Being Sara

I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this yet anywhere in my blog, but Xander loves books. We have a stack of books that we keep in the living room, mostly on top of his toy storage shelves. Xander often picks up a book and comes to us with his arms up in what is easy for us to interpret - “read me this book”. I also have not documented Xander’s favorite books, and he’s got quite a few.Sometime around 9 or 10 months, Xander finally started expressing interest in books - we of course read to him since he came home from the hospital, but it took a while before we got any feedback that this was an enjoyable experience for him. When he was too little to get away, we could of course read to him, at least until he started fussing. As soon as he could wiggle, he would start wiggling almost as soon as we sat down to read. We never forced reading on him - we just always made it available, and kept trying routinely to read to him. At first he had little patience for more than a few pages at a time, but slowly he started to develop a preference for The Berenstain’s B book. We got it as a part of the Dr. Seuss book club. It was a pretty basic book - the first page said big brown, then the next said big brown bear, then big brown bear, blue bull, and the book went on like that - it was pretty easy to memorize and Xander loved it. He still wouldn’t sit through any of the other Seuss books though, and eventually we stopped trying for a while.For his first Christmas we bought him a set of beginner books by Sassy. They were plastic and foam, and great for chewing on, which he did frequently. Hello Bee, Hello Me was also an early favorite. That one was good because it was so easy to turn the pages Xander could do it himself - we often took that one on car trips with us.Now that Xander is perfectly capable of telling us what he likes and doesn’t like, he has developed an extensive list of favorite books, and we often read the whole stack before bed. His number one all time favorite book (for the moment) is Brown Bear, Brown Bear what do you see? by Bill Martin, Jr. and Eric Carle. His second favorite books seems a bit random - Auntie Jenny bought it for him for Christmas this year. It’s called A Hat for Minerva Louise by Janet Morgan Stoeke. Xander also loves Dinosaur’s Binket - he got this one from our friend Dan and his family for Christmas. Also making the list is One Hungry Monster (a counting book) that he got from his Uncle P.J. and Aunt Mandy, How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight (another Auntie Jenny find), and a very thick collection of Curious George stories from his Grandmother and Aunt Cait. He doesn’t really want us to read him the stories, he just wants to flip through the pages.I love that Xander is enjoying books - it’s something that Zach and I enjoy a great deal. I’m excited for him to start enjoying slightly more complex stories - I’d love to bring him to the library to pick out books, but we aren’t quite ready for that yet - he’s still just as likely to crumple and rip pages as he is to turn them at this point. We don’t have many paper books out for consumption at the moment, though they are starting to slowly filter their way into regular circulation. At any rate, I realized that I hadn’t yet documented any of Xander’s favorite books, and that is something I most definitely want to remember in the future.

Last week’s post generated some excellent discussion! I definitely agree with Chloe and Mary that everything in moderation seems to be the way to go. Too much of anything is generally a bad thing. That being said, Xander definitely doesn’t spend all of his time chasing electronics around the house. He plays with everything else you would expect a toddler to play with - balls, blocks, cars and trucks, action figures, chasing the cats, climbing on everything that will stand still long enough, and books. I’d like to think that we are doing the whole moderation thing well. But I still marvel at how things have changed so much from one generation to the next. I know my parents weren’t concerned about over-exposure to technology when I was a child. They didn’t have to worry about me playing too many video games, watching too much television (at least not until I was in elementary school), or getting exposed to the dangers of the internet.

Ben made several excellent points in his comment. I entirely agree that we need to be aware of how our children are using resources. It is so easy for predators. I know a 14-year-old girl who was lured by a predator to a city (he paid for her taxi while her mother was at work) to a hotel room. When he was done with her, he packed her back into a taxi and sent her back home. It was that easy for him.

I think we do need to be aware of the resources out there and how to use them. We need to have our own facebook and myspace accounts - if only to gain a little more insight into our children’s world. We need to understand social networking so that we can teach our children how to use it appropriately. I think it’s naive to believe that a child doesn’t participate in social networking just because they have limited access to the internet. It’s hard to find a teenager these days who doesn’t have an account to one of the social networking sites. Instead of burying our heads in the sand, we need to understand the powers of social networking, and set appropriate limits for our children.

Along with the most commonly thought of dangers in social networking comes a new age of bullying. Rumors can spread so much more quickly and easily. Reputations can be built and destroyed in a matter of seconds. The things that kids fearlessly write to one another online follow them to school the next day. I just finished reading a novel by Jodi Picoult called Nineteen Minutes - it’s all about a school shooting.  Although it’s fiction, the ways in which the shooter is bullied in school sound just like techniques any kid today could use - forwarding a personal email to the entire school, using text messages and instant messages to taunt and bully the boy, etc.  These are all things that parents need to know about, and I think that Ben is correct in saying that far too many parents prefer to see their straight A student, and happily ignore anything that doesn’t fit into this stereo-type. 

Thankfully, Xander has several years before we’ll have to address this issue. I can’t honestly say I know what we’ll do when we reach that bridge. Currently, we have 2 desktop computers in our house - one in our living room and one in our kitchen (I know the kitchen is a little weird - we use it to store recipes and to play music while we’re cooking/eating). I suspect that we’ll continue to keep computers in common living spaces, but perhaps we won’t allow them in bedrooms where we can’t see what is going on. Some parents keep their children’s login information so that they can access the account on a regular basis and make sure that nothing inappropriate is happening. Some parents talk to their kids about internet safety and trust their children to be responsible. I don’t know how we’ll address this issue - I think it will depend on what kind of kid Xander is and where social networking is at when he gets interested in it. Luckily, both Zach and I are involved in technology. I also work with college students who provide me with an excellent window into how they use social networking software. I hope that this knowledge will help us to educate Xander, and also be aware of his activities on line. If you have any thoughts or experiences with children and social networking software, I’d love to hear about them!

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Xander loves electronics. Any type of electronics. Cell phones, telephones, televisions, laptops, desktop computers, remote controls, etc. If it lights up and does something interesting, he wants it. It doesn’t matter that half of his toys light up, or that he’s got a respectable collection of old remote controls that don’t have batteries. Those are not interesting - not when there are laptops with so many buttons to push and cell phones with those itty bitty power buttons that need to be turned on. Sometimes I think there is some sort of magnet in Xander’s head that draws him toward LCD displays. This leads me to wonder if this is just a sign of the times. We have so many electronics in our house that of course Xander and every other child born after the year 2000 is completely comfortable with all of this technology. Or is it just Xander? Is this part of his personality? Either way, I worry that maybe too much technology will be too much of a good thing. Should we limit the amount of time Xander spends pushing buttons on the telephone or “playing” video games with Dad (he carries a spare controller around the house while Zach is playing)? Do we really want to fight those battles? There are already so many battles with a toddler, do we really want to add electronics to the list? Is it bad that he’s so enamored with technology?

Will he be too dependent on technology as he grows up, or will this be a lifestyle choice that will lead him to wealth and happiness? Maybe we should be encouraging his technology interests more - will he be able to keep up with emergent technology It’s so hard to know, and as with any parenting decision, I’m not sure we’ll know the ramifications of our decisions until much later in Xander’s life - if ever.

On a side note, Someone showed me this video the other day, which then started me thinking about all of these things in different ways, which then prompted me to blog about it.  It’s a very interesting commentary on technology and our children.

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