Toddlers on Technology: A Parents' Guide

By A. DeSollar, H Leathers and Patti Summers

TODDLERS ON TECHNOLOGY

Does your toddler seem to know more about the iPad than you do? Welcome to the world of the Digitods: the young children born into the era of mobile technology. These kids are learning faster and better than any generation that has come before them. And they are loving it!
Take a look at toddlers using an iPad. They are pictures of concentration. Their hands are moving and their eyes are constantly scanning the screen. They are in an active state of learning: their neurons are firing on all cylinders! It is not surprising that they find learning such an enjoyable activity, with the bright colors, interesting activities and cheery voices urging them on.
Have you ever tried getting a Digitods attention when he is working with an iPad? It is not easy. Often, the child is so fixated on the work that he protests when he has to move on, even to something as interesting as a snack. It just underscores what teachers have always known. Good learning is addictive: the more you get, the more you want.
Digitods are racing down the information superhighway and we have to be ready for them! But what does this entail? The answer to this ever-important question lies within.
Patti Wollman Summers has written the first book on the subject by an early child-hood educator. Ms. Summers collaborates with Heather Ibrahim-Leathers, a mom who provides many practical tips, and Ann DeSollar-Hale, PhD, a neuropsychologist who gives a full account of the research so far in our Science section.
Learn why interacting with an app is so fascinating to a young child. Discover what constitutes a good app, and how to match an app to your childs temperament and learning style. Read a description of many excellent apps in our App Reviews section, and learn how to balance your childs digital work with real-life, see-saw activities. For parents of children under six who are concerned about their childrens development in a surprisingly unfamiliar world, TODDLERS ON TECHNOLOGY is a must-read!
Visit Digitod.com or ToddlersOnTechnology.com | Design & Photography by AndrewAyad.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481730471

Book preview

TODDLERS

ON

TECHNOLOGY

A PARENTS’ GUIDE

Patti Wollman Summers, M.Ed

Ann DeSollar-Hale, PhD

Heather Ibrahim-Leathers

US%26UKLogoB%26Wnew.ai

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2013 Patti Wollman Summers; Ann DeSollar-Hale, PhD; and Heather Ibrahim-Leathers. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the authors.

Published by AuthorHouse 4/4/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-3050-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-3048-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-3047-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013905053

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

FOREWORD BY GABRIELLA ROWE

INTRODUCTION: WHO ARE TODAY’S TODDLERS?

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCING THE DIGITOD

CHAPTER TWO: THE TEACHING MACHINES

CHAPTER THREE: ANATOMY OF AN APP

CHAPTER FOUR: A SHORT DISCUSSION ON TEMPERAMENT AND LEARNING STYLE

CHAPTER FIVE: IT’S ALL ABOUT BALANCE

CHAPTER SIX: THE APP REVIEWS

CHAPTER SEVEN: TO THE FOUR YEAR-OLD….AND BEYOND!!!

THE SCIENCE: THE SCIENCE OF TODDLERS ON TECHNOLOGY

ENDNOTES

DEDICATIONS

PATTI WOLLMAN SUMMERS

To my mom Reyna for her steadfast encouragement; to my son Ben, for his impressive expertise; to the best beta-testers and granddaughters, Sadie and Orli; and to my heart’s desire, my husband Robbie, for his unwavering support and love, this book is affectionately dedicated.

ANN DESOLLAR-HALE, PHD

I dedicate this work to my family: Charlie, Julia, Charles, and my parents. I am indebted to and grateful for you.

HEATHER IBRAHIM-LEATHERS

This book is dedicated to my parents Gamila and Ibrahim, whose sacrifices as immigrants for my education and freedom have made me everything that I am. I also dedicate this book to widows around the world, whose silent suffering against impossible odds gives me resolve to fight for what is undeniably theirs. I would like to thank my sons Aiden and Stephan, whose boundless curiosity offers infinite inspiration. For the love, support, and encouragement of my best friend and husband, Eric, I dedicate this book.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people we need to thank for helping us with our book. As they say, it really does take a village! First, many thanks to Gabriella Rowe, Head of the Mandell School, for her enthusiasm and her steadfast encouragement. She immediately understood what we were trying to say, and was most helpful in granting us access to the resources of her school.

