Screentime revisited

Longtime readers of my blog know that I am not a convert to the belief that unlimited screentime is fine for kids. There are plenty of homeschoolers who do, in fact, believe this, and they have their arguments. In this case, I will respectfully agree to disagree.

I had no opinions about kids and TV, really, until I had my son. One night, while I nursed my baby, my husband and I were watching our then-traditional Thursday night TV: Seinfeld, Friends, and ER. Our son was young, probably only a couple of months old, but he was alert, interested in the world. And he was definitely interested in that TV. He kept popping off to watch it, mesmerized.

I reacted as I react to almost everything: research.

At that point, not a lot of good research had been done, but what had been done seemed clear enough to me: Kids who watched a lot of TV had lower IQs, lower grades in school, lower attention spans, higher body fat.

Because he was the first, it was an easy choice. We turned off the TV. Until he was about 4, we watched almost no video at all, except the occasional Muzzy when I still was deluded enough to think that we’d all become fluent Spanish speakers.

Our second child came into a house with no TV. But after it was clear that she was a different sort of child, and after it was clear that preschool, then kindergarten, were just not going to work for her, I begged my sisters, who had not limited screentime: “Please, tell me what’s good!”

I hadn’t paid any attention to kids’ media, and I needed a break. I needed that electronic babysitter.

In other words, I gave in a bit in terms of screentime. But in reality, my kids went from waaaay weird (no screentime) to pretty darn weird (up to 1 hour a day so Mommy could sit in her office and type her brains out).

Meanwhile, the digital world became more enticing, and the research became more clear:

Too much screen-watching, no matter what type of screen it is, is not completely healthy for your child.

The unhealthy things are obvious:

  • Kids who watch a lot of TV and use a lot of video games are more likely to be obese and have the host of health problems to go along with that.
  • Kids who have a lot of screentime are more likely to have low IQs and low grades in school.
  • Kids who have a lot of screentime, especially unmonitored screentime, are more likely to be psychologically damaged, with their psyches, in one report I heard on the radio, similar to those of kids who grow up in war zones.
  • Screentime promotes ADHD-like behaviors: short attention span, excitement-seeking, lower tolerance for the slow-moving parts of life.

Let’s face it: TV is largely dumb, violent, sexist, and passive, reducing your kid to a passenger in a car that is totally out of control. Many video games, even the ones made for kids, are much the same.

But then there’s the other side. My husband and I spend much of our professional lives “online.” We use computers for our work. We are hooked into various types of media to give us news that feeds our work, networks that feed our professional lives, and yes, lots of dumb stuff. But we use the dumb stuff wisely: I am very good about being professional with Facebook, for example. I have “friended” a number of present and past real-world friends, but FB is mainly a way for me to receive news from organizations that I care about.

And there’s also the other side of the research: Yes, many kids who OD on screentime are freaked-out fat kids, but many of them also benefit:

  • Video games can stimulate reflexes and hand-eye coordination.
  • The decision-making skills of video game users seem to be quicker.

I think that as parents, our decision-making comes down to the same thing it always does: What are our values?

My husband and I met in Silicon Valley, working at a computer company. We have known many people who have spent way too much time in front of screens. Those people show the effects: They are largely obese (though sometimes unhealthily skinny), they lack social skills, they often have no life outside of the one they live online. My husband and I value the “real” world and want our kids to be healthy and successful in it. We want them to have interests outside of the world in their computers. We want them to be able to chat in real life with their grandmas as well as with the geeky kid next to them in an Internet cafe in Thailand.

We also want them to make up their own minds as to what is right, what is valuable, what is good. TV and increasingly, the Internet are attempting to take over people’s decision-making abilities. TV has largely succeeded with a segment of our population. Now it’s on to the Internet. Do you want someone else to tell your child what is good and right?

So we find ourselves walking that line: Yes, our kids use computers. Computers are tools, and why would you deny a child a hammer if what he really needs is to pound in a nail?

But no, we don’t think that unbounded screentime is good for anyone (not even adults). And we do believe that parents have the inescapable role as mentor and guide for their children. (In other words, even if you don’t serve as a role model for your kids, you’re serving as a role model for your kids. Get used to it, and decide to live the life that you want model for them.)

