Chapter One: Parenting in the Media Age
Children are the purpose of life.
We were once children and someone took
care of us. Now it is our turn to care.
-- Cree Indian Elder
This quote has long been a favorite of mine, so centered and wise, so accepting of what parenthood is all about: making children the priority. All children deserve to come first, from rural towns and pulsing metros, living with two caregivers and one, economically secure and disadvantaged. As parents, our basic job is to care for our children: to see to their physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs. Like you, the overwhelming majority of parents want to take good care of their children. It is with this belief that this book unfolds.
Just how you go about caring for your child depends on your individual family situation. If you live in the country, for example, keeping your child safe requires certain considerations, while living in a city neighborhood requires others. Or, if you work in an office full time, managing your child's care after school is different than if you work at home.
Whatever the mix of variables is, one factor that figures into the equation for all parents is the society in which they are raising their children. History has shown, many times over, how spectacular events reshape the world, changing the way people live, work, and communicate. Consider the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. The implications were astounding. For the first time, printed information became widely available, the ability to read spread across generations, and literacy took root in civilization. The significance of this event goes much deeper: the ability to read and write transformed the way we think, in effect, ending the Dark Ages and beginning the Renaissance.
Whether you realize it, you exercise this transformation every time you move from spoken to written language. Just think about how your vocabulary expands when you write. You take the time to choose the words that most precisely, powerfully, or effectively capture what you want to communicate. When you speak, you have to the pull the words out quickly to keep a sentence going. Written language also brings discipline to the thought process. When you write, you have to organize your thinking differently from when you speak; writing is not just a stream of consciousness. You have to systemize your thoughts into outlines, paragraphs, and chapters. When you look at the whole picture, that one event -- the invention of the printing press -- is pretty impressive.
New York University professor Neil Postman adds yet another chapter to the legacy of the printing press. He argues that its invention led to the actual concept of childhood -- the notion that children go through stages of development to become adults. Prior to the availability of the printed word, children were thought of as a minature adults or little people. This perspective began to change with the realization that learning to read and write does not happen overnight; that children learn and develop this skill over a period of years. The idea of childhood as a time of development began to take shape. Coming from our contemporary perspective, where there is so much focus on issues of child development, it's hard to imagine there was a time when being a child simply meant being a little person.
Another history-making, culture-shaking event took place in the early nineteenth century: the Industrial Revolution. We consider it significant because it gave rise to mass production. Goods that were made more efficiently, in greater quantities, and of higher quality, meant a higher standard of living. The effect of this event on family culture was just as remarkable. Prior to the revolution, the worlds of work and family life were interwoven, the line separating them indistinct. If you were a candlemaker or a shoemaker, your shop was at the front of the house and your family lived at the back. If you were a farmer, your fields surrounded your cottage. As soon as the kids were old enough, they took part in the family business. Parents and children interacted all day long. Children learned skills right along with attitudes and values in this natural blend of family life and work.
When the Industrial Revolution took hold, manufacturing centers appeared, cities grew up around them, and people began to migrate from rural livelihoods to urban employment. In the process, family life changed dramatically. With adults off to factories every day, parents not only interacted with their children less, they had to make arrangements for the care of the young ones while they were at work. Widespread public education was the eventual outcome. The way kids learned skills, attitudes, and values took a critical turn.
This history minilesson helps put us in the right frame of mind to look at our own situation. Families are now in the midst of a revolution at least as profound as these historical milestones. And it, too, is changing the way children -- our children -- are being raised. Some call it the Dawn of the Information Age, others the Digital Revolution, or the Telecommunications Revolution. By any name, it is changing the way we live and communicate at a faster rate than any other force. Its dazzling array of electronic media has become essential to our lives. In fact, our kids spend more time with these media than doing any other activity in their waking hours. Inevitably, this changes what it means to care for our children.
Because this incredible revolution is becoming our way of life we may not appreciate just how awesome it is, but you don't have to look far for evidence. You may have seen the Hallmark card that lets you record a greeting. For about $8.95, the recipient of your good wishes can hear the words right out of your mouth via a tiny computer chip imbedded in the card. That you can buy a card that speaks for you is novel enough but, what's really stunning, is that there is more computing power in that one chip than existed in the entire world prior to 1950. Perhaps even more remarkable is the electronic picture frame: You give it to a loved one; then send digital images via e-mail directly to the frame. Grandma and Grandpa can have a new picture of their grandchild every day.
Here's another perspective on the Digital Revolution: If the speed of change in the computer industry over the last fifty years was matched in the auto industry, we would be buying our new cars for one-tenth of one penny. Those inexpensive cars would be traveling at the speed of light.
To further prove the point, if you buy a computer today, you have to resign yourself to Moore's Law (after Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, the leading manufacturer of microprocessors). It promises that "the speed and capacity of the microprocessor doubles every eighteen months." So, your new PC is becoming outdated before the carton even makes it to the recycler.
This digital age has even changed our language. We have a whole vocabulary for talking about how much information can be digitally stored. The first computers held kilobytes of information (mere thousands of bytes), only to be replaced by megabytes (millions of bytes), then gigabytes (billions of bytes), soon terabytes (trillions of bytes), and, eventually, petabytes (quadrillions of bytes).
The same thing has happened to measuring time. Look at any athletic scoreboard. Instead of hours, minutes, and seconds, we break down the last moments of the game into hundredths of a second. If that doesn't do it, we can measure in milliseconds. In this digital world, we can measure increments of time in nanoseconds, and, even finer yet, in picoseconds.
This gives us a feel for the scope of the revolution we are in. We're as much a part of it as it's a p
