False Promise
Parking your child in front of the computer may seem like a good idea, but think again
Perched in his mother's lap, Jonathan Foldi taps on the keyboard. "Car starts with the letter C," says the pleasant computer-synthesized voice as a red roadster zips around the screen, and Jonathan stares, transfixed, ignoring the toy trucks, plastic balls, and rocking horse that cover the hardwood floors of his suburban Maryland home. His mouth open in wonder, Jonathan pecks another letter, and another. At the age of 13 months, he's already familiar with JumpStart Toddlers and several other computer games, all designed for kids under 2. Wire racks set up beside him hold more than 20 others, the collection of his 4-year-old brother, Matthew.
This is the face of childhood, circa 2000: Parents have been told that it's their responsibility to prepare children for a multi-tasking, technology-driven future, so they "JumpStart" their babies, leave 6-year-olds in the care of Carmen Sandiego, and tutor third graders on the finer points of PowerPoint presentations. Believing that starting earlier is starting better, they invest in "lapware" and special keyboards designed to withstand drool and tiny fists, and they stick children who aren't even forming sentences yet in front of computer screens. The idea: Buy the computer and the software, and the brain will grow. Without an early start, parents fear, their kids will fall so far behind they'll never catch up.
But a growing number of educators, child development experts, and doctors are beginning to speak out against early computer use, especially when coupled with regular television watching. Too much "screen time" at a young age, they say, may actually undermine the development of the critical skills that kids need to become successful, diminishing creativity and imagination, motivation, attention spans, and the desire to persevere.
Last week, some experts--including Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia; Harvard professor of psychiatry Alvin Poussaint; and noted child and adolescent psychiatrist Marilyn Benoit--went even further, putting their names to a petition calling for "an immediate moratorium on the further introduction of computers in early childhood and elementary education" until it can be determined what effect they have on young children. "The only way to do that is to slow down, look at the research and evaluate," says Pipher.
Early action. Keep kids away from computers? It seems to fly in the face of everything the 21st-century cyber-ready parent is told to believe. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study showed that on a typical day, 26 percent of 2- to 7-year-olds spent time on the computer, averaging 40 minutes. Matthew Foldi's parents started him playing on the computer at 8 months--partly as an alternative to the bland baby babble on Teletubbies but also, says his mother, Bonnie Glick, because "we spend so much time on the computer at work that it's important for kids to know this is part of the real world."
"Parents have been sold a bill of goods about how valuable these experiences are," says Frank Wilson, a neurologist and the author of The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. Wilson and other skeptics say that as a nation we leapt without looking, launching a grand experiment without doing any serious long-term studies on the possible developmental, behavioral, or physical effects early computer use has on kids. "Many of the answers won't play out for five, 10, or 20 years," says Michael Rich, coauthor of an American Academy of Pediatrics position paper that calls for some limits on screen time.
That's certainly the opinion of the Alliance for Childhood, a child-advocacy group that last week released the report "Fool's Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood," in which they say that computers can potentially damage the health and intellectual and social development of young children. Challenging many of the claims about computers' ability to motivate the young, the report asserts: "Children need stronger personal bonds with caring adults. Yet powerful technologies are distracting children and adults from each other."
The reaction to the report and petition was heated and mixed. Educators who have worked for almost a decade to update classroom technology were outraged. "If we don't bring the institution of schooling into the 21st century," says Cheryl Williams, director of the education technology program at the National School Boards Association in Alexandria, Va., "then the institution of schools will become irrelevant." At the same time, some teachers are reporting shrinking attention spans and decreasing motivation, while many child-development specialists say they see kids who have withdrawn socially, passing up friends in favor of computer games. "For certain types of learning," says educational psychologist Jane Healy, author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--for Better and Worse, "certain mental habits such as motivation, perseverance, concentration, and certainly reading and language skills, everything we know suggests that this technology may do more harm than good."
IN THE EARLY YEARS, CHILDREN BEGIN to learn many of the skills that will carry them through the rest of their lives: language and socialization, the ability to organize their thoughts, and the concept of cause and effect. They learn to find solutions, to be creative, to imagine, to self-motivate, and to respond to failure by trying again. They develop and refine small and large motor skills, depth perception, and hand-eye coordination. They are beginning to understand how they fit into a larger world and gain a sense of competence and a basic self-esteem.
How do they learn so much? Through experience, experimentation, and observation: tasting, smelling, hearing, touching. It is the real-life lessons--the climbing over and scooting under, putting one cup inside another, and chasing Cheerios around the kitchen floor--that teach a child how the world and his body work. Pushing a computer key to make an animated monkey dance does not have the same effect. "Two-dimension play is not as good as three-dimension play," says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, director of the Infant Language Laboratory at Temple University in Philadelphia. "For young children, seeing circles and squares is not as good as manipulating circles and squares."
