Читать книгу The Tech Talk - Michael Horne PsyD - Страница 11

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). In developing a core identity, the child experiences a sense of Fidelity to his own personhood. The child tries to understand who he is and where he fits in based on his interactions with others.

How does technology fit in at each stage? Young children (one to three years old) might find it appealing to “do” things independently on a computer or tablet. Certainly there are plenty of apps currently designed for toddlers. Just search “toddler games” in your favorite apps store, and you get more than ten thousand hits. It’s important to note, however, that according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children younger than two shouldn’t spend time in front of a screen, because it can cause problems with their brain development. Yet, some kids still use tablets to learn the ABC’s, count, or color using a finger.

At this age, children are still learning to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Toddlers don’t understand that the images on the tablet screen are not real. Or, the images are real enough to them that there is no distinction from reality in their own minds. This is one of the reasons why it’s important to monitor kids’ television shows, including the commercials. Children who are still learning how the world (meaning the actual world) works can be confused when they also encounter singing polka-dotted dragons or dogs that talk. They may draw illogical conclusions based on this confusion, as evidenced in the early 1990s, when one of my cousins believed that my mother lived in the phone jack in the wall. Why? Because he could talk to my mom on the phone. He knew she wasn’t living in the phone (because that would be ridiculous), but he naturally assumed that because he could trace the phone cable back into the wall, my mother must live there. My cousin also assumed that my father lived in the dishwasher. I’m not totally sure how he came to that conclusion, although it was close to the phone jack.

While toddlers are seeking a sense of independence and autonomy, it’s important for them to gain that level of competency in a wide range of real-world skills, not just in digital formats. Using a tablet to build and create art isn’t the same as actually using a paintbrush or finger painting. The physical activity and tactile stimulation enrich brain development and promote growth in their gross and fine motor skills. Sure, there’s some fine motor skill development taking place as children are using tablets, but it’s not a replacement for things such as lacing cards, sorting trays, or building simple structures out of blocks.

For kids in their preschool years, there are a boatload of available apps, ranging from educational apps that focus on reading, writing, or math skills, to Montessori-inspired apps, to apps designed primarily to entertain through scavenger hunts, or by having kids create monsters with a program that allows them to piece together wacky faces using a mishmash collection of facial parts. Is the child able to take initiative in doing things on his own using a computer or tablet? Probably so, but there are other factors to consider when assessing the value of a given form of play.

Good Play/Not-So-Good Play

How children play matters. The actual act of playing with toys is a key part of emotional development for children. Virginia Axline, one of the original experts on play therapy, believed that “play is the child’s natural medium of self-expression.” Children work through concerns and problems using play. They grow and develop social skills using play. Children learn about consequences and cause and effect through play. The free-form ability to fully engage in imagination, playing out complex scenarios, allows children to learn about the world.

Video games, even those with the most accessible digital worlds, are limited in their ability to match the free play of a group of five-year-olds. This holds true even for those “sandbox games” in which kids are free to interact with the world in whatever way they want, unconstrained by needing to do things in a specific way or order. Every video game starts out with a premise and a defined world in which to play. This is a space game. This is a racing game. This is a soldier game. But for children, the ability to fully create a fantasy world tailored specifically to the individual or the group only occurs in free-form play and cannot be replicated within the boundaries of a video game. Known therapeutically as “child-centered” or “non-directive” play therapy, just such free-form play is one of the best ways to help children process the events of their lives and to grow.

In working with many children over the years, I have seen the power of play firsthand. I have seen children dealing with the trauma of a divorce or extreme anxiety heal and flourish using play therapy. But in recent years, I have also seen that children who spend a significant amount of time plugged into screens have a harder time engaging in play, therapeutic or otherwise. I believe this is because these children have not learned how to play, or at least have not learned how to play outside of the structured or semi-structured worlds inside their Xboxes.

So for some children, an unstructured world can be overwhelming, especially if they mainly experience the structured world of preprogrammed software. Now, I’m not advocating that children run around like it’s a Lord of the Flies world. Structure is important. Children need structure and predictability to feel safe in the world. However, children also need the opportunity to explore freely in the real world and use their imaginations.

When I was growing up, one of the best things in the world was having an oversized cardboard box. That box could be anything. Open side up? It’s a pirate ship! Open side down? A rocket to Mars! Open side on its side? A cave! With a few strategic cuts, I could open up windows and doors to make a house. If kids spend most of their time with screens, there is a real chance that they will miss out on an important stage of development: the ability to think creatively and to demonstrate the initiative to do things on their own, without needing to be guided by a preprogrammed narrative.

God-Given Abilities

By the time children reach school age (Erikson’s six- to eleven-year-olds), there is a normal developmental tendency for a child to base his worth on how he compares himself to others. If he sees himself doing well compared with his peers, he feels a growing sense of competence. But if he only sees himself struggling compared with his peers, he feels he is inferior to others. Obviously, not all children have the same skills and talents. Not every child will be good at using technology, just as not every child will be good at sports or good at art. God gives each of us different gifts.

