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1 " Our resistance to digital play is just like Socrates's resistance to writing. It is futile. Your kids need your help. And it's easy to provide. Parents, children, and families just need to start playing in the digital world together. "
― Jordan Shapiro , The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World
2 " It was the mid-1800s when family members began to face one another during mealtime. Before then, they ate side by side, quickly and quietly. “Food was fuel,” according to Abigail Carroll, “socializing was secondary—if it happened at all.” Dinnertime conversation did not become “a standard expectation and eventually a carefully cultivated and highly prized art” until the nineteenth century. "
3 " The screen-averse attitude is about values, principles, and cultural customs. It's a moral and ethical position. It's grounded in beliefs about proper and improper ways of living a good life. It may be framed as if it were objective, as if it were about physical or mental health; but the real problem is that grown-ups are resistant to change. They are anxious about their kids' adjustment. They should be. After all, today's parents aspire to the impossible: adjusting their kids to old-time habitual norms that no longer characterize the predominant social experience. This is the root cause of their screen-time anxiety - it is not the technology, but rather discomfort with the increasingly ambiguous boundary between home and work. Like Engelhardt, parents don't like it that the private world of the controlled family home fraternizes with the frightening unpredictable chaos that is supposed to happen elsewhere. Connected digital devices exacerbate their stress because, paradoxically, they facilitate deeply private encounters with a wildly public world. Parents see attention streaming away from the household. The lines between inside and outside, private and public, isolated and connected become ambiguous. And grown-ups become become confused. This is why most of the screen-time advice offered by experts, practitioners, and journalists advocates for drawing clearer boundaries and achieving better balance -- these are misguided attempts to bring what's blurry into focus. "
― Jordan Shapiro
4 " consider what’s happening in this book when I describe sandbox play as the beginning of the age of the individual, dinner as the ritualized celebration of industrialization, television as a new hearth, clockwork mechanics as the foundation of twentieth-century developmental health, penmanship as up-skilling for a burgeoning capitalist economy, and card catalogs as a representation of an obsolete epistemological attitude. I’m situating the familiar technologies of the past in a hopeful story about a digital future—a future that requires folks to understand information in a drastically new way. If the old education cultivated habits of mind for a card-catalog world, then the new education needs to build habits of mind for a world of nonlinear hyperlinks. Luckily, situation theory can help. "
5 " while it’s certainly no fun to be the disciplinarian, we need to be persistent. Eventually, the pestering parental influence becomes the internal voice of a child’s conscience. "
6 " My son is afraid of getting eaten. Not only by me, but also by a big, scary, two-deaded monster. He is twelve years old and struggling to learn how to show up simultaneously in the physical and the virtual worlds. Both threaten to devour him. Both constantly attune him to the fact that his private sense of self is not necessarily aligned with the way others perceive him. He sometimes gets in fights with his friends. He gets in trouble with his teachers. He pisses off his younger brother and frustrates his father. Each situation is unexpected. He doesn't see it coming. What's going on inside his mind is not the same as what's happening around him. Like all tweens, his internal and external experiences are way out of sync. "
