Recently, at the age of seven, my son discovered how the remote control works. He was proud that he figured it all by himself.
And I was proud that my son discovered that at the age of seven and not at the age of two or three.
When my children wakes up in the morning they don't switch the tv on or any other screen.
They play.
They build stuff with Lego or wood game. They draw. They go in the garden to play with the dog or with their bikes.
Of course they sometimes play a game on my tablet or telephone, it's not 20th century anymore.
But they don't own any. And they don't choose when they can watch a screen. (Steve Jobs did the same with his children after all [0])
Despite that, I will start to teach them programming next school year, I've bought a PI for each, and I welcome the article ! It's just I think this is important, but not a priority for youngs.
> A young child (0 to ~3 years) does not understand electronics.
On the other hand, my 2 year old niece can easily take an iPad, unlock it, swipe through the pages and folders, find YouTube, and watch videos. And in an ever-increasing electronics-driven world, I don't think it's bad to learn some of those skills at that age. (Though her screentime is limited and she also plays with wooden toys etc.)
Ofcourse explaining a battery or 'the internet' would be too complex at that age, but apparently the 'input output response from a battery device can be easily guessed'.
It's worth remembering that Steve Jobs, like many other tech titans, limited their own children's exposure to the tech they built.
>When the Apple founder called [NY Times reporter] Bilton to complain about a story shortly after the iPad's launch, Bilton asked how his kids were enjoying the wildly popular new product.
"They haven't used it," Jobs responded. "We limit how much technology our kids use at home."
Play with their peers, construction toys like Lego, 3D puzzles (physical, not computer based), gardening, painting (using paint & brush, not an app), music, swimming, take kid out in nature or to zoo / musea / maker fairs & such... there's so much to discover & do in this world.
Electronics & computers have been in my life like 'forever', but I didn't start with that until ~8y.
Have your kid enjoy the "physical" world as long as (s)he can. Screen devices will come soon enough through other routes like school.
>I think the another issue with most of these "for kids" environments is that they have low ceilings of mastery
A modern GUI OS for adults has a very low ceiling of mastery. I don't know why we need to make simpler designs. When my kid was literally fourteen or fifteen months he could pick up a phone or tablet, swipe to the youtube app, press it, and then press the thumbnails from a recently viewed video and watch videos (usually Peppa Pig).
Kids don't need dumbed down displays. We already have dumbed down displays for adults. This reminds me of why the OLPC failed so badly. Even ignoring the cheap netbook competition, the interface was too 'top down' academic crap about 'how kids think' and involved a lot of shoddy assumptions on how to teach kids how to use a computer. A netbook with XP was perfectly usable by even the very young.
I was 6 or so I could use my parent's TRS-80 and was writing fun little BASIC programs with it. I think we need to give kids more credit here. They're much smarter than we think and its adult hubris to pretend they're so unintelligent and unable to figure things out on their own. Perhaps we shouldn't shy away from overly-challenging kids. The recent trends of 'soft' and 'helicopter' parenting cannot be good for the long run. I plan to be somewhat tough with my son because I don't want him to grow up into some of the people I work with who have near zero self-learning and critical thinking skills and have a 'give me fish' mentality and will actively fight against a 'teach me to fish' mentality.
The article is about what Steve Jobs said, that “Everyone should learn how to program.." but Steve Jobs did not allow his kids to use a computer up to a certain age.
As I looked after children I can tell a certainty confirmed by others: "Millenials are cry babies". Nowadays children as small as a few years old want to do what their parents are doing, including to have a girlfriend, before they are able to stop using pampers..
> Young children are also famously voracious learners
That really depends on the environment a child grew up in. When I see parents who delegate their child rearing to an iPad with Cocomelon on 24/7 I'm quite sure that kid won't benefit from unstructured self-paced anything.
>I sit in front of my PC all day for work and after work (after dinner) I also spend a ton of time in front of my PC doing things like [...]
If they see you watching a YouTube video about circuitry or whatever, are they registering "that's an educational video about circuits" or are they just seeing the YouTube logo and thinking "Wow, $parent watches a lot of YouTube"?
Any kid is just going to register that you spend 10 (or whatever) hours a day on the computer, they aren't going to be categorizing your use into educational or not.
"I Raised My Kids On the Command Line...and They Love It" - no they don't, most kids just want to play with their paint or chat app or some game. OP's kids haven't actually learned anything other than they had to go through some irrelevant ceremony to get to play with their favourite app. You don't make your kids break out ICE's or hardware debug tools just so they can boot the lounge flatscreen so they can watch Postman Pat.
I wish people would stop pretending this is educational for children at this age, it's not. All the kids are doing is spending a bit of time with their Dad, who I'm sure they love, to get to the end result which is to play with TuxPaint.
