2013.04 触摸屏幕的一代

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TECHNOLOGY
The Touch-Screen Generation
Young children—even toddlers—are spending more and more time with digital technology. What will it mean for their development?

By Hanna Rosin

Erin Patrice O’Brien
APRIL 2013 ISSUE

on a chilly day last spring, a few dozen developers of children’s apps for phones and tablets gathered at an old beach resort in Monterey, California, to show off their games. One developer, a self-described “visionary for puzzles” who looked like a skateboarder-recently-turned-dad, displayed a jacked-up, interactive game called Puzzingo, intended for toddlers and inspired by his own son’s desire to build and smash. Two 30‑something women were eagerly seeking feedback for an app called Knock Knock Family, aimed at 1-to-4-year-olds. “We want to make sure it’s easy enough for babies to understand,” one explained.

The gathering was organized by Warren Buckleitner, a longtime reviewer of interactive children’s media who likes to bring together developers, researchers, and interest groups—and often plenty of kids, some still in diapers. It went by the Harry Potter–ish name Dust or Magic, and was held in a drafty old stone-and-wood hall barely a mile from the sea, the kind of place where Bathilda Bagshot might retire after packing up her wand. Buckleitner spent the breaks testing whether his own remote-control helicopter could reach the hall’s second story, while various children who had come with their parents looked up in awe and delight. But mostly they looked down, at the iPads and other tablets displayed around the hall like so many open boxes of candy. I walked around and talked with developers, and several paraphrased a famous saying of Maria Montessori’s, a quote imported to ennoble a touch-screen age when very young kids, who once could be counted on only to chew on a square of aluminum, are now engaging with it in increasingly sophisticated ways: “The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence.”


What, really, would Maria Montessori have made of this scene? The 30 or so children here were not down at the shore poking their fingers in the sand or running them along mossy stones or digging for hermit crabs. Instead they were all inside, alone or in groups of two or three, their faces a few inches from a screen, their hands doing things Montessori surely did not imagine. A couple of 3-year-old girls were leaning against a pair of French doors, reading an interactive story called Ten Giggly Gorillas and fighting over which ape to tickle next. A boy in a nearby corner had turned his fingertip into a red marker to draw an ugly picture of his older brother. On an old oak table at the front of the room, a giant stuffed Angry Bird beckoned the children to come and test out tablets loaded with dozens of new apps. Some of the chairs had pillows strapped to them, since an 18-month-old might not otherwise be able to reach the table, though she’d know how to swipe once she did.

Not that long ago, there was only the television, which theoretically could be kept in the parents’ bedroom or locked behind a cabinet. Now there are smartphones and iPads, which wash up in the domestic clutter alongside keys and gum and stray hair ties. “Mom, everyone has technology but me!” my 4-year-old son sometimes wails. And why shouldn’t he feel entitled? In the same span of time it took him to learn how to say that sentence, thousands of kids’ apps have been developed—the majority aimed at preschoolers like him. To us (his parents, I mean), American childhood has undergone a somewhat alarming transformation in a very short time. But to him, it has always been possible to do so many things with the swipe of a finger, to have hundreds of games packed into a gadget the same size as Goodnight Moon.

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In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy on very young children and media. In 1999, the group had discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for “direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers.” The updated report began by acknowledging that things had changed significantly since then. In 2006, 90 percent of parents said that their children younger than 2 consumed some form of electronic media. Nonetheless, the group took largely the same approach it did in 1999, uniformly discouraging passive media use, on any type of screen, for these kids. (For older children, the academy noted, “high-quality programs” could have “educational benefits.”) The 2011 report mentioned “smart cell phone” and “new screen” technologies, but did not address interactive apps. Nor did it broach the possibility that has likely occurred to those 90 percent of American parents, queasy though they might be: that some good might come from those little swiping fingers.

I had come to the developers’ conference partly because I hoped that this particular set of parents, enthusiastic as they were about interactive media, might help me out of this conundrum, that they might offer some guiding principle for American parents who are clearly never going to meet the academy’s ideals, and at some level do not want to. Perhaps this group would be able to articulate some benefits of the new technology that the more cautious pediatricians weren’t ready to address. I nurtured this hope until about lunchtime, when the developers gathering in the dining hall ceased being visionaries and reverted to being ordinary parents, trying to settle their toddlers in high chairs and get them to eat something besides bread.

I fell into conversation with a woman who had helped develop Montessori Letter Sounds, an app that teaches preschoolers the Montessori methods of spelling.

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She was a former Montessori teacher and a mother of four. I myself have three children who are all fans of the touch screen. What games did her kids like to play?, I asked, hoping for suggestions I could take home.

“They don’t play all that much.”

Really? Why not?

“Because I don’t allow it. We have a rule of no screen time during the week,” unless it’s clearly educational.

No screen time? None at all? That seems at the outer edge of restrictive, even by the standards of my overcontrolling parenting set.

“On the weekends, they can play. I give them a limit of half an hour and then stop. Enough. It can be too addictive, too stimulating for the brain.”

Her answer so surprised me that I decided to ask some of the other developers who were also parents what their domestic ground rules for screen time were. One said only on airplanes and long car rides. Another said Wednesdays and weekends, for half an hour. The most permissive said half an hour a day, which was about my rule at home. At one point I sat with one of the biggest developers of e-book apps for kids, and his family. The toddler was starting to fuss in her high chair, so the mom did what many of us have done at that moment—stuck an iPad in front of her and played a short movie so everyone else could enjoy their lunch. When she saw me watching, she gave me the universal tense look of mothers who feel they are being judged. “At home,” she assured me, “I only let her watch movies in Spanish.”

By their pinched reactions, these parents illuminated for me the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children. Technological competence and sophistication have not, for parents, translated into comfort and ease. They have merely created yet another sphere that parents feel they have to navigate in exactly the right way. On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them. Parents end up treating tablets like precision surgical instruments, gadgets that might perform miracles for their child’s IQ and help him win some nifty robotics competition—but only if they are used just so. Otherwise, their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who can’t make eye contact and has an avatar for a girlfriend.

Norman Rockwell never painted Boy Swiping Finger on Screen, and our own vision of a perfect childhood has never adjusted to accommodate that now-common tableau. Add to that our modern fear that every parenting decision may have lasting consequences—that every minute of enrichment lost or mindless entertainment indulged will add up to some permanent handicap in the future—and you have deep guilt and confusion. To date, no body of research has definitively proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust her neural circuitry—the device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So what’s a parent to do?

In 2001, the education and technology writer Marc Prensky popularized the term digital natives to describe the first generations of children growing up fluent in the language of computers, video games, and other technologies. (The rest of us are digital immigrants, struggling to understand.) This term took on a whole new significance in April 2010, when the iPad was released. iPhones had already been tempting young children, but the screens were a little small for pudgy toddler hands to navigate with ease and accuracy. Plus, parents tended to be more possessive of their phones, hiding them in pockets or purses. The iPad was big and bright, and a case could be made that it belonged to the family. Researchers who study children’s media immediately recognized it as a game changer.

Previously, young children had to be shown by their parents how to use a mouse or a remote, and the connection between what they were doing with their hand and what was happening on the screen took some time to grasp. But with the iPad, the connection is obvious, even to toddlers. Touch technology follows the same logic as shaking a rattle or knocking down a pile of blocks: the child swipes, and something immediately happens. A “rattle on steroids,” is what Buckleitner calls it. “All of a sudden a finger could move a bus or smush an insect or turn into a big wet gloopy paintbrush.” To a toddler, this is less magic than intuition. At a very young age, children become capable of what the psychologist Jerome Bruner called “enactive representation”; they classify objects in the world not by using words or symbols but by making gestures—say, holding an imaginary cup to their lips to signify that they want a drink. Their hands are a natural extension of their thoughts.

Norman Rockwell never painted Boy Swiping Finger on Screen, and our own vision of a perfect childhood has never adjusted to fit that now-common tableau.
I have two older children who fit the early idea of a digital native—they learned how to use a mouse or a keyboard with some help from their parents and were well into school before they felt comfortable with a device in their lap. (Now, of course, at ages 9 and 12, they can create a Web site in the time it takes me to slice an onion.) My youngest child is a whole different story. He was not yet 2 when the iPad was released. As soon as he got his hands on it, he located the Talking Baby Hippo app that one of my older children had downloaded. The little purple hippo repeats whatever you say in his own squeaky voice, and responds to other cues. My son said his name (“Giddy!”); Baby Hippo repeated it back. Gideon poked Baby Hippo; Baby Hippo laughed. Over and over, it was funny every time. Pretty soon he discovered other apps. Old MacDonald, by Duck Duck Moose, was a favorite. At first he would get frustrated trying to zoom between screens, or not knowing what to do when a message popped up. But after about two weeks, he figured all that out. I must admit, it was eerie to see a child still in diapers so competent and intent, as if he were forecasting his own adulthood. Technically I was the owner of the iPad, but in some ontological way it felt much more his than mine.

