Child's Play
I have a statement to make. I'm generally a very laid back person, but sometimes things bother me. I'm going to tell you about what is bothering me right now. I'm not just bothered but I'm also concerned.
I know the very least I could possibly know about children, and most of me doesn't want to know any more than I already do know. I don't have any younger siblings and I don't really spend that much time around kids. But what I do know is a little bit of psychology, and from what I know things don't look particularly well for this current generation of young children.
We are all quite familiar with the notion that children are born quite creative but lose most of their creativity growing older (possibly due to school). There are countless experiments that have confirmed this. Kids are generally quite good at divergent thinking, which is generally the "process of generating multiple related ideas for a given topic or solutions to a problem." As a person gets older this ability decreases, which might have a little to do with standardized testing and there being only one correct answer in most questions you're asked to solve in school. Now schooling probably does stifle a child's ability to think in this way, but that is not the subject of my matter right now, so you'd probably have to do your own googling if you want to know more about that.
Little children are very curious about their surroundings and are very exploratory. A baby has no idea what your phone is, and thus puts it in his mouth to try to figure out whether it is edible (I'm can't get into a child's head to confirm this statement but I'm sure the child is curious about your phone). This sort of behavior encourages divergent thinking. However, soon enough the child starts understanding language and can speak a handful of words. Then the child is burdened with orders of what to do and what not to do, kind of hindering the exploration the child wants to do on his own (I think this is the perfect explanation for why kids are constantly throwing tantrums). Even better, the child start going to school and is then spoon fed the things he'd much rather be finding out on his own. The child is left little room to think of things on his own, he's left no room to be creative with his thought.
It seems clear to me that if you want to nurture a child's creative right brain, then it's best to start at the earliest stage of life as possible. In any case, a person's most important years of life are the first six. The first six years are the ones where a child's personality forms and when neuron connections are formed in the brain. It is much harder to teach a child something afterwards because it will not be permanently wired into the child's brain, as it would be if taught early in life. But what does the current generation of young children spend their time doing?
They spend it playing with their iPads.
Go back to your own early childhood. You probably played with dolls (or cut up their hair and clothes like I did), played with little toy cars, built sand castles and houses made of lego bricks, among other things. Most importantly, you probably played pretend quite a lot. I honestly miss playing with my toy cashier and all those plastic fruits and vegetables I kept forcing my parents to buy. All these things encourage divergent thinking. The following video is an excellent example of what divergent thinking can do (if you haven't seen it already).
But this generation of kids? All I see them carrying are iPads. I personally have not spotted a doll in quite a while, I'm not sure all my little cousins own half the number of toy cars I once did, and I surely haven't accidentally stepped on a piece of lego in a very long time. I don't think I'd have forgotten it if I had. Do kids even own crayons these days?
As an ex-gamer, you can take my word for it when I say that computer games are the worst thing you can let a child play with. They are made by programmers, and they've probably programmed it so that there's one way to progress to the next level. There are a set of rules and a specific way to control the game, the rest is pretty much mindless (they don't really make strategy games for babies). I don't know about you, but I always got frustrated when I'm supposed to be climbing a mountain and the game wouldn't let me cross the bridge nearby it. Game developers don't really have time to design infinite worlds for you to explore, so there's only one path to follow. You can see this probably works in the opposite direction of what divergent thinking is all about.
As toddlers, we couldn't play with computer games because things were too complicated for us to comprehend, but with Apple's iPad that became a thing of the past and brought forth this new dilemma. I'm sure that in a divergent thinking test such as "How many uses can you think of for a spoon?" these kids would score lower than past generations of kids, or those who don't spend their time playing computer games, would score (an average adult would think of 10 but a child good at divergent thinking should be able to find around 100). Plenty of data is probably available for use in previous research papers so maybe someone should go ahead and test my hypothesis.
In any case, please keep your children or your young siblings or any other children you know from their iPads. Buy them some blocks of lego instead. It's for the best.
