hello Readers! This week, I have a special guest post for you from Ann-Marie, a dear friend and co-worker at the school where I used to work! This all started when I went back to the school to visit with my daughter one morning, and happily bumped into her in the hallway. After catching up a bit, she began sharing passionately about her observations and some frustrations she’d encountered with students who were consumed with technology. I found it fascinating, and asked her to write more about it to share with you, readers! ~JoEllen
How Has Technology Affected Children at School? A Teacher’s Perspective
A Guest post by Ann-Marie
I have been teaching kindergarten for a little over ten years now. I’d give you a specific number, but you start to lose count after a while. I don’t know if I’d call myself a veteran, but I’ve been around the block for quite some time now. A few months back I was asked to write this guest blog post and here I am. Have I ever done anything like this? No. By any means would I call myself an expert? No. Am I parent? No. But I am a woman who has spent a lifetime around children. I babysat, I nannied infant twins for 2 years in college and am a proud “auntie” of two beautiful young ladies in middle and high school. I only tell you this so you know that I know children.
How technology addiction manifested itself at school
The first time I really noticed anything was about five years ago. For the first time in my teaching career I had a new crop of kids that didn’t seem to have the ability to discuss books. Granted I have traditionally taught in schools with a high percentage of English language learners (aka “English as a Second Language”), but it wasn’t just the non-English speakers having difficulty. I would read a book like Goldilocks and the Three Bears and ask questions like, “How do you think baby bear is feeling when his food is gone…when his chair is broken? How do you think Goldilocks feels when she wakes up?” Questions I had asked over and over again for years, but something was different. Instead of a room full of five year olds eagerly raising their hands or shouting out answers, they mostly just sat there. A handful of children wanted to answer, but for the most part I received blank stares. It was the beginning of the school year. I thought…they could be shy…they could be nervous. I came up with a whole host of reasons why this was happening. As I got to know my class in the next month or two and during parent conferences, a common thread appeared: electronics. At the time it was mostly video games and TV.
Let me pause again to give you a little more personal background with technology. I do watch TV on the regular. I have been known, like many teachers, to spend an entire Saturday in the winter glued to say, the Hallmark channel or Lifetime watching a slew of movies or a TV show marathon just to unwind. I did play video games as a child, but it was a different era. My first at-home video game system was Atari, which we inherited from another family. When I was a little girl, most kids didn’t have home systems. The games were sooooo sloooow and there wasn’t a great selection. If we wanted to play video games, our parents dropped us off with a handful of dollars at the local arcade. We went to town for a few hours and that was it. Eventually we graduated to Nintendo (1st generation). Fast forward to the present: we did buy an Xbox Kinect for my nieces several years ago.
Back to my story… In parent conferences, I discovered the students I mentioned spent the majority of their time in front of the TV (many with TVs in their own rooms). They had at-home video game systems that they played regularly and/or watched older siblings play regularly. Discussing the content of said video games would be an entirely different blog, but in many cases they were not age-appropriate. Some of these kids also had their own handheld systems as well. Not all, because the DS was still newer and a bit pricey. Let me reiterate again: I teach children ages 4 ½ years to 6 years old!
It’s not just academic—it’s social
Fast forward five or six years later…the problem has only gotten worse. Not only are the students walking in my door having difficulty discussing books. They are having difficulty interacting with each other! Never in my entire career–lifetime– of being surrounded by children, have I had to teach children how to play on a playground. Yes, children have always gotten into squabbles that as an adult I have helped mediate, but this is a whole new phenomenon my colleagues and I have never seen before.
In the past there were a handful of children that had difficulty socializing with other children on the playground or in the classroom, but now it seems that handful has become the majority. It’s not just that they don’t know how to socialize with other children either. It’s that these children don’t know how to socialize or interact period. They don’t understand how what they do affects other people. They do not understand that people constantly thinking about other people because quite frankly they are only thinking about themselves. In the simplest of terms they are missing and/or have huge holes in their social cognition chip.
What is social cognition you ask? As defined by Kendra Cherry on the About Education website: It “focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in our social interactions. The way we think about others plays a major role in how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us.”
For example, imagine Fred putting tan bark on his friend Jill’s head. Jill says stop. Fred continues. Jill runs to an adult for help and tells Fred she no longer wants to be his friend. Fred is left sad, confused and distraught because he doesn’t understand why Jill no longer wants to be his friend. Fred, after all, was just playing and having fun. He wasn’t throwing the tan bark, but simply sprinkling it on her head. He really and truly does not understand. Why? Because Fred really and truly does not understand that something he was doing (sprinkling tan bark on Jill’s head) was irritating her. When he didn’t stop, it made her feel frustrated and mad. Feeling frustrated and mad she no longer wanted to play with him which made him sad because she was his friend. He doesn’t understand that what he initially did caused a chain reaction that resulted in an outcome he did not like. If he would have stopped when she asked him to then they would have still been playing. Seems like common sense to most of us, but for the new generation of children, it’s not. Why? Because they do not see how what they do affects other people.
Think back to when this starts. When do children start to interact with other people? When did we traditionally discover that what we did affected other people? That we could cause a reaction from another person? Infancy. The first time someone smiled at us we smiled back. The first time someone played peek-a- boo with us, it made us happy and we smiled back. The first time someone talked to us we “cooed” back. Driving in the car our parents talked to us even though we couldn’t talk back. If we were bored as children, we used our imagination and we made up games to play. If we didn’t have a toy, we made a toy out of pot or a box. Oh the things the neighborhood kids and I could do with a refrigerator box (I have no idea where they came from), but we played with them until they were paper thin. A fort, a bus, a car, you name it and we created it. We constantly played with other kids or siblings! No one had to teach us that what we did affected other people. We were raised understanding it because from the time we opened our eyes we were interacting ALL the time with other people. By the time we got to kindergarten we understood it just from our previous 5 years of social interaction.