For example, I am not good at learning foreign languages. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, even though I did make it through grad school pretty well, and I can hold my own in most conversations. But I cannot learn French to save my life. From the time that I was five to the time I was nineteen, I took (or attempted to take) French eight times. Eight! I’ve never made it past beginning French. I kept getting shuffled along in the “French B” track in high school, because: 1) I needed three years of a language to graduate and 2) “God bless him, he’s trying.” “French B” was basically the “stupid but savable” track for foreign languages. We repeated beginning French every year. It was mostly songs and a continued inability to conjugate verbs. I can say two, maybe three sentences in French, one of which is “Je déteste le poisson!” which means “I hate fish!” and that’s not even true. In short, God did not give me the gift of learning French. My youngest brother, on the other hand, is fluent in three languages and conversational in a handful more, although he struggled in school as a child because of dyslexia.

My point is that we don’t all have the same abilities, and neither do our children. But when certain activities and interests become extremely popular (such as video games), children can feel pressure to be good at them. A child can feel a sense of inferiority if he is the only person in his class not to be able to beat Level 27 of whatever game is popular at the time. This struggle for competence can also quickly become entangled with the popularity contests of school age children, in which today the number of social media “friends,” “followers,” or contacts becomes the litmus test for whether one is considered cool. Unfortunately, the modern obsession with Facebook “likes” and similar votes of confidence online has become practically institutionalized in society at large, affecting not only children, but adolescents and adults as well. The child who bases his self-worth on these factors, with limited opportunity for competency in real world skills, is being primed for a constant need for outside affirmation rather than a stable sense of self rooted in a deep understanding of her dignity and her experience of success in varied arenas.

A child may be further impeded from fitting in or being “liked” if his family lacks the resources to provide him with the latest technology. In these situations, access itself can lead to a sense of inferiority. Children who don’t have access to the latest game or the latest device can begin to feel less than their peers if everyone around them is talking about a new game. But at $20 to $60 a pop, the latest game becomes expensive or even impossible for families who are struggling to make ends meet financially.

For teenagers, Erikson recognizes the importance of developing a core identity. Children from twelve to eighteen years old are trying to figure out their place in the world. This sense of self doesn’t develop in a vacuum, but rather grows from the encounters they have had with others such as family members, friends, or anyone else they deal with in the course of their day — be it a surly teacher, a quirky next-door neighbor, or their boss at an after-school job. We all need to interact with other people if we want to understand how we fit in. Teenagers, who start off as awkward and gangly adolescents in junior high, grow in confidence as they learn how to interact with others, and real-world encounters are crucial to this development.

Of course, there is a difference between being confident and reaching reasonable conclusions, but this might not be on the radar for most seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds. For example, my backup plan if I didn’t get into college was to be a pirate (I blame the cardboard boxes I mentioned earlier). Several friends and I, realizing that college was expensive, decided (prudently) that we didn’t want to waste money by going to college uncertain of what we wanted to do with our lives. I proposed that we (or our parents or whoever was going to help us pay for college) invest that money in a replica of a Spanish galleon, and we’d be good to go. We could gallivant around the Caribbean doing … well, we never got that far in the plan. So while we didn’t have a clear sense of what we wanted to major in, we were pretty confident that we knew who we were. Prospective pirates without a ship!

What we were, in reality, was a bunch of guys who were anxious about the future and developed a funny way to deal with it. That became a form of identity, coping with worry through humor. We knew where we fit in to the world, or at least we were comfortable enough with ourselves that we didn’t take ourselves too seriously while we figured things out.

Back to Erikson. The hope is that by the time our kids go to college, they have a sense of what this whole relating-to-people thing is all about. Currently, however, many professionals believe that Erikson’s identity stage continues easily into the mid- to late twenties in a prolonged adolescence. What Erikson saw as the capacity to fully develop an understanding of identity and relationships may not completely form until the end of an “Emerging Adulthood” stage that psychologists now propose takes place from eighteen to twenty-six years of age (it is beyond the scope of our discussion to speculate what role technology, as well as the current college culture, might have to do with this change). In any case, teenagers are still learning how to be in relationships, and many of them now see technology as being a fundamental element of those relationships. In some cases, entire friendships and romantic relationships are built online, calling into question the authenticity of such a mediated encounter as well as the opportunity to grow in person-to-person communication and interaction.

Relationships as Genuine Encounters

Catholic teaching reveals to us that our understanding of human relationships is (or should be) modeled on the relationship of God within the Holy Trinity – what theologians would describe as a “communion of love” and a “total self-gift” between the Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As such, a genuine encounter is necessary in order to affirm the God-given dignity of the other and make a gift of oneself, giving and receiving love. I acknowledge your dignity as being made in the image and likeness of God, and I offer myself to you. I also acknowledge my own dignity as someone valuable and worthy of your time and attention. Basically, both persons see themselves as having something of value to give the other, and simultaneously accept what the other offers them. It might help to think of this exchange as a gift. When we give ourselves and receive the gift of others that they present to us, we are involved in a genuine encounter. That ultimately leads us to Christ, as it is Christ who fully reveals us to ourselves. This means that everything — including our relationships — find their meaning and purpose in Him. This is what is at stake when we discuss the difference between a genuine encounter and an encounter mediated by technology, which fails to satisfy the longing of the human heart, whether it be our children’s or our own.

As we have seen, digital technology has a substantial impact on the psychosocial development of children of all ages, and social media stands between people, often blurring the line between friend and stranger so that the genuine encounter that helps to develop identity is replaced with something less authentically human. Recognizing this, we are ready to explore how broad this impact may be.

For Reflection

When, with whom, and how does our family experience the gift of “genuine encounter” with others?

What are some ways we work to nurture each family member’s individual identity in relation to our family, parish, and community?

How does our family follow Christ’s teaching to love one another?