Without seeming to think much about it or resolve how they felt, parents began giving their devices over to their children to mollify, pacify, or otherwise entertain them. By 2010, two-thirds of children ages 4 to 7 had used an iPhone, according to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which studies children’s media. The vast majority of those phones had been lent by a family member; the center’s researchers labeled this the “pass-back effect,” a name that captures well the reluctant zone between denying and giving.

The market immediately picked up on the pass-back effect, and the opportunities it presented. In 2008, when Apple opened up its App Store, the games started arriving at the rate of dozens a day, thousands a year. For the first 23 years of his career, Buckleitner had tried to be comprehensive and cover every children’s game in his publication, Children’s Technology Review. Now, by Buckleitner’s loose count, more than 40,000 kids’ games are available on iTunes, plus thousands more on Google Play. In the iTunes “Education” category, the majority of the top-selling apps target preschool or elementary-age children. By age 3, Gideon would go to preschool and tune in to what was cool in toddler world, then come home, locate the iPad, drop it in my lap, and ask for certain games by their approximate description: “Tea? Spill?” (That’s Toca Tea Party.)

As these delights and diversions for young children have proliferated, the pass-back has become more uncomfortable, even unsustainable, for many parents:

He’d gone to this state where you’d call his name and he wouldn’t respond to it, or you could snap your fingers in front of his face …
But, you know, we ended up actually taking the iPad away for—from him largely because, you know, this example, this thing we were talking about, about zoning out. Now, he would do that, and my wife and I would stare at him and think, Oh my God, his brain is going to turn to mush and come oozing out of his ears. And it concerned us a bit.
This is Ben Worthen, a Wall Street Journal reporter, explaining recently to NPR’s Diane Rehm why he took the iPad away from his son, even though it was the only thing that could hold the boy’s attention for long periods, and it seemed to be sparking an interest in numbers and letters. Most parents can sympathize with the disturbing sight of a toddler, who five minutes earlier had been jumping off the couch, now subdued and staring at a screen, seemingly hypnotized. In the somewhat alarmist Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think—and What We Can Do About It, author Jane Healy even gives the phenomenon a name, the “ ‘zombie’ effect,” and raises the possibility that television might “suppress mental activity by putting viewers in a trance.”

Ever since viewing screens entered the home, many observers have worried that they put our brains into a stupor. An early strain of research claimed that when we watch television, our brains mostly exhibit slow alpha waves—indicating a low level of arousal, similar to when we are daydreaming. These findings have been largely discarded by the scientific community, but the myth persists that watching television is the mental equivalent of, as one Web site put it, “staring at a blank wall.” These common metaphors are misleading, argues Heather Kirkorian, who studies media and attention at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A more accurate point of comparison for a TV viewer’s physiological state would be that of someone deep in a book, says Kirkorian, because during both activities we are still, undistracted, and mentally active.

Because interactive media are so new, most of the existing research looks at children and television. By now, “there is universal agreement that by at least age 2 and a half, children are very cognitively active when they are watching TV,” says Dan Anderson, a children’s-media expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In the 1980s, Anderson put the zombie theory to the test, by subjecting roughly 100 children to a form of TV hell. He showed a group of children ages 2 to 5 a scrambled version of Sesame Street: he pieced together scenes in random order, and had the characters speak backwards or in Greek. Then he spliced the doctored segments with unedited ones and noted how well the kids paid attention. The children looked away much more frequently during the scrambled parts of the show, and some complained that the TV was broken. Anderson later repeated the experiment with babies ages 6 months to 24 months, using Teletubbies. Once again he had the characters speak backwards and chopped the action sequences into a nonsensical order—showing, say, one of the Teletubbies catching a ball and then, after that, another one throwing it. The 6- and 12-month-olds seemed unable to tell the difference, but by 18 months the babies started looking away, and by 24 months they were turned off by programming that did not make sense.

Anderson’s series of experiments provided the first clue that even very young children can be discriminating viewers—that they are not in fact brain-dead, but rather work hard to make sense of what they see and turn it into a coherent narrative that reflects what they already know of the world. Now, 30 years later, we understand that children “can make a lot of inferences and process the information,” says Anderson. “And they can learn a lot, both positive and negative.” Researchers never abandoned the idea that parental interaction is critical for the development of very young children. But they started to see TV watching in shades of gray. If a child never interacts with adults and always watches TV, well, that is a problem. But if a child is watching TV instead of, say, playing with toys, then that is a tougher comparison, because TV, in the right circumstances, has something to offer.

How do small children actually experience electronic media, and what does that experience do to their development? Since the ’80s, researchers have spent more and more time consulting with television programmers to study and shape TV content. By tracking children’s reactions, they have identified certain rules that promote engagement: stories have to be linear and easy to follow, cuts and time lapses have to be used very sparingly, and language has to be pared down and repeated. A perfect example of a well-engineered show is Nick Jr.’s Blue’s Clues, which aired from 1996 to 2006. Each episode features Steve (or Joe, in later seasons) and Blue, a cartoon puppy, solving a mystery. Steve talks slowly and simply; he repeats words and then writes them down in his handy-dandy notebook. There are almost no cuts or unexplained gaps in time. The great innovation of Blue’s Clues is something called the “pause.” Steve asks a question and then pauses for about five seconds to let the viewer shout out an answer. Small children feel much more engaged and invested when they think they have a role to play, when they believe they are actually helping Steve and Blue piece together the clues. A longitudinal study of children older than 2 and a half showed that the ones who watched Blue’s Clues made measurably larger gains in flexible thinking and problem solving over two years of watching the show.

For toddlers, however, the situation seems slightly different. Children younger than 2 and a half exhibit what researchers call a “video deficit.” This means that they have a much easier time processing information delivered by a real person than by a person on videotape. In one series of studies, conducted by Georgene Troseth, a developmental psychologist at Vanderbilt University, children watched on a live video monitor as a person in the next room hid a stuffed dog. Others watched the exact same scene unfold directly, through a window between the rooms. The children were then unleashed into the room to find the toy. Almost all the kids who viewed the hiding through the window found the toy, but the ones who watched on the monitor had a much harder time.

A natural assumption is that toddlers are not yet cognitively equipped to handle symbolic representation. (I remember my older son, when he was 3, asking me if he could go into the TV and pet Blue.) But there is another way to interpret this particular phase of development. Toddlers are skilled at seeking out what researchers call “socially relevant information.” They tune in to people and situations that help them make a coherent narrative of the world around them. In the real world, fresh grass smells and popcorn tumbles and grown-ups smile at you or say something back when you ask them a question. On TV, nothing like that happens. A TV is static and lacks one of the most important things to toddlers, which is a “two-way exchange of information,” argues Troseth.

A few years after the original puppy-hiding experiment, in 2004, Troseth reran it, only she changed a few things. She turned the puppy into a stuffed Piglet (from the Winnie the Pooh stories). More important, she made the video demonstration explicitly interactive. Toddlers and their parents came into a room where they could see a person—the researcher—on a monitor. The researcher was in the room where Piglet would be hidden, and could in turn see the children on a monitor. Before hiding Piglet, the researcher effectively engaged the children in a form of media training. She asked them questions about their siblings, pets, and toys. She played Simon Says with them and invited them to sing popular songs with her. She told them to look for a sticker under a chair in their room. She gave them the distinct impression that she—this person on the screen—could interact with them, and that what she had to say was relevant to the world they lived in. Then the researcher told the children she was going to hide the toy and, after she did so, came back on the screen to instruct them where to find it. That exchange was enough to nearly erase the video deficit. The majority of the toddlers who participated in the live video demonstration found the toy.

Blue’s Clues was on the right track. The pause could trick children into thinking that Steve was responsive to them. But the holy grail would be creating a scenario in which the guy on the screen did actually respond—in which the toddler did something and the character reliably jumped or laughed or started to dance or talk back.

Like, for example, when Gideon said “Giddy” and Talking Baby Hippo said “Giddy” back, without fail, every time. That kind of contingent interaction (I do something, you respond) is what captivates a toddler and can be a significant source of learning for even very young children—learning that researchers hope the children can carry into the real world. It’s not exactly the ideal social partner the American Academy of Pediatrics craves. It’s certainly not a parent or caregiver. But it’s as good an approximation as we’ve ever come up with on a screen, and it’s why children’s-media researchers are so excited about the iPad’s potential.

a couple researchers from the Children’s Media Center at Georgetown University show up at my house, carrying an iPad wrapped in a bright-orange case, the better to tempt Gideon with. They are here at the behest of Sandra Calvert, the center’s director, to conduct one of several ongoing studies on toddlers and iPads. Gideon is one of their research subjects. This study is designed to test whether a child is more likely to learn when the information he hears comes from a beloved and trusted source. The researchers put the iPad on a kitchen chair; Gideon immediately notices it, turns it on, and looks for his favorite app. They point him to the one they have invented for the experiment, and he dutifully opens it with his finger.

