Posts Tagged ‘children’

Wired Wednesdays: Protecting Children from Device Addiction

Digital-Dependence-Parenting-for-Peace

Adoption Insight by Marcy Axness, PhD | Parenting for PeaceOf the many aspects of our digital dependence I’ve been writing about for over a year now, the most troubling by far is device addiction. The entire online machinery is designed to foster device addiction in us, and–more troubling–in our children, whose developing neural landscapes are more vulnerable to being fundamentally shaped by engineered device addiction.

If you’ve been following Wired Wednesdays, you already know this. But for folks who haven’t been looped in with me on that, I’ve put together a sort of Cliffs Notes blog post that pulls together threads from several installments over the past year.

I wrote it for New Earth Nation, where I’m on faculty in the School of Health & Wellness at their university. Ryan, the cool millennial who maintains the blog, included this message after he published it: “Yet another truth bomb from Dr. Marcy Axness! This one really caused me to look at my own device use and I’m already seeing a difference in my usage and self awareness around this. 🙂 Thank you so much.” (more…)

Digital Dependence: Is This Legislation a Solution?

Wired-Wednesdays | Marcy Axness, PhD | Parenting for Peace

Concern over the effects of digital dependence is clearly something you share with me if you’re following these posts. One of the most pressing of these concerns is how it impacts the rapidly-developing brain circuitry of children and adolescents, and can impair and rewire their capacities for social intelligence. (See 1st and 4th posts in the list below.)

Recently it was announced that an action group in Colorado is introducing an initiative to ban cell phone sales to children under the age of 13. (more…)

WIRED WEDNESDAYS: “Don’t Use Your Device When…”

TWO GREAT GUIDELINES FOR DIGITAL MASTERY

As with most of the principles and ideas in my book, these are oh-so-simple, but not always oh-so-easy!

1: Don’t Use Your Device While Doing Anything Else

To me this seems like a no-brainer, but that turns out to be a highly old-fashioned attitude. The very portability of our devices reinforces our digital dependence by eliminating virtually all barriers to their use–and voilá, a feed-forward loop that has established habitual multi-tasking device usage as the new normal in less than a decade.

Indeed, it wasn’t even ten years ago when you had to go to your desk… or at best to your laptop, sitting over there… to check your email, play solitaire or do that IMDb search. Doing those things was an activity in itself. (more…)