I just read this article in the New York Times about how flashy-spinny electronic do-dads marketed to parents of young children are taking off again.  The idea is that you can take a child’s plastic little brain and program it to be smarter from the get-go.

     The author pointed out that there is little research supporting this…and what little there is does not conclusively prove the issue one way or another.

     I myself don’t know much about brain development and intelligence (like most subjects, I had a class once in college)…but it doesn’t seem to me that any single item or group of items can affect “Intelligence” that much.  Perhaps one aspect of intelligence, but not all of the many heads of the IQ hydra.  For instance, there is some evidence that playing video games improves processing and assimilations speeds…allowing the children who grow up playing them to take in vast amounts of information, sift through it to find the relevant information, and formulate a quick response.  In particular, they appear to have a measurable positive impact on visual processing and kinesthetic response.

     Personally, I wonder if that’s why we have a whole generation of kids who can’t seem to “sit and listen”…but are uniquely primed to “see and do”.  It is also, in my semi-informed opinion, why we are having so much push from our schools to get kids on Ritalin.

     Hey, we have a system geared toward “shut up, listen, memorize and write” designed by and for people of the past who were more likely to be conditioned for that sort of behavior.  People who went to church, who as children were “seen and not heard”, who were constantly dragged along to town meetings and grown-up parties and expected to sit and listen and keep their mouths shut.

     The current educational model has memory and absorption as its base, and defers assimilation of information for the later grades.  So they throw all this information at students, expecting them to just remember it and figure out what to do with it later.

     And we have an increasing percentage of students who want a higher level of stimulation, are primed to sort out the relevant from the irrelevant, with the goal of processing and immediately acting on the relevant information.

     Now, picture them getting spoon-fed small, focused amounts of information with no context.

     All the “factoids” they are expected to know, without the framework of context appears to be irrelevant.

     Hence, it is possible to have incredibly intelligent children who are “bored” in school while at the same time not learning anything.

      There has been some improvement on this.  Our school district has a new math program that teaches “context”…in other words, mathematical thinking.  Its focus is on teaching “how math works”.  I kind of like it…except that the way they explain these math concepts is like baby talk, and not like math at all.  Which means that I don’t necessarily know from looking at the worksheets how to help my child if he has a question.  That’s incredibly frustrating.  Coupled with my Math anxiety, it’s not a good combination and so Rocky does the math stuff.

     The other thing is that they are REALLY light on the math facts and the computational drills and such.  So in fourth grade, Adventure Boy could tell you how to calculate how many gallons of water his bedroom would hold…but when it came time to do the math…he was counting on his fingers (they call it “skip counting” when it’s multiplication, and counting when it’s addition).

     There’s still work to be done, is what I’m saying.  We don’t even understand the effects that our changing world has had on our children’s brains…haven’t figured out how to educate brains that are faster, hungrier and different from any brains we’ve had to educate before.  Our best answer is medication…and now we have parents out there actively seeking (and spending tons of money) to have a powerful unproven and unpredictable effect on their children’s brains?

     Our world is changing, the stimuli-driven patterning that our infant’s brains undergo appears to be changing with it…so they can cope with the world they are living in.  Electronic do-dads are part of that.

     The basic brains are the same, but they are extremely plastic and how they work is programmed by their environment.

     It therefore makes sense to me that the wider variety of stimuli you give your kids at the earliest stages, the better.  And it seems to me that the best way to do that is to get them out of the living room and away from electronic artificial stimulation once in a while and out to see the world.

     But denying them similar experiences to their peers is also a problem because how do you get along in a world populated by people whose experience is so alien to your own?

     I was out at the mall one day with my kids, having lunch n the Food Court, and Adventure Boy and I were having this conversation:

AB (mock snotty):  “Mom, I read an article that said video games are educational, because they make your brain work faster.  So ha ha…now you have to let me play as much as I want.”

Me:  “Every experience is valuable, but you’re forgetting one thing.”

AB:  “What’s that?”

Me:  “Every hour you spend experiencing video games is an hour you’re NOT experiencing something else.  It’s like filling up on bad food and not having enough room for dinner.  The chocolate cake won’t kill you:  it’s the vegetables you’re NOT eating that are the problem.”

AB:  “Oh poop.” (shaking fist like a bad movie villain)  “Curse you for making sense.”

Maybe my friend Jen has some input on this, being the psychology student and all…but it just seems to me that the best way to make your child “smarter” is to provide a diverse and rich environment and then support, correct, and encourage your children’s interaction with it.

*Yes, Tony, I stole your "big throbbing brain" schtick... So sue me.  No wait, you can't...this is your attribution. I attributed it so it's not stealing.  So HA!