Sharenthood by Leah A. Plunkett

Sharenthood by Leah A. Plunkett

Author:Leah A. Plunkett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press


Play: Making Room for Make-Believe, Mischief, and Mistakes

We may be the hypocrites our teenagers think we are. We use digital technologies to enhance our own lives without thinking enough about the impact that sweeping up youth into our tech use might have on them.13

This book is focused on the impact of our sharenting on our children. Briefly: many other dimensions of our relationships with our children are likely impacted by our digital tech use. We need to ask whether our bonds with our digital devices are interfering with the parent-child bonding necessary for healthy child development.

This isn’t a sharenting question. For this question, it doesn’t matter whether we are using our phones to take pictures of our kids (and then posting them online) or to pay parking tickets. It matters only that we are using a phone or other digital device. Academic inquiry into the developmental impact of adult digital tech use on parent-child and other adult-child relationships is still in its early stages. Notably, a study published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics cautions that despite some positive potential from digital tech, “mobile devices can also distract parents from face-to-face interactions with their children, which are crucial for cognitive, language, and emotional development.”14 Presumably, a study is forthcoming that concludes it is better to direct the inevitable frustrations associated with parenting into a snarky text thread with your friends rather than be snarky toward your children.

Back to the hypocrisy allegations: we use tech to create opportunities for ourselves and to control young people’s digital and nondigital lives. For example, we encourage our kids and teens to use ed tech in their classes and activities in order to put down roots in STEM. Yet many schools have “zero tech tolerance” policies for students’ use of their own devices on school grounds, and a student caught texting too many times can wind up with an out-of-school suspension.15 We value “entrepreneurship.” We applaud start-ups that “think big” and “fail early and often.” Yet we are often intolerant of that same iterative process in childhood, even though it’s necessary developmentally.

We’re letting the grown-ups play and making the kids pay.16 We have it backward. The digital world needs a protected place for childhood to play in the same way we try to protect brick-and-mortar playgrounds and classrooms—by making them experimental, iterative, inclusive, and equitable. We can’t have play be the province only of those privileged enough to build private forests for their kids.17

So how do we head in the right direction? The near history of the development of our current frontier, the digital one, offers some inspiration. In its origins, the internet had a Wild West ethos that allowed individual participants, including kids, a lot of room to play.18 That playful spirit is alive and well, but the terrain has shifted. Increasingly, the Wild West ethos seems to be manifesting itself in a gold rush for data.19 Institutions in the private and public sectors have a “grab data now, figure out what to do with it later” mentality.



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