The response to a recent post in GeekDad about the “A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work” Video was significant, both personally and for the creator of the video (with whom we hope to have a discussion-based post up soon). However, it also lead me to a range of great research and thinking around children and mobile technology. There are people out there interested in changing the way we talk, think and engage in discussions about children and technology. Discussions beyond “good vs. bad” that are interested in the nuances of the role technology plays in children’s lives and how we can or can’t shape that in ways that support our children as they grow.
One of these people is Meryl Alper.
Meryl is a second year Ph.D. student in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. More importantly, she is a trained early childhood professional and, as an undergraduate at Northwestern, she was Lab Assistant Manager in the NSF-funded Children’s Digital Media Center/Digital-Kids Lab and interned in the Domestic Education & Research Department at Sesame Workshop in New York. This means she has been engaged with these issues and ideas for some time, and her perspective is a fresh and interesting one.
Meryl blogs at teething on tech, where she publishes aspects of her research which focuses on young children’s evolving relationships with analog and digital technologies. Recently, she just published a three part series title “There’s a nap for that!”: YouTube videos of young children using Apple devices. It is a great read and an interesting piece of research that deserves more attention. Read it here: Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3.
In the meantime, I threw a few probing questions to Meryl that aligned to research, but also her career observing and thinking about the way children engage with technology from a young age. I’m interested in how we can all begin a new type of discussion about the whys and hows of children’s technology use.
GeekDad: In your three part blog series you analyze YouTube videos of children using Apple’s mobile devices and ask questions not just about the child’s use, but the parent’s intentions and own process in posting the videos. What do you think drives our motivations to share and explore children’s use of technology?
Meryl Apler: To contextualize, parents’ public and private sharing of photographic and symbolic imagery of children’s growing up processes is not a new historical phenomenon. For example, the US Library of Congress has a fascinating online photographic exhibition of children’s fleeting moments of youth, from the late 1800s and early 1900s. A hundred years apart, the children in these pictures are also using “technology” – but in the form of operating factory machinery or rowing a boat in a fishing village. Children in modern developed nations often have a recorded video presence before they are even born. As another form of video “lifecasting,” the sonogram in particular has created contested forms of feminist and childhood identity and visibility in private, public, and private/public hybrid spaces. Digital technology enables wider distribution, particularly as social mobility, economic disturbances, and the growth of cities distance family members from loved ones. These digital artifacts simulate proximity and help maintain social ties.
GD: That said, how well are we talking about early childhood development and new and emerging technology? Are we doing it in a way that benefits us as parents and educators? Are we paying the type of attention that supports childhood development?
MA: Any conversation of child development, and what is considered to be a “new” or “emerging” technology, must be held within specific cultural contexts. Child development research is consistently revealing pretty major differences across cultures when it comes to issues such as adult-child relationships, parenting, and attachment. The nature of the “we” in your question must be addressed up front. In general, as is evident in US federal and state budgets, early childhood education is an undervalued and underfunded component of children’s lives. Policy makers may congratulate themselves for investing in K-12 education, but unless Pre-K is a part of that conversation, then it is very hard to address underlying social conditions that shape birth through infancy. Amazingly, it’s only been since the 1960s that child development researchers have theorized development as a “transactional” process – that parents shape children, but that children also shape parents. It is also difficult to conduct research that is tied to learning outcomes from specific hardware, as such devices are designed and planned to become obsolete. Also, conversations that are designed to scare parents, particularly pieces of journalism that demonstrate a staggering level of research illiteracy regarding children and media, do particular harm in making parents – across social and economic classes – feel often unwarranted guilt and anxiety.
GD: In 2007, I wrote a book called Idolising Children that suggested the way we construct our images and ideas of childhood and youth impact on the decisions we make at a policy level and so impact on the systems that govern children’s lives. I was interested in your reflections that while there is lots of emerging literature on the educational benefits, or developmental positives and negatives, of touch technology that “there is a scarcity of literature on how parents may be constructing the image of their child as technologically proficient.” Why is considering how we construct images of children’s technology use important?
MA: I think that how we construct what we mean by “technology” is just as important as the way we construct images of children’s technology use. It’s a fun thought exercise to think about what “technological innovation” might mean from a developmental perspective. I love the example about the age at which young children progress from using “thick” crayons to being able to manipulate the “thin” crayons. It may not be digital, but as a writing implement, a crayon is a communication device, and moving from “thick” to “thin” is a technological advancement – maybe not to you or I, but “mastery” and “proficiency” is age-specific. It is also culturally specific. In other countries, parents wouldn’t think twice about handing their child a machete to cut fruit, but adult pulses generally quicken in the US when a four-year-old reaches for the “wrong” end of the scissors. How we determine which uses of technology are “appropriate” has implications for how children are allowed to experiment with technologies. If we downplay the mistakes and the wrong-ended scissors grasping within the technological proficiency process (as in how these videos reflect the end of a “naturalization” process towards dexterity using Apple devices), then we might not allow children the experiences of the messy failures and theory testing that are crucial for deep learning.