Onto the screen comes a floppy kangaroo-like puppet, introduced as “DoDo.” He is a nobody in the child universe, the puppet equivalent of some random guy on late-night public-access TV. Gideon barely acknowledges him. Then the narrator introduces Elmo. “Hi,” says Elmo, waving. Gideon says hi and waves back.

An image pops up on the screen, and the narrator asks, “What is this?” (It’s a banana.)

“This is a banana,” says DoDo.

“This is a grape,” says Elmo.

I smile with the inner glow of a mother who knows her child is about to impress a couple strangers. My little darling knows what a banana is. Of course he does! Gideon presses on Elmo. (The narrator says, “No, not Elmo. Try again.”) As far as I know, he’s never watched Sesame Street, never loved an Elmo doll or even coveted one at the toy store. Nonetheless, he is tuned in to the signals of toddler world and, apparently, has somehow figured out that Elmo is a supreme moral authority. His relationship with Elmo is more important to him than what he knows to be the truth. On and on the game goes, and sometimes Gideon picks Elmo even when Elmo says an orange is a pear. Later, when the characters both give made-up names for exotic fruits that few children would know by their real name, Gideon keeps doubling down on Elmo, even though DoDo has been more reliable.

By age 3, Gideon would tune in to what was cool in toddler world, then drop the iPad in my lap and ask for certain games by their approximate description.

As it happens, Gideon was not in the majority. This summer, Calvert and her team will release the results of their study, which show that most of the time, children around age 32 months go with the character who is telling the truth, whether it’s Elmo or DoDo—and quickly come to trust the one who’s been more accurate when the children don’t already know the answer. But Calvert says this merely suggests that toddlers have become even more savvy users of technology than we had imagined. She had been working off attachment theory, and thought toddlers might value an emotional bond over the correct answer. But her guess is that something about tapping the screen, about getting feedback and being corrected in real time, is itself instructive, and enables the toddlers to absorb information accurately, regardless of its source.

Calvert takes a balanced view of technology: she works in an office surrounded by hardcover books, and she sometimes edits her drafts with pen and paper. But she is very interested in how the iPad can reach children even before they’re old enough to access these traditional media.

“People say we are experimenting with our children,” she told me. “But from my perspective, it’s already happened, and there’s no way to turn it back. Children’s lives are filled with media at younger and younger ages, and we need to take advantage of what these technologies have to offer. I’m not a Pollyanna. I’m pretty much a realist. I look at what kids are doing and try to figure out how to make the best of it.”


Despite the participation of Elmo, Calvert’s research is designed to answer a series of very responsible, high-minded questions: Can toddlers learn from iPads? Can they transfer what they learn to the real world? What effect does interactivity have on learning? What role do familiar characters play in children’s learning from iPads? All worthy questions, and important, but also all considered entirely from an adult’s point of view. The reason many kids’ apps are grouped under “Education” in the iTunes store, I suspect, is to assuage parents’ guilt (though I also suspect that in the long run, all those “educational” apps merely perpetuate our neurotic relationship with technology, by reinforcing the idea that they must be sorted vigilantly into “good” or “bad”). If small children had more input, many “Education” apps would logically fall under a category called “Kids” or “Kids’ Games.” And many more of the games would probably look something like the apps designed by a Swedish game studio named Toca Boca.

The founders, Emil Ovemar and Björn Jeffery, work for Bonnier, a Swedish media company. Ovemar, an interactive-design expert, describes himself as someone who never grew up. He is still interested in superheroes, Legos, and animated movies, and says he would rather play stuck-on-an-island with his two kids and their cousins than talk to almost any adult. Jeffery is the company’s strategist and front man; I first met him at the conference in California, where he was handing out little temporary tattoos of the Toca Boca logo, a mouth open and grinning, showing off rainbow-colored teeth.


In late 2010, Ovemar and Jeffery began working on a new digital project for Bonnier, and they came up with the idea of entering the app market for kids. Ovemar began by looking into the apps available at the time. Most of them were disappointingly “instructive,” he found—“drag the butterfly into the net, that sort of thing. They were missing creativity and imagination.” Hunting for inspiration, he came upon Frank and Theresa Caplan’s 1973 book The Power of Play, a quote from which he later e-mailed to me:

What is it that often puts the B student ahead of the A student in adult life, especially in business and creative professions? Certainly it is more than verbal skill. To create, one must have a sense of adventure and playfulness. One needs toughness to experiment and hazard the risk of failure. One has to be strong enough to start all over again if need be and alert enough to learn from whatever happens. One needs a strong ego to be propelled forward in one’s drive toward an untried goal. Above all, one has to possess the ability to play!
Ovemar and Jeffery hunted down toy catalogs from as early as the 1950s, before the age of exploding brand tie-ins. They made a list of the blockbusters over the decades—the first Tonka trucks, the Frisbee, the Hula-Hoop, the Rubik’s Cube. Then they made a list of what these toys had in common: None really involved winning or losing against an opponent. None were part of an effort to create a separate child world that adults were excluded from, and probably hostile toward; they were designed more for family fun. Also, they were not really meant to teach you something specific—they existed mostly in the service of having fun.

In 2011 the two developers launched Toca Tea Party. The game is not all that different from a real tea party. The iPad functions almost like a tea table without legs, and the kids have to invent the rest by, for example, seating their own plushies or dolls, one on each side, and then setting the theater in motion. First, choose one of three tablecloths. Then choose plates, cups, and treats. The treats are not what your mom would feed you. They are chocolate cakes, frosted doughnuts, cookies. It’s very easy to spill the tea when you pour or take a sip, a feature added based on kids’ suggestions during a test play (kids love spills, but spilling is something you can’t do all that often at a real tea party, or you’ll get yelled at). At the end, a sink filled with soapy suds appears, and you wash the dishes, which is also part of the fun, and then start again. That’s it. The game is either very boring or terrifically exciting, depending on what you make of it. Ovemar and Jeffery knew that some parents wouldn’t get it, but for kids, the game would be fun every time, because it’s dependent entirely on imagination. Maybe today the stuffed bear will be naughty and do the spilling, while naked Barbie will pile her plate high with sweets. The child can take on the voice of a character or a scolding parent, or both. There’s no winning, and there’s no reward. Like a game of stuck-on-an-island, it can go on for five minutes or forever.

Soon after the release of Toca Tea Party, the pair introduced Toca Hair Salon, which is still to my mind the most fun game out there. The salon is no Fifth Avenue spa. It’s a rundown-looking place with cracks in the wall. The aim is not beauty but subversion. Cutting off hair, like spilling, is on the list of things kids are not supposed to do. You choose one of the odd-looking people or creatures and have your way with its hair, trimming it or dyeing it or growing it out. The blow-dryer is genius; it achieves the same effect as Tadao Cern’s Blow Job portraits, which depict people’s faces getting wildly distorted by high winds. In August 2011, Toca Boca gave away Hair Salon for free for nearly two weeks. It was downloaded more than 1 million times in the first week, and the company took off. Today, many Toca Boca games show up on lists of the most popular education apps.

Are they educational? “That’s the perspective of the parents,” Jeffery told me at the back of the grand hall in Monterey. “Is running around on the lawn educational? Every part of a child’s life can’t be held up to that standard.” As we talked, two girls were playing Toca Tea Party on the floor nearby. One had her stuffed dragon at a plate, and he was being especially naughty, grabbing all the chocolate cake and spilling everything. Her friend had taken a little Lego construction man and made him the good guy who ate neatly and helped do the dishes. Should they have been outside at the beach? Maybe, but the day would be long, and they could go outside later.

The more I talked with the developers, the more elusive and unhelpful the “Education” category seemed. (Is Where the Wild Things Are educational? Would you make your child read a textbook at bedtime? Do you watch only educational television? And why don’t children deserve high-quality fun?) Buckleitner calls his conference Dust or Magic to teach app developers a more subtle concept than pedagogy. By magic, Buckleitner has in mind an app that makes children’s fingers move and their eyes light up. By dust, he means something that was obviously (and ploddingly) designed by an adult. Some educational apps, I wouldn’t wish on the naughtiest toddler. Take, for example, Counting With the Very Hungry Caterpillar, which turns a perfectly cute book into a tedious app that asks you to “please eat 1 piece of chocolate cake” so you can count to one.

