iKids: Parenting in the Digital Age

By Craig Kennet Miller

iKids - the generation emerging in the midst of the digital revolution. A generation defined by a vast and rapidly changing technological landscape, the iKids generation will never know a world without touch screens, social media, and the internet. "iKids: Parenting in the Digital Age" takes a close look at the culture of this generation and raises critical questions about the effects of technology on children's brains, physical health, educational experiences, relationships, and faith formation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Discipleship Resources
• Release date: Aug 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780881777062

Craig Kennet Miller

Craig Kennet Miller is the Director of Pastoral Leadership through Disciple-Making Faith Communities at General Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church in Nashville. He is an elder in the Cal-Pac Annual Conference and the author of numerous books including NextChurch.Now: Creating New Faith Communities and co-creator of the L3 Leadership Incubator and the Church Vitality Indicator (CVI).

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

When Every Day is Disneyland

Iwonder what my son’s life will be like when he is my age. His childhood is already vastly different than mine was. I grew up with Mickey Mouse, Superman, and Batman, characters from my favorite comic books. He has grown up with Mario, Sonic, Bowser, Princess Peach, Zelda, Link, Pikachu, Spyro, and Donkey Kong from his favorite video games.

While I had the complete set of the Hardy Boys mysteries on my bookshelf, he has a complete set of 39 Clues, Percy Jackson, and The Hunger Games on his Kindle. While my family had a black-and-white TV, he has access to a variety of screens, from a Kindle Fire HD, to a Wii U game pad, to a Nintendo DS, to an old Mac Pro his sister used at college, to the HD TV that sits in our family room, not to mention the smartphones my wife, daughter, and I carry around with us as lifelines to the World Wide Web. Daily he reminds me that all his friends have smartphones, so he should have one too.

As a kid growing up in Southern California, I wished every day included a trip to Disneyland. All year long I looked forward to our annual trek to the happiest place on earth. It was a world of wonders where at each intersection of the park I could make a choice to travel to a different land. I could walk down Main Street and go into Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. I could go to Adventureland, to ride the Jungle Cruise as wild animals tried to swamp the boat. I could go down a waterfall on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Frontierland. In Fantasyland I could relive a cartoon on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. And in Tomorrowland, I could imagine a future with picture phones, color TVs with remotes, and plastic houses at the Monsanto Chemicals House of the Future.

Each ride was a carefully crafted experience created by imagineers; the genius developers who knew how to turn the everyday thrill ride into a story. You didn’t just get on a roller coaster; you went on bobsleds in the Swiss Alps as you rode the Matterhorn, the iconic ride that every kid looked for as they entered Anaheim.

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WHAT IS TECHGEAR?

Techgear is shorthand for such items as tablets and smartphones that share these characteristics:

1.A self-illuminating screen that emits blue light, the part of the light spectrum that our eyes associate with daytime.

2.A touch-sensitive screen that allows you to manipulate and click on objects with the touch of a finger.

3.Customizable by downloading apps (applications), which are typically small programs for games, business applications, and entertainment.

4.Able to connect to the web.

5.Includes a camera that allows the user to take pictures and videos, which are easily shared on social networking sites

Some examples of techgear include iPhones and iPads from Apple, the Kindle Fire HD products from Amazon, Samsung smartphones and tablets, Nintendo 2DS and 3DS portable game systems, and tablets designed for young children from companies like LeapFrog, VTech, and Nabi.

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The worst part about going to Disneyland was going home. You knew it would be a long time before you were again immersed in a world of imagination that consumed your every thought and action.

For my son and his generation, every day is like going to Disneyland—their entertainment choices are at their fingertips. The same imagineers who created the rides at Disneyland now spend thousands of hours creating immersive games that grab gamers’ attention whenever they turn on a smartphone, tablet, or game system.

Games with names like Dragonville, Candy Crush, and Doodle Jump can be downloaded onto a device, and within seconds gamers jump into the newest carefully crafted scenario that makes them want to come back for more.

To have fun, children today don’t have to get in a car and ride to a theme park; they just have to text, chat, or livestream with their friends from the privacy of their bedrooms. If they feel goofy they can use Snapchat to send a video or picture that disappears in a few seconds. They can update their Tumblr site or Facebook account to let their friends know what they are watching online, or they can let them in on the latest news about their friends and school. And they can do this at any time of the day or night.

