On a recent vacation I downloaded a toy piano app to the iPad and gave it to my 10 month old daughter to play with. Her response was fascinating. For nearly only a minute to two, she hammered away at the screen, enjoying the stream of sounds and blinking keys (and animal heads jumping around in response). But after her first few moments, the wonder and discovery dissolved, and she moved on to much more interesting things. Like the backside of the iPad, the side with the embossed apple shape on it. Or to her thick paged books, the ones with bright colors and the occasional textured pages.
On the same trip I spent some time around our friends’ young boys. They were 7 and 9, and couldn’t get their faces out of their iPhones. Then, once back from the trip I noticed that the family we share a nanny with had given their 2 year old son an iPhone too. He was walking about, proud as a peacock with his new toy, his face again buried in it.
On the one hand, I’m excited for my daughter to embrace and learn from the inevitable iDevice in her future. On the other, I’m a bit freaked. Nearly every kid I see with one seems like they are crack-addicted to it. There are two issues at the root of my anxiety.
The first is that the flat, smooth touch screen is too simple. I fear a day when life’s modes of input are reduced to a swipe, a tap, and a voice automated command. Perhaps the fact that I can no longer write a long letter by hand due to my reliance on cut, copy and paste has helped to seed this dread.
My second issue is the time kids spend with their faces smashed up against the screen. I don’t have a link to an article or paper reinforcing the following statement, but there is some quality of human socializing that is altered or somewhat missing when our interactions are mediated by screens. I give it two years before facetime is the new good night kiss.
Perhaps I’m having an Andy Rooney moment. Or perhaps I’m right to be suspicious. In any case, I’m happy that my daughter is more content to play with and explore tactile objects at this time in her life, than she is drooling over a pixelated landscape.
