Tech and Toddlers

Alright, I have to jump in now. Particularly as I definitely have a dog in this fight (disturbing as that metaphor is).

As evidenced by the fact that I'm currently on my laptop blogging (as I listen to a podcast playing Just A Minute from BBC's Radio 4), I'm definitely in the camp of people who have a positive attitude towards technology. I have a laptop, we have a desktop, I have a smartphone, and at Christmas we bought a tablet. And guess what? Horror of horrors, I let my 2 1/2-year-old son play with some of these things. He watches Toy Story and Cars on our home computers, I've loaded up episodes of Sarah & Duck on long car trips when Ethan gets bored and irritable, and he has his own user on the tablet to play puzzle games.

So, when I saw this nonsense on the Huffington Post, I had to take a look. To be frank: it's scaremongering. It's reactionary, misleading, and - while well-intentioned - not helpful. I seriously side-eye anyone whose academic rigor is so lacking that they can reductively blame modern technology use, wholesale, for delayed development, epidemic obesity, sleep deprivation, and mental illness. All of those things are much more complex issues than Cris Rowan made them sound in her article. Not to mention, she didn't even make a good case for a causal relationship between heightened technology use by children and any of these conditions. Thankfully, the HuffPo gave airtime to another article which addressed a lot of these points. (Incidentally, most of their rebuttals boil down to Rowan's repeated confusion of correlation and causation and ignoring third-party issues in order to make a stronger case.)

To indulge in a bit of anecdotal evidence: I remember as a kid when we got our first PC. It was a Commodore 64, and I must have been about 6 years old when my dad first set it up on our first floor landing outside of my parents' bedroom. A short time later - after a few games of Jet Boot Jack - the Commodore died and we got a Compaq Presario. My sister and I played all sorts of games on it (including my favourite PC game ever), most of which - if I'm being fair - weren't overtly educational. Sure, I learned how to type properly with that computer: I learned to use the Microsoft Office Suite back when most computers still ran Windows 3.1 (feel old yet?). I learned how to surf the internet and use a search engine on that computer, but mostly it felt like a toy. When I was 14 or 15, my grandfather bought me a Gateway and I did my summer AP assignments on it. I learned to navigate the infancy of social media: chat rooms, MySpace, and AIM. I never realised until later that my years of typing, chatting, surfing, pointing, and clicking had given me useful skills for the workplace and for keeping up meaningful relationships with friends and family half a world away.

And yet, I still got outside, climbed trees, rode bikes, rollerbladed around the car park pretending to be a drive-thru waitress with my best friend, held footraces down our close, and developed the best pitching arm of all the kids on our street...even including the boys in little league. While I never got to keep my tech in my room (beyond my stereo, that is), I never had restrictions on its usage. My mother saw me use it for play and for school. I still did my homework, practised my music, and kept up a healthy social life.

I expect that my boys will be able to do the same. Sure, they're much more inundated with advanced electronics and technology from an earlier age than I was, but that doesn't automatically mean that they're doomed to be obese, lethargic, attention deficit, violent addicts. To suggest a ban on these technologies is irresponsible. Does my son need his own tablet? No. He's two. That's why he only has occasional use of the family device. But should I be restricting all watching of Disney DVDs and CBeebies on iPlayer? No. He needs to be taught responsible consumption of media from an early age. Being allowed small portions of fun things - while it may bring on tantrums when it's time to put toys or tablet away - will help him to mature and learn. He'll learn what my rules are. He'll learn that every activity has its place. He'll learn that throwing a tantrum won't get him what he wants and that disappointment is a part of life that we all deal with.

But do you know what else my sons will learn from being trained on technology from a young age? They'll learn how to do research; something that their historian mother knows is an invaluable skill for school, university, and life beyond. They'll learn STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, maths). With a mechanical engineer for a father - someone who is himself a STEM ambassador at work - we'd be remiss if we kept them from being able to easily develop the sort of skills my husband uses every day in his job. They'll be technologically literate, which is so important; but here's the thing: it won't be at the sacrifice of their social, emotional, physical, or mental development.

Unless you want to move onto a commune or join an Amish community, there's little escape from technology these days. Yes: it's always good to take the time to unplug and unwind, but an outright ban just tilts the ship too far in the other direction. For every stereotype of children using smartphones at the dinner table, or parents distractedly yelling at children while playing Angry Birds or checking Facebook, or overweight children parked on the sofa with cheese puffs and Call of Duty, there are responsible people. People who teach their children limits, as well as technological prowess. Who see smartphones, iPods, tablets, and PCs for what they ought to be: tools to navigate life in the modern world rather than crutches or babysitters.

The real key is to teach balance. To teach healthy respect for handheld tech as a tool: something that makes our lives easier...not something that is our life. Rowan's ostrich-like attitude, her reactionary totalitarian tactic - the ban - isn't helping anyone. It's not helping the children who need to be exposed to technology to learn how to navigate the world around them, and it's not helping the adults who need to be taught healthy limits and self-regulation. And if we're saying that these people who use the TV to babysit their children, or who can't tear themselves away from Candy Crush Saga long enough to be an engaged parent are exactly the reason Rowan calls for a ban, then guess what? Big Brother hand-holding, draconian restrictions, and fearmongering aren't the way to improve them as people.

Of course there will always be people who have the requisite personality and skills to overcome a generational divide in technology adoption, but why bet on your child having the ability to jump an unnecessary hurdle? Teach computer skills and responsible media consumption in the same way that you teach them how to read, how to share, or how to show good manners: early and often.

