Know the Content

The landscape of the world today is vastly different from when I was growing up.  Having a viewport to the internet in your pocket has changed the game.  In my adolescent years the internet hadn’t really come of age, and for those that would argue, it’s access wasn’t nearly as ambiguous as it is now.  Technology in general is a requirement today, how to interface, operate, and fundamental concepts will dictate your personal and professional life.

With its prevalence we must do everything we can to make sure that our children have every advantage as they grow, which means introducing them to technology so that they can succeed in the world as we can only imagine it will be when they reach adulthood.  Being an IT professional means that I have an affinity for technology.  I used to say I am the purveyor of all things cool in the world of tech.  I’d like to think that I still am, though there are some boundaries to what I can obtain which leads me to make more careful considerations on what I purchase.

Pulling back to the parenting theme; We as parents have a role in our child’s life that is more impactful that we can fathom.  We are the ones responsible for the introduction of technology to our children, and with it the internet.  As powerful as it can be I think a base level of understanding needs to be in place before ever setting a child loose on the internet.  It can be a great learning opportunity, but it can also be the first step down a slippery slope or even downright dangerous.

Consider this; There are lots of things in the average home to drink.  You’ve got water, milk, juice, alcohol, etc.  Sure, you immediately dismiss alcohol as an option, but do you limit the amount of juice you give to your kid?  Milk?  Water?  What if you give them Juice too often?  It isn’t inherently bad, but have you seen a child deny water in favor of juice?  This is curating the content that your child consumes.  Basic interacting with the internet and technology is similar.  There needs to be a balance in place so that basic skills and learning techniques are still present.

With that analogy in place just how much internet are you willing to just blindly hand over to your child?  Let’s face it here, there’s some applications you can get for mobile that are educational, but they are the beginning of the avalanche.  How long before the application becomes boring?  Now on to Netflix, or YouTube, or any other of content delivery networks?  While trying to understand how I should introduce technology into my son’s life, I had to take a few more steps back to appreciate where my understanding of it came from.

Largely technology and the ambiguity of the internet have lead many to take it for granted.  It has become my realization that more and more people don’t understand where we came from.  What did we do before the smartphone?  What did we do before the internet was always on?  I really think that missing out on physically reading a book, writing things down on paper, or interacting face-to-face with someone is incredibly detrimental to a developing child.

I think it’s tough to appreciate an always on fast internet connection without knowing what it’s like to have to tie up a phone line for it.  It’s difficult to understand the pathways that have opened because we can transfer data across the globe in seconds rather than days.  This is not to say that I will subject my son to a decade of internet at the painfully slow 56k (or worse).  But I want him to know how to talk to people, how to read a book, and how to write.  Additionally, I want him to be able to learn at will and not rely on an internet connection.  If all goes according to plan the light I’ll have to tell him to turn off in the middle of the night will be a flashlight, not a smartphone or tablet.

What I am trying to convey here, is I want to give my son, at the very least, a Cliff’s Notes version of technology history before introducing him to all that the internet and technology has to offer, because I want him to understand how powerful of a tool it can be.

Choose Your Babysitter Wisely

Time to address the elephant in the room; Technology.  When is it applicable to hand over to your child and when should you misdirect with the toy truck? 

A good half of parenting is observation, both in watching the child and what other parents are doing.  Observation being something that I have always been good at.  Then picking apart someone’s actions from a sociological standpoint has always been something that interests me.  So, I tend to see the why of how someone reacts a lot quicker than most.  I think this is where my initial judge of character comes from. 

One of the biggest trends in parenting that I’ve seen today is when in a restaurant handing off the smartphone to keep the child entertained / quiet.  I’ve seen this happen with children ranging in ages from 2-well into their teens.  Admittedly the latter half of that tend to have their own smartphone.  While I can relate that it is a very easy way out, I’ve got to wonder if it’s more harm than help. 

I’ll set the stage for you.  Two parents and their child walk in to a restaurant.  They get seated and the kid is fidgety and inconsolable, one parent frantically pulls out their phone, unlocks it, opens an app and hands it over.  This is a desperate attempt to keep the kid quiet, it’s got an added side effect of the parents can now speak to each other unhindered by the interests of their child. 

How did we get here?  When did the smartphone become the replacement for the pacifier?  Well, it’s not a new trend.  Parents used to be able to turn on the television and plop their children in front of it for time to themselves.  There is an unfortunate downside; the parents have caved once on this, they will cave again and again.

Throughout a child’s developmental life, they begin everything with mimicry.  You never really appreciate just how much of this happens until you see it happen.  Hearing my son trying to repeat something I said while not consciously censoring my language was an eye-opener.  That’s not to say mimicry is only going to show you what you need to do differently, I also remember my son sitting in a high-chair with a spoon tapping the surface of his tray and then bringing the end of the spoon to his face.  My wife and I thought the behavior was odd until we pieced together that he was mimicking us eating.  But I’ve gotten off topic. 