I have strong TV memories from my childhood: I’m from a family of 5 kids, with scientist parents. They decided that we could have one “TV night,” and that we would vote on what night that would be.

TV night was a treat for us! We would buy pop (Pepsi and Sprite), and pop some popcorn. We’d line up on the naugahyde couch (green, of course) to watch Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy. The shows didn’t really matter. The lesson we learned from this exercise was that TV — screentime — was a treat. The real world would still be out there, and we had to be ready to meet it.

But it was fine, about once a week, to sit back on that shiny, sticky surface, and enjoy what we knew was just entertainment.

Superman running in a race to nowhere

I think it’s indicative of our times that there are two films about education making the rounds of theaters right now. Everyone seems to know that there’s a problem. Many people are sure they have the answer.

The places where we disagree are are simply these:

What is the problem?

What is the solution?

OK, so that should be easy to fix, right? Just kidding.

For background, you can read my review of Waiting for Superman here, and my review of Race to Nowhere here.

The easiest way to think of these films is as Superman, the Republican, and Nowhere, the Democrat. Superman as tough love, Nowhere as nurturing earth parent. Superman as quantifying and Nowhere as qualifying. That would be oversimplifying, but oversimplification is something both films had plenty of.

Here’s where the films agree:

Our schools are really not working. Our students are not happy. We aren’t producing the right sorts of students that are needed. We’re going about it all wrong.

But really, the films don’t even agree on what the problem is. According to Superman, the problem is unions, lack of flexibility, big schools, lack of government oversight, too much government oversight, low expectations, non-involvement of parents, and teachers.

According to Nowhere, the problem is too high expectations, too much homework, too much stress, over-involvement of parents, and cavalier attitudes by administration.

I think that both films are right, in the sense that for any reasonable problem you investigate, you’re going to find plenty of kids who fit the bill. And both films did a great job of finding those kids. Superman found kids who wanted to work harder, who wanted their parents to be involved, who wanted to be asked for more. Nowhere found kids who needed lower expectations, less work, less stress, schools less focused on numbers.

Neither film, true to what’s going on in general in our culture, spent much time talking to the teachers who are on the front lines of all this. Superman simply vilified them; Nowhere showed them as passive enablers of society’s worst attributes.

Both films suffered from what all 2-hour documentaries suffer from: lack of depth and oversimplification of the issues. I got the sense, however, that Superman would not have benefited from a longer length because, frankly, the film-makers were trying NOT to look at the wider picture. They had a narrow thesis and they stuck with it; the film was not nuanced enough to deal with all the exceptions to the rules they were stating.  Nowhere, however, did attempt to do a quick tour of all the issues, and would simply benefit from the format of a PBS series instead of a film that tries to say it all in 2 hours.

What it comes down to is that these two films are a great opening to a much wider conversation. That conversation absolutely must include the undeniable fact that although we have the same rights, we are not all the same. We do not all need the same kinds of schools, the same kinds of instruction, the same levels of stress, the same kinds of teachers… or really the same of pretty much anything.

Superman suffered from the assumption that all neighborhood schools are failing, all charter schools are succeeding, and all kids would do better in the environment they were pushing.

Nowhere raised some very good points, and allowed for a bit more fluidity in the assumptions about what kids need, but it also didn’t speak for all kids, all schools, or all families.

In my wandering about the educational opportunities where we live, trying to place two very different kinds in an environment that suits them, I have seen the whole spectrum. It always comes down to this: For almost every school someone hates, someone else loves it. For almost every teacher who can’t reach your kid, there’s another kid she can reach. For almost every kid who is stressed out about a high level of expectations, there’s another kid who’s suffering because so little is expected of him.

What we need is educational choice. We need to admit that there is not one answer for every child, and we need to open up the possibilities for all children. I actually wrote about my vision for community schooling a few months ago, so I won’t go into details here!

