The Myth of Normal 160

Normal developmental tasks are to play with another person, not with an Xbox. Not to talk on a cell phone or text, but to make face-to-face interactions. All these things are neural exercises that provide resilience, creating an ability for an individual to regulate their internal emotional states.” To be up front: I think the influence of the digital/screen problem is almost unfathomably pernicious. In 2016 it was reported that British children ages five to fifteen years were spending three hours a day on the internet, and over two hours watching TV. By contrast, the time spent reading books for pleasure declined from an hour a day (as recently as 2012) to just over half an hour four years later.[16] The vast majority of “gaming” these days takes place alone in front of a screen, with pixelated avatars and disembodied voices standing in for actual playmates. Just what time does all that leave for free, creative, emergent, interactive, individual, or collective play? What kind of brains are we creating? The same question might be asked about the educational system. In 2016, an American professor and Fulbright scholar named William Doyle, just returned from a semester-long appointment at the University of Eastern Finland, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that for those five months, his family “experienced a stunningly stress-free, and stunningly good, school system.” His seven-year-old son was placed in the youngest class—not because of some developmental delay, but because children younger than seven “don’t receive formal academic training . . . Many are in day care and learn through play, songs, games and conversation.” Once in school, children get a mandated fifteen-minute outdoor recess break for every forty-five minutes of in-class instruction. The educational mantras Doyle remembers hearing the most while there: “‘Let children be children,’ ‘The work of a child is to play,’ and ‘Children learn best through play.’” And as far as outcomes go? Finland consistently ranks at or near the top of educational test score results in the Western world and has been ranked the most literate nation on Earth.[17] “The message that competition is appropriate, desirable, required, and even unavoidable is drummed into us from nursery school to graduate school; it is the subtext of every lesson,” writes educational consultant Alfie Kohn in