Before the year 2000, children lived in a world in which it was easy to distinguish between the digital world of created experiences and the analog world of everyday life. While the children of the 1980s and 1990s played computer games, had first- and second-generation gaming systems like Game Boys and Sega, and were kept busy watching videos of their favorite movies like The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, their entertainment choices pale in comparison to the 24-7 always-on digital world our children and teens inhabit.

It was just a few years ago, in 2007, that Apple introduced the iPhone, the revolutionary device with something called apps that allowed users to simply touch the screen to make choices. You no longer needed a computer to access Facebook, to get driving directions, or to find a best-reviewed restaurant. The iPhone allowed you to take clear pictures and videos, which you could upload and share with others. It also came with games that took advantage of the touch screen to give you a gaming experience that was not available on a PC.

Today’s generation of children and emerging teens have taken to smartphones and tablets like ducks to water. For them having techgear is a birthright. It is their access to their culture, it’s the way they connect to one another, and it’s the way they navigate childhood and adolescence.

As the parent of an iKid, a member of the generation of children and teens born since 2000, I began to wonder how all this techgear was influencing parents, children, and the newly minted teenagers who had recently celebrated their thirteenth birthdays. I spent a year sifting through books and articles and talking to parents, pastors, and teachers as I investigated the pros and cons of the emerging digital culture of the iKids generation.

The one discovery that most resonated with me was this: We are in the midst of a great experiment. No one knows how the use of techgear and digital media is affecting the mental and social development of iKids. Whether it’s Toys’R’Us selling a line of tablets for four-year-olds or school systems giving children iPads so they can take the Common Core test online or parents giving eight-year-olds smartphones so they can track them when they go to school, the iKids are immersed in a screened-in environment that beckons them at every turn.

The only thing we know for sure is that as our society purchases techgear in record numbers and puts it in the hands of our youngest generation, we are faced with a slew of questions that won’t be answered until the iKids are in their twenties and thirties.

Beyond the family, every retailer and online business is trying to figure out how to best use the latest devices to connect with the iKids. Children and young teens are not simply users of iPhones, Samsung Galaxy tablets, game sites like Webkinz, or social networks like Facebook. They are salespeople working on behalf of the brands they love. Whenever an iKid signs up for something or says they like it, they are adding to the value of that device or app. When I was a child I was just a passive viewer of my favorite TV program. Now digital companies actively track iKids’ choices because the use of their products increases their bottom line.

As households, schools, corporations, and places of worship embark on a race to catch up with the newest, fastest, and most innovative techgear and apps, we would do well to remember that children are not miniature adults with fully developed bodies, values, and emotions. They are under construction. No matter how great our technology, the unassailable fact remains that the human body develops over time. It is not until a person reaches his or her early twenties that the brain is fully formed.

Children and teens are not just nodes on a digital network. They are persons of worth, created by God, who are at their most vulnerable and are at the time in their lives when they decide on their values, their beliefs, and the nature of the relationships they will have in the future.

While it may appear that I am a technophobe, ready to shut down the World Wide Web, in fact the challenge of a parent is finding the right balance between digital and analog, between images on a screen and face-to-face interaction, between virtual and real.

In the pages that follow we will discover how the emerging digital culture is influencing and impacting the lives of iKids and their families. We will investigate key issues that are facing parents and iKids:

•how iKids who are entering adolescence are at the peak of brain development and the implications for the use of digital media

•how the parents of iKids have been shaped by their own cultural experiences

•how iKids in public schools will be affected by the biggest sweeping change in education in generations, the rollout of Common Core

•how corporations use data gathered from children, teens, and parents to influence their purchases

•how to understand identity and privacy in a digital economy

•how the values of the creative class affect everything we do

•how to think about spirituality and faith formation in a digital age

Rather than a self-help book on parenting, iKids brings forth the questions parents, teachers, pastors, and Christian leaders need to examine to understand the impact our digital culture is having on our lives. Along with the main text, you will find short articles that highlight key findings and ideas.

I invite you to reflect on the world we are creating for the iKids, our children and emerging teens who are embracing the digital life and will, as every generation before has done, be creating their own culture as they move toward adulthood.

For me this topic is personal. As I have been writing this book, my twelve-year-old son has served as my cultural guide and confidant into the world in which he lives. In many ways he was my cowriter, who kept me on track and allowed me to see many of these issues from his side of the life-span continuum.

