No Touching! (Except if it's an iPad)

“Look, but don’t touch.”  It’s a common refrain in outdoor education programs for today’s children, and—according to a recent New York Times blog post—it is creating a new generation of kids without much interest in nature. This summer, a slew of educators and commentators have expressed concern about the impact of this museum-style approach to nature. Time-honored childhood activities like digging holes and climbing trees are being replaced with a hands-off attitude meant to protect both the kids and the environment.  The trend widens an already growing chasm between young Homelanders and nature.  However, it also points to an even more fundamental trend: Today’s kids are devoting less time to tactile learning and play, both indoors and out, than any generation before them.

Almost from infancy, the Homelanders are spending an unprecedented amount of time interacting with the digital world, and less time interacting with the physical world.  Consider the video that recently went viral showing a one-year-old baffled by the pages of a magazine as she tries to use it like an iPad.  According to LMX Family data, parents are increasingly exposing their preschoolers to smartphones, tablets, laptops, and games, in part because the kids prefer these digital devices to traditional media and modes of play. Six- to twelve-year-olds now spend five hours a day consuming digital media.  According to another survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, kids ages 8-18 spend 7 hours and 38 minutes a day on media (and, by multitasking, they actually pack in 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of content). As numerous surveys have shown, all of that time spent in the digital world comes at the expense of physical, kinesthetic play.  Even old-fashioned physical toys are now integrating digital elements like smartphone apps to attract today’s digitally-minded kids.  From video games to toys to nature walks, physical play is taking a backseat. 

What does the trend away from tactile learning mean for the Homeland Generation in the long-term? As a 2011 Sesame Workshop report highlights, child development researchers are locked in an ongoing debate.  On the one hand, experts agree that infants and toddlers don’t learn well from digital media because they need direct experiences and interaction with people to develop cognitively.  Young children are primarily kinesthetic learners: They learn through touching, doing, and experiencing things. Some older children develop into auditory or visual learners, who can learn by watching and listening, but others retain the need to touch and do.  Some researchers believe that the lack of kinesthetic learning opportunities—both because of sedentary classroom teaching and digital media overload—is contributing to the rise in diagnoses of attention disorders like ADHD.

On the other hand, most experts concede that, at the right age and with the right content, digital media can help children’s development.  As a 2008 Princeton-Brookings report explains, studies show that children older than three can benefit from electronic media that uses specific educational strategies like repetition, capturing attention with sights and sounds, and using child voices for the characters.  (However, more is not necessarily better; achievement seems to peak with one to two hours of daily educational programming and then declines with heavier use.)  A number of researchers have found that TV, video games, and other virtual media dramatically improve certain cognitive abilities both for children and for adults. Steven Johnson, author of the 2005 book Everything Bad is Good for You, argues that we can thank digital media for the rise in IQ scores in recent decades (a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect).

Overall, there is a general consensus that the rise of the digital over the physical is fundamentally shifting this generation’s mental skill set, increasing certain types of intelligence while decreasing others.  High-tech, low-touch Homelanders will probably be better than their predecessors at visual and spatial skills, multitasking, and pattern recognition—skills honed by video games, Google searches, and complex TV plotlines.  But they are likely to be worse at the in-depth critical thinking and analysis that comes with long-form reading and writing.  And fewer opportunities for kinesthetic learning may leave some learners with attention problems and achievement deficits. 

Clearly, balance is key.  A judicious mixture of the digital and the real, with carefully chosen media content, can help the next generation of children develop both the new skills and the old.  Efforts in this direction are already underway.  For example, toy makers like Mattel are working hard to make toys that incorporate digital elements that enhance rather than replace physical play—like pushing a toy car on the floor that engages with a virtual game course on an iPad.  Creative combinations of digital and real experiences are also emerging in brands that serve adults, from high-tech NFL stadiums to virtual fitting rooms in clothing stores. 

Most parents seem to agree that balance is critical.  Even the anti-technology Waldorf parents agree that some contact with technology is useful for their children, and even the Everything Bad is Good for You devotees know that some limits should be set.    

Unfortunately, children from poorer families often don’t get this balance.  They are the most likely to experience a digital overload at the expense of physical play and learning. In what has come to be known as the “reverse digital divide,” socioeconomically disadvantaged kids now spend more time on digital entertainment than do their more advantaged peers. Kids from poor families also tend to have less parental monitoring, so their digital activities are less constructive and educational—a phenomenon The New York Times recently dubbed “the time-wasting gap.”  One thing is clear; the uneasy balance between physical and digital will be one of the great struggles of the next generation.

About the author

Neil Howe is the founder and president of Life Course Associates. This article was originally published as part of his newsletter