The Present is Our Business

As a cooperative preschool, each family is responsible for sending an adult (usually a parent) to school with their child one day a week to work in the classroom as an assistant teacher under my supervision.

When I began teaching, cell phones were fairly common, but smartphones were still in the future. Even so, we, as a community, identified these devices as a problem for the classroom because they distracted parents from the job at hand, which was to keep the children safe enough and help them when they needed it. Our rule was that if you had to take a call or answer a text message, you were to let the rest of us know so that we could cover for you while you left the room to deal with your emergency. 

As smartphones became ubiquitous, we stuck with this policy, although things became a little more complicated. It's hard to tell a parent not to take pictures of their children doing remarkable or cute stuff. The smartphone made documenting through photos an accessible and valuable tool for educators as well. And sometimes the children had pressing questions that we could answer with our amazing pocket computers. Yes, there is at least as much power in wondering as there is in knowing, but there are also times when only knowing will do, especially in an educational context. 

Talking, texting, and scrolling, however, weren't acceptable "on the children's time."

Our debates over these devices, and screens in general, are all over the place. Are they changing the minds of our children? Of course they are. That's true of every technology, from fire to quantum computers. As Marshal McLuhan pointed out, every new technology (or in his terminology every new "medium") is simply an extension "of some human faculty -- psychic or physical . . . The wheel is an extension of the foot . . . the book is an extension of the eye . . . clothing, an extension of the skin . . . electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system." Our modern devices are definitely changing us because they take certain of our abilities and turn them into superpowers. 

And yes, for every superpower we embrace, we lose whatever it was we relied on before. The composer John Phillip Sousa was concerned that the advent of recorded music would mean that average people would no longer learn to make their own music . . . And he was right. Far fewer of us can play musical instruments or carry a tune than previous generations. "The discovery of the alphabet," worried Socrates, "will create forgetfulness in the learner's souls, because the will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves . . . You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing." . . . And he was right, most of us no longer have memories capable to holding, say, the entirely of Homer, as was common in Ancient Greece.

This is the story of technology. Hopefully, we gain more than we lose as we adopt and adapt, but we'll never really know until we've already become something new. And this will be true of such things as the smartphone as well.

That said, one concerning impact of smartphones is that adults are not talking to babies as much as they did in the pre-smartphone era. A recent study found a significant association between maternal phone use and a reduction the amount of speech infants were exposed to. "Overall, researchers found that phone use was linked to a 16% decrease in maternal speech directed toward the infant. The reduction was more pronounced during short phone use events of 1-2 minutes, with speech dropping by 26% during these periods . . . The findings suggest that even brief interruptions caused by checking a phone can sharply decrease verbal engagement with an infant."

This is concerning because caretaker speech is foundational to language development in young children and is associated with early vocabulary development. Smartphones, in effect, are taking parents away from their children for significant chunks of time even if they are physically present. That said, maybe it's not so concerning because today's mothers are spending almost twice as much time with their children than mothers in the 1960's and fathers are spending nearly 75% more time with them. Childhood independence, time spent engaging the world while off a caretaker's radar is associated with greater creativity, lower levels of anxiety, and enhanced basic skill development . . . So maybe it's not so bad that today's smartphone using parents are hovering a little less.

My point isn't to make a case one way or another, but rather to say that as important adults in the lives of young children, it serves us to remember that much of what people predict for the future, including scientists and technologists, is fear mongering and hyperbole. History and philosophy, I think, are often better guides when it comes to the future than these secular prophets. 

But more importantly, the children in our lives are not their future selves and our world is not the future world. Our children are who they are right now, living in a world as it is, and so are we. What they most need from us is to love them for who they are right now in the world as it is right now. The future isn't our business, even if it can be alternatively frightening and exhilarating to contemplate. The present is our business and when love stands at the center of it, the rest revels itself as little more than noise. When we know this, we can trust ourselves and our children. That is what we all need.

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