Did you know that grade school age children who spend more time surfing the Internet report feeling less lonely?

Everyone goes through bouts of loneliness, and children have an even harder time of dealing with that because they have lower levels of autonomy and their well-being is directly related to their parents. It's not always easy to tell your parents that you might be dealing with troubles in school, or that you're having problems making or keeping friends.

In the dawn on commercial internet, a lot of parents were worried about internet predators. This fear was so significant that Dateline NBC created a hit show named "To Catch A Predator" in which they focused on apprehending adults who preyed sexually on teenagers. However, as time has gone on, this fear has been somewhat abated, being replaced by the real growing community of young people online. A 2009 article by Patti Valkenberg and Jochen Peter named "Social Consequences of the Internet for Adolescents" discusses how online relationships are much more likely for young people regardless of their social status offline. These relationships also tend to be with people their own age who they aren't able to reach geographically, and most importantly these relationships are stable. This kind of online interaction could be very important for teens who might be being persecuted offline for things like their sexual orientation, interests, or appearance. Having an online community can ward off mental illness and social alienation.

An article by Shen Caixia, Liu Rude, and Wang Dan at Beijing Normal University in 2013 also illustrates this. The study involved 637 children grades 3-6 and looked at personality in its' correlation with other factors like entertainment and information seeking. They found that children ultimately used the internet more when they were lonely, but that internet use also abated those feelings. 

The 2009 Valkenberg and Peter article also showed that having stable relationships promotes mental and physical well-being. By having these strong relationships, whether online or offline, children scored higher on "the five-item satisfaction-with-life scale developed by Diener, Emmons, Larsen, and Griffin (1985)." The big takeaways here are as follows: the internet is a huge place. Just because not-so-good things happen in some parts of it doesn't mean good things can't happen elsewhere. People meet on the internet all the time, and that doesn't devalue the status of their friendship. In-fact, online friendships can be more open because they are "low stakes" so to speak. If things go south with an internet friend, you can block them and move on. No awkward conversations at school or gossip. This means you can share more easily and freely, and there is not so much on the line. Stable online relationships can also lead to higher levels of mental and physical health, not to mention greater life satisfaction. Having internet friends can improve childhood development, and it's becoming an important part of internet use. 

Ok, you earned it. Click here for a Buzzfeed article entitled, "17 Stages Of Having An Internet Friendship". 

 

Did you know that children develop their reading skills just as well and sometimes better by using interactive, talking books, for example, off their iPads, as by working one-on-one with an adult tutor and paper copy books?

As we as a society have made the switch from printed word to digital books, the resistance has been intense. I myself have been one of the people thought of digital word as inferior; how could any iPad or Kindle replace the pure joy of turning a page or smelling the rustic woody smell of a book? Books are our history, so how could we possibly accept such a step down in terms of how we consumed knowledge?

While an iPad might not smell like a book, that doesn't mean it can't teach us the same things. In fact, reading on a digital device could actually teach us more through its' use of highlighting and hyperlinks. Have you ever been reading a fascinating book that you're captivated with, and then you stumble upon a word that you have no idea how to pronounce, let alone define? Then you're forced to stop, find a dictionary (or use Google, no shame), and define the word before you can proceed. This is an arduous process that can deter readers from finishing books, or even starting them. This is where iPad's come in: you can tap on the foreign word, define it right then and there, and continue in the story.

How does this help children's development, though? In a 2014 article named "Development of reading ability is facilitated by intensive exposure to a digital children's picture book" by Nobou Masataka, they investigate how audiovisual books on iPad's help children's reading skills. The study used 30 4-year old Japanese children; researchers tested the children's level of Japanese 'kana' characters (which are similar to our phonetic letters/words) before exposing them to the stimuli.



Children read a book on an iPad which was narrated by a voice actor, and when that part was being read, they text highlighted in red. They found that when the children were tested 4 weeks later they were still able to recognize the characters! The use of the iPad features actually gave the children a better way of learning language. Another 2005 study by Clare Wood named "Beginning readers' use of ‘talking books’ software can affect their reading strategies" showed the same effects in UK children. 

The use of technology is not new, and overall improves the state of childhood education. What should be the takeaway on an institutional and personal level? Institutionally, we should be investing more money and time in making sure children have one-on-one interaction and attention. iPad's are so useful because a teacher cannot tend to every child all the time. Equipping classrooms with iPad's would massively impact the learning environment. And where does this leave us personally? If your kid uses your iPad, phone, or computer, download some educational applications. They will keep your child busy and learning without them even realizing it!

http://hechingerreport.org/teaching-preschoolers-to-use-computers-along-with-their-parents/

These next few posts will be reviewing a series of points made in Professor Gernsbacher's video 'Internet and Development'.

"Did you know that toddlers learn new words just as well through conversations on Skype as through conversations in person (and much better than simply watching a passive video)?"

I found this point quite interesting, because I have heard the constant argument that the internet is ruining our language development. Isn't it true that the slang and textisms of today are the reason children no longer are creative writers? According to the 2014 article written by Roseberry, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff named "Skype Me! Socially Contingent Interactions Help Toddlers Learn Language.", the opposite is true

Although we don't completely know how language acquisition happens, we know that it happens due to social language interaction. As a matter of fact, people who hear language but don't have interactive experiences to enact that language will lose their chance to acquire language skills. One example of this is Genie the Wild Child, whose parents kept her locked up and didn't speak to her for nearing 12 years. by the time she was rescued, she had all but lost her abilities to learn new words and phrases. For this experiment, researchers drew on their knowledge of interactive word acquisition to complete their study. The experimenters took 36 toddlers aged 24-30 months and randomly sorted them into one of 3 categories: live-interaction learning, "yoked" learning (pre-recorded videos), and live video chat learning. They presented the babies with action verbs that they had never been introduced to to see if they would pay attention to the instructive adult, and if they would retain words. 

Babies in the live video chat condition did excellent; not only did they keep their eyes trained to the adult, but they managed to retain the words they were taught and start to use them in other forms and contexts! Video chat was an excellent mediator of learning. The important part was social contingency: babies needed to have an adult who gave them confident and immediate responses. So if you're out of town and you want to talk to your child over Skype, maybe read them a bed time story or try and teach them some new things, don't worry! It will be just like you're there. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jayneandd/4500700731/sizes/m/in/photostream/

What We've Gone Over Already

In this series of posts, we'll be looking into the information provided by my Psychology 532 class. I'm starting here because I want to be able to accurately cover the information I was given, decide which topics could be investigated further, and then move forward into looking at those topics.

I plan on analyzing the articles we had from our "Development and Aging" Unit and explaining the articles and their meanings. These articles contain empirically tested research, and have been reviewed by academic journals. Stay tuned for the upcoming posts! (transcript of the video 'The Internet and Development')