Before the conference, Buckleitner had turned me on to Noodle Words, an app created by the California designer and children’s-book writer Mark Schlichting. The app is explicitly educational. It teaches you about active verbs—spin, sparkle, stretch. It also happens to be fabulous. You tap a box, and a verb pops up and gets acted out by two insect friends who have the slapstick sensibility of the Three Stooges. If the word is shake, they shake until their eyeballs rattle. I tracked down Schlichting at the conference, and he turned out to be a little like Maurice Sendak—like many good children’s writers, that is: ruled by id and not quite tamed into adulthood. The app, he told me, was inspired by a dream he’d had in which he saw the word and floating in the air and sticking to other words like a magnet. He woke up and thought, What if words were toys?

During the course of reporting this story, I downloaded dozens of apps and let my children test them out. They didn’t much care whether the apps were marketed as educational or not, as long as they were fun. Without my prompting, Gideon fixated on a game called LetterSchool, which teaches you how to write letters more effectively and with more imagination than any penmanship textbooks I’ve ever encountered. He loves the Toca Boca games, the Duck Duck Moose games, and random games like Bugs and Buttons. My older kids love The Numberlys, a dark fantasy creation of illustrators who have worked with Pixar that happens to teach the alphabet. And all my kids, including Gideon, play Cut the Rope a lot, which is not exclusively marketed as a kids’ game. I could convince myself that the game is teaching them certain principles of physics—it’s not easy to know the exact right place to slice the rope. But do I really need that extra convincing? I like playing the game; why shouldn’t they?


Every new medium has, within a short time of its introduction, been condemned as a threat to young people. Pulp novels would destroy their morals, TV would wreck their eyesight, video games would make them violent. Each one has been accused of seducing kids into wasting time that would otherwise be spent learning about the presidents, playing with friends, or digging their toes into the sand. In our generation, the worries focus on kids’ brainpower, about unused synapses withering as children stare at the screen. People fret about television and ADHD, although that concern is largely based on a single study that has been roundly criticized and doesn’t jibe with anything we know about the disorder.

There are legitimate broader questions about how American children spend their time, but all you can do is keep them in mind as you decide what rules to set down for your own child. The statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics assumes a zero-sum game: an hour spent watching TV is an hour not spent with a parent. But parents know this is not how life works. There are enough hours in a day to go to school, play a game, and spend time with a parent, and generally these are different hours. Some people can get so drawn into screens that they want to do nothing else but play games. Experts say excessive video gaming is a real problem, but they debate whether it can be called an addiction and, if so, whether the term can be used for anything but a small portion of the population. If your child shows signs of having an addictive personality, you will probably know it. One of my kids is like that; I set stricter limits for him than for the others, and he seems to understand why.


In her excellent book Screen Time, the journalist Lisa Guernsey lays out a useful framework—what she calls the three C’s—for thinking about media consumption: content, context, and your child. She poses a series of questions—Do you think the content is appropriate? Is screen time a “relatively small part of your child’s interaction with you and the real world?”—and suggests tailoring your rules to the answers, child by child. One of the most interesting points Guernsey makes is about the importance of parents’ attitudes toward media. If they treat screen time like junk food, or “like a magazine at the hair salon”—good for passing the time in a frivolous way but nothing more—then the child will fully absorb that attitude, and the neurosis will be passed to the next generation.

“The war is over. The natives won.” So says Marc Prensky, the education and technology writer, who has the most extreme parenting philosophy of anyone I encountered in my reporting. Prensky’s 7-year-old son has access to books, TV, Legos, Wii—and Prensky treats them all the same. He does not limit access to any of them. Sometimes his son plays with a new app for hours, but then, Prensky told me, he gets tired of it. He lets his son watch TV even when he personally thinks it’s a “stupid waste.” SpongeBob SquarePants, for example, seems like an annoying, pointless show, but Prensky says he used the relationship between SpongeBob and Patrick, his starfish sidekick, to teach his son a lesson about friendship. “We live in a screen age, and to say to a kid, ‘I’d love for you to look at a book but I hate it when you look at the screen’ is just bizarre. It reflects our own prejudices and comfort zone. It’s nothing but fear of change, of being left out.”

Prensky’s worldview really stuck with me. Are books always, in every situation, inherently better than screens? My daughter, after all, often uses books as a way to avoid social interaction, while my son uses the Wii to bond with friends. I have to admit, I had the exact same experience with SpongeBob. For a long time I couldn’t stand the show, until one day I got past the fact that the show was so loud and frenetic and paid more attention to the story line, and realized I too could use it to talk with my son about friendship. After I first interviewed Prensky, I decided to conduct an experiment. For six months, I would let my toddler live by the Prensky rules. I would put the iPad in the toy basket, along with the remote-control car and the Legos. Whenever he wanted to play with it, I would let him.

Gideon tested me the very first day. He saw the iPad in his space and asked if he could play. It was 8 a.m. and we had to get ready for school. I said yes. For 45 minutes he sat on a chair and played as I got him dressed, got his backpack ready, and failed to feed him breakfast. This was extremely annoying and obviously untenable. The week went on like this—Gideon grabbing the iPad for two-hour stretches, in the morning, after school, at bedtime. Then, after about 10 days, the iPad fell out of his rotation, just like every other toy does. He dropped it under the bed and never looked for it. It was completely forgotten for about six weeks.


Now he picks it up every once in a while, but not all that often. He has just started learning letters in school, so he’s back to playing LetterSchool. A few weeks ago his older brother played with him, helping him get all the way through the uppercase and then lowercase letters. It did not seem beyond the range of possibility that if Norman Rockwell were alive, he would paint the two curly-haired boys bent over the screen, one small finger guiding a smaller one across, down, and across again to make, in their triumphant finale, the small z.

Hanna Rosin is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of The End of Men, which is based on her story in the July/August 2010 issue of The Atlantic.



技术
触摸屏幕的一代
幼儿--甚至是学步儿童--正花越来越多的时间接触数字技术。这对他们的发展意味着什么？

作者：汉娜-罗辛

艾琳-帕特里斯-奥布莱恩
2013年4月号

去年春天，在一个寒冷的日子里，几十名为手机和平板电脑开发儿童应用程序的开发者聚集在加利福尼亚州蒙特雷的一个古老的海滩度假村，展示他们的游戏。一位开发者自称是 "拼图专家"，看起来像个滑板运动员，后来又变成了父亲，他展示了一款名为 "Puzzingo "的互动游戏，是为幼儿设计的，灵感来自于他自己儿子对建造和粉碎的渴望。两位30多岁的女性正急切地寻求对一款名为 "敲敲家 "的应用程序的反馈，该应用程序面向1至4岁的儿童。"我们想确保它对婴儿来说足够容易理解，"一位女士解释说。

这次聚会是由沃伦-巴克利特纳组织的，他是互动儿童媒体的长期评论员，喜欢把开发商、研究人员和兴趣小组聚集在一起，而且往往有很多孩子，有些还在尿布中。它以哈利波特式的名字 "尘埃或魔法 "来命名，在一个离海仅有一英里远的旧石木厅里举行，是巴蒂尔达-巴格肖特收拾完魔杖后可能退休的那种地方。巴克利特纳利用休息时间测试他自己的遥控直升机是否能到达大厅的第二层，而与父母一起来的孩子们则敬畏而高兴地抬头看。但他们大多是低头看，看大厅里摆放的iPad和其他平板电脑，就像许多打开的糖果盒。我走来走去，与开发人员交谈，有几个人转述了玛丽亚-蒙台梭利的一句名言，这句话是为了美化触屏时代而引进的，在这个时代，曾经只能依靠咀嚼一块铝板的年幼孩子，现在正以越来越复杂的方式参与其中。"手是人类智慧的工具"。


实际上，玛丽亚-蒙特梭利会对这一场景作何评价？这里的30多个孩子并没有在岸边用手指戳沙子，或沿着长满青苔的石头跑，或挖寄居蟹。相反，他们都在里面，独自或两三人一组，他们的脸离屏幕只有几英寸，他们的手在做蒙台梭利肯定想不到的事情。一对3岁的女孩靠在一扇法式门上，读着一个名为 "十只咯咯笑的大猩猩 "的互动故事，为下一个要挠哪只猩猩而争吵。附近角落里的一个男孩把他的指尖变成了红色记号笔，画了一幅他哥哥的丑陋画。在房间前面的一张旧橡木桌上，一只巨大的毛绒绒的愤怒的小鸟召唤着孩子们来测试装着几十个新应用程序的平板电脑。一些椅子上绑着枕头，因为一个18个月大的孩子可能无法够到桌子，尽管她一旦够到就会知道如何刷卡。