I do hope that these films open up the conversation more: really, Superman and Nowhere could have quite a discussion if they both agreed to leave politics aside and talk about what’s good for all kids. All of us need to stop thinking quite so much about political clout and money, and a whole lot more about how to serve the needs of the students who walk in the doors of our public schools, no matter who they are today and who they will be tomorrow.

Accidental favorites

If homeschoolers were living up to our name, you might think we spend a lot of time at home. However, the opposite usually ends up being true. We are out and about, going to clubs and classes, our homeschool program, and on fieldtrips.

This results in a lot of time for my kids to argue in the car. And argue they do, unless, I have found, something else is occupying their brains.

The best thing I’ve found is audiobooks. Unfortunately, we seem to need a steady supply, and unless I have been doing my homework, ordering books from the library ahead of time, we find ourselves about to embark on a roadtrip, bookless.

The last two books we listened to were found in this way: we’d run out of books, and I had to make do with what I could find that day. One day, we were at our homeschool program and I happened to look on the books on CD shelf. There was a book I’d never heard of before, A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park. It looked promising, so I checked it out and popped it in.

One of the problems we’ve been having lately is that my kids like big, meaty books, but aren’t so fond of scary books. As you move past the kids’ classics and get into the middle grade and teen fiction, a lot of it gets way too exciting and full of stories more scary than we are interested in. A Single Shard is an example of what can be done with a sweet, historically based story. Though it has no blood-sucking vampires, no evil villains, and no end-of-the-world scenario, the book is powerful and fully gripping.

A Single Shard
A Single Shard

In the book, a young orphan is being raised by a homeless cripple under a bridge in medieval Korea. The orphan is awed by the work of the local potters, who are famous across the land for their celadon glaze. Through a mishap, he ends up needing to work for an elderly master potter to repay a debt, and becomes his helper.

The book is rich with historical details woven seamlessly into the stories. I believe that my children and I learned more about historical Korea just by listening to that book than we have about historical Japan in the studying we’ve been doing. (Can anyone recommend a similar book set in Japan?) On top of that, the book had a moral lesson. When the main character is about to embark on a long, arduous journey, the man who has raised him tells him that sometimes, a closed door leads us to find an open door. It’s a tiny bit of wisdom that takes on great significance in the book.

I recently reviewed the book Some of my Best Friends are Books, which is such a great read. One of the things that the author says is how important it is for kids to learn from fiction. She points out that books can act as therapy, teaching kids lessons in ways that really stick in their brain.

Can there be a better lesson than this? A loss often leads to an opportunity. In the case of A Single Shard, the opportunity is small. Our hero doesn’t become world-famous, rich, or even well-known enough to pass his name to the present. His work was anonymous; his identity is lost. But in writing this book, Park shows how much meaning a life can have, if only a boy does not give up on his quest.

The next time we were left without an audiobook, we had time to stop at the library. I never know what’s going to be there, though I can be sure of a few things:

  • All the books on CD that we’ve already listened to will be available for checkout
  • Lots of second, third, and fourth books in series will be available
  • Most of what’s left will be for little kids, teenagers, or in a language we’re not studying at the moment.

At this stop, however, there was one book that didn’t fit in those categories. It didn’t look too scary. It wasn’t part of a series. (I later found out it was the first in a series, though.) And we had never heard of it. Trusting the staff of SCPL, I checked it out.

Airborn by Kenneth Oppel was completely unfamiliar to me. The description sounded promising, though it had very little information. We popped it in and were immediately sucked in.

The story takes place in a sort of alternate universe — like His Dark Materials, but much less dark and scary. In this version of Earth, a compound called Hydrium has been discovered, and Victorian-age peoples have taken to the air. Our hero is not much of a hero yet. Matt is just a cabin boy on a luxury sky-ship.

What I loved about this book was the slow, Victorian-age pacing. I am reading Oliver Twist to my 11-year-old right now, and Airborn has the same easy pace. “Don’t worry,” the book seems to say. “Your world is all in a rush, but this one drifts with the air currents.”

Nothing happens all in a rush. We have time throughout the book to experience things as our protagonist does: through his senses and his emotions. This isn’t a perfect book, but it’s more than good enough. The flights of imagination are superb. I can almost feel the whoosh of the cloud-cat’s wings as it flies past me.

