David Elkind, a professor emeritus of child development at Tufts University, wrote a succinct response to the fact that some of our country’s schools are using “recess coaches” to help teach kids to play during their time away from the classroom. Because many schools are dropping recess in favor of more academic time and because children often favor gazing at computers and TVs over goofing around with siblings or friends, our kids are losing the benefits of unstructured time. Elkind believes that recess coaches might be more freeing than intrusive when they force children to play rather than sit around during class breaks. He wants to see kids get the advantages that come from being imaginative with one another, running around for exercise, and socializing (such as solving problems — he finds a correlation between a lack of knowing how to play with others and more bullying among peers).
Elkind does not condemn or deny the reality of changing times. He writes, “We have to adapt to childhood as it is today, not as we knew it or would like it to be. The question isn’t whether recess coaches are good or bad — they seem to be with us to stay — but whether they help students form the age-old bonds of childhood. To the extent that the coaches focus on play, give children freedom of choice about what they want to do, and stay out of the way as much as possible, they are likely a good influence…In any case, recess coaching is a vastly better solution than eliminating recess in favor of more academics.”
What do you think? Right now, I’m going to turn off the TV (which often entertains my boys while I write this blog) to kick off a game of hide-and-seek. It’s a small effort, and I’ll lean on electronics again (not always for worse), but I do think there are lots of things we can do as our children’s personal “recess coaches.”
With its candy-colored emoticon graphics and remarkable ease of use, FaceChipz ™ serves as a holiday gift that will outlast most of the presents parents might buy. This is because it offers something its grown-up counterpart, Facebook, cannot — a community made of kids with abundant safety features and no chance kids can wander to inappropriate pages or have inappropriate adults trying to log on to their profiles. Because of this, it allows kids to be children and parents to breath easier if they are concerned (and there’s plenty of reason to be worried) that Facebook is just not safe enough — even with some decent protective layers that parents can use — for their sophisticated grade-schooler, tween, or teen.
The FaceChipz ™ team has collected every safey certification imaginable (including the Socially Safe Seal of approval). And collecting is a key mechanism for the social networking site. Here’s how it works: Once a child signs up for FaceChipz ™ with a parent (both must have logins), the child can set up a page at which the kid can chat, play games, get e-mail, share pictures, etc. To get a friend to join, the child must purchase and register the code of a FaceChip, which looks like a poker chip only cuter. Then, the child can deliver or send the chip to a friend, who also registers the chip. In this way, only a child given a physical chip by another child can be a friend on FaceChipz ™. This kind of safety does have a price, albeit a small one, as the FaceChipz cost $7.99 for a pack of 5. But the concept is ingenius because it incorporates kids’ love of collecting with high-end Web technology. You can also earn points with the FaceChipz ™ with which kids can buy stuff on the Web site.
This really is a terrific invention that is already growing quickly and will continue to evolve to keep up with kids’ demands. As a sort of a bridge between Club Penguin and Facebook, it makes a safe home (kids can even block members who are mean to them) in a world of social networking that is a staple of contemporary children’s lives. It’s an indoor activity worth checking out, particularly with the extra time many of us will have over the holidays and the cold winter months.
I’ve just begun contributing articles to Glubble, a nifty new online activity center that helps families safely play and communicate together on the Internet. The center, which is free to join, focuses on families with children under 12 and provides them with a secure environment to browse a wide range of other preapproved Web sites, to chat online. It has features to help you share photos, organize schedules, and play games. It’s a bit like social networking with your family because you can invite relatives from anywhere in the world onto your family page.
The news section is just getting started but already has parenting advice from Linsey Knerl and Sarah Newton as well as my articles, which will be posted several times a month. Glubble has also partnered with Highlights for Children magazine, Sittercity.com babysitting service, and Yahoo! Kids. Take Glubble for a spin and let me know what you think.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is coming out strong in an effort to more effectively protect our children from the harms of advertising (http://www.aap.org/advocacy/releases/dec06advertising.htm). Referencing the estimate that children view up to 40,000 ads per year — seen on everything from TV and billboards to the Internet and school bathroom stalls – the AAP worries that the exposure may lead to more problems with obesity, substance abuse, and poor nutrition.
The group has many ideas, including political advocacy to curb the advertising that reaches our kids. But the most important recommendation is to make our children more “media literate” to understand the messages being sent to them. I think media literacy is a great tactic because it accepts the reality of agressive advertising and suggests fighting back with education. Other than the excellent idea of turning off the TV more often, we must make our kids aware of what they’re seeing during normal children’s programming (all of those sugared-cereal ads!) and sports programming (how do commercials about erectile dysfunction affect them?). We should explain to our kids that some ads are fun to watch but the advertisers really want us to buy their products, even if they can be bad for our health.
To teach them more organically, it would be an interesting experiment to videotape your own commercial with your kids and ask them what their message and end goal are for that video. When possible, we may also want to use digital video recorders and teach our young ones to skip over the commercials while watching them via these recorders.
