Skip to main content

Do Screens Hamper Socialization?

Screens in public… do kids need them?  I suppose a screen per kid could have led to a more blissful early childhood for my partner and I with us maybe having conversations at dinner, perhaps getting chores done more quickly, but I’ll never know.  We lucked out.  Early on, we had no way to provide the kids with screens.  We were poor grad students so buying the kids a screen of their own was out of the question.  In retrospect, our lack of screens provided more opportunities than it took away.



Yeah, we did miss going out to eat for the first six months or so, (we couldn’t eat out all that much on our budget anyway).  Here’s the thing though.  As the first kid learned to sit up on her own and learned to crawl, all of our problems started to fade.  When we went out she involved herself with us, the condiments, her silverware, her napkin, her food, and ours.  She quit screaming.  Not all together, and not all alt once, but over time she tapered it off.  Other things began to happen as well.  The kid watched us like a hawk.  All the time.  Before long, she was holding her fork, not like a kid, but in the exact same way I learned how to hold mine when I was oh, I don’t know, ten years old, as opposed to one.  She learned how to drink from a cup without a straw—straws would go on to become the bane of my existence with the next two kids—or a lid.  She also learned how to talk to waiters, restaurant managers, the people eating at neighboring tables, anyone who caught her attention really.  By the time she was four, she was proud to be ordering for herself.  By the time she turned six, she began to experiment with not sitting with us at all.  She’d pull out a bar stool at the counter while the rest of us found our table.  We’d tell the waiter that we’d cover the young lady at the bar’s tab.

The oldest kid’s storied rise to restaurant independence wasn’t the only perk of staying away from screens.  The next two kids learned to handle themselves more quickly.  In the intervening time, as they learned, my partner and I had also developed some new skills.  If the youngest started to scream, one of us would simply just head outside, bouncing them in the wrap, cooing until they calmed down.  The parent that was left inside had great company for their meal: the older kids.

Finally, without the screens, with nothing else to do, the kids started to form connections at the joints we frequented.  They really had nothing to while we were out but talk.  At slower establishments, they started to build their own friendships with the staff.  The connections were distinctly theirs, not ours.  Three year-old No. Two insisted that we go into our local coffe and wine bar to say hi to Marvin every time we passed anywhere near the place.  Even if we were ultimately going somewhere else, we had to stop in to say hi.  Two was learning to maintain his network.

So, screens or not?  I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts, but for us?  I’m delighted we missed them.  Our life wouldn’t be nearly as fun if we hadn’t.

Postscript:
Oh yeah, the straws.  The older two kids learned how to drink from cups almost instantly—keeping in mind time perception was perhaps one of the first skills to exit my sleep-deprived, addled parent’s brain.  Annoyingly—for me at any rate—every so often a person, just trying to be helpful, would bring us a cup with a straw.  A simple cup in the hands of a two year-old is just the right height for them to pull off the table and then tilt back to their mouth to get a sip.  Add the extra height of a straw to that, and—for a kid that already knows how to drink from a cup—you’ve got a disaster.  They tend to leave the cup on the table, leaning it back enough to get the straw into their mouth.  This pores the water into their lap, and the hilarity ensues.  For me, kid-friendly is almost never kid-friendly.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in concept very sim