> > don't force anything on him. ... Just let him use a computer in a completely natural way.
> This is absolutely true.
I disagree, sort of. I have a 5 yo and an 8 yo. If you let kids use a computer without guidance, they will learn how to use a computer from their friends at school. And what they learn is to fire up a browser (chrome if you've got it, otherwise Firefox) type "<some word> games" into Google and play thousands of really mind-numbing flash games. Go ahead. Try it.
The article (and the rest of the author's writings on the topic) contains a lot of evidence that his children are delighted with what they're doing. They're happily choosing to spend hours of time tinkering with this stuff, both with dad and on their own.
And it's not surprising at all. You're not thinking like a small child. Children focus intently on things that would bore adults to tears all the time. They have so little context that almost anything can be deeply interesting to them.
Now that I have a one-year-old, we spent a lot of time admiring the workings of garbage trucks, examining grass, etc. I can easily see his curiosity evolving over the next couple years to the point where he could amuse himself for hours with a command line and a speech synthesizer.
And he likes the iPad too. This isn't an either-or proposition.
>kids’ ubiquitous attachment to computers for social and gaming uses is often presumed to simply transfer to using technology to work with information and transform it in ways critical for the 21st Century workplaces
This strikes me as so naïve. By which mechanism does swiping through YouTube, TikTok or whatever the newest fad is, confer knowledge about technology. Some kind of brain osmosis?
Looking back to my childhood I grew up with both parents working in software. I learned to type on a typewriter and later a computer, played video games, and fixed or reinstalled Windows and it's drivers hundreds of times. My parents even taught me a little basic.
I was always amazed about the huge amount of abstraction that was there, I learned how a few things worked, but when my dad explained something, I'd often think "wow there are so many layers to this, if I'd grown up earlier I'd maybe have a chance to learn all this."
I did learn a lot about some of these layers in the meantime, but the number of layers has only grown. We barely even use native applications nowadays, everything is a tower of babel of abstraction layers.
The second aspect to this is the UX revolution. We expect every app to be self-explanatory nowadays. Nobody reads the manuals. Everything just works.
If you learned how to use an iPhone you haven't learned much. This is because the user experience is packaged so naturally that most people barely need to think about it.
Maybe you've learned about the design language used, what a burger menu usually represents. What the home button does. After all single-button mice seemed like a constraint to Windows users, single button phones have become the norm.
The app stores have made it hard to screw up your system. Drivers nowadays just work. Many families don't have a device with a keyboard at home, so you don't learn to type.
I think the digital natives might have a good intuition of UX, but we failed to give them a chance to fall and learn about the technology stack because the user experience is easy nowadays.
We've created perfect digital consumers. As producers they may be near illiterate though.
"Jacob informed me that he wanted his computer to look “just like yours."
This is it. What the kid wants is to mimic what he sees his parent is doing, and I believe the parent is projecting his own desires and inclinations onto the little one.
I do not think there is anything specifically wrong with this though, because that's what learning is about (too screen time as a kid could be an issue regarding myopia and so on, though). But stating that at 3 years the "kid wants" something as specific as running a Linux destop by himself is wrong.
There is no real skill involved in watching YouTube or even in operating an iPad. Modern gizmos are filled with apps that battle each other for your kids attention and they play on their weaknesses. All the time a kid spends staring at a screen being passive (watching low IQ vloggers praise the latest soda, watch hours of other kids gaming, watch other kids unpack Kinder Eggs, etc) is time spend learning the brain that this is the way to relax. All that time is not spend in social situations, in nature, playing outside, using fine motor skills, learning what is feels like to actually make something of value to yourself or someone else.
A healthy relationship with technology is not that of a consumer in my view, but that exact relation is most profitable to technology producers in this age. Tablets, chromecasts, smartphones and gaming consoles are consumption devices designed to elicit ever more desire to consume. Being a good consumer is not an important part of life imo and that is a message I want to thoroughly imprint on my kids. While they are to young to self regulate I'm right on top of it.
Father of two little guys of 7 & 5 here. Personal story below.
There's no tablets at home, no games on parent's smartphones. They have access to technology thought. But we are a "NO ADS ALLOWED HERE" kind of home :)
Netflix is freely accessible on the only TV we have, during "opening hours", so that they can choose actively their program and not be exposed to TV ads (the TV has only access to Netflix).
They can switch on a Raspberry with an emulator where they can play some games from the 80/90'. But they have to enter one command on the little Bluetooth keyboard (and they do!).
And finally they can sit at the home's PC, start windows, ask parents to open their session and launch complex games such as Age Of Empire.
No internet access, only books for now.
