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Your Computer Doesn't Have Developmental Stages

October 15, 2012

Some of you may have caught this video when it first came around months ago. It’s a video of a baby trying ‘use’ a magazine as an ipad. The baby’s experience has been, simply put, ‘I do this, and this happens’. She expects the same experience with a magazine that she gets with the ipad: I swipe, it moves. If you were to search around the internet using the phrase ‘baby uses magazine as an ipad’, you would find quite a few blog entries discussing this video. They range from judgemental, to excitement about a young child using technology, to the opinion that this is a normal response for a young child, and not ‘ipad enduced’. So what thoughts do you have when you watch the video? You may find it hard to watch without judgement. Or not. You may start having a little internal argument with yourself, or with this child’s parents. Or, you may have negative thoughts about this youngster thumbing through Marie Claire magazine at her age. Whatever your reaction, it is very likely a conversation starter of some sort. What’s great about that is it opens the door for some exploration of technology/media and age-appropriateness. If you have a student in a Waldorf school, you’ve heard about technology and media use guidelines for students, and maybe you’re about to click out of this post. Over the past five years, the technology scene has changed rapidly as smart phones proliferate and ipads abound. It’s not just a game of minesweeper on your flip phone, it’s Angry Birds, complete with a marketing plan that includes stuffed characters available in stores. Is it ‘bad’? No. But in a Waldorf school, we can sometimes give and get the message that all technology is evil to be avoided. It used to be referred to primarily as ‘media’, and that meant movies, tv, and computer use. We can’t really call it ‘media’ these days, and I question whether we need to define ‘it’. I think a more complete approach is to focus on how children and their brains and bodies grow and develop and why certain activities are good for them at different stages. To do that, we as parents have to commit to informing ourselves about child development. More »