I know the very least I could possibly know about children, and most of me doesn't want to know any more than I already do know. I don't have any younger siblings and I don't really spend that much time around kids. But what I do know is a little bit of psychology, and from what I know things don't look particularly well for this current generation of young children.
We are all quite familiar with the notion that children are born quite creative but lose most of their creativity growing older (possibly due to school). There are countless experiments that have confirmed this. Kids are generally quite good at divergent thinking, which is generally the "process of generating multiple related ideas for a given topic or solutions to a problem." As a person gets older this ability decreases, which might have a little to do with standardized testing and there being only one correct answer in most questions you're asked to solve in school. Now schooling probably does stifle a child's ability to think in this way, but that is not the subject of my matter right now, so you'd probably have to do your own googling if you want to know more about that.
Little children are very curious about their surroundings and are very exploratory. A baby has no idea what your phone is, and thus puts it in his mouth to try to figure out whether it is edible (I'm can't get into a child's head to confirm this statement but I'm sure the child is curious about your phone). This sort of behavior encourages divergent thinking. However, soon enough the child starts understanding language and can speak a handful of words. Then the child is burdened with orders of what to do and what not to do, kind of hindering the exploration the child wants to do on his own (I think this is the perfect explanation for why kids are constantly throwing tantrums). Even better, the child start going to school and is then spoon fed the things he'd much rather be finding out on his own. The child is left little room to think of things on his own, he's left no room to be creative with his thought.
It seems clear to me that if you want to nurture a child's creative right brain, then it's best to start at the earliest stage of life as possible. In any case, a person's most important years of life are the first six. The first six years are the ones where a child's personality forms and when neuron connections are formed in the brain. It is much harder to teach a child something afterwards because it will not be permanently wired into the child's brain, as it would be if taught early in life. But what does the current generation of young children spend their time doing?
They spend it playing with their iPads.
Go back to your own early childhood. You probably played with dolls (or cut up their hair and clothes like I did), played with little toy cars, built sand castles and houses made of lego bricks, among other things. Most importantly, you probably played pretend quite a lot. I honestly miss playing with my toy cashier and all those plastic fruits and vegetables I kept forcing my parents to buy. All these things encourage divergent thinking. The following video is an excellent example of what divergent thinking can do (if you haven't seen it already).
But this generation of kids? All I see them carrying are iPads. I personally have not spotted a doll in quite a while, I'm not sure all my little cousins own half the number of toy cars I once did, and I surely haven't accidentally stepped on a piece of lego in a very long time. I don't think I'd have forgotten it if I had. Do kids even own crayons these days?
As an ex-gamer, you can take my word for it when I say that computer games are the worst thing you can let a child play with. They are made by programmers, and they've probably programmed it so that there's one way to progress to the next level. There are a set of rules and a specific way to control the game, the rest is pretty much mindless (they don't really make strategy games for babies). I don't know about you, but I always got frustrated when I'm supposed to be climbing a mountain and the game wouldn't let me cross the bridge nearby it. Game developers don't really have time to design infinite worlds for you to explore, so there's only one path to follow. You can see this probably works in the opposite direction of what divergent thinking is all about.
As toddlers, we couldn't play with computer games because things were too complicated for us to comprehend, but with Apple's iPad that became a thing of the past and brought forth this new dilemma. I'm sure that in a divergent thinking test such as "How many uses can you think of for a spoon?" these kids would score lower than past generations of kids, or those who don't spend their time playing computer games, would score (an average adult would think of 10 but a child good at divergent thinking should be able to find around 100). Plenty of data is probably available for use in previous research papers so maybe someone should go ahead and test my hypothesis.
In any case, please keep your children or your young siblings or any other children you know from their iPads. Buy them some blocks of lego instead. It's for the best.
I love the way you think, mashallah. A fascinating hypothesis I would say, very convincing and sadly... very true.
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