That's My Kid Up There!

By NEIL FLETT and Jenny McCracken

Is your child spending too much time on iPhones and iPads? Are you worried that they might grow up without the effective communication skills they will need beyond school?

That's My Kid Up There! is a parent's handbook with ten easy-to-play games and exercises that will improve your child's face-to-face communication skills. It's a book not only to be read but to be DONE with your child, with games you can play that will change their communication behaviours, increasing eye contact, developing confidence and comfort, helping with structuring class presentations and coaching in the delivery skills that will give your child the edge, at school, university, business and community.

TMKUT! is written by communication guru Neil Flett who built a global company training business and community leaders in presentation, persuasive skills, negotiating skills and public speaking. Every exercise in this handbook has been proven to work around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Mar 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781456630737

Book preview

INTRODUCTION:



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My granddaughter Summer rang me on her mother’s iPhone.

I answered and for the next two minutes we had a conversation, with her talking nonsense and me pleading with her to hand the telephone back to her mother.

Give the phone to Mummy, darling…

Summer, give phone to Mummy.

Where’s Mummy, Summer? Give her the phone…

Summer, yes, it’s Poppa…

Can Poppa talk to Mummy, please?

She was 14 months old.

I rang her mother on the landline and asked what was happening. Summer had picked up the iPhone and scrolled through the contacts, photo by photo, until she saw her Poppa. Then she pressed the button and rang me.

Welcome to the new world of communication, an era in which the way we speak to each other is changing so radically that none of us can keep up. We fought against it, we swore we would not succumb, but now we have Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, just for starters. We check our emails a dozen times a day and the very way we speak is being affected.

The communication revolution is changing our children and grandchildren in ways we could never have imagined – good in many cases, but also in ways that sometimes terrify us!

Our neighbors have four-year-old twins who can program the DVD player to record programs.

A workmate has children who leave their friends after school and then SMS them until 10 at night.

Children forego the joy of playing outside for the fascination of the small screen.

TV bombards them with imagery and useless information.

Ten-year-olds use Twitter.

Pre-teens have dozens of friends on Facebook.

Kids of five can Google, but 19-year-olds can’t spell!

Young adults can text at blinding speed, but can’t write a business letter.

Running writing is under threat as the keyboard takes over.

They can download a video, but cannot put a CV together.

School children used to sit on the bus, chat to each other, read a book or stare out the window. Now they text friends, scroll through Facebook.

Drivers risk killing themselves and others to respond to a text.

Parents take the family to a restaurant and hand the children iPads.

Interesting debates among friends, are now solved instantly by Googling.

Parents despair as language is butchered and the endless pause has replaced clear diction.

Social media is a triumph of quantity over quality.

And worse, schoolyard bullies have found a platform to harass individuals without the consequences of a face-to-face confrontation.

This is the Instagram generation. More comfortable facing a screen than another human. And we have every right to fear that we might be rearing a child who is computer literate, an electronic communicator, but more and more reluctant to talk face-to-face...

Equally alarming is the fact that our culture is now being altered to one in which our children cannot sit quietly with a book, instead needing to be bombarded with action, whether from an iPad or from the television, or both at the same time.

Engaging conversation and persuasiveness are being outweighed by the convenience of electronic media, with an overload of often poor-quality information. A technology that is claimed to connect us, is at one level divisive. The byte is replacing in-depth argument, quality face-to-face communication is decreasing and email/text is increasing – not just significantly but exponentially. Everybody has an opinion and if they don’t, they forward someone else’s.

These are not the rantings of one old journalist and communication trainer. Science agrees:

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA):

UCLA scientists found that sixth-graders who went five days without even glancing at a smartphone, television or other digital screen did substantially better at reading human emotions than sixth-graders from the same school who continued to spend hours each day looking at their electronic devices.

Decreased sensitivity to emotional cues — losing the ability to understand the emotions of other people — is one of the costs. The displacement of in-person social interaction by screen interaction seems to be reducing social skills.

On the other side of the ledger, and in defence of electronic media, my daughters,