I remember so well the days when my now-grown daughter was a little girl learning to count and read and taking in life lessons from the beloved characters on Sesame Street about how to be a good, caring person. Back then, she could only watch Sesame Street on our one household TV at the time it came on. Today, kids can watch the show on multiple channels, on different devices, whenever they want.

In honor of the 50th Anniversary of Sesame Street, Common Sense Media, the leading advocacy organization for kids in the digital age, has teamed up with Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind the iconic children’s show, on a new series of TV spots starring all your favorite Sesame Street friends getting together for dinner—we see them tossing, stashing and even eating (guess who) their devices as they sit down around a big community table. The key takeaway of the campaign that everyone can agree on: Devices and dinner just don’t mix.

Research emphasizes the importance of family dinner for kids, showing positive outcomes that include boosting literacy development, fewer behavior problems, less substance abuse, and healthier eating. 

A Common Sense Media poll of nearly 900 families with children between the ages of 2 and 17 years old found:

• Family dinner is an institution. Seventy percent of families eat dinner together five or more times a week.
• Dinner is a time for sharing. Almost all (93 percent) of parents think conversations at family dinners are important for talking about things happening in their children’s lives.
• Devices aren’t welcome but often have a seat at the table anyway. Even though previous research has found that 88 percent of adults don’t think it’s OK to use a phone at a family dinner, 47 percent of parents said they or a family member used a mobile device at dinner in the last week. Thirty-four percent said they had the TV on for all or most dinners.

While today’s technology brings amazing benefits, it can too easily take the place of important in-person interaction and conversation, and families need the reminder that our kids learn best from loving caregivers and supportive teachers—the people in their lives who they look up to and spend time with. From a very young age, kids also mimic the stories and characters they see on TV. What better on-screen role models for young viewers than the colorful characters of Sesame Street?

“Our devices keep us connected, informed, and engaged, but dinner time is an important time to just say ‘no,'” said James P. Steyer, founder, and CEO of Common Sense. “Everything from better grades to a healthier lifestyle has been linked to eating together regularly as a family. By having Device-Free Dinners, families will gain important family time and set an example for kids that we all need to carve out face-to-face conversation time in our lives.”

Setting regular family device-free dinners show children the importance of tech-free time together. Parents are a child’s most important role model and a parent’s frequent engagement with media and devices takes away quality interactions with their child. Sesame Workshop’s Dr. Rosemarie Truglio also suggests that parents be mindful of the amount of time and types of programs they watch in their child’s presence since their child will adopt their media preferences and habits. The Sesame Street characters deliver the message in a way that will engage both children and their parents.

Now in its third year, Common Sense’s award-winning Device Free Dinner campaign aims to raise awareness around media balance and encourage families to make the most of their time together. The Common Sense and Sesame Street PSA will be distributed nationally and will run in both English and Spanish. Click this link to view the Common Sense and Sesame Street PSA, and get the tools and advice to help you and your family enjoy device-free meals.

Diane Jones Lowrey is a marketing and communications professional with over 20 years of experience building brands and leading the marketing operations of global brands. Diane currently is the Senior Director of Marketing for Common Sense, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to helping kids thrive in a world of media and technology and promoting digital well-being for all kids. She leads Consumer, Education, Partnerships and Entertainment marketing for the organization.

Jordan Shapiro, author of The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World, recently took the time to answer questions that readers submitted. See more questions and answers here.

Our sixth grade grandson spends much of his middle school day on the computer, does homework on the school-provided ChromeBook he brings home, and then wants to connect with friends after school on his iPhone. Even if screen time is limited at home, what can be done to balance the hours of school screen time?

One of the things I write about in the book is that so many of our current school practices are connected to the tools and technologies of the past. We’re not just teaching students content like math, history, science, and literature, we’re also teaching them how to apply that content in specific instrumental ways. We are teaching them how to use it within a particular technological and economic context.

Consider how much of school is technological. The chalkboard is a kind of technology. The pencil. The desk. The school bell. The report card. These are all tools. They are also all products of the industrial age. And therefore, they maintain and reinforce the epistemological customs of the industrial age. Similarly, so many of our pedagogical practices—like the lecture, the exam, the worksheet—can be understood as technological. They function, almost algorithmically, as ways to promote industrial age habits of mind. But now the world is changing.