不久前，只有电视，理论上可以放在父母的卧室里或锁在柜子后面。现在有了智能手机和iPad，它们与钥匙、口香糖和杂乱的发带一起被冲进家庭杂物中。"妈妈，每个人都有技术，只有我没有！"我4岁的儿子有时会哀嚎。他为什么不觉得自己有资格呢？在他学会说这句话的同一时间段内，成千上万的儿童应用程序已经被开发出来--大多数是针对像他这样的学龄前儿童。对我们来说（我指的是他的父母），美国的童年在很短的时间内经历了一个有点令人震惊的转变。但对他来说，一直以来，只要动动手指就能做这么多事情，在一个和 "晚安月 "一样大小的小工具里装下数百个游戏。

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2011年，美国儿科学会更新了其关于幼童和媒体的政策。1999年，该组织不鼓励2岁以下的儿童看电视，理由是大脑发育研究表明这个年龄段的儿童非常需要 "与父母和其他重要照顾者的直接互动"。更新后的报告首先承认，自那时以来，情况发生了很大变化。2006年，90%的父母说他们两岁以下的孩子消费某种形式的电子媒体。尽管如此，该小组采取了与1999年基本相同的方法，一致不鼓励这些孩子在任何类型的屏幕上被动使用媒体。 学院指出，对于年龄较大的儿童，"高质量的程序 "可能具有 "教育效益"。2011年的报告提到了 "智能手机 "和 "新屏幕 "技术，但没有涉及互动应用程序。它也没有提到那90%的美国父母可能已经想到的可能性，尽管他们可能会感到不安：那些小手指的滑动可能会带来一些好处。

我来参加开发者大会的部分原因是，我希望这群对互动媒体充满热情的家长可以帮助我走出这个难题，他们可以为美国家长提供一些指导原则，因为他们显然永远无法达到学院的理想，而且在某种程度上也不想达到。也许这个群体能够阐明新技术的一些好处，而这些好处是那些比较谨慎的儿科医生不准备涉及的。我一直抱着这个希望，直到午餐时间，当聚集在餐厅的开发人员不再是有远见的人，而是恢复到普通的父母，试图把他们的幼儿安顿在高脚椅上，让他们吃点面包以外的东西。

我和一位帮助开发蒙台梭利字母发音的女士聊了起来，这是一款教学龄前儿童使用蒙台梭利拼写方法的应用程序。

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她曾是一名蒙台梭利教师，也是四个孩子的母亲。我自己有三个孩子，他们都是触摸屏的粉丝。她的孩子喜欢玩什么游戏？我问道，希望能得到一些建议，我可以带回家。

"他们玩的不多"。

真的吗？为什么不玩？

"因为我不允许。我们有一个规则，在一周内没有屏幕时间，"除非它明显具有教育意义。

没有屏幕时间？完全没有？这似乎是限制性的外缘，即使以我的过度控制的育儿标准来说也是如此。

"在周末，他们可以玩。我给他们限定了半小时的时间，然后停止。够了。这可能会让人上瘾，对大脑的刺激太大了。"

她的回答让我很吃惊，我决定问其他一些也是父母的开发者，他们在国内对屏幕时间的基本规则是什么。一个人说只有在飞机上和长途汽车上才可以。另一位说星期三和周末，半小时。最放任的人说每天半小时，这是我在家里的规则。有一次，我和一个最大的儿童电子书应用程序的开发者以及他的家人坐在一起。蹒跚学步的孩子开始在高脚椅上大吵大闹，所以妈妈做了我们许多人在那一刻都做过的事--把iPad放在她面前，播放了一部短片，这样其他人就可以享受他们的午餐了。当她看到我在看时，她给了我一个母亲普遍的紧张表情，因为她们觉得自己正在被评判。"在家里，"她向我保证，"我只让她看西班牙语电影。"

这些父母的紧张反应为我揭示了我们这个时代的神经症：随着技术在我们的生活中变得无处不在，美国父母对技术可能对他们的孩子造成的影响越来越警惕，而不是越来越少。对父母来说，技术能力和先进性并没有转化为舒适和轻松。它们只是创造了另一个领域，让父母觉得他们必须以正确的方式来驾驭。一方面，父母希望他们的孩子能在他们一生都必须驾驭的数字流中游刃有余；另一方面，他们担心过多的数字媒体，过早地将他们击沉。家长们最终把平板电脑当作精密的外科手术器械，这些小工具可能会对他们孩子的智商产生奇迹，并帮助他赢得一些漂亮的机器人比赛--但前提是他们必须如此使用。否则，他们的孩子最终可能会成为那些悲伤、苍白的生物，不能与人眼神交流，而且有一个女朋友的头像。

诺曼-洛克威尔(Norman Rockwell)从未画过在屏幕上挥动手指的男孩，而我们自己对完美童年的看法也从未调整过，以适应现在常见的表象。再加上我们现代人担心每一个养育孩子的决定都可能产生持久的后果--担心每一分钟的丰富生活或无意识的娱乐放纵都会在未来造成一些永久性的缺陷--你就会产生深深的内疚和困惑。迄今为止，没有任何研究机构明确证明iPad会让你的学龄前儿童变得更聪明，或教她说中文，或者说它会使她的神经回路生锈--该设备只推出了三年，比一些学者寻找资金和收集研究对象的时间多不了多少。那么家长该怎么办呢？

2001年，教育和技术作家马克-普伦斯基(Marc Prensky)普及了数字原住民一词，以描述第一代在计算机、视频游戏和其他技术语言中流利成长的儿童。(2010年4月，当iPad发布时，这个术语有了全新的意义。iPhone已经在诱惑着年轻的孩子们，但屏幕太小，对于蹒跚学步的孩子们的手来说，无法轻松和准确地浏览。此外，父母往往对他们的手机更有占有欲，把它们藏在口袋或钱包里。iPad又大又亮，可以说它是属于这个家庭的。研究儿童媒体的研究人员立即认识到这是一个游戏规则的改变者。

以前，年幼的孩子必须由他们的父母告诉他们如何使用鼠标或遥控器，而且他们用手做的事情和屏幕上发生的事情之间的联系需要一些时间来掌握。但在iPad上，这种联系是显而易见的，甚至对学步儿童也是如此。触摸技术所遵循的逻辑与摇动拨浪鼓或推倒一堆积木的逻辑相同：孩子扫一扫，就会立即发生一些事情。Buckleitner称它为 "类固醇的拨浪鼓"。"突然间，一根手指可以移动一辆公共汽车，或粉碎一只昆虫，或变成一个大的湿胶状画笔。" 对一个幼儿来说，这与其说是魔术，不如说是直觉。在很小的时候，儿童就有了心理学家杰罗姆-布鲁纳所说的 "主动表征 "的能力；他们不是通过使用语言或符号，而是通过手势来对世界上的物体进行分类--例如，把一个想象中的杯子放在嘴边，表示他们想喝水。他们的手是他们思想的自然延伸。

诺曼-洛克威尔（Norman Rockwell）从未画过在屏幕上挥动手指的男孩，而我们自己对完美童年的设想也从未调整过，以适应现在常见的表象。
我有两个大一点的孩子，他们符合早期数字原住民的概念--他们在父母的帮助下学会了如何使用鼠标或键盘，并且在进入学校后才对放在膝上的设备感到舒服。 当然，现在，9岁和12岁的他们可以在我切洋葱的时间内创建一个网站。我最小的孩子是一个完全不同的故事。iPad发布时，他还不到2岁。他一拿到手，就找到了我一个大孩子下载的会说话的河马宝宝应用程序。这只紫色的小河马会用它自己吱吱呀呀的声音重复你说的任何话，并对其他提示做出反应。我儿子说了他的名字（"Giddy!"）；河马宝宝回了一句。吉迪戳了戳河马宝宝，河马宝宝就笑了起来。一遍又一遍，每次都很有趣。很快他就发现了其他的应用程序。老麦当劳，由Duck Duck Moose制作，是他的最爱。起初，他试图在屏幕之间缩放时会感到沮丧，或者当有信息弹出时不知道该怎么做。但大约两个星期后，他明白了所有这些。我必须承认，看到一个还穿着尿布的孩子如此能干和专注，就好像他在预言自己的成年一样，这让我感到很奇怪。从技术上讲，我是iPad的主人，但从某种本体论的角度来看，它更像是他的而不是我的。

父母们似乎没有多想，也没有解决他们的感受，就开始把他们的设备交给他们的孩子来安抚、安抚或以其他方式娱乐他们。根据研究儿童媒体的琼-甘兹-库尼中心（Joan Ganz Cooney Center），到2010年，三分之二的4至7岁儿童使用过iPhone。这些手机中的绝大多数都是由家庭成员借出的；该中心的研究人员将此称为 "回传效应"，这个名字很好地抓住了拒绝和给予之间的不情愿的区域。

