Based upon Steve Jobs’ assertion that Apple “stands at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts,” I found myself yesterday trying to figure out whether my machines humanize me or, at the very least, aid in my humanization. I think they probably do. At the very least, I thought of that William Norris quote people keep on their refrigerators: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” How we use the things, and maybe more importantly how our children use them, remains a matter of anxiety, debate, thing’s we’ll never know for sure. Sometimes I get angry at Steve Jobs for inventing an iPad that my children scream and fight about (although I’d be angrier if someone mugged me for it).
Nick Bilton recently wrote in the NYT about the magical calming powers of the iPad with children (it works!), and wondered, as we do, about the dangers of kids watching and playing. There’s a fair amount of BS here, like righteous scientiests claiming that depriving children of conversation at dinner is ruining their ability to enjoy solitude. What I found most interesting among the findings is that while watching video affected behavior, game playing did not.
A report published last week by the Millennium Cohort Study, a long-term study group in Britain that has been following 19,000 children born in 2000 and 2001, found that those who watched more than three hours of television, videos or DVDs a day had a higher chance of conduct problems, emotional symptoms and relationship problems by the time they were 7 than children who did not. The study, of a sample of 11,000 children, found that children who played video games — often age-appropriate games — for the same amount of time did not show any signs of negative behavioral changes by the same age.
Another recent and game-related study, this one reported by Gareth Cook in the New Yorker, shows that game playing has no brain benefit beyond getting better at the game itself.
“CAN YOU MAKE YOURSELF SMARTER?” The answer . . . appears to be a pretty firm no—at least, not through brain training. A pair of scientists in Europe recently gathered all of the best research—twenty-three investigations of memory training by teams around the world-and employed a standard statistical technique (called meta-analysis) to settle this controversial issue. The conclusion: the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence. Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.
One hears similar kinds of spurious claims about the iPad and autistic/disabled children—some are undoubtedly with merit, but I suspect more often than not the greatest benefit of the iPad is as a respite-delivery device; parents need a break and for kids to occupy themselves sometimes, education be damned. And I’m unconvinced that watching or playing within measure (whatever that is) has any deleterious effect on imagination or a kid’s drive to play. One more annoying fantasy I’d be glad to stop hearing. That’s not to say games can’t be useful tools; I, too, have used video games to help kids learn reading. It can work, sure, but it’s not some magic in the game play itself.
The moral of this story: when it comes to raising kids, we remain and always will remain fuzzy on the good/bad thing. In reality, it’s much harder to ruin them than we suppose. We are told by experts not to cross the streams, which is maybe good advice until you need to vanguish a moldy old Babylonian god (Sumerian, sorry).