Tricks of the trade: technology

I really do not know what I would do if I were raising young children in our technology-saturated society today. When Julien and Sara were young, we were using DOS computers and small floppy disks to load computer games. So, no judgment either way towards parents who choose to raise their children in a technology desert or a technology amusement park. Every parent needs to choose a path for helping their children navigate towards media literacy.

As long as you do not get on your high horse, believing your way of raising media-savvy children is the Right Way, your children will probably survive. Much in the same way that, regardless of good or bad teachers, most children learn to read and write. The trick is not to feel as if what you are doing is superior to what other parents are doing.

There are many scientific studies you can lean on for guidance. Some focus on the dangers of playing computer games, while others give insights into the possible benefits, such as pattern recognition, problem-solving, and cognitive skills. It’s important to be informed about both. In the end, though, you will have to experiment and test your theories.

In our household, technology, especially computer games, was a means of feeding our children’s curiosity. They started at a very young age, perhaps two or three, playing simple children’s games. Giui or I would sit with them while they clicked on two apples or five pears, or dragged and dropped a teddy bear into a box. We didn’t have a television, so these short sessions, usually fifteen or twenty minutes, were their only screen time.

Gradually, they progressed to other learning games such as Living Books, Pettersson and Findus, and some nursery rhyme games. Once they knew how to play a game, they could play it together or use an egg timer set to a specific playing time. The computer was in the living room, so everyone could sit and watch when someone was playing.

Giui has always been someone who plays video games, so the children mimicked his behaviour, much in the same way they did with music.

The fact that I was working at a university research institute on a brilliant project called KiMM, Kids in Media and Motion, highly influenced the way we brought up Julien and Sara. In the project, we worked closely with students of all ages across the school curriculum, with teachers of different ages and levels of experience, as well as with parents. What a joy it was to take all the lessons we learned in these school projects and bring them into our home.

I wonder whether the things we held to be true during those years still hold true today. Here are some of the conclusions we reached during our research:

• Children are forever curious, and giving them access to appropriate technology can spark that curiosity.

• Technology is a patient teacher. Children learn through repetition. Getting consistent positive feedback every time they complete a task, no matter how small, paves the way for further discovery.

• Children have far more patience when something goes wrong in a game than adults do. Their ability to start over again can be bewildering.

• Get two or three children working together on a media project and their imaginations can soar. At the same time, they learn how to make pragmatic choices when faced with difficulties.

• As parents, we are responsible for helping our children develop a healthy, creative understanding of when and how best to use technology. Therefore, it is imperative that we not only supervise their journey but also use and understand the technology ourselves.

Perhaps that was the trick of the trade. It wasn’t about deciding whether technology was good or bad. It was about teaching them how to use it, and then giving them room to discover what it was good for.

The dangers of inappropriate or excessive use of media are well known. This does not mean we should keep technology out of our children’s reach. Our children, for instance, started playing computer games when they were very young. They learned how to hold a book properly; at the same time, they learned how to use a mouse. It was all about taking care of these tools.

Controlling the amount of media time was also one of the easiest ways for us to reward good behaviour or impose consequences for bad behaviour. Computer time was something the children valued, so an extra ten minutes meant something, as did not being able to play that day. The important thing was that the boundaries were clear. We didn’t have to invent elaborate punishments or rewards. Time itself became the currency. Whether I would use screen time in quite the same way today, I am not sure, but at the time it worked remarkably well.

The true benefit of technology, though, was not in consumption but in participation. I wanted the children to do something with it. Playing a game meant solving problems, making choices, trying something, failing and starting again. As they got older, technology became a way to create things, find information and explore their own interests. There was a difference between sitting passively in front of a screen and becoming absorbed in something that required their attention and imagination. For us, the value was never simply that the children knew how to use technology. It was what they learnt to do with it.

Not all the books they read or computer games they played were pedagogically worthy. That was not really the point. They had fun. They followed their curiosity. With time, they became skilled at using different kinds of technology and figuring out for themselves what they could do with it.

Looking back, I don’t think we made much distinction between reading books, playing music and playing computer games. They were simply different ways of exploring the world. A book, a musical instrument, a computer: each gave the children somewhere for their curiosity and imagination to go.