On the heels of yesterday’s blogue, I come back with another interesting point of view. It seems that some people in this world, mostly educators and child psychologists feel we are raising a bunch of nincompoops! According to a Newsday article, the kids today are growing up with push button technology, and electronic devices. According to one mother of a teenager, her daughter can’t use a can opener, as most cans come with pull-tops these days. If a can has no pull top, the girl slumps her shoulders and moves on.
“Second-graders who can't tie shoes or zip jackets. Four-year-olds in Pull-Ups diapers. Five-year-olds in strollers. Teens and preteens befuddled by can openers and ice-cube trays. College kids who've never done laundry, taken a bus alone or addressed an envelope.”
The use of cell phones and Google make it so that children no longer figure things out for themselves. Some teenagers and now soon to be adults, can't even write in script, they have to print!
Then there is the other extreme written by Newsday:
Lenore Skenazy, who writes a popular blog called Free-Range Kids, based on her book by the same name, has a different take.
Skenazy agrees that we are partly to blame for our children's apparent incompetence, starting when they are infants.
"There is an onslaught of stuff being sold to us from the second they come out of the womb trying to convince us that they are nincompoops," she said.
Despite all this, Skenazy thinks today's kids are way smarter than we give them credit for: "They know how to change a photo caption on a digital photo and send it to a friend. They never took typing but they can type faster than I can!"
3 comments:
We are most definitely in a transitional time. Kids today literally have one foot in each century. But I think that has probably been true in every generation.
ss-i-l
Kids today are much further along technologically than we ever were. What I think they lack is "street smarts", the skill set that you aquire from being out there with your friends day after day learning to get along with others, play fair, recognize what behaviors to stay away from, when to fight and when to run. They lead very sheltered lives, micromanaged by their parents and unused to fending for themselves. The world has definitely changed, and as a result kids get cheated out of learning to cope without mommy.
Reference above last sentence: why is it always the "mommy" who gets blamed for everything?
ss-i-l
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