Like A Single Shard, there is no gratuitous excitement here. This book is exciting, however, and there is violence. One of the main characters is killed, but his death is properly mourned, and the meaning of his death — a young man’s life has been ended before he had the chance to find out his purpose in life — is made clear. This is a very moral book, which I appreciated. Our hero is Errol Flynn, not Steven Segal.

My kids and I sat in the car a few times, unwilling to stop the book and go in. In the end, I relented and brought the CD in to listen inside. We just couldn’t leave our hero hanging out in the car while we went on gaily with our lives!

Certainly, I’ve not had 100% luck in random audiobook choices, but these experiences reminded me that there are so many great books out there. You just have to be willing to try something new and unknown. And be willing to jump ship if it turns out not to be the journey you had hoped.

Teaching programming to children

Kids tend to become interested in programming through being consumers. So it’s likely that if your child expresses interest in programming, it will be such activities as making app’s for the iPod or becoming a computer game programmer. The problem is, those are not really attainable as first goals, and trying to attain them too early may either turn your child off to future attempts, or teach him bad habits that will cause him trouble later.

My husband is a computer scientist with strong opinions about what make bad programming. He sees it all the time in his line of work. So when our son first started expressing interest in programming, we wanted to find a good way to proceed that would lead him to understand programming, restrict him from making frustrating mistakes, and also allow him to have fun.

At the time, the options were a bit more limited. We found Microworlds, which is based on the Logo programming language. Microworlds is made by a for-profit company, and thus does cost money. But it’s an excellent starting place, especially if you have a really young child and start with Microworlds JR. Of the programming environments we’ve used, JR is the only one that is 100% usable for a pre-reading child. Our son was 6 when he started using it, so he only used it for a short time, but if you’re starting with a younger child, I would definitely suggest this as the way to go.

(I will insert the caveat that my husband and I, as a computer scientist and a writer/graphic designer who use computers a lot in our daily lives, did not believe that screen time was appropriate or in any way beneficial for our preschool-aged children, so we had no need for computer-based applications for pre-reading children.)

Our son moved up to Microworlds EX, which is a very wide-ranging, adaptable programming language for kids. The makers of EX recommend this environment for kids in fourth grade and higher, and after using it with a younger child and then going on to other programming environments, I would agree. Because EX involves typing, and typing is not the forte of many younger children, it’s easy to introduce syntax errors into programs. Now that our son is older, I’ve asked him to go back to it to see if it has capabilities that he wasn’t ready to use at a younger age.

Our next discovery was Scratch, a fabulous and free programming environment from MIT. Scratch offers a number of advantages for kids who want to program.

First of all, Scratch is visually based. The bits of each program are contained in “blocks” which you fit together very much like blocks in the real world. Though this might sound limiting, it’s actually freeing for a child who is not ready to conceive of a program in a language, but can visualize it as blocks of activity. It correlates well with the way kids play with ideas.

Second, because Scratch is contained within this block world, it’s impossible for a child to run into the sorts of problems that the freedom of a programming language offers. An analogy is this: Your child wants to play. You could choose the construction site down the street, which would be very, very fun! However, it contains real tools that a child could cut her hand off with, and real girders above real concrete where she could fall. So instead, we create playgrounds which, if they are good ones, are both safe and offer activities that teach our children skills through play. Scratch is like the coolest safe playground on your computer.

Third, the biggest strength of Scratch is the wonderful, safe, online community. Our son loved posting his work and getting comments, and seeing the work that everyone else was doing. Programming is something that can tend to lead to lots of time in a dark room staring at a glowing screen. Scratch gets kids at least metaphorically out of that dark room so they can share with each other. If you live, as we do, in a community where there are few opportunities for young programmers to get together, the online Scratch community is very valuable.

My son says that the main drawback of Scratch is its limitation on creating new commands. He recommends that more advanced programmers should check out BYOB, an extension to Scratch that allows more creativity in programming. This is not, however, the version that new users should start with.