Let me give you one example. If you think about math education, we know that children need to learn mathematical thinking. This will probably never change. But what you do with that thinking has changed many times. You no longer need to know how to operate an abacus. In fact, nowadays you no longer need to be able to solve a problem on paper. We all carry computers in our pockets that can do this much more efficiently and accurately. Of course, our children still need to understand the theory well enough that they know the right ways to use these powerful tools. And they may need to do a lot of pencil-and-paper work in order to comprehend the theory. But ultimately, we should no longer be assessing how well kids solve equations; we should be assessing how well they can understand and identify ways to input complex mathematical problems into computerized systems. Long division is now all about theory, spreadsheets are the new skillset.

Therefore, we shouldn’t worry too much about how much “screen time” kids get at school. We should worry about how that screen time is used. Is it effective? Are the learning games being integrated into the curriculum and the pedagogy, or are they just being used as rewards for completing the old worksheets? Is school screen time organized in such a way that it promotes habits of mind for a connected world, or is it just trying to teach old skills in new ways (a kind of techno-fetishism)?

I am increasingly worried about the collection of our children’s data by various companies. By the time they are adults, there will likely be very detailed profiles available about their past experiences and habits. Is there anything that parents should be thinking about now to safeguard their children’s privacy?

The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World by Jordan Shapiro

I agree with you wholeheartedly! Parents should be worried about their children’s privacy…and also their own.

When it comes to data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, we’re talking about a huge contextual change in the way human civilization organizes itself. And there are so many big societal issues around technology that will likely need to be addressed through government policies. I avoided a lot of these questions in The New Childhood because didn’t want to put the responsibility for this on parents, teachers, and caregivers alone. It’s so much bigger than that. Plus, a comprehensive examination of the policy issues was outside the scope of the book.

I wish I could give you clear and concise advice, but I can’t. Telling you to read the End User License Agreements (EULA) carefully is a start, but it’s somewhat unrealistic. And unfortunately, it won’t help much because so far, we’ve organized our current digital economy in such a way that one can’t participate without surrendering an inappropriate amount of personal data.

Currently, in the US, we have a few laws, like COPPA, which try to address this for kids under 13 years old. But ultimately the policies that exist remain inadequate. What does that mean for you? Well…if you’re the activist type, I’d encourage you to get involve with organizations like the Mozilla Foundation. If you’re not, call or write to your representatives and let them know you’re worried about this issue. As you know, this is how our democracy functions.

Also, remember that in the long run, solving these problems through policy will require raising citizens who have enough technological literacy that they’ll be able to democratically address the unique social and economic challenges of a connected world better than we have.

Do you have a list of great games by child age, that you could recommend for family play?  For instance, years ago we found Dragon Box which is a game that teaches young children algebra concepts…It would also be amazing to have digital game suggestions listed by topic, or specifically appropriate for families to engage in together!

We’ve run a bunch of great blogs about that on this website, and even created a guide for families to use apps together. You might also want to check out the App Fairy podcast, in which youth services librarian Carissa Christner interviews some of her favorite children’s app makers—she also curates a list of recommended apps. You might also want to check out Families at Play: Connecting and Learning through Video Games by Sinem Siyahhan and Elisabeth Gee.

These days, we don’t keep a current or running list of recommended games or apps, but we can recommend other resources that provide great reviews, including Common Sense Media, Children’s Technology Review, Parents’ Choice Foundation, Teachers with Apps,  and School Library Journal.

Jordan Shapiro, author of The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World, recently took the time to answer questions that readers submitted. Stay tuned for more next week.

You say that a lot of adults are suffering from “technophobia.” What does that mean? And where does it come from?

The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World by Jordan Shapiro

As humans, we mediate most of our experiences through tools. Technology is so ordinary and ubiquitous that we barely notice most of it. Roads, chairs, clocks, forks, languages, government, agriculture, plumbing, monetary currency: these things are all technologies that humans use regularly.

All of these tools do more than just make our lives easier. They also contour our thinking. In order to use them well, we need to construct specific narratives about our experiences in the world. We need to think about the world in ways that are aligned with those tools. And therefore, a transformational shift in tools represents a threat to the status quo, not only on the everyday practical level—how we communicate, shop, work, entertain ourselves—but also on deeper psychological levels: how we imagine ourselves, the way we assemble our identities, how we relate to other people.

So, at its core, technophobia represents a fear of ideological change. It’s a resistance to the uncertainty that comes along with new ideas. From this perspective, it’s completely understandable that parents would be scared of unfamiliar ways of thinking. After all, it can be very difficult to identify the dangers associated with unfamiliar ways of being, let alone protect your children from them.

But it’s not as hard as grownups think. That’s why I wrote the book. I wanted to quell those fears, to offer an image of the future that feels a little less destabilizing to parents.

I heard an interview on NPR in which you said kids might not be losing themselves in their devices, but rather, finding themