A kids & tech letter 🕊

we love it, I think.

I thought a lot this year about the invitations and limits of technology for kids. I find so much of it exciting! Yet pitfalls and sabotages seem to be around every turn. It offers so much! And seems to take everything it can get. Some of the things on my mind: timing, devices, games, useful tools. I’m curious to know what you think about all this. Let’s dig in.

A Question of Timing

I recently listened to a podcast with the writer Jacki Hill Perry. The interviewer had teens, and Jacki has two young children. At one point the interviewer recommends to Jacki that she not allow children to have social media accounts until they turn 18. He points out that companies have designed their products to be addictive and to play with human endorphin responses. “You wouldn’t give a teenager addictive drugs, why would you invite them to use addictive technology?” was his question.

Naturally many parents in the last ten to fifteen years have had the same question, but their child’s peers, and culture in general, whisked past before logic might have a word edgewise.

It sounded like an extreme approach to me when I first listened to the podcast, but it became significantly less extreme after I heard to some of Frances Haugen’s testimony of the details Facebook knew about how cleverly addictive and factually damaging their products are. In particular as a mom of girls, the mention of the ads and accounts that appear once a user shows an interest in weight loss and weight control was terrifying.

It’s hard to imagine actually being the parent that bans all social media accounts though. And I do think online communities can offer unique connections for teenagers, particularly for niche interests and passions. I hope in the next few years more formats for engaging with peers online will appear, formats that are drastically less profit-driven. For example, I have seen basic messages boards (monitored by adults) work beautifully for our ten-year-old’s online classes. The 9-14 age range can be incredibly encouraging and enthusiastic in online communication, if monitored. I think of a response I saw on there recently. The question was, “What’s your favorite book?”

One thirteen-year-old boy responded,

“a seperate peace the five kingdoms series the giver quartet percy jackson the fablehaven series serafina and the black cloak the hatchet series the magisterium series wings of fire series a monster calls the three musketeers the count of mounte cristo the lord of the flies.... if you want some more i have to many.”

umm….goals.

It feels important to remember the scenario is always changing anyway. I expect an enticing VR world is just around the corner for our children—one can imagine a shared pet tiger that thirteen-year-olds take turns taking care of, playing with and feeding, chatting while they do. Sounds fun, honestly. Discerning and balancing these opportunities within a healthy lifestyle with lots of communication between you and your child is a huge parenting challenge of our time.

devices: Laptop // Phone

My youngest brother, ten years younger than me, is a gen Z-er with a sensitivity to the risks and banality of sharing on social media (my generation, by comparison, eagerly racing to engage as much as we could). He suggested to me skipping “the phone” altogether and giving laptops to our teens instead when the time comes. We are already on the Wait until 8th bandwagon, a collective opt-in for parents to agree not to give your child a smart phone until 8th grade. But I appreciated his point about laptop-engagement being a more open and productive approach within a household.

Perhaps for us it will a personal laptop at thirteen or fourteen, and a flip phone on the side for soccer pickup and check-ins.

games: Minecraft // Roblox 

Friends introduced Roblox this summer as a way to play together online, so that is happening two hours a week at our house. The kids’ ideal is to play Roblox with a facetime screen popped up alongside, so they are chatting with a friend and playing at the same time. Was my youth of talking on the phone for hours, gazing at the wall and winding my finger around the telephone cord (falling into gossip far too often), really superior to that in some way? I’m not going to try to argue that point. But…

The thing is—Minecraft is way better than Roblox for a lot of reasons. Minecraft is about building and using basic materials to create something wildly more imaginative than the materials with which you began. It’s freeform, a bit challenging, and a blank slate for creativity. Minecraft doesn’t punish you for only having a few minutes to play here and there. Finally, Minecraft doesn’t ever suggest you need to spend money to enjoy the game more.

So, how did Roblox, a pixel-wonky restrictive collection of anxious shopping sprees, pets, and repetitive jumping challenges, win the day? They made it easy to find your friends on there, and teleport to them. A child needs an adult to either make or find a safe server for them to play on in order to do this in Minecraft. Roblox requires zero setup. And unfortunately, I think Minecraft just sounds like a dark and scary old fashioned video game to some parents, so they are more skeptical of it when their kids ask if they can play it. One of my friends, knowing nothing about the game, remarked to me, “I draw the line at Minecraft.” Roblox, looking innocuous (and pink) slipped into the void, when it’s actually just an obnoxiously designed hyper-consumerist pit.

