Check out a bit of this conversation between two doctors--you can watch the whole thing if you like, it will show even more clearly what is meant by the kinds of cognitive, communication, and character skills I'm talking about, but the part I'm interested in here is from around 50:00 to 56:00 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN5_af-_Xp0
Constructive boredom is essential to full development of cognitive abilities, as well as desirable character traits such as self-control, in humans. The U.S. is now going on two generations, a majority of whom, as children, have not had the opportunity to experience this and develop those abilities and traits.
They don’t know how to think; how to marshal their reason and work through problems and challenges to take considered action accordingly. They only know how to FEEL; to REact. This is certainly a major contributing factor to the violence we’ve seen recently on both “sides” of our political divisions. There is marching with facile slogans; that doesn’t yield instant gratification, so there is destruction and damage, strong-arming to attempt forced compliance with an “agenda” that is so without reasoning as to be undefined and therefore impossible to evaluate, let alone comply with, and then inevitable escalation to sieges, assaults and murders.
If we don't counter this trend, we're in real trouble as a society.
What's the counter? LET your children be bored; give them opportunity to learn to occupy themselves with real things in the real world (can I make my own musical instruments? can I build something with these cast-off items?), and even the opportunity, as both of these men say, to just sit with their own thoughts and learn HOW TO THINK--how to organize the random ideas flitting around in their heads into coherent streams. It is effortful and challenging: we actually need PRACTICE to learn to do that, and it does not happen while we are taking in all kinds of stimulation; it happens when we have quiet time on our own, without distractions. When they reach their limit interacting with the real world around them, give them a PRINTED BOOK, so they can see good models of how other people organize their thoughts, without the temptation to switch to an electronic distraction.
The one doctor describes how his family does this on one day of the week. Frankly, although that is certainly better than nothing, it does not amount to anything like the opportunities he had to learn to marshal his own personal resources. Good for him for making a move in the right direction; I encourage you to move even further.
The CDC recommends that children under the age of 2 have NO screen time whatsoever, and children older than that have quite limited and supervised screen time. If your reaction to that is "how could we possibly do that?" then you probably need to look at your own addiction to screen time first. Human children have been raised by actual interactions with actual other humans, and with the actual objects in the natural environment, as long as there have been humans. I contend that the less of our direct, undivided human attention we give them, and the less time and opportunity they have to learn and develop themselves by interacting with real-world objects and situations--especially in-person interactions with other humans--the less human they will grow to be.
Personally, I think that is a tragic outcome.
Choose the human.