Our most recent discovery is Alice, a free environment offered by Carnegie Mellon. Alice is a very seductive environment for kids who are born storytellers. You start an Alice program by creating a “world” and populating it with characters and objects, all of which can be manipulated. If you’re looking to interest a child who isn’t naturally attracted to programming, Alice is a good place to start. It’s possible to create things in Alice without even knowing that you are programming!

Like Scratch, Alice is heavy on the need to read, but light on demands for typing skills. I am running a club for young Alice users, ranging from 7 to 11, and it’s fascinating to watch. I have fantasies of devising child psychology experiments using Alice, because kids love to play with it, but each of them plays differently. Some kids just love the silliness that can be created with clicks of the mouse. Some kids immediately want to tell a story. Others figure out pretty quickly that storytelling is only the beginning in Alice, and they can entice the viewer to interact with the story or play a game. Some of my kids are creating rich and varied worlds with little story at all.

I’ve noticed that kids who think of programming as a more serious pursuit might be tempted to think that Alice is an environment just for playing, but Alice is deceiving that way. After assuring me that Alice couldn’t possibly do the math that he was doing in a Scratch program, my son and I did a little research and found that Alice could, in fact, do the same thing. But a programming environment is a bit like a car: the type of car you’re in will inspire you to drive differently. Alice is certainly more playful and narrative than Scratch on its face, but Alice is deeper and offers more insight into how programming works once you graduate to a “real” programming language.

The Alice blog offers this post about the difference between Alice and Scratch. My experience bears out their points well: Scratch was really great for our son’s self-directed explorations. With Alice, the kids have needed a lot more guidance, but it seems like Alice offers a wider range of opportunities for stepping into the study of real-world programming (especially Java, which is its basis). We have only been using it a couple of months, and have hardly scratched the surface. It would be nice if there were a community analogous to Scratch’s community, but so far I haven’t found one (Alice’s online community is much more geared toward teachers).

In summary, I believe that kids wanting to program are offered a lot of great choices, and which you use depends on their needs and interests, as well as your ability to mentor them. All of the environments we’ve used allow kids to learn the basics of programming, so that if they continue to be interested once they get what programming really is, they’ll be set up with a solid foundation. (Some kids try out programming, and find out that even though they love to use software, creating it just isn’t their cup of tea!) Using visually based environments made especially for kids allows kids to explore in ways that will save them from the frustration and headaches of too many choices and too many demands they’re not ready for.

So if your child tells you they want to start by programming iPod app’s, you might want to offer them a period first of learning programming through tools that will help them understand what programming is. Just like a climbing wall is a better starting place to learn climbing than Half Dome, these environments can offer fun and learning that will spark creativity and well-developed logical and spacial reasoning abilities before your child goes on to the wild world of programming.

Note: See the comment below for links to Alice tutorials.

Running in a Race to Nowhere

The other night I joined a boisterous, energized crowd at the Rio Theater to see the second of two films about education making waves these days. (See my review of the first, Waiting for Superman. I’m going to attempt to avoid a compare/contrast of these two radically different films here; hopefully I’ll get to that soon.)

Race to Nowhere is tailor made for Santa Cruz. The audience loved it, alternately cheering and sighing (and sometimes a bit of crying) for kids suffering from the high stakes of our current educational system. You’d think that Race to Nowhere was just preaching to the choir in Santa Cruz, a city/county chock full of alternative educational opportunities. But the comment time afterwards made it clear that the film’s message is one we could pay a lot more attention to here.

Race to Nowherewas made by a mom, Vicki Abeles, whose daughter was hospitalized due to the stress of her middle school education. Abeles realized that her daughter’s experience was not only not unique, but that it was becoming more and more common. Faced with pressure to succeed from kindergarten or even before, kids are stressed out and anxious. But far from being stressed by an education that demands that they grow and learn, they are being stressed out by an education that constantly demands busy work with few real applications in their future lives.

The film is a low-budget affair, with bad lighting, inexpert camera work, and bare basics editing. But what it doesn’t have in fancy tricks is made up for by the overwhelming sincerity of the people who took part in this project. They didn’t just criticize our system, they poured their hearts out about their experiences in it.