A chief criticism is the quality of software. Healy, for one, believes much of the educational software marketed to parents is "drill and practice, thinly disguised as some sort of game." Math programs that teach a child to memorize but fail to let the child explore and understand the concept are missing the point. And "having them blast letters out of the sky is not the way to teach kids reading and reflection," says Bob McCannon of the New Mexico Media Literacy Project. Reading, he says, involves "concentration, attention span, enjoyment of detail, and some level of inspiration. . . . To this date we haven't seen any soft-ware that accelerates that, and there is a tremendous amount of software that detracts from that." Further, computer learning is often by rote, and "children tend to lose that kind of knowledge," says Claire Lerner, a child development specialist with Zero to Three, a nonprofit group that promotes healthy development in the early years. For example, rather than using a computer program to teach a toddler about proportion, she recommends finding a way to describe it in daily life. "Talking about big shirts and small shirts while you do the laundry is much more meaningful and long lasting."
Virtual tiaras. Then there is the importance of imagination in encouraging creativity. A child can pop in a CD-ROM and pop up a princess, her wardrobe, and the crown jewels, but it would be far better for the child to pretend to be a princess herself. "She has to grab a pink pillowcase and make a skirt," says Healy, with a kitchen chair for her castle and the floor for a moat. Even though princess jobs are hard to get in the real world, playacting teaches kids to problem solve and thus prepares them for their future. "The people who have rewarding jobs are going to be the people who have ideas," says Healy.
But there is some good software out there, if you know where to find it (box, Page 55). "Modern software can provide very, very rich environments for learning," says Susan Haugland, a Denver-based early childhood education professor. Children exposed to high-quality developmental software showed significant gains in intelligence, nonverbal communication skills, long-term memory, and self-esteem, according to a nine-month study of 4- and 5-year-olds she conducted while at Southeast Missouri State University in 1992. The children who were exposed only to drill-and-practice software, however, showed a 50 percent drop in creativity.
BACK IN 1994, WHEN PRESIDENT Clinton vowed to connect every school to the information superhighway, fulfilling that pledge seemed like a distant and costly dream. Only about 1 in 3 schools, and just 3 percent of classrooms, were wired to the Internet. But by 1999, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 95 percent of schools--and 63 percent of all classrooms--had Internet access.
Bringing computers into the schools has, without a doubt, served many students well, particularly lower-income or geographically isolated kids and learning-disabled students. Word processors, for instance, can help kids who struggle with handwriting or translating thoughts into prose organize their work and compose stories. Certain kinds of software can help dyslexics learn to associate letters with their corresponding sounds, while other "assistive technologies" can enlarge words for sight-impaired students or respond to voice instructions.
So it's not surprising that many in the education field were dismayed by the Fool's Gold report and the petition asking that schools hold off on buying new equipment. "I cannot conceive of why we'd want to take computers out of their hands," says Linda Roberts, the director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, who has spent years trying to get computers into classrooms. Like blackboards or fingerpaint, she says, the computer "is just one of many tools" that help children develop everything from critical-thinking skills to problem solving.
The key is to use the technology well. For some schools, this means waiting until a child has mastered reading and writing. At Forest Bluff Montessori in Lake Bluff, Ill., kids can start on keyboarding when they are 9, but aren't introduced to the Internet until the age of 12. Other schools start earlier, but take a thought-out approach. "We don't do drill and practice here," says Betty Carle, a computer teacher at Dows Lane Elementary School in Irvington, N.Y., which last year embarked on an ambitious program to enhance the curriculum with computers and a high-speed Internet connection. Instead, students work in pairs on class-related "Web quests," making books and creating PowerPoint presentations. This fall, third graders are learning to classify things and creating graphic "personality inventories." And, says Carle, Dows Lane teachers don't just plop students down in front of the computer and disappear. She also disputes the notion that computers create unsocial loners or phlegmatic students, she says. "If a kid is passive, he will be passive no matter where. I have a niece who would sit and read all day." And no one thinks that is an antisocial activity. Then again, muses Carle, "sometimes it's the way the child is raised."
Her point hits home. In school, after all, few kids get to spend all that much time in front of the screen. But a child who gets 20 minutes of computer time each week at school may get 20 hours at home. Parents who would limit TV watching often encourage cybergame playing. And they're often driving the excesses in school: Even at the preschool level, some parents insist on having a computer in the classroom, says Silvia Dubovoy, a San Diego psychologist who trains Montessori teachers working with 3- to 6-year-olds. "They are very concerned about their children being able to go to Harvard."
