There is continuous discussion about the
overuse of screen time by young children but this is an interesting article in
Exchange Everyday by Erika Christakis to consider whether we as parents are
tuned in?
Continuous Partial
Attention
Communication leads to
community, that is, to understanding, intimacy, and mutual valuing.-Rollo May
“Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy
outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship
problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier
to list the things they don’t mess
up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of
digital devices,” writes Erika Christakis in the July/August 2018 edition
of The Atlantic.
“Even so,
emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated,” she
continues. "It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you
think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about
tuned-out parents…
Despite a
dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today
astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the
1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality,
even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children’s lives
physically, but they are less emotionally attuned…
Yet for all the
talk about children’s screen time, surprisingly little attention is paid to
screen use by parents themselves, who now suffer from what the technology
expert Linda Stone more than 20 years ago called ‘continuous partial
attention.’ This condition is harming not just us, as Stone has argued; it is
harming our children. The new parental-interaction style can interrupt an
ancient emotional cueing system, whose hallmark is responsive communication,
the basis of most human learning. We’re in uncharted territory.”
Source: “The Dangers of Distracted Parenting,” by Erika
Christakis, The
Atlantic, July/August 2018