Abeles develops her theme by first showing that our kids are stressed out, and that they don’t have to be. A generation ago, kids were taking home less homework, taking fewer tests, and worrying about college much later. In the last 20 years, our culture and our educational system have changed radically. Where homework once was used as a tool to help kids learn, now it’s used as a tool to punish kids and families by taking away their free time. Where kids once competed with each other for honors, kids now compete with a system designed to constantly cut them down. Where teachers once taught kids how to think, now they are forced to teach test-taking skills. Where kids once learned for life, now they learn for the test and nothing more.

Some of the most poignant aspects of the film for me:

A high school English teacher in East Oakland is shown being the brilliant teacher she clearly is. She inherits kids whose education has left them with few options. Instead of spending another year trying to get these kids to do better on tests, she spends that year inspiring them and teaching them to think for themselves. At the end of the film, she tearfully relates why she became a teacher… and why she is now quitting.

A mom whose teenage daughter committed suicide speaks, for the most part, calmly and with a challenging look at the camera. She knows that her daughter’s story is important. What we don’t know until the film advances is that her daughter’s story is also about how our culture has made getting good grades a life-and-death issue for some kids. This mom challenges us to reconsider our beliefs about teen suicide: her daughter didn’t show any warning signs. She didn’t have any obvious emotional problems. She didn’t run with a bad crowd. She was a normal, healthy girl who was driven to suicide by the pressure placed on her by school, college, and, her mother admits, her parents themselves. Late in the film, we see the mom interacting with her surviving son, and we hear her talking about how she has changed her parenting. She has learned a lesson in the way that none of us wants to have to learn.

The anecdote of a school where the principal read an anti-homework book and decided to try cutting out homework for a while. The parents and teachers liked it so much, they decided to cut out homework entirely. The result? Happier kids, families, and teachers, and no change in test scores. In fact, homework has no correlation with test scores.

I came into this film a member of the choir. In fact, many homeschoolers are part of the league of composers who have been composing for this choir for quite a while. For whatever reason, we took our kids out of school. And then we noticed some weird things:

Our kids were learning more.

Our families were happier and less stressed out.

Our kids (or the older homeschoolers we met) were doing just fine in college and in life, without tests and stress and piles and piles of homework!

But I thought that this film did an admirable job of presenting the facts clearly for those who have never even considered listening to this chorus of voices telling them that everything is being done backwards. In Santa Cruz, a hiss rose from the audience when George W. Bush was on the screen announcing what he hoped to achieve with No Child Left Behind. But we have to remember this: Most of the country, even liberals around this country, thought that NCLB would improve things. This was a bill co-authored by revered liberal politicians. The fact that the educational establishment largely predicted its ill effects on education aside, most people in this country applauded more testing, more focus, less fun.

If you’re one of those people, if you’re reading this and poo-poohing all I’m describing, you are the person who needs to see this film. Yes, it’s short on data. (Most films are.) Yes, it’s heavy on tear-jerking. But these tears are for real kids who suffered real abuse from our educational system. The overwhelming strength of this film is its emphasis on simple reality. No predictions are needed. Kids with less homework are happier kids. They learn just as well. Kids who go to OK colleges learn a lot and become productive members of society. We don’t all have to go to Harvard. If your kid fails algebra, it’s not the end of the world.

And if your kid gets a B in algebra, it shouldn’t be the end of her life.

The open comment time at the end showed just how much this film is needed even in alternative universes like Santa Cruz. The most powerful speakers were teens who got up and talked about the stress and competition at their schools. A graduate of Pacific Collegiate School (PCS) talked about how the teaching in this school that is regularly cited as “one of the best in the country” was geared to the test. He said that AP classes were shoved at students and it was just an exercise in memorizing information for tests. He talked about how many kids in his class dropped out due to the stress.

Ironically, this film was hosted by a number of local private schools, some of which are notable for their reputation for piling on huge amounts of homework. After the film, I heard a parent go up to one of the schools’ information tables and ask, with a twinkle in her eye, “So, you’re going to cut out homework at your school now, right?”

The mom manning the table simply rolled her eyes.

It’ll take more than a film to change our culture, but at least it’s a start.

Now available