When they happen to be exposed to TV ads at grand-parents home, for ex, you can really see what kind of behavior ads are ingraining in little brains: "I want this!", "Why is this so short?", "Why don't they tell the price?". That's always an opportunity for me to educate them to what's actually happening before their eyes: "look guys, this is a company (some people at work) that's working to expose their products (toys) to your eyes, hoping that you will ask your parents to spend money to buy it. They're smart, but we are smarter!".
I'm very inclined to think that toddlers should not have access to tablets, moreover to mainstream games on Android/Iphone. My personnal guess is that It's not preparing them to mastering technology, it's preparing them to be addicted to technology.
> By exposing them to something that doesn't react to the laws of physics, I fear they get a wrong first impression of the world
By this logic, "cartoon physics" are also a big no-no, because they teach kids that gravity only acts if you look down and notice that you have no support. Next thing you know you'll have kids running off ledges and expecting to float.
And I don't see how a mouse is more "physical" and "logical" than a touchscreen. On a touch screen, the pointer is right under your finger where you touch. The mouse is this strange thing which does action at a distance, through the intermediation of this "cursor" which has no correspondent in the physical world. Which is why I presume it's easy for a toddler to understand a touch-screen unlike a mouse which requires some pretty advanced hand-eye coordination and mental models.
> Nguyen, who is 10, said she has used one before - once - but the clunky desktop computer/monitor/keyboard/mouse setup was too much for her. "It was slow," she recalled, "and there were too many pieces."
> "Human hands and voice, if you use them in the digital world in the same way as the physical world, are incredibly expressive,"
> Why the explosion now? For decades, attractive, interactive graphic interfaces have been available on home computers. But young children’s access to these was limited by both their cost [with the cost of hardware, software, and home internet contributing to the “digital divide” (Norris, 2001)] and by the fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination required to manipulate a keyboard and mouse. With the advent of touch screens on less expensive devices – smartphones and tablets – these financial and developmental barriers have been reduced: By their first birthdays, most children can become adept at touching, swiping and pinching on the screen. As a result, children’s access to touch screens has outpaced what we know about its effects – for better or worse – on early development.
I'm not saying we should be giving tablets to toddlers. I don't know about that. But not doing this because of concerns about being able to distinguish between physical and virtual seems pure speculation at this moment, especially when we have as precedent fantastical stories that parents typically say to kids, which are also full of physics defying stories.
"So how would a 14 year old wanting to play games"
In the real world my son pulls out his school issued ipad and starts playing games. Sometimes his friend comes over and he complains he can't connect to "my" wifi until I whitelist his MAC, whatever, and then they play minecraft on their ipads. Quite often they play games on the xbox connected to the living room TV because its a big enough screen to be shared. He has access to a desktop and hasn't really used it since gaining access to an ipad.
As for myself I go thru phases of dwarf fortress and heavily modded minecraft on my desktop and I just kicked a severe "pixel dungeon" habit on my phone.
My SiL still plays that farming game on facebook, or some modern clone or whatever.
The only thing worse than letting the "gamers" take over linux would be letting the "desktop" people take over linux, whoops looks like we did. Well, there's always freebsd for me.
I have no problem if they were playing Minecraft, Civ, Sim City or heck even Switch or Zelda.
I have problems with Smartphone Games that are built with 2 min Game play and 1 min of Ads. Or Games that tricks you into micro payments. In a perfectly curated App Store by a company that in the recent years claims to be so righteous. ( Sorry I cant resist )
Broadcast TV have some regulations on content so you know fairly well within certain time zone kids get their TV screen time without much problem. On Youtube and TikTok, even with Kids filter it is still an algorithmic brainwash machine. I rather expose them to Anime.
Oh and the fight against iPad and Gaming usage due to their peer pressure.
>I'm at a complete loss and feel like I'm watching my kids fall prey to some really awful predators that are commonly known as big tech.
In the old days, at least Steve Job's Apple would try to improve or solve real user's problem. Larry page while not exactly a Saint that does no evil or a product person, had the decency to say no to certain things. But both Founders are either gone or no longer in control. Apple and Google are now run by managers who has zero product sensibility.
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
"So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
Well, no.
(Here comes my 2cts)
Recently, at the age of seven, my son discovered how the remote control works. He was proud that he figured it all by himself.
And I was proud that my son discovered that at the age of seven and not at the age of two or three.
When my children wakes up in the morning they don't switch the tv on or any other screen.
They play.
They build stuff with Lego or wood game. They draw. They go in the garden to play with the dog or with their bikes.
Of course they sometimes play a game on my tablet or telephone, it's not 20th century anymore.
But they don't own any. And they don't choose when they can watch a screen. (Steve Jobs did the same with his children after all [0])
Despite that, I will start to teach them programming next school year, I've bought a PI for each, and I welcome the article ! It's just I think this is important, but not a priority for youngs.
[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-app...
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