Why are the grown ups afraid of expose their kids to technology? We are facing the first generation of parents who grew up playing video games. And they do play until now. Today my husband said to my 4 years old daughter who was playing Rayman having a bad time with the boss: "I never asked my dad for help to kill a boss, I had to do it by myself!" And the games weren't any easier. We are the first generation who learned from the video games and computers. (I already wrote about it here.) And now, we are having kids and they are growing up with eletronics all around too. But not at school. There they find papers, paints, pencils, glues, rubbers... Curious stuff, funny, that's all. But it lasts for at least 12 years! And what do you really learn about pratical life? Not enough, that's for sure.
My 4 years old kid recognizes all the letters and a lot of brands since she was 2. Few months ago she had the "click" about how to combine letters to turn them into words by herself while playing a memory game on Ipad mixing pictures and words. We were working with her for months, fixing the possible connections between letters and the sound of them together, but it wasn't natural yet until that click. She saw "barco" (boat) and just read it. After that she realized what she did and tried again: "castor" (beaver). Ca... s... cas... to... r... Castor!! And now she is just reading everything. No school envolved, just her parents, two avaiable Ipads, computer, books and television.
We have a lot of games on our Ipads for the kids. My younger one is 2 years old and is going the same way his sister did. He already knows a lot of symbols, we refer to them by their names, like "press cancel button", "where's youtube", "go to the history button to find your movie". He can even remember the path he did to go to a movie linked 2 or 3 movies away using the navigational history. He knows we don't like some kinds of movies and he already identify a few by himself, changing to another one or, sometimes, turning the volume down... (sigh) The older one guides herself by the likes next the new videos while surfing youtube, so she can avoid the bad ones. We also teach them how to recognize fake dubbings and avoid videos with bad language or too much screaming. Besides youtube, we got coloring games, writing, dressing, cooking, racing, shooting, strategy, everything we can find they play. If they like, we keep or even buy the collection of games from that company, when they get tired from a game, we search for others.
Sometimes they get very interested in a difficult game that make them angry or frustrated. We give them opitions: keep trying by yourself, you'll die a lot, but eventually will learn how to play; or give it up and try again later, with a fresh mind. They usually keep trying and stop complainning so we don't make them go do something else. There are no forbidden games here, just games that need more help from us and others that don't need much help. The young one likes to spend time hunting zombies in the backyard. He likes to watch his dad playing rail shooters with zombie themes, or even see game traillers like zombie u on youtube. He was afraid at the begining, but we thaugh him how to "kill" the zombies and now he loves to go out on huntings everyday. He uses pillows as barricades and a brush or his fingers as gun to hunt them and hide behind the corners. Or sometimes he gets bitten and becomes the zombie himself and come after us to eat our belly.
The primary difference between our kids and us is that our parents barely knew the meaning of the expression "I'm fighting the boss, mom!". They wasn't there to help us. We can provide the instruments to our kids, we can provide meaning to what they are experiencing, we can give names to their ansieties and fears and help them to overcome it. Both of my kids are already learning english because of the games they play. We don't have to push them, they do it by themselves. We speak english fluently, watch a lot of english movies and they are growing in a bilingual enviroment. Plus, we don't make it easier or harder, we just take it naturally. We speak, they will aprehend when they are ready. But the most important is that e don't cut off explainations. We explain a lot. Every single thing. Why or how are the most commom questions them make. And if we don't know, we do researches on the net to find out. Always.
That's how we have two kids actively engaged on the literacy process before completing 2 years old, who don't fear zombies and knows how to select good stuff on youtube to watch. And I wrote all of this just to say: don't fear technology, learn it! Your kids can be a lot smarter if you have the right instruments and they are all out there to be found and well used. Our kids are not at school yet and both are learning naturally how to read, interpret and judge critically the information around them. We can't hide our kids from the world, but we can teach them how to be safe, if we know how to do it, of course. Don't think your kid is too young for this or that. Watch carefully and you will know how much your kid can handle. Just listen to them, give them the instruments and learn with them. We can build a much better world if we move from fear to curiosity and experience. Let the kids be curious and joy them on their trip around the world of knowledge. We all have a lot to learn from this. And trust me, we really need to learn a better way to raise our kids than the standard quickly, or our kids will do it without us as we had to do once. Not a big problem, we are all alive, but it's just funnier to do it together. Grow with your kid, you both won't regret it!
(Sorry about the bad english, I'll review it later!)
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