ONE

Digital Child

Children and their techgear are all around us. Whether it’s the newest smartphone, the latest e-reader, a handheld game device, or a tablet, iKids have their hands on them. Sure, their parents or grandparents bought them or even own them, but as soon as an iKid sees one he is ready to claim ownership. Within five minutes of having it in his or her possession, the child will inevitably download a favorite game app, be it the latest version of Angry Birds or Minecraft.

Give this child another five minutes, and he or she will take a couple of pictures, edit them, and share them on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. If given a little more time, a new screen will appear with mystifying apps and images that most parents didn’t know existed. And now the adult will have to ask the child how to make the device work.

This scenario may sound all so true and familiar because it’s being repeated in millions of homes across the United States and the world as the iKids generation, those born since 2000, latch on to the newest technology as if it’s water and air. This new wave of change is remarkable because of the speed of adoption by the masses.

How big is this change? In 2010, 17 million tablets were sold worldwide. By 2015 this is projected to grow to 345 million. Smartphones have also shown tremendous growth, with more than 1.9 billion projected to be sold worldwide in 2015. Overall, 2.6 billion digital devices are projected to be sold in 2015.¹

While it’s hard to wrap our minds around the numbers, the reality of this widespread adoption of techgear by families is seen all the time. I was at the Nashville Public Zoo, walking with my son through the bamboo forest when I came upon a conversation that defines our time. A toddler, around two years old, was looking at a very colorful bird in its enclosure. He looked at his mother and asked, Phone? Then he pointed at the bird and said, Picture.

So his mom got out her iPhone, placed it in his hands, and showed him how to point it at the bird. Once the picture was lined up in the screen, she guided his tiny finger to the camera icon. Gently he touched the screen, and a perfectly focused image was created, ready to be sent via cyberspace to friends and family who could be anyplace on the globe.

As his mom praised him for taking the picture, he gave the iPhone back to her, and with the enthusiasm only a toddler can generate, he pointed at the bird and said, Banana head. Which is a perfect name for the rhinoceros hornbill, one of the weirdest birds you will ever see, which happens to have a banana-shaped protuberance on top of its beak.

While this may be a commonplace scene played out in daily interactions between parents and their children, the use of smartphones and tablets is a recent phenomenon. The technology found in the iPhone has been with us only since 2007. The device and the techgear it has fostered are the culmination of thousands of years of human ingenuity and innovation. It is so advanced, so intuitive, so easy to use, even a toddler can operate it.

In the blink of an eye, the human race has generated a network of communication that is creating new ways of connecting, working, believing, and thinking. We are in the midst of a technological and culture change akin to the invention of the printing press in the 1450s, the first electric lightbulb in 1879, and the launching of the Mac, the first computer with a mouse, in 1984.

What is different this time is how fast it is all happening. It took more than a hundred years before printed Bibles and books were accessible in the Middle Ages. It took more than fifty years for electricity to be made widely available after the completion of huge projects like the Hoover Dam. Tracking from the year 1984, the number of US homes that contained computers reached 51 percent in 2000; and 51 percent had Internet access in 2001.²

In a span of just seven years, smartphones and tablets jump-started a digital revolution that is sweeping the world. By the beginning of 2014, there were more smartphones, tablets, and personal computers than there were humans on the planet, with more than seven billion devices connecting people from every corner of the world. The biggest challenge for companies and governments is creating enough Internet bandwidth to handle all the traffic. By 2017 the average smartphone will generate 2.7 GB of data a month, almost tenfold the amount of data generated by a smartphone in 2012.³

If you are trying to catch up, forget about it. We now have to live with the reality that change is constant, and the younger you are, the better equipped you are to navigate the cultural and technological shifts that are remolding our society. But that does not necessarily mean that the younger you are, the wiser you are. And that is the rub; the challenge for parents is how to navigate this brave new world alongside the youngest generation, who gravitate to screens as if they were magnets pulling them into the latest digital experience.

Today’s thirteen-year-old sitting in a park is able to use his smartphone to videoconference with a friend who is traveling with her family, use a mapping app to find the nearest Starbucks, use a Kindle app to bring up a book he needs to read for English class, and update his Instagram account with a selfie.