Second, thanks to our many friends and neighbors who were kind enough to listen and offer suggestions as we talked of practically nothing else. We owe a debt of gratitude to Marianne Green, who proofread every inch of our manuscript with affection and efficiency. We greatly appreciate Jill Fuersich for her excellent research on children’s apps. Thanks also to Dan Green for his wise counsel. And a huge thank you to Elkin Taylor for allowing us to spend so much time each month with the adorable Master Jack Taylor as he grew from infancy to toddlerhood. In addition, we would like to thank the beautiful and charming Julia (and her love of technology!) for gracing our cover, and her beautiful twin Ava, also photographed within. We extend our gratitude to their parents, Nader and Nancy. Thank you also to our website designer and photographer Andrew Ayad for his incredible talent.

Third, many thanks to the app developers we interviewed who offered us information, advice and encouragement. Most appreciated are our talks with Irra and Rani Friedman of MyFirstApp.com and Anne Glick of One Globe Kids. They understood and applauded our mission because they were already working towards the same goal of helping young children and their parents benefit from the digital world without being consumed by it.

Fourth, we greatly appreciate the researchers who generously shared their knowledge and their work with Ann. The following researchers have been extremely helpful and we hope the scientific community will adopt their collaborative spirit. We extend a special thanks to: Heather Kirkorian, Rachel Barr, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Rosemarie Truglio, Jennifer Kotler, JoAnn Deak, Alexis Lauricella, Dan Anderson, Tovah Klein, Tom Chatfield, Adam Brickman, Georgene Troseth, Pamela Johnson, Barbara Lovitts, and Sonya Dougal.

Finally, our most important thank-you and our biggest hugs to our wonderful families. We will always be grateful for their love, attention and patience as we waded into a process that turned out to be longer, more complex, and more significant than any of us expected.

Patti Wollman Summers

Ann DeSollar-Hale, PhD

Heather Ibrahim-Leathers

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Patti Wollman Summers, Head of the Parenting Program at the Mandell School, has been an early childhood educator on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for over thirty years. In addition to her extensive teaching experience, Patti was the founding Director of two pre-schools. Her master’s degree in Early Childhood is from Bank Street College. She has taught children from two to five years old, and is currently teaching parent-child classes for children from one to two, featuring an integration of the iPad into a classroom setting. As Patti Greenberg Wollman, Patti is the author of two books, Behind The Playdough Curtain, and I’m Afraid Of The Vampire State Building. Patti and her husband Robert live in New York City. Together they are the proud parents of six children and two grandchildren and they are excited to report that one more grandchild is on the way!

Ann DeSollar-Hale, PhD is a neuropsychologist with a background that includes de-tasseling corn, hunting big game in the bush of Africa, and climbing Mt. Everest. However, her most humbling experience and greatest joy comes from trying to raise her twins, Julia and Charles Hale. Before attending graduate school, Ann worked for Citibank in Venezuela as an Analyst, various technology companies in Mexico, and the late Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Jack Kemp. Ann has too many degrees: Bachelor in Business Administration from University of Illinois, Masters in Clinical-Developmental Psychology from Columbia University, Masters and Doctoral degrees in Clinical Health Psychology-Neuropsychology from Ferkauf G.S.P. at Einstein Medical School. Ann currently sees patients in New York City, if she can be pulled away from her twins in Central Park. She extends love and gratitude to her husband, Charlie, who made everything possible.

Heather Ibrahim-Leathers is the President and Founder of the Global Fund for Widows, a nonprofit dedicated to providing economic empowerment to widows and female heads of households in the developing world through skills-based training, employment, education, and Micro-Social Capital. Prior thereto, Heather served as a Vice President in Credit Suisse’s Leveraged Investment Group, where she was directly responsible for over $1 billion in high yield and leveraged loan assets. Prior to Credit Suisse, Heather worked at JPMorgan as an Emerging Markets Fixed Income analyst. Heather is extensively published and her award-winning research has been translated into several languages for global distribution. Heather earned her Bachelors in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and is a Chartered Financial Analyst.

FOREWORD

D ay in and day out, we make decisions in our professional lives that have serious consequences for the businesses we work for or the fields we work in. After a while, we get so good at our jobs that our decisions become second nature. But when it comes to parenting, we often feel like we’re riding upstream without a paddle.