Anne Alpert, director of the Side by Side Community School in Norwalk, Conn., says she can tell from afar which of the younger students are home-computer nuts and which spend their off time goofing around with friends. The computer users "are reticent," she says, less inclined to take the small risks that build competence and creativity and more likely to have trouble negotiating the politics of the playground. The computer-free kids, who spend hours doing old-fashioned things like playing dress-up and Crazy Eights and reading books, are social and outgoing, curious, and work well in groups.
There may be physical ramifications as well, though the evidence is mixed. The American Optometric Association says that computers can exacerbate conditions like nearsightedness, but the American Academy of Ophthalmology says no evidence has been found of damage and that eye strain is a normal reaction to prolonged close-up work. Still, some in the field, like pediatric optometrist Pia Hoenig, are concerned. In practice since 1973, Hoenig says that in the late '90s she noticed a "significant increase" in kids with weak focusing skills. "We used to see [these] problems just in children doing an incredible amount of reading," says Hoenig, a professor and chief of the binocular-vision clinic at the University of California-Berkeley. "The increase has been exponential . . . with the rise of computers in homes." In years past she found these problems among heavy readers who read chapter books before the fourth grade. "Now, I'm seeing them around second grade . . . for computer-related problems."
And, since computer workstations are rarely designed for kids, there are longstanding concerns--and, again, no consensus--about the effects on young wrists, arms, and backs. Cornell professor of ergonomics Alan Hedge says that today's ergonomic habits could have a lasting effect. "We know these injuries typically take five to 10 years to develop," he says. There really hasn't been enough time to see what the consequences are going to be. Laptops are particularly likely to cause problems, he says. But with children as with adults, prevention is pretty easy. "It's not one size fits all," he says.
SEVENTH GRADER ANDREW BEN- ware is an A student "with the occasional B plus or A minus" at Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High in Davis, Calif. Andrew is also perfectly comfortable on the computer--even though his parents waited until last year to buy one. "When Andrew was younger [we felt] it was important for him to learn to rely on his imagination . . . to play, to have tangible contact with things," says Jana Tuton, his mother. "Our idea was to make life so boring that reading . . . would look good," she says, laughing.
Offline. So Andrew spent much of his childhood swimming, riding bikes and scooters, and staging what his mother calls "elaborate dramas" with his friends. Not that he didn't miss the machine: "He pointed out that he was the only kid in the neighborhood who didn't have a computer," says Tuton. ("I know a second grader with a computer in his room," says Andrew.) But now that there's a PC in the house, is Andrew a devoted user? No. "I think it gets boring after a while," he says. "I have more interesting things to do."
The bloom is off for the Foldis, too. For a while, they were impressed with the way their older boy, Matthew, learned hand-eye coordination and language on the " 'puter." At age 3, he knew how to say "Eustreptospondylus" from playing Dinosaur Adventure 3D. By then, though, he was spending as much as three hours a day on the computer. When his parents wanted to use a program to work on their finances, Matthew would ask how many minutes they really needed. Eventually, after he showed little interest in an easel and paint set he got for his birthday, they restricted Matthew to one hour on the computer a day. (Younger brother Jonathan gets 10 minutes.)
TV over PC? Experts disagree over when the ideal time is to introduce children to computers. "I am very reluctant to have any child under the age of 7 spending any time on a computer, certainly not alone," says Healy. "He probably is better off watching TV" with a parent. Douglas Sloan, professor of history and education emeritus at Teachers College, Columbia University, favors postponing computer use "until kids develop conceptual abilities, at around the sixth grade at the earliest." But Tufts psychologist David Elkind believes kids can begin limited, supervised fooling around on the computer after their third birthday.
What's crucial is that parents be involved. "Too much of the time we think the computer is supposed to do it all, and we don't really appreciate how important the people are," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof. Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist and author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. "It's the computer plus the human environment around the computer that matters." A child who is left alone to use the software and doesn't understand it will have a shallow experience. Look for balance, she urges: "You want to be sure your children are comfortable in the complex, messy shades-of-gray world of people and in the clean, black-and-white world of machines."
When kids do log on, they may do best to start by using the machine as a simple word processor, rather than playing with fancy software. "At 7, children love to write stories on computers," says Healy. The American Association of Pediatrics and other experts also advise against putting a computer in the child's bedroom, preferring a room that gets a lot of family traffic, such as the den or kitchen.
And it's important to feed the body, not just the mind: "If we want to capitalize on what evolution has given us, we don't want to make them sit in a chair and stare at moving pictures," says neurologist Frank Wilson. "What we want is to get them outside to play."
With Mary C. Lord and David L. Marcus
This story appears in the September 25, 2000 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.