Marc Prensky, who coined the term Digital Natives in 2001 to describe how college students were using the Internet, says the digital revolution has come of age. Parents and children alike use techgear as an extension of their lives. The question for today is not how do I use it? but, what is its best use?

Prensky says, "Our most important educational need now is to communicate to our young people a strong sense of when their use of technology is wise, when it is just clever, and when it is dumb."⁴ His words ring all too true when we think of the countless examples of politicians, celebrities, religious leaders, sports stars, teachers, and workers in companies who have destroyed their reputations and lost their jobs due to sending out an embarrassing picture or tweeting an inflammatory remark.

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TECHGEAR AND iKIDS’ SLEEP HABITS

If your iKid is having problems falling to sleep at night, it could be from looking at a smartphone or tablet screen too close to bedtime. A study conducted by the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute showed that exposure to self-illuminated backlit displays in tablets caused the suppression of melatonin, the hormone that helps to control sleep patterns.

Melatonin is produced by the pineal gland, and when light hits the retina in the eye, production of melatonin is inhibited. When humans experience darkness, enough melatonin is produced to cause people to get sleepy. Exposure to light, especially the blue light that comes off techgear devices, delays this natural cycle.

Mariana Figuerio, who led the team, reported, Our study shows that a two-hour exposure to light from self-luminous electronic displays can suppress melatonin by about 22 percent. Stimulating the human circadian system to this level may affect sleep in those using the devices prior to bedtime.⁵

This study gives us some practical guidance: turn off those screens two hours before bedtime. Reading a real book, playing a board game, or doing homework without screens will help children go to sleep at their designated sleep time.

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The iKid’s World Is Always On

While we are still trying to discover how the use of techgear and digital media is affecting children and young teens, what we do know is this: children are growing up in a media-rich environment that surrounds them with sounds and images on a constant basis during most of their waking hours. The only break comes when children are asleep, unless they have one of those $19.99 pillows with speakers and lights that are advertised on TV.

It used to be that schools were screen-free, but that is becoming increasingly rare. In fact, in most school systems the race is on to provide tablet-based learning as a way to teach kids in the midst of an information-rich world. As a result, iKids will be spending more and more time on screens because they will be required to do so to complete their schoolwork.

The iKids generation lives in a world that is always on. The average eight- to eighteen-year-old spends 7.5 hours a day with digital media. From watching TV to texting on their phones, from playing the latest version of Candy Crush Saga on a tablet or the latest version of Halo on a video console, digital media are today’s wallpaper.⁶

Even the youngest children, newborn to age eight, spend time each day in front of a TV or playing with a computer or a video console, or swishing their fingers across the screen of an iPhone or Kindle Fire. On an average day children ages two to four spend 1:37 minutes in front of a screen while the use for eight- to ten-year-olds increases to 2:36 minutes. This does not include time spent with techgear at school. While the majority of time is spent with TV, as children age, their use of digital media increases.

Even more incredible, their parents who are primarily from the Millennial Generation born from 1981 to 1999, spend an average of eighteen hours a day online. How do they get to eighteen hours? This number takes into account multiple devices being used at the same time. For example, watching TV while scanning the Internet.

Unlike other activities, like attending school, going to worship, or participating in extracurricular activities like sports or the arts, participating in digital media is a 24-7 affair.

Perhaps the most important information related to the studies of children and media is this: At age eight usage increases dramatically. As children’s ability to read increases, their ability to access information and navigate computers, smartphones, and tablets grows rapidly. By age eight more than two-thirds are regularly on the Internet. Another interesting piece of information is that children do not use their techgear separately. Most of them are watching TV while playing on a Nintendo 3DS or texting on a smartphone or playing a game on a tablet. They also are following their parents’ example and are well aware of how their parents are using digital media.

How One Fourteen-Year-Old Uses Her Phone

By age fourteen, an iKid is digitally proficient, can multitask on any digital device, and uses techgear as his or her main connecting point with friends. Bianca Bosker, a writer for the Huffington Post, interviewed Casey Schwartz, a fourteen-year-old from Milburn, New Jersey, to find out how Casey and her friends used their techgear.

For Casey, the iPhone and its apps are the center of her universe. Her identity is tied to the apps she uses. Where previous generations used websites to surf the Internet, iKids surf the Internet via apps. Through her apps Casey