What is different now? Technology. Children are constantly plugged in. We all have smart phones, tablets, laptops, TVs in our cars, TVs in more than one room in the house, video game systems, etc. How many times, when you go out to a restaurant, do you see toddlers (and I’m being generous because I’ve seen smaller) playing on a smart phone or tablet at the table? How many times on the road have I seen a TV on in a vehicle with a child in the back seat? How many of my students have TVs in their rooms? What do all these things have in common? No reciprocity. All of these interactions are one-sided. The tablet or smart phone does what the child wants it to do. Kids play the games or watch the shows they want. They never have to be flexible or compromise. They never have to think about anything different than what they want or what they’ve asked their “gadget” to do.
So what should I do?
Don’t get me wrong. I do understand the convenience of some of it all. I do understand on a long road trip having a TV in the car. I do understand giving your child a smartphone or tablet to occupy them while waiting. I will NEVER understand at the dinner table. I’m just “old school” in that regard. Families should be interacting together.
Sadly because of the convenience of technology and the way in which it easily distracts children, we have lost the most key element to children naturally developing social cognition…parent/adult-to-child interaction. In some cases, we’ve even lost children-to-children interaction. I fear for some children the damage is already done. My colleagues and I have come to the conclusion that we now need to begin the school year by expressly teaching children how to “socially think.” Never in a million years did I think I would have to teach children how to interact with each other on the most basic of levels.
What can you do as a parent? Unplug your children. Make a conscious effort to think about whether your child really needs your smartphone or tablet at the moment (even if it’s an educational game). What could they be doing instead that would involve some sort of reciprocal interaction? Talk to your children! It is unbelievably sad to me that we now have public service announcements and commercials saying just that…talk to your children about everything and nothing. Take your child to the park to play with random children. Put your child in organized sports/activities. It makes all the difference in the word. Even if you don’t have children, continue to talk to the random infant in the restaurant, smile at the toddler or infant in line in front of you at the store. Take a stand. Take a few steps back. Unplug your children. Start interacting with them on a regular basis again and hopefully we can reverse this scary trend of a generation of socially deficient children.
10 responses to “How Has Technology Affected Children at School? A Teacher’s Perspective”
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Nicely said… I will share that with our staff.
Wonderful!
This is very helpful. Thanks for posting it!
I’m so glad you thought so. Yes, thanks, Ann-Marie!
Wonderfully written and so important! I taught in a K classroom which had 3 computer stations for the children. My students preferred to play with each other than to sit facing the computer. It made me happy to see this! I am saddened when I see a child using their parents phone to play on, sitting in a shopping cart, while their parent is shopping.
I agree! I love when children choose interactive play with one another or active play outside over technology. So glad you enjoyed this piece!
Wow, fascinating. I have never felt that constant technology all the time was a good thing (although I have slipped into using it more than I wanted a time or two) but to hear that it’s affecting social interaction… it’s one of those things that we of course *should* have seen coming, but didn’t. It also makes me think about MY interaction with my kids when I’m using the computer or my phone. I’ve been on them a lot the past few weeks, because I’ve been doing online classes. I’ve really felt the need to take a break and build in a better structure though – and this is yet another reason that reinforces that need!
Oh wow don’t know how I missed this comment! But yes… we teach our kids so much by example, so all these technology pieces work as good accountability and remind me to check my own technology time! Of course if you’re doing an online course, some things can’t be helped, but it helps to keep this in mind so we can be careful about when we show our kids our tech-time haha :). Hope it is all going well!!
I could write an entire blog post in response to this, which would basically be an “Amen” with a few corroborating personal vignettes. I was a nanny for 10 years, teacher for 6, and now mom to a toddler and one on the way. I noticed in grading students’ papers that the ones who read the most (or who had read any books at all, as sad as such a low barometer may be) were able to form coherent, albeit not necessarily eloquent sentences. They were more analytic, could process information, and had emotional intelligence. The best way to learning these skills is free play, conversation (actual conversation), and reading. Technology, especially when used in isolation from others, actually slows our response time and ability to cope with real-world interactions. I’ve noticed this phenomenon just running errands errands or getting coffee—10 years ago, people could say “excuse me” when they bumped into others, ask “is this seat taken?” etc. Now someone will bump into me and they are shell-shocked: a real person! Response time is slow, social graces are lost, individulsism is king. I’m only 33 and am sounding like an old fart, but in high school we had family computers with dial-up, and most of our interactions were “real.” My toddler learned how to swipe right to unlock my phone, and that’s when I realized she sees ME having too much screen time on my phone. Where once I consulted a calendar, picked up a camera and phone occasionally, now having everything accessible means I spend exponentially more time isolated on this little iPhone than I would if I were kicking it old school. Helping our children become socially-conscious, well-rounded individuals starts with us as well. I’m taking the opportunity to write this blog post-length comment when my daughter is napping, so she doesn’t see Mama glued to a screen. Thank you for the fabulous post!! 🙂
Wow, thanks for all the personal examples, Heather! (LOL at the thought that you had to be glued to technology to write about its negative effects… and how I’m sitting here in front of my screen saying these very words… *sigh* :)). It really is amazing to see the subtle but powerful ways our culture is changing! I have to admit my toddler knows all about swiping, and even likes to grab my phone to try to “take a smile!” these days. Sigh. It’s a hard balance! Thank you for sharing your observations here.