I’m a typical poor parent
May 30, 2012 1 Comment
The Times has an interesting article today on kids’ use of electonic gadgets. As I read it, the kids were playing away on the Ipads (Alex was actually at an educational site, but I don’t think he was interested in the education). Anyway, as to the headline:
In the 1990s, the term “digital divide” emerged to describe technology’s haves and have-nots. It inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families.
Those efforts have indeed shrunk the divide. But they have created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government now wants to fix.
As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.
This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.
Well, I guess I need to work on my ability to monitor.
About Steve Greene
Maybe the government should stop trying to “fix” these types of differences between groups of people. Such fixes won’t work, waste money, and set in motion a whole variety of unintended consequences that themselves becomes problems that will prompt calls for further government action. Rinse repeat.