The Tech Talk. Michael Horne, PsyD

preschool years, there are a boatload of available apps, ranging from educational apps that focus on reading, writing, or math skills, to Montessori-inspired apps, to apps designed primarily to entertain through scavenger hunts, or by having kids create monsters with a program that allows them to piece together wacky faces using a mishmash collection of facial parts. Is the child able to take initiative in doing things on his own using a computer or tablet? Probably so, but there are other factors to consider when assessing the value of a given form of play.

       Good Play/Not-So-Good Play

      How children play matters. The actual act of playing with toys is a key part of emotional development for children. Virginia Axline, one of the original experts on play therapy, believed that “play is the child’s natural medium of self-expression.” Children work through concerns and problems using play. They grow and develop social skills using play. Children learn about consequences and cause and effect through play. The free-form ability to fully engage in imagination, playing out complex scenarios, allows children to learn about the world.

      Video games, even those with the most accessible digital worlds, are limited in their ability to match the free play of a group of five-year-olds. This holds true even for those “sandbox games” in which kids are free to interact with the world in whatever way they want, unconstrained by needing to do things in a specific way or order. Every video game starts out with a premise and a defined world in which to play. This is a space game. This is a racing game. This is a soldier game. But for children, the ability to fully create a fantasy world tailored specifically to the individual or the group only occurs in free-form play and cannot be replicated within the boundaries of a video game. Known therapeutically as “child-centered” or “non-directive” play therapy, just such free-form play is one of the best ways to help children process the events of their lives and to grow.

      In working with many children over the years, I have seen the power of play firsthand. I have seen children dealing with the trauma of a divorce or extreme anxiety heal and flourish using play therapy. But in recent years, I have also seen that children who spend a significant amount of time plugged into screens have a harder time engaging in play, therapeutic or otherwise. I believe this is because these children have not learned how to play, or at least have not learned how to play outside of the structured or semi-structured worlds inside their Xboxes.

      So for some children, an unstructured world can be overwhelming, especially if they mainly experience the structured world of preprogrammed software. Now, I’m not advocating that children run around like it’s a Lord of the Flies world. Structure is important. Children need structure and predictability to feel safe in the world. However, children also need the opportunity to explore freely in the real world and use their imaginations.

      When I was growing up, one of the best things in the world was having an oversized cardboard box. That box could be anything. Open side up? It’s a pirate ship! Open side down? A rocket to Mars! Open side on its side? A cave! With a few strategic cuts, I could open up windows and doors to make a house. If kids spend most of their time with screens, there is a real chance that they will miss out on an important stage of development: the ability to think creatively and to demonstrate the initiative to do things on their own, without needing to be guided by a preprogrammed narrative.

       God-Given Abilities

      By the time children reach school age (Erikson’s six- to eleven-year-olds), there is a normal developmental tendency for a child to base his worth on how he compares himself to others. If he sees himself doing well compared with his peers, he feels a growing sense of competence. But if he only sees himself struggling compared with his peers, he feels he is inferior to others. Obviously, not all children have the same skills and talents. Not every child will be good at using technology, just as not every child will be good at sports or good at art. God gives each of us different gifts.

      For example, I am not good at learning foreign languages. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, even though I did make it through grad school pretty well, and I can hold my own in most conversations. But I cannot learn French to save my life. From the time that I was five to the time I was nineteen, I took (or attempted to take) French eight times. Eight! I’ve never made it past beginning French. I kept getting shuffled along in the “French B” track in high school, because: 1) I needed three years of a language to graduate and 2) “God bless him, he’s trying.” “French B” was basically the “stupid but savable” track for foreign languages. We repeated beginning French every year. It was mostly songs and a continued inability to conjugate verbs. I can say two, maybe three sentences in French, one of which is “Je déteste le poisson!” which means “I hate fish!” and that’s not even true. In short, God did not give me the gift of learning French. My youngest brother, on the other hand, is fluent in three languages and conversational in a handful more, although he struggled in school as a child because of dyslexia.

      My point is that we don’t all have the same abilities, and neither do our children. But when certain activities and interests become extremely popular (such as video games), children can feel pressure to be good at them. A child can feel a sense of inferiority if he is the only person in his class not to be able to beat Level 27 of whatever game is popular at the time. This struggle for competence can also quickly become entangled with the popularity contests of school age children, in which today the number of social media “friends,” “followers,” or contacts becomes the litmus test for whether one is considered cool. Unfortunately, the modern obsession with Facebook “likes” and similar votes of confidence online has become practically institutionalized in society at large, affecting not only children, but adolescents and adults as well. The child who bases his self-worth on these factors, with limited opportunity for competency in real world skills, is being primed for a constant need for outside affirmation rather than a stable sense of self rooted in a deep understanding of her dignity and her experience of success in varied arenas.

      A child may be further impeded from fitting in or being “liked” if his family lacks the resources to provide him with the latest technology. In these situations, access itself can lead to a sense of inferiority. Children who don’t have access to the latest game or the latest device can begin to feel less than their peers if everyone around them is talking about a new game. But at $20 to $60 a pop, the latest game becomes expensive or even impossible for families who are struggling to make ends meet financially.

      For teenagers, Erikson recognizes the importance of developing a core identity. Children from twelve to eighteen years old are trying to figure out their place in the world. This sense of self doesn’t develop in a vacuum, but rather grows from the encounters they have had with others such as family members, friends, or anyone else they deal with in the course of their day — be it a surly teacher, a quirky next-door neighbor, or their boss at an after-school job. We all need to interact with other people if we want to understand how we fit in. Teenagers, who start off as awkward and gangly adolescents in junior high, grow in confidence as they learn how to interact with others, and real-world encounters are crucial to this development.

      Of course, there is a difference between being confident and reaching reasonable conclusions, but this might not be on the radar for most seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds. For example, my backup plan if I didn’t get into college was to be a pirate (I blame the cardboard boxes I mentioned earlier). Several friends and I, realizing that college was expensive, decided (prudently) that we didn’t want to waste money by going to college uncertain of what we wanted to do with our lives. I proposed that we (or our parents or whoever was going to help us pay for college) invest that money in a replica of a Spanish galleon, and we’d be good to go. We could gallivant around the Caribbean doing … well, we never got that far in the plan. So while we didn’t have a clear sense of what we wanted to major in, we were pretty confident that we knew who we were. Prospective pirates without a ship!

      What we were, in reality, was a bunch of guys who were anxious about the future and developed a funny way to deal with it. That became a form of identity, coping with worry through humor. We knew where we fit in to the world, or at least we were comfortable enough with ourselves that we didn’t take ourselves too seriously while we figured things out.

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