four.) If violent play is the norm, we end up with kids like those at my office, describing in gruesome detail exactly what their battle axes did to the face of the orc they dispatched to the lowest level of some dungeon. We probably would not want our kids watching these things on television, but we seem to be much less aware that they are not only watching such things on their computers, but actually pushing the buttons that cause the attack.
To illustrate how ingrained these norms can become for our kids, consider the advent of air conditioning. My mother grew up in New Orleans in the 1950s. She tells stories about when they got air conditioning for the first time during her high school years and how she felt cold all the time afterward. Personally, I can think of nothing worse than living in New Orleans in August without air conditioning. I’ve spent plenty of summers in New Orleans and know exactly how miserable that climate is. (In fact, I was born in New Orleans, so you can’t even use the argument that a person has a biological predisposition to the temperature.) Bottom line: I do not like the heat. But even beyond that, I cannot imagine living without air conditioning, because I have never lived without air conditioning in a climate where you would want it. That technology, producing frosty cold air on a day when it was 97 degrees on the other side of the window, has always been available to me. It has changed the way I see my world as well as my expectations of the world. It has given me a different experience, and a different perspective, from my mother.
To talk about a world before air conditioning, in that climate, is almost unfathomable to me. It is like telling a twelve-year-old today that there was a time without cell phones, and then expecting him to sagely nod and be able to imagine what that would be like.
The addition of any major development in technology has broad and rippling effects on our world. Following the widespread availability of air conditioning in the 1950s, enclosed shopping malls began to develop. Cities such as Phoenix and Houston experienced significant population booms and economic growth. Even the way that we built houses changed from promoting ventilation to designing around central cooling systems.
Media Technology Changes Us
Media technology is no different. The technological changes that have become commonplace in our society have, arguably, an even broader impact than the development of appliances such as window air conditioning units. Rather than change our physical compass, media technology has changed what we might call our “relational compass,” the way in which we understand and interpret human interactions and how we act upon them. We see people and the world differently when the internet mediates our dominant method of developing and preserving relationships. To our kids, the “new normal” of the digital age is just that — normal. Their experience of human relationships, therefore, has the potential to be vastly different from our own, often in ways that do not build opportunities for deep, authentic human relationships.
As parents, then, we need to be aware of what it is that the media portrays as normal or appropriate in the context of relationships. We need to identify the specific assumptions of the environment to which our children are exposed, and whether these assumptions are consistent with our values or at odds. If we believe the messages reaching are children are problematic, we need to know what we can do in response.
Statistics confirm our experience.
1. According to the Nielsen’s Social Media Report of 2016, in the United States alone, there was a 36 percent increase in time spent on social media from 2015 to 2016.
2. The average person in the United States will spend five years, four months of their life on social media. This is equivalent to the time it would take to walk across the United States thirteen times.
3. In 2012, Consumer Reports published a survey that showed 5.6 million Facebook users were under the age of thirteen despite Facebook having a policy that all users must be at least thirteen before having an account.
Given both the massive amount of time spent online and the ease of access to various forms of social media and other technologies, even for young children, we need to know the terrain in order to help our kids navigate this increasingly weird and wired world. So how do we help kids navigate the new cultural “norms” regarding connectivity, relationship, and violence? Read on.
For Reflection
What evidence do you have that your children absorb what they experience or take what they see uncritically and at face value?
Have you seen technology impact how you experience relationships or what you expect from them?
What hope, fear, or desire motivated you to read this book?
Chapter Two
Growing Up over Upgrading
To understand how technology impacts our children and how we can help them manage its effects, we first need a good understanding of how children develop, both socially and emotionally. The work of Erik Erikson, a developmental psychologist who wrote primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, is considered foundational in this field of study. He proposed eight stages of psychosocial development that occur at different points in the life of every individual, beginning with the development of basic trust during infancy in response to the mother, and concluding with the development of wisdom sometime after the age of sixty-five.
Erikson proposed that specific types of “conflicts” at certain ages lead to the development of psychosocial strengths. He posits that the first stage of development begins when the infant experiences the conflict between basic trust and basic mistrust. Based on her experience, it is as if the baby is saying internally, “If I alert people that I am hungry, I know that my mother will come and feed me,” or “Man, I have been crying for a solid ten minutes now. I might be on my own on this one.” A consistent experience of warm responsiveness to the child’s need leads to a basic sense of trust, which is the foundation for the development of hope.
For our purposes, we will focus on the second through fifth stages, which encompass the ages and stages most critical for children to develop a healthy sense of self and others after basic trust has been established. The stages then proceed as follows:
• Second Stage (one to three years old) — The child faces a struggle between Autonomy (or a healthy independence) and Shame (the sense of being bad or unworthy). If the child experiences support for exploration and age-appropriate opportunities to grow in independence, he will successfully develop a sense of autonomy and an accurate understanding of the role of his Will in making and executing decisions.
• Third Stage (three to six years old) — The child faces tension between Initiative (the drive to accomplish tasks and assert control) versus Guilt (the sense of having done something wrong). If he develops an understanding of his own initiative, he has a clear understanding of his own Purpose. The child has confidence that he can do things on his own and overcome challenges.
• Fourth Stage (six to eleven years old) — The child faces the challenge of being stuck between Industry (the ability to cope with new situations and social demands) versus Inferiority (the feeling of rejection from peers). In learning to be industrious, he gains a sense of Competence. The child compares his self-worth to others’ favorably and can see his own strengths as well as weaknesses when compared with other children.
• Fifth Stage (twelve to eighteen years old) — The child deals with the conflict between Identity (developing a clear sense of self) versus Role Confusion (the lack of a clear direction or having a sense of meaning in life).