When you realize the parroting is happening you really need to be more conscious of what you do in front of your child.  How often do you check your phone?  How often is it out in the open?  This is where you really need to lay the groundwork for what is acceptable, and bear in mind that if you want your child to follow the rules, you must adhere to them as well.  Otherwise, you will be fighting an uphill battle against a fundamental learning method; mimicry. 

The other side of this is what else will your child mimic?  Take our family in the restaurant from earlier; did they just open YouTube, or some other video service?  Do you think the child is going to mimic what they see there?  They absolutely will.  Maybe not with as much conviction as they parrot their parents, but it will happen.  Additionally, I must ask, does the child understand at this point what is morally and socially acceptable for them and what isn’t?  Does the child comprehend just how powerful the device is that they hold in their hands? 

This post is going to be at least a two-parter, on one hand to keep the length of the posts consistent, and to try and maintain a consistent train of thought.

Parenting: Git Gud Edition

Parenting is this super weird thing that cannot be likened to anything else.   Sure, there are other situations that are analogous, but nothing is completely the same.  You and, hopefully, your partner are responsible for turning this little uncoordinated, babbling, poop-factory into a productive member of society.  If all is done correctly you do this with as few nurtured mental issues as possible.  How to do this, and what are the best methods are all in the rub, as it were.  There’s countless blogs (oh, the irony), magazines, and other publications about what the current trends are to create the best human possible.  Through the eyes of a new parent this is all very daunting.  At the end of the day it all leaves you with a sense of inadequacy.

I’m sure we can all relate; our parents weren’t perfect.  My upbringing was no different, it took me quite a while to work through any lingering angst I felt for my parents.  Hindsight is always 20/20, and I’ve managed to work out most if not all the why’s.  My parents had to make some tough decisions, I may not have understood them at the time but now I understand.  To top it all off I don’t think my younger self would have fully comprehended the reasoning behind it all.  So here I am, putting together my very own C.S.I. episode about my life, trying to do my best to put all the pieces together, and come out with a better understanding.

I told you that to give you a preface to where all my future ‘Parenting’ posts are coming from.  I could go in to detail about my childhood, but I doubt that will ever make it here.

When my wife was pregnant with our first child my brain went haywire trying to culminate all the what-ifs, how’s and whys.  As we neared the third trimester I really settled down and was able to formulate more of a plan.  I got over the initial sticker shock of what this was going to do to us fiscally and began to think about how we as people operated and how we we’re going to work around being parents.

Like many new parents, I took to the internet to start reading about what to expect and how to handle it.  Spending many nights up past my bedtime scanning through headlines like ‘Top ten Parenting Tips’ and ‘How to raise your first child’.  I was bewildered with the sheer volume of the people putting forth their opinions on how to handle a child.  The problem with so many of these was that they were more focused on their ad revenue and less so on the actual content.  Then, the ‘A-Ha!’ moment happened.  These ad-laden sites were there because of analysis of searches, meaning that lots of people were searching for parenting tips.  Which means that no-one has the answers that I sought.

Armed with this I still looked, now I was looking at literature that the hospital had pointed us toward.  Thinking they should know better, right?  Nope, hospital pamphlets were chock full of recommendations that had absolutely no research to back them up.  So, now what was I to do?  I felt like I knew less about being a parent having read all the publications.  Then another moment of clarity hit; There is no one-size-fits-all guide.

Well, now what?  I had a few conversations with other parents, they didn’t have answers either.  It wasn’t until speaking with my Mother-In-Law who gave the best bit of advice I could have ever gotten.  “Instructions come with the package.”  To elaborate on that a little bit, “Instructions come with the package; You’ll figure out what language they’re in.”  And that’s it; the Rosetta Stone for parenting.  It has nothing to do with what some article tells you to do or what some check-out lane magazine says.  There aren’t answers to the questions, and that’s okay.

Moving forward it’s more about taking a more logical approach to what the child needs.  This became more apparent when nurses asked if we would like to test for Down’s Syndrome.  There was a small risk involved with the test which made me adjust the terms of the test.  Since the risk was a terminated pregnancy, I had to ask if there were any outcome of the test that would cause us to willingly terminate the pregnancy.  Since my wife and I are both reasonable human beings that answer was a very quick ‘No’ we opted to not take the test.

2 years down the road my son is mostly polite and thoughtful.  Understands sharing as much as a 2-year-old only child can and has developed into an awesome kid.  All attributed to my wife and I making good decisions in the developmental process.