"... our kids are growing up in a virtual Neverland: a place where they’re learning to navigate the world around them without the emotional and social experience of adults. It’s not because our kids have raced off to this mythical island to escape us; rather, it’s more like we’ve given them the island, but don’t know how to get there ourselves." Sarah Brown Wessling, excerpt from first article linked below
If you lived forever you would never have enough time to read all there is on the subject of technology. Some folks think it’s ruining our kids and our lives, others think the opposite but very few waffle in between without an opinion.
We have two Minecraft junkies in the house. We don’t have a problem with that. The kids know that when we say: "Okay, that's enough, you have five minutes to shut it down then we are going outside or to read/ to draw/ to play a game." they know not to whine or complain otherwise they won’t be allowed back into their favorite cyber world.
Recently my 10 year old had a social studies unit about natural resources and she told me she could see how what she was learning about the real world applied in Minecraft. She needed to collect coal to light her fires so she could cook her meat to get more energy reserves than she would if she ate it raw. If she had enough coal to keep her torches burning at night the zombies couldn’t come kill her. She had to dig deep into the ground to find water and coal and she had find sustainable resources to survive. Pretty cool if you ask me, nothing I did in school was relatable with Etch-a-Sketch and Slinky.
The iPod is their pen, Google is their library and social media is their new stomping grounds. In the same way we would learn Sign Language to communicate with our deaf child, we need to learn the language our techy kids talk or we leave leave them alone in a world they must navigate for themselves.
Learning about this stuff is sounds like a scary proposition but it’s not as hard as you may think and learning a little will go along way to understanding what your kids are doing and who they are doing it with. Or, if they are not online yet, it will make it much easier for you to allow them into traffic when the time comes - because, make no mistake, they will have to get into one day - with or without your help.
This morning my kids were talking and used the term “griefer” - I asked, they explained. A griefer is a person who causes problems in a game. I could have Googled it too.
When I was a teen I could have discussed buying, deseeding, rolling and smoking a bag of pot right in front of parents in terms they would not have understood. Had they been curious they had nowhere to go to find out about my lingo, man.
It's all there. You can poke around on your own, ask to watch they are doing, read about it. It doesn't have to be huge volumes of information but at least learn as much of their native tongue as you would learn Spanish to be able to order a beer in Mexico.
The more you know about all this, the less you will worry about your kids when they are on line. The more you can talk about it with them the less likely it is they will get into trouble out there.
Here is a good article to get you started. Parents Need to Step Up Their Tech Game
Here is a link to infographics, one of the quickest ways to get up to speed on a subject.
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