“They haven’t used it. We limit the amount of technology our children use at home.”

–Steve Jobs, commenting on his own kids’ use of iPads and iPhones (NY Times interview, 2010)

 

Someone once told me, “I don’t like Disney World; everything there is so fake.” Well, yeah, that’s kinda the point Walt had in mind, right?

If you’re a Disney patron, you go because it takes you into a world of fantasy where you can temporarily dissociate from the cares and pressures of real life. But you know Cinderella’s a made-up character, monkeys don’t fly, and mice don’t talk–not even Mickey!

When you go home, you return to the reality of your life … and pay the credit card bill for your Disney experience. That’s when reality really sinks in!

But today, the problem is many folks are blurring reality with fantasy. The advent and growth of artificial intelligence is proof of that. It can write books, compose music, and replace Hollywood actors in films. Do we want a computer program to write what we read or compose what we listen to? Do we want to see the real Harrison Ford or Nicole Kidman perform on the big screen, or fictional composites made to look like them?

As hard as it is for most adults to understand the technical complexities of AI, it’s even harder for our youth to distinguish fact from fiction. The things they see and hear on their screen devices give them a distorted take on the world, and it can be dangerous.

Think of the teenage girls scrolling through model-thin images of other girls–possibly created by AI–and it’s easy to understand why they get caught up in attempts to create their own version of those pictures. There’s a direct correlation between that phenomenon and the life-threatening eating disorders of anorexia nervosa and bulimia.

We’ve probably all read about our youth being bullied, not just face-to-face, but also online, where words and images live in perpetuity; again, images sometimes photoshopped by AI to alter a real picture of a teen by putting her, or his, facial image on an x-rated body. We’ve read about teens who committed suicide because they couldn’t handle the fame-shame such images brought them.

Recall, if you can, your formative years, when one new pimple, especially on date night, was at minimum a national crisis. Then, imagine what it would be like to have your friends’ phones populated with falsified naked images of you. Is there any wonder there’s an increase in adolescent/teen depression and suicide?

So, what’s the solution? At the risk of simplifying a complex issue, take your children’s screens away, or never give them one in the first place. There’s no good reason for a child or preadolescent to own a phone. Period. Even if they’re shielded from the more nefarious aspects of screen devices, they’ll have access to mindless games and videos that do nothing to enhance their developing minds and psyches.

Could today’s increase in gun violence and other crimes correlate with the ready access to video games of war and violence? It’s not a stretch to imagine that’s the case. A mature pre-frontal cortex can differentiate between reality and Bruce Willis’s John McClane taking down all the bad guys in Die Hard, but can a child or teen understand it’s all fantasy?

It’s just my opinion, but we should keep our children from cell phone ownership until age sixteen, or perhaps the earlier teen years if they stay home alone at times. Furthermore, limit what they have access to on their phone.

What? How can kids live without a phone? What will they do with their time? How about eye-to-eye conversation at home, and family meals unencumbered by screen devices? Perhaps we could dare to send them outside to play. Sandlot baseball, touch football, and one-on-one basketball games still exist, as do bicycles. And when the weather’s bad? Introduce them to the library and teach them how to check out a book to read.

I’m confident a child engrossed in reading books will fare better academically than a child consumed by nonsense on screens.

There’ll be enough hours spent in front of screen devices in most people’s careers. Let’s not start so early that our children don’t reap the rewards of a rich, and real, childhood!