Bombarded with information – too little knowledge

Parents today are much better educated and many of them have had the opportunity to go to college and to do the things so there’s this kind of gap between them and their own parents and I think it is different. And they’re not going to take anything just a face value. They want to know what to do and how to do it and why you would do it. So while I think parents are the answer, it’s a whole different thing.

Things to think about

Who do you turn to when you have questions about parenting or teaching?
What conflicts do you often face when thinking of the young children in your life?
Do you agree with Bev’s assessment that parents in general have more education than they used to and that this causes them to question philosophies more?
How can you meet parents of this generation to provide them with the knowledge they are missing?

Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce

I guess I am stuck on the importance of attention. If you want to get fancy we can talk about mirror neurons synchronizing, not with nature but with technology. I prefer to keep it simple. We become what we give our attention to. On average, children ages two to five spend thirty-two hours a week in front of a screen. That is 5,000 hours invested, I say lost, between ages two and five. Today the average adult spends forty minutes a day on Facebook. More than a quarter (28 percent) of the average worker’s day is spent messing with emails. Researchers at Baylor University found that college age women spend ten hours a day on their phones. Men spend eight. Sixty percent admitted to being addicted (getting agitated when their phones weren’t in sight, and so on). Most time was spent texting, 94.6 minutes a day. Pinterest and Instagram are among the most addictive activities. What is Instagram? Hint! A very short attention span, bam, and on to the next thing. Another study, this time with high school students, found the more time young people spend with technology, the less able they are to read and respond to the facial expressions of others. They have less empathy, less connection while believing they are more connected. They are less present, less “real.” And the entire industry is based on addiction. Historically television ratings were based on the number of viewers. The more viewers, the more the program was worth. Video games are based on addiction. Social media is based on addiction, how many likes. But addiction to what? Virtual reality is literally dead.

The things that work for me, with my children, are very different than what these parents are faced with. It’s very different. They have been bombarded with so much information, not knowledge. They don’t have the knowledge about children that I had, that I brought to my children. They are scared. They’re frightened. They don’t know who to listen to. I didn’t think that my mother was the perfect parent but I certainly turned to her a lot. I notice that many of the parents at my school do not turn to their parents. That they are a little bit disbelieving and they’re discouraged and they think that their parents made some huge mistakes. So it is a whole, who are they going to turn to?

I think one of the things is that parents today are much better educated and many of them have had the opportunity to go to college and to do the things so there’s this kind of gap between them and their own parents and I think it is different. And they’re not going to take anything just a face value. They want to know what to do and how to do it and why you would do it. So while I think parents are the answer, it’s a whole different thing. I’ll tell you the parents meetings that we do now are so much different than the ones I did when I first started.