Just a few weeks ago, as CEO of the Mandell School, I made the decision to relocate an entire school to a new neighborhood, after having announced and planned for a prior location. No big deal, right? All in a day’s work. Yet when it was time to decide whether my nine year-old should be allowed to sleep over at his friend’s house while supervised by his friend’s twenty-one year-old sister, I spent the better part of a week wrestling with the idea. I am still unsure if I made the right choice: apocalypse ensued in my house when I decided against letting him go. The truth is, parenting is very difficult, and unlike in our professional lives, we’re never sure whether we’re getting it right.

Even those evolutions in our daily lives that are meant to improve our existence present complex parenting challenges. When television became pervasive in American households, parents across the country wondered, often aloud, whether their kids’ brains would turn into mush if they were permitted unlimited access to the TV. With the help of thoughtful discussion and guidance, our parents decided it was probably a good idea to balance the time spent sitting in front of the tube with books and play. A challenge appeared and, collectively, a challenge was met. Decades later, the astronomical growth of digital media, evolving and expanding faster than any technological advancement we have likely ever seen, has us fretting over some of the same quandaries all over again: how do we responsibly manage our children’s access to this new medium?

The challenge we face as parents today, which our parents did not, is the two-sided nature of the relationship with new media. Our children don’t simply receive pre-programmed information as we did from the TV that, despite some of its excesses, had been filtered by producers, programming executives, and a hoard of people who developed the programs before they were beamed into our living rooms. Today’s reality is that a sixteen year-old from Bangkok has the same ability to deliver content to our ten year-old’s iPad as the NBC control room did in 1982 - and by the way, that content is interactive.

Unlike television shows, which focus mostly on raw entertainment, tablet technology, the internet, social media, and the ease of producing digital media provides unprecedented access for our children into a world of learning like never before. Great, right? Truthfully, we really don’t know. While providing easy access to learning, they also provide access into the types of social engagement that have the potential to isolate our children, and which, in the real world, we work to protect our kids from on a daily basis. Unlike our parents, we really don’t have an either/or option here with respect to limiting access. Balance is much more elusive.

The reality is that digital access is a must in today’s learning environment. Whether in the form of tablets, smart boards or Wikipedia, educators depend on these tools to reach all learners. But this also means that our children are potentially being thrown into an unruly and messy digital portal where parental control and guidance is tremendously difficult. In addition, we walk through that digital portal in our own daily lives quite constantly, modeling the very behavior that we struggle with in their world.

The question before parents now is how do we teach, guide, and protect our kids as they engage with these new digital technologies? As parents, how do we prepare children for the lives they are growing into when the map that guided our parents on such things provides route options that may no longer apply?

There are no simple answers. But there is a simple thread that transcends time and technology: common sense. While our mothers and fathers never faced the question of how to manage children’s access to their iPhone or Facebook, how to screen who they followed on Twitter, or how to provide oversight of what photos they post on Instagram, they did provide significant guidance and control over who we socialized with and how. They taught us, sometimes sternly, how to interact appropriately and engage our peers, what it meant to be respectful, and how to develop manners. They provided us with a road map for life. Such a road map lies in the chapters that follow.

While no one expects a prescription that tells us exactly what to do or will make us as comfortable in our parenting choices as we are in our professional ones, Patti Summers’ years of common sense experience with young children and their parents has given her the perfect platform for TODDLERS ON TECHNOLOGY. This book is the first serious attempt by an educator, parent and grandparent to construct a map of options that allows us to chart new and productive paths for our youngest children in a digital world.

Under Patti’s guidance you will learn how to apply and refine some of the same common sense, real-world realities that guided our parents when we were growing up. Working with Ann DeSollar-Hale, PhD and Heather Ibrahim-Leathers, whose children began their education at The Mandell School, Patti presents a plan of action for parents of the very young child in today’s increasingly technological world. After reading this book, parents can hopefully proceed not with the fear of what the growth of these new technologies and digital spaces mean for the development of our children, but with the same commitment and purpose that made us want to be parents in the first place: to be models and mentors in developing the next generation.

Gabriella Rowe

CEO The Mandell School

INTRODUCTION

P icture this scenario:

I am in the crowded elevator of a department store three days before Christmas. It is hot, stuffy and filled with people thinking about their own lives. Among the shoppers are two mothers and their children. Directly in front of me, a semi-harried mom is trying to engage her two fidgety boys by pointing to the numbers of each floor as they light up on the way down. The boys begin to shout them out along with her, obviously enjoying themselves. They are noisy and mildly annoying, but they are