市场立即发现了回传效应，以及它所带来的机会。2008年，当苹果公司开放其应用程序商店时，游戏开始以每天几十个、每年几千个的速度到来。在他职业生涯的前23年里，巴克莱特纳一直试图在他的出版物《儿童技术评论》中全面报道每一个儿童游戏。现在，根据巴克莱特纳的粗略统计，iTunes上有超过4万个儿童游戏，Google Play上也有数千个。在iTunes的 "教育 "类别中，大多数最畅销的应用程序都针对学前或小学年龄的儿童。到了3岁，吉迪恩会去学前班，收听幼儿世界里最酷的东西，然后回到家，找到iPad，把它放在我的腿上，并根据其大致描述询问某些游戏。"茶？洒了？" (这就是Toca Tea Party）。

随着这些给幼儿带来的乐趣和消遣激增，对许多父母来说，传授知识变得更加不舒服，甚至是不可持续的。

他已经到了这种状态，你叫他的名字，他不会有任何反应，或者你可以在他面前打响指......。
但是，你知道，我们最后实际上把iPad从他身上拿走了，主要是因为，你知道，这个例子，我们正在谈论的这件事，关于打瞌睡。现在，他会这样做，我和我的妻子会盯着他，想，哦，我的上帝，他的大脑会变成浆糊，从耳朵里渗出来。这让我们有点担心。
这是《华尔街日报》记者本-沃顿(Ben Worthen)最近向全国公共广播电台的黛安-雷姆(Diane Rehm)解释他为什么把iPad从儿子身边拿走，尽管它是唯一能长时间吸引孩子注意力的东西，而且它似乎正在激发孩子对数字和字母的兴趣。大多数父母都能同情这种令人不安的景象：五分钟前还在沙发上跳来跳去的幼儿，现在被压制住了，盯着屏幕，似乎被催眠。在有点危言耸听的《濒危的头脑》中。作者简-希利（Jane Healy）甚至给这种现象起了个名字，叫"'僵尸'效应"，并提出了电视可能 "通过使观众处于恍惚状态而抑制心理活动 "的可能性。

自从观看屏幕进入家庭以来，许多观察家都担心它们会使我们的大脑陷入昏迷状态。一项早期的研究声称，当我们看电视时，我们的大脑大多表现出缓慢的阿尔法波--表明一种低水平的唤醒，类似于我们做白日梦的时候。这些研究结果在很大程度上被科学界所抛弃，但神话仍然存在，即看电视在精神上相当于，正如一个网站所说的，"盯着一堵空白的墙"。威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校研究媒体和注意力的希瑟-柯科里安（Heather Kirkorian）认为，这些常见的比喻有误导性。Kirkorian说，与电视观众的生理状态相比，更准确的一点是深陷在书中的人，因为在这两种活动中，我们都是静止的，没有分心的，而且精神活跃。

由于互动媒体是如此之新，大多数现有的研究是针对儿童和电视的。马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校的儿童媒体专家丹-安德森说："到现在，人们普遍认为，至少在2岁半以前，儿童在看电视时认知能力非常活跃。在20世纪80年代，安德森通过让大约100名儿童接受某种形式的电视地狱，对僵尸理论进行了测试。他给一群2至5岁的儿童播放了《芝麻街》的混乱版本：他以随机的顺序拼凑场景，并让角色倒着说话或用希腊语说话。然后，他将这些经过篡改的片段与未经编辑的片段进行拼接，并注意到孩子们的注意力如何。孩子们在节目的拼接部分更频繁地看向别处，一些人抱怨电视坏了。安德森后来用天线宝宝对6个月到24个月大的婴儿重复了这个实验。他再次让角色们倒着说话，并将动作序列切成无意义的顺序--比如说，让一个天线宝宝接住一个球，然后再让另一个宝宝扔球。6个月和12个月的孩子似乎无法分辨，但到了18个月，孩子们开始转过头去，到了24个月，他们对没有意义的程序感到厌恶。

安德森的一系列实验提供了第一条线索，即即使是非常年幼的儿童也可以成为有鉴别力的观众--他们事实上并不是脑残，而是努力地使他们所看到的东西有意义，并把它变成一个连贯的叙述，反映他们已经知道的世界。30年后的今天，我们了解到儿童 "可以做出很多推论并处理信息"，安德森说。"而且他们可以学到很多东西，包括积极的和消极的。" 研究人员从未放弃过父母互动对年幼儿童的发展至关重要的观点。但他们开始从灰色的角度看待看电视的问题。如果一个孩子从不与成人互动，总是看电视，那么，这就是一个问题。但是，如果一个孩子看电视而不是，比如说，玩玩具，那么这是一个比较困难的比较，因为电视，在适当的情况下，有一些东西可以提供。

小孩子究竟如何体验电子媒体，这种体验对他们的发展有什么影响？自80年代以来，研究人员花了越来越多的时间与电视节目制作人协商，研究和塑造电视内容。通过跟踪儿童的反应，他们已经确定了某些促进参与的规则：故事必须是线性的，容易跟随，剪辑和时间间隔必须使用得非常少，语言必须精简和重复。一个精心设计的节目的完美例子是小尼克公司的《蓝色生死恋》，它从1996年到2006年播出。每一集的主角是史蒂夫（或乔，在后来的几季中）和一只卡通小狗布鲁，他们解决了一个谜题。史蒂夫说话缓慢而简单；他重复单词，然后把它们写在他方便的笔记本上。几乎没有剪辑或无法解释的时间差距。蓝帽子》的伟大创新之处在于一个叫做 "暂停 "的东西。史蒂夫问了一个问题，然后停顿大约五秒钟，让观众喊出答案。当孩子们认为他们可以发挥作用时，当他们认为他们实际上是在帮助史蒂夫和布鲁拼凑线索时，他们会感到更加投入和投入。一项针对2岁半以上儿童的纵向研究表明，观看《蓝色预言》的儿童在观看该节目的两年中，在灵活思考和解决问题方面取得了可观的进展。

然而，对于学步儿童来说，情况似乎略有不同。小于2岁半的儿童表现出研究人员所说的 "视频缺陷"。这意味着他们在处理由真人提供的信息时比处理录像带上的人要容易得多。在范德比尔特大学发展心理学家乔治-特罗塞斯（Georgene Troseth）进行的一系列研究中，孩子们在现场视频显示器上观看隔壁房间的人藏匿一只毛绒狗。其他人则通过房间之间的窗户，直接观看完全相同的场景。然后孩子们被释放到房间里去寻找玩具。几乎所有通过窗户观看藏匿过程的孩子都找到了玩具，但在监视器上观看的孩子则更难。

一个自然的假设是，幼儿在认知上还不具备处理符号表现的能力。(我记得我的大儿子，在他3岁的时候，问我他是否可以进入电视并抚摸蓝。） 但是还有另一种方式来解释这个特殊的发展阶段。学步儿童善于寻找研究人员所说的 "社会相关信息"。他们对那些有助于他们对周围世界进行连贯叙述的人和情况进行调整。在现实世界中，新鲜的草的味道和爆米花的翻滚，当你问他们问题时，大人对你微笑或回话。在电视上，这样的事情不会发生。电视是静态的，缺乏对幼儿最重要的东西之一，即 "双向的信息交流"，特罗塞斯认为。

在最初藏匿小狗的实验几年后，即2004年，特罗塞斯重新进行了实验，只是她改变了一些东西。她把小狗变成了一个填充的小猪（来自小熊维尼的故事）。更重要的是，她使视频演示明确地具有互动性。幼儿和他们的父母来到一个房间，在那里他们可以看到一个人--显示器上的研究人员。研究员就在藏有小猪的房间里，可以在监视器上看到孩子们。在藏起小猪之前，研究者有效地让孩子们参加了一种媒体培训。她问他们关于自己的兄弟姐妹、宠物和玩具的问题。她和他们一起玩西蒙说，并邀请他们和她一起唱流行歌曲。她告诉他们在他们房间的椅子下面找一个贴纸。她给孩子们一个明显的印象，那就是她--屏幕上的这个人--可以和他们互动，而且她说的东西和他们生活的世界有关。然后，研究人员告诉孩子们她要把玩具藏起来，在她藏好之后，又回到屏幕上指导他们在哪里找到它。这一交流足以消除视频的不足之处。参加现场视频演示的大多数幼儿都找到了玩具。

蓝皮书》的方向是正确的。暂停可以欺骗儿童，使他们认为史蒂夫对他们有反应。但是，最重要的是创造一个场景，让屏幕上的家伙真的有反应--幼儿做了什么，角色就可靠地跳起来或笑起来，或开始跳舞或回话。

例如，当吉迪恩说 "Giddy "时，会说话的河马宝宝也会说 "Giddy"，每次都是如此。这种有条件的互动（我做什么，你就回应什么）是吸引幼儿的地方，甚至可以成为非常年幼的孩子学习的重要来源--研究人员希望孩子们能把这种学习带入现实世界。这并不完全是美国儿科学会所渴望的理想社会伙伴。它当然不是父母或照顾者。但它是我们在屏幕上想出的最好的近似，这就是为什么儿童媒体研究人员对iPad的潜力如此兴奋。