GD: Given the last question, you also point to your demographic assumptions about who can afford and engage in the activity of allowing infants to play with their new mobile devices. Can our assumption of a generation of “digital natives” sit comfortably in a society where access to technology is not equal? And, what impact, if any, do you see on children who have limited or no access to these tools during their first 8 to 10 years?
MA: The myth of the “digital native” masks the need for serious pedagogical and policy-level interventions in adults’ role in scaffolding and supporting children’s early experiences with technology. In the MacArthur Foundation white paper “Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture,” my Ph.D. advisor at USC, Henry Jenkins, and his collaborators (2006) identify three areas of concern: 1) a “participation gap,” in which many young people fall through the cracks because they lack access and opportunities to practice skills and acquire knowledge; 2) a “transparency problem,” in which critical literacy skills are difficult to develop when technologies and processes of mass media production and dissemination are opaque; and 3) an “ethics challenge,” in which young people lack mentorship by those with experience in community engagement and public roles as media makers and distributors. These are pressing needs for privileged children and children of poverty alike. There is not one digital divide, but many – on axes of race, gender, queerness, disabilities, etc.
GD: Given the piece of research you have done, generally, do you have any thoughts or ideas as to how technology may shape the interactions parents have with children?
MA: I think that while, for the sake of empirical research, much research on parent-child interactions in regards to technology is conducted in a laboratory setting, there is a need for more ethnographic work. For example, I have a growing interest in assistive technologies/augmentative and assistive communication (AAC) device use by children with disabilities. Many of these technologies enable parents, children, and siblings to communicate with each other. And in other cases, a parent squarely focused on his or her Blackberry while sitting on a playground bench may miss their child’s physical and verbal cues that indicate that they want to show off how quick they can fly across the monkey bars. It is not technology that shapes interactions, but what people do and do not do with technology. Nor are all Apple apps created (or researched!) equally.
GD: In part 2 you open saying, “Much of the discussion surrounding very young children’s media use is often of a protectionist nature against negative effects, or conversely proselytizes educational benefits of digital technology.” You suggest your analysis can help reframe some of this discussion? Where do our conversations about early childhood and technology need to go to be of value and help improve the quality of life for children during the early years?
MA: Conversations about technological inclusion, particularly the framework of Universal Design for Learning, have the potential to improve the quality of life not just for children with disabilities, but for all children during their early years. What I hope my analysis sparks is a critical engagement about which children and which technologies broader conversations tend to privilege.
GD: Finally, your discussion in part 3 explores a wide range of ideas around different types of cultural and social capital. And, your work is appropriately non-judgmental in terms of the uses and purposes of adults you analyze in the 80-odd YouTube videos. But, what does this mean for early childhood professionals? If parents are engaging children in technology at this age – what is the role of the kindergarten teacher in regards to fostering play and building social skills and the like? I guess I’m asking, how does your work help inform what we need to begin considering in regards to supporting early childhood development in this technological age?
MA: Luckily, there are many wonderful researchers studying this very topic in relation to early childhood professionals. For example, I find the work of Karen Wohlwend at Indiana University particularly thoughtful and helpful in locating the role of the K-1 teachers as a partners in digital and non-digital learning with both students and parents. The observations and reflections by Vivian Paley at the University of Chicago Lab school are timelessly invaluable resources for thinking about storytelling and fantasy play (technologically enabled or otherwise). The Fred Rogers Center is also doing important work in this area.
Making general assumptions about what parents are engaging in at home (e.g. media rules, book reading) does a disservice to everyone, especially the child. These videos at least go somewhat “behind the scenes” even though they are carefully edited and curated, and also lack a great deal of racial and ethnic diversity. I would hope that my work does something deceptively simple – help people ask better questions about their own practices and relationships with technology, be it at home or in the classroom. Are children’s social, emotional, cognitive, and physical needs being met in a given environment? What evidence or documentation is being relied upon to measure the meeting of those needs? Can these YouTube videos spark conversations at teacher meetings or back-to-school nights with parents?
Digital technology can streamline teachers’ documentation processes and information sharing with parents. However, teachers also deserve more time, money, and professional development opportunities to think about the needs of their students on both a classroom and individual level. These videos are not just about how children use technology as part of the growing up process, but how adults use technology as part of their own roles as parents, friends, children, co-workers, mentors, and citizens.