Paying a small monthly fee for a server where our kids and their friends can build together is a goal for Joe and me to roll out in January. I wish I had put in the time to figure it out four years ago when a cool homeschool friend at a woodworking class in Boston told me how fantastic she thought Minecraft was for kids.

🛠 For more about why Minecraft is a great game, read this article.

What’s Safe? 

👣 I found this overview of safe practices for minecraft, roblox, tiktok, et all to be helpful. A pdf produced by a Scottish Security department.

If you’ve seen something similarly comprehensive and helpful like this, send it to me, or share it in the comments.

Learning Tools

Ok, let’s talk about some of the fun education tech stuff from this past year!

+ In May’s newsletter I shared that our ten-year-old was very into the gamified study of Spanish on duolingo. She plays it for twenty minutes a day, about four times a week. In December, Duolingo popped up year-in-reviews for their users. She was very proud of her learning stats on there; she had memorized over 1000 vocabulary words this past year. I took a screenshot of the image and added that to a photo album that Joe and I share. This album is useful for pulling together what we accomplished this year, or reminding us of something fun and education that we did.

+ She is in her second year of online Latin class with Schole Academy, with a group of students scattered across the United States that now feel like friends to her. The Latin teacher has begun doing vocabulary reviews on Quizizz, rather than having the kids write up their flashcards at home. Quizizz also uses gamificiation to make the monotony of review more engaging…hey, maybe they’re on to something here!

+ This year she also began one-on-one coding classes. We love encouraging that language alongside other traditional language study. We use Code Combat; they paired her with a female undergraduate in computer science. They have an hour together, once a week, and seem to have a great time together while learning a lot. When we were researching programs IDTech also seemed to have a great tutoring program.

+ That is a number of things just for the oldest; when the next kid turns 9 next summer, she’ll begin doing many of the same weekly programs. Meanwhile, arts & crafts, audiobooks, and imagination games fill up her time.

+ Typing Club. I give this typing program a B-, I’d be open to finding a new one any time. I don’t like that they’ve arranged the statistics to make a kid feel like they’ve failed even when they’ve done a good job at the exercise. And I don’t like that the free version is absolutely inundated with distracting ads. But, helping the kids learn to touch type before they begin two-finger-pecking is important. This one is easy to pull up, relatively well designed, and free (until you can’t stand the ads anymore). The kids practice with it 2-3 times a week, for ten to fifteen minutes each time.

+ Starfall—I love this app for ages eight and under. So educational. It only works with wifi and requires a subscription, but it’s great.

Time for a Pancake Recipe

I’m loving this pancake recipe with simple proportions, it makes it easy to teach! My goal this month is to get at least two of the kids fluent in whipping up pancake batter. One can manage pouring some frozen berries into a pan, sprinkling a little sugar, and getting that bubbling over the stove for a berry syrup. Another can warm up syrup in the microwave, and another can set the table. It’s a lot to do, but it’s worth it.

One Stick of Butter Pancakes, by Ruth Reichl

1 stick butter
1 cup milk
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 cup flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
4 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt

Melt a stick of butter in a heavy skillet. Whisk together a cup of milk, 2 large eggs and a tablespoon of vegetable oil, then add the butter. Put the buttery skillet back on the burner, ready for the pancakes. 

Whisk the flour with the baking powder, sugar and salt. Whisk the mixture into the butter mixture, just until it’s combined. Don’t overmix. Allow to sit for a moment, then add enough milk to make it pourable.

Pour some batter into the skillet. The size is up to you; sometimes I make them tiny for children, sometimes I make them ludicrously large. Watch as the bubbles appear in the batter, grow larger, and then pop and vanish. When most have popped, carefully flip the pancake and cook the other side.  

Rush the pancakes to the table as each one is finished. You want them hot, sweet, salty and a little bit crisp. You want the memory to linger with your family as they move through their day.  

🛀 And, a quote I found just for you:

But if I could have, I would have styled the whole thing with cotton nightgowns. It is such a pleasure to be freshly bathed, in clean pajamas, book propped in front of you, and tucked in for bed on the early side. And if you have young children, even greater pleasure in tucking them in, clean and contained in their beds. All the hassles of the day can be left behind if they would just please God stay in their beds.

-Ann Mashburn