乔治敦大学儿童媒体中心的几位研究人员出现在我家，带着一个包裹在亮橙色盒子里的iPad，以便更好地诱惑吉迪恩。他们是受该中心主任桑德拉-卡尔弗特(Sandra Calvert)的委托，来这里进行关于幼儿和iPad的若干持续研究之一。吉迪恩是他们的研究对象之一。这项研究旨在测试当孩子听到的信息来自于他所喜爱和信任的来源时，他是否更有可能学习。研究人员将iPad放在厨房的椅子上；吉迪恩立即注意到它，打开它，并寻找他最喜欢的应用程序。他们指给他看他们为这个实验发明的应用程序，他恭敬地用手指打开它。

屏幕上出现了一个软绵绵的袋鼠状木偶，被介绍为 "DoDo"。他在孩子的世界里是个无名小卒，相当于深夜公共频道上的某个随机的人。吉迪恩几乎不承认他。然后，叙述者介绍了埃尔莫。"嗨，"埃尔莫说，挥手。吉迪恩打了个招呼，然后挥手致意。

屏幕上弹出一个图像，叙述者问道："这是什么？" (是一根香蕉）。

"这是一个香蕉，"多多说。

"这是一个葡萄，"埃尔莫说。

我笑了，内心充满了母亲的光辉，她知道她的孩子即将给几个陌生人留下深刻印象。我的小宝贝知道香蕉是什么。他当然知道。吉迪恩压住了埃尔莫。(旁白说："不，不是艾尔莫，再试一次。"）据我所知，他从来没有看过芝麻街，从来没有喜欢过艾尔莫娃娃，甚至在玩具店觊觎过一个。然而，他对幼儿世界的信号很敏感，而且，显然，他已经知道艾尔莫是一个最高的道德权威。对他来说，他与Elmo的关系比他知道的真相更重要。游戏一直在进行，有时即使艾尔莫说橘子是梨，吉迪恩也会选择艾尔莫。后来，当这两个角色都给那些很少有孩子会知道其真名的异国水果起了假名字时，吉迪恩不断重复选择艾尔莫，尽管多多的表现更可靠。

到了3岁，吉迪恩会关注幼儿世界里的酷事，然后把iPad放在我的腿上，按其大致描述询问某些游戏。

碰巧的是，吉迪恩并不在多数人之列。今年夏天，卡尔弗特和她的团队将公布他们的研究结果，结果显示，大多数时候，32个月左右的孩子会选择说真话的角色，无论是埃尔莫还是DoDo，而且当孩子们还不知道答案时，他们很快就会相信那个更准确的角色。但卡尔弗特说，这只是表明幼儿已经成为比我们想象的更精明的技术使用者。她一直在研究依恋理论，并认为幼儿可能重视情感纽带而不是正确的答案。但她的猜测是，关于敲击屏幕，关于获得反馈和实时纠正的东西，本身就具有指导意义，并使幼儿能够准确地吸收信息，无论其来源如何。

卡尔弗特对技术采取了一种平衡的看法：她在一间办公室工作，周围都是精装书，她有时会用纸笔编辑草稿。但她对iPad如何在孩子们还没有达到接触这些传统媒体的年龄时就能接触到他们非常感兴趣。

"人们说我们在拿孩子做实验，"她告诉我。"但从我的角度来看，它已经发生了，而且没有办法扭转它。孩子们的生活在越来越小的年龄段里充满了媒体，我们需要利用这些技术所能提供的优势。我不是一个波利尼西亚人。我几乎是一个现实主义者。我看着孩子们正在做的事情，并试图找出如何使其达到最佳效果。"


尽管有艾尔莫的参与，卡尔弗特的研究旨在回答一系列非常负责任、高尚的问题。幼儿能从iPad上学习吗？他们能把学到的东西转移到现实世界吗？互动性对学习有什么影响？熟悉的人物在儿童从iPad上学习的过程中扮演什么角色？所有这些问题都很有价值，也很重要，但也都是完全从成人的角度考虑的。我猜想，许多儿童应用程序被归入iTunes商店的 "教育 "类别，是为了减轻父母的负罪感（尽管我也猜想，从长远来看，所有这些 "教育 "应用程序只是延续了我们与技术的神经质关系，因为它们加强了必须警惕地分为 "好 "或 "坏 "的想法）。如果小孩子有更多的投入，许多 "教育 "应用程序将顺理成章地归入一个名为 "儿童 "或 "儿童游戏 "的类别。而更多的游戏可能会像瑞典一家名为Toca Boca的游戏工作室所设计的应用程序一样。

创始人Emil Ovemar和Björn Jeffery在瑞典的一家媒体公司Bonnier工作。Ovemar是一名互动设计专家，他形容自己是一个从未长大的人。他仍然对超级英雄、乐高积木和动画电影感兴趣，并说他宁愿与他的两个孩子和他们的表兄弟玩困在岛上的游戏，也不愿与几乎任何成年人交谈。杰弗里是公司的战略家和前台；我第一次见到他是在加州的会议上，他正在分发Toca Boca标志的小临时纹身，一张嘴张开笑着，露出彩虹色的牙齿。


2010年底，奥维玛和杰弗里开始为邦尼尔公司做一个新的数字项目，他们萌生了进入儿童应用市场的想法。奥维玛首先研究了当时的应用程序。他发现，其中大多数都是令人失望的 "指导性"--"把蝴蝶拖进网里，诸如此类的东西。他们缺少创造力和想象力。为了寻找灵感，他看到了弗兰克和特蕾莎-卡普兰1973年出版的《游戏的力量》一书，他后来把其中的一段话通过电子邮件发给了我。

在成人生活中，特别是在商业和创造性职业中，是什么让B类学生经常领先于A类学生？当然，这不仅仅是言语技巧。为了创造，一个人必须有一种冒险和玩乐的感觉。一个人需要坚韧不拔的精神，去尝试和承担失败的风险。一个人必须足够强大，在需要时可以重新开始，并有足够的警觉性，从发生的任何事情中学习。一个人需要有强大的自我，以推动他向一个未曾尝试过的目标前进。最重要的是，一个人必须拥有玩耍的能力!
Ovemar和Jeffery从早在20世纪50年代就开始猎取玩具目录，当时还没有出现爆炸性的品牌绑定时代。他们列出了几十年来的畅销产品--第一辆Tonka卡车、飞盘、呼拉圈、魔方。然后他们列出了这些玩具的共同点：没有一个真正涉及与对手的胜负。它们都不是创造一个独立的儿童世界的努力的一部分，成年人被排除在外，而且可能对其有敌意；它们更多的是为家庭娱乐而设计。此外，它们并不是真的要教你一些具体的东西--它们的存在主要是为了获得乐趣。

2011年，这两位开发者推出了Toca Tea Party。该游戏与真正的茶会没有什么不同。iPad的功能几乎就像一张没有腿的茶桌，孩子们必须发明其余的东西，例如，让他们自己的毛绒玩具或娃娃坐下，每边一个，然后让剧院开始运作。首先，从三种桌布中选择一种。然后选择盘子、杯子和点心。这些点心不是你妈妈会给你吃的东西。它们是巧克力蛋糕、糖霜甜甜圈、饼干。当你倒茶或喝茶时，很容易打翻茶水，这是根据孩子们在试玩时的建议而增加的功能（孩子们喜欢打翻，但在真正的茶会中不能经常打翻，否则会被骂的）。最后，出现一个装满肥皂水的水槽，你洗碗，这也是乐趣的一部分，然后重新开始。就这样吧。这个游戏要么非常无聊，要么非常刺激，取决于你对它的看法。奥维玛和杰弗里知道有些父母不会明白，但对孩子来说，这个游戏每次都很有趣，因为它完全取决于想象力。也许今天毛绒熊会很调皮，做了洒水的动作，而裸体的芭比会把盘子里的糖果堆得很高。孩子可以扮演某个角色的声音，也可以扮演责备他的父母，或者两者都扮演。没有赢家，也没有奖励。就像一个被困在岛上的游戏，它可以持续5分钟或永远。

Toca Tea Party发布后不久，这对夫妇又推出了Toca Hair Salon，在我看来，这仍然是最有趣的游戏。这个沙龙不是第五大道的水疗中心。它是一个看起来很破旧的地方，墙上有裂缝。其目的不是美容，而是颠覆。剪掉头发，就像洒水一样，是孩子们不应该做的事情的清单上。你选择一个长相怪异的人或生物，然后用你的方式来处理它的头发，或修剪，或染色，或长出头发。吹风机是个天才；它达到了与泽恩（Tadao Cern）的 "吹箫 "肖像画相同的效果，后者描绘了人们的脸被大风吹得疯狂变形。2011年8月，Toca Boca免费赠送了《发廊》近两个星期。这款游戏在第一周的下载量就超过了100万次，公司的业务也随之起飞。今天，许多Toca Boca游戏出现在最受欢迎的教育应用名单上。

