Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf

Author:Maryanne Wolf
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

Protecting the Lost Time of Childhood

What should parents do about the rest of their young children’s time in home and preschool environments where they are surrounded with digital devices and where their “down time” is increasingly filled with always stimulating entertainment that requires nothing of them? I wish there were a movement for the protection of lost time, when children would need very little but their imagination to make a closet door a portal and the preschool’s playground the asteroid-pummeled surface of the moon. To create the space and time in childhood to do just that, exposure to digital devices will have to be introduced more gradually and more intentionally than they are now. Children should be helped to conceptualize such media as one part of their background environment, like television and music systems, but nothing to be used to consume every available empty moment of their very short time between two and five years of age.

That’s easier said than done. We are all creatures of obsession, children just more so. They will become obsessed with whatever captures their attention, and there are few more effective attention getters than screens that move and buzz and bathe their senses in the hormones usually meant for fight or flight. My major fear for this developmental period is that if we do not attend—as parents and as a culture—to what makes up both the days and nights of these early years of childhood, our children and their habits will be set in screen mode.

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