Some Thoughts on Vaccinations

In general over the past few years, and more frequently in recent weeks, I've seen plenty of articles in my Twitter and Facebook feeds about various facets of the anti-vaccination campaign and its consequences; it's proponents, detractors, and controversies. Now, considering that I took my lovely 9-week old boy to get his first round of vaccinations earlier this week at our GP's office, it's pretty damn obvious where I stand in regards to all this nonsense. But, without name-calling or vitriol, I want to spell out my position and the reasons behind it.

To start with a fairly inflammatory statement on purpose: if your kids aren't vaccinated, don't expect them to play with my boys. This has nothing to do with me crucifying your character based on one decision you make for your family. I'm a parent too: I get the very natural impulse to reduce risk for your children. You love them. You want the best for them. But here's the thing: the diseases we're vaccinating against are so much worse than the temporary discomfort of an injection, a slight post-immunisation fever, or the slim possibility of complications. We as a society have lost sight of just how awful diseases like mumps, measles, and rubella are precisely because we've been so effectively protected against them for so long by vaccines and the resultant herd immunity they give us.

If your kid is one of the few who is likely to suffer ill effects, by all means, take the advice of people who have been trained in this understanding of the world around us and skip the vaccines. But for those who are simply exercising their right to disagree & do their own poor research...I'm not exposing my kids to the risk of disease because you want to conscientiously object to science. Thanks. It's a bit like a seatbelt, in my opinion: you put it on every time and hope against hope that you never experience a car crash where you need to use it. Likewise, I vaccinate my sons and hope that their immunity is never tested by being exposed to someone who actually carries polio or rubella.

I'm not going to enumerate all of the science behind the vaccine debate: other people have done that far better than me - among them Dr. Steven Novella - and so I'd just pass their work along for reference.

NESS - Vaccines Don't Cause Autism

Neurologica: Vaccine Denial Pseudoscience

The Guardian - False Balance

Wikipedia: Vaccine Controversy

Wall Street Journal: Doctors 'Fire' Vaccine Refusers

So yes: a few of the articles I've linked to will resort to words like 'wing-nut' or 'nut job' or 'loon'. Despite their (to me) understandable, but unfortunate choice of words, I think the points still stand.

But why, you may be asking, aren't there any good sources on anti-vaccination? Why nothing from the Natural News or a health & wellness site? Well, for the simple reason that not all evidence is created equal. I'd like to refer to the brilliantly concise site Your Logical Fallacy Is... to pinpoint just some of the problems I often see with the anti-vax argument:

False Cause: otherwise known as "correlation doesn't equal causation", this conflates two independent phenomena. Just because the noticeable signs of autism coincide with the current vaccination schedule, it doesn't mean vaccines cause autism.

Straw Man: misrepresenting one person's argument to make it easier to argue against. This one tends to take the form of a misunderstanding of scientific principles.

Bandwagoning: or the appeal to popularity. In the anti-vaccination articles I've read, this tends to work in the opposite form. It's not your usual, Nancy Reagan style peer pressure scenario: "everyone's doing it, Dave...", but rather: "don't be sheeple! Follow the evidence! If all your friends pumped scary-sounding chemicals and viruses into their children, would you do it, too?" The popularity, or lack of it, for any given position is not a reliable indicator of its truthfulness or validity. The one place where this tends to hold some water, however, is in the consensus opinion of experts in a field. With the caveat that our understanding can always be improved or deepened, if a group of people with in-depth knowledge and extensive study of a subject come to an overwhelmingly similar conclusion, it's not bad practise to give some weight to their collective understanding of reality. (And for the record, 'in-depth knowledge and extensive study' does not mean 4 hours with Dr. Google.)

Genetic Fallacy: assuming something is good or bad depending on who said it. While this happens on both sides - discrediting a given article based on where it appeared (like the Natural News) - it often happens when anti-vaxxers decry any claims made by "science" or "the medical industry" as if these were monolithic entities who all speak with some sort of hive consciousness like a bad sci-fi movie. All claims need to be taken into consideration on the merit of what they say, not just who said them. That said, you should probably trust the word of a medical doctor above my own in a discussion about how the body reacts to vaccines, because biochemistry, immunology, and pharmacology aren't subjects I know anything about. I can armchair diagnose until the cows come home, but it's not my area of expertise. On the other hand, if you want an opinion on Regency fashion and neo-Classicism, you're better off talking to me than, say, the Surgeon General.

There are plenty of other logical fallacies evident on both sides of the debate, but in the end, I'll stick with the overwhelming body of evidence that vaccines do what they say they will and protect us from what were once devastating diseases. I will accept the fact that just because something sounds scary and convoluted and unpronounceable doesn't mean that it's harmful...it's irresponsible of me to require the world to fit into my limited understanding. The better proposition by far is to expand my understanding to encompass the intricacies of the world around me.

To use a good-old-fashioned cliche, "no man is an island, entire of itself". Vaccination isn't just a choice you make for your own family like whether to shop organic or join little league or attend Mass. It's a public health issue, and while I'm far from advocating an Orwellian compulsory vaccination program, credible research and scientific reality shouldn't bend to misinformation, fearmongering, and indignant and misleading rhetoric about rights. Rights aren't the issue here: health and safety are.

As the old saying goes, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions". And I have no doubt that most parents in the anti-vaccination movement have the best of intentions; but when we're dealing with the health of our children, intentions don't count nearly as much as results. And when the result is a resurgence of horrible and preventable diseases, we need to seriously consider where good intentions have led us.