它们有教育意义吗？"那是父母的观点，"杰弗里在蒙特雷的大礼堂后面告诉我。"在草坪上跑来跑去有教育意义吗？孩子生活的每一部分都不能用这个标准来衡量。" 在我们交谈时，两个女孩在附近的地板上玩Toca Tea Party。一个女孩把她的毛绒龙放在一个盘子里，它特别调皮，抢走了所有的巧克力蛋糕，并把所有东西都洒了出来。她的朋友拿着一个乐高建筑小人，让他成为吃得很整齐并帮助洗碗的好家伙。他们应该在外面的海滩上吗？也许吧，但这一天会很漫长，他们可以稍后再去外面。

我和开发商谈得越多，"教育 "类别似乎就越难以捉摸，越无用处。(野生动物在哪里》有教育意义吗？你会让你的孩子在睡前读教科书吗？你只看教育电视吗？还有，为什么孩子们不应该得到高质量的乐趣？） 巴克利特纳将他的会议称为 "尘埃或魔法"，以教导应用程序开发人员一个比教育学更微妙的概念。通过魔法，Buckleitner想到的是一个能让儿童的手指动起来、眼睛亮起来的应用程序。说到灰尘，他指的是明显由成人设计的东西（而且是蹒跚地）。有些教育性的应用程序，我不希望最顽皮的幼儿也能使用。以《和饥饿的毛毛虫一起数数》为例，它把一本非常可爱的书变成了一个乏味的应用程序，要求你 "请吃一块巧克力蛋糕"，以便你能数到1。

在会议之前，巴克利特纳向我介绍了Noodle Words，这是一个由加州设计师和儿童书作家马克-施利希廷（Mark Schlichting）创造的应用程序。这款应用程序具有明确的教育意义。它教你认识主动动词--旋转、闪光、伸展。它也恰好是美妙的。你点击一个盒子，一个动词就会弹出来，并由两个昆虫朋友表演，他们具有三个小丑的滑稽感。如果这个词是摇晃，他们就会摇晃，直到他们的眼球发出响声。我在会议上找到了Schlichting，结果他有点像莫里斯-森达克（Maurice Sendak），就像许多优秀的儿童作家一样：被本能所支配，还没有完全驯服到成年。他告诉我，这个应用程序的灵感来自于他做的一个梦，在梦中他看到 "和 "字漂浮在空中，像磁铁一样粘在其他字上。他醒来后想，如果单词是玩具会怎样？

在报道这个故事的过程中，我下载了几十个应用程序，并让我的孩子测试它们。他们并不太关心这些应用程序是否被宣传为具有教育意义，只要它们是有趣的。不用我提醒，吉迪恩就盯上了一个叫LetterSchool的游戏，这个游戏教你如何写字母，比我遇到的任何笔法课本都更有效，更有想象力。他喜欢Toca Boca游戏，Duck Duck Moose游戏，以及像Bugs and Buttons这样的随机游戏。我的大孩子们喜欢《Numberlys》，这是一个由曾与皮克斯合作的插图画家创作的黑暗幻想作品，正好可以教字母。我所有的孩子，包括吉迪恩，都经常玩《割绳子》，这不是专门作为儿童游戏销售的。我可以说服自己，这个游戏是在教他们某些物理学原理--要知道切开绳子的确切位置并不容易。但我真的需要这种额外的说服力吗？我喜欢玩这个游戏；他们为什么不喜欢呢？


每一种新媒体在推出后的短时间内，都被谴责为对年轻人的威胁。纸浆小说会毁掉他们的道德，电视会毁掉他们的视力，电子游戏会使他们变得很暴力。每一种都被指责为诱使孩子们浪费时间，而这些时间本来是可以用来学习总统知识、与朋友玩耍或将脚趾挖进沙子里的。在我们这一代，担忧的焦点是孩子们的脑力，担心孩子们盯着屏幕时未使用的突触会枯萎。人们担心电视和多动症，尽管这种担忧主要是基于一项被广泛批评的单一研究，而且与我们对这种疾病的了解不一致。

关于美国儿童如何度过他们的时间，有一些合理的更广泛的问题，但你所能做的就是在你决定为你自己的孩子制定什么规则时记住它们。美国儿科学会的声明假设了一个零和游戏：花一小时看电视就是没有和父母在一起的一小时。但父母知道生活不是这样的。一天有足够的时间去上学、玩游戏和与父母相处，而且一般来说这些时间是不同的。有些人可能会被屏幕所吸引，以至于除了玩游戏，他们什么都不想做。专家说，过度的电子游戏是一个真正的问题，但他们争论的是，这是否可以被称为成瘾，如果是的话，除了一小部分人之外，这个词是否可以用于其他方面。如果你的孩子表现出具有成瘾性人格的迹象，你可能会知道。我的一个孩子就是这样；我为他设定的限制比其他孩子更严格，而他似乎也明白原因。


记者丽莎-格恩西（Lisa Guernsey）在她的优秀著作《屏幕时间》（Screen Time）中提出了一个有用的框架--她称之为三个C--来思考媒体消费问题：内容、背景和你的孩子。她提出了一系列的问题--你认为内容是否合适？屏幕时间是否是 "你的孩子与你和真实世界互动的相对较小的一部分？"--并建议根据孩子的答案来调整你的规则。格恩西提出的最有趣的观点之一是关于父母对媒体的态度的重要性。如果他们把屏幕时间当作垃圾食品，或者 "像发廊里的杂志一样"--适合以轻浮的方式打发时间，但仅此而已--那么孩子就会完全吸收这种态度，而这种神经质会传给下一代。

"战争已经结束了。土著人赢了。" 教育和技术作家马克-普伦斯基（Marc Prensky）如是说，他是我在报道中遇到的人中拥有最极端育儿理念的人。普雷斯基7岁的儿子可以接触到书籍、电视、乐高积木和Wii--普雷斯基对它们都一视同仁。他不限制对它们中任何一个的接触。有时，他的儿子会玩一个新的应用程序几个小时，但后来，普雷斯基告诉我，他就厌倦了。他让儿子看电视，即使他个人认为那是一种 "愚蠢的浪费"。例如，《海绵宝宝》似乎是一个恼人的、毫无意义的节目，但普雷斯基说，他利用海绵宝宝和他的海星伙伴帕特里克之间的关系，给他儿子上了一堂关于友谊的课。"我们生活在一个屏幕时代，对孩子说，'我很想让你看书，但我讨厌你看屏幕'，这实在是太奇怪了。它反映了我们自己的偏见和舒适区。这只不过是对变化的恐惧，对被抛弃的恐惧。"

普雷斯基的世界观真的让我难以忘怀。在任何情况下，书本总是比屏幕好吗？毕竟，我的女儿经常用书本作为避免社会交往的方式，而我的儿子则用Wii来与朋友联系。我不得不承认，我对海绵宝宝也有完全相同的经历。很长一段时间，我都无法忍受这个节目，直到有一天，我克服了这个节目太过喧闹和狂热的事实，更加关注故事线，并意识到我也可以用它来与我儿子谈论友谊。在我第一次采访普雷斯基后，我决定进行一个实验。六个月来，我将让我的孩子按照普伦斯基的规则生活。我会把iPad放在玩具篮里，还有遥控车和乐高积木。只要他想玩，我就会让他玩。

吉迪恩第一天就考验了我。他看到iPad在他的空间里，问我是否可以玩。当时是早上8点，我们必须为上学做准备。我说可以。他坐在椅子上玩了45分钟，我给他穿好衣服，准备好书包，还没给他喂早餐。这让人非常恼火，而且显然是无法忍受的。 然后，大约10天后，iPad就从他身边消失了，就像其他玩具一样。他把它丢在了床底下，再也没有找过它。在大约六个星期的时间里，它被完全遗忘了。


现在他偶尔会拿起它，但不是那么频繁。他刚刚开始在学校学习字母，所以他又开始玩LetterSchool了。几个星期前，他的哥哥和他一起玩，帮他把大写字母和小写字母全部读完。如果诺曼-洛克威尔还活着的话，他似乎会画出两个弯着腰的卷发男孩，一个小手指引导一个小手指穿过、放下、再穿过，在他们胜利的结局中，画出了小Z。

汉娜-罗辛是《大西洋》杂志的特约撰稿人，也是《男人的末日》一书的作者，该书是根据她在《大西洋》杂志2010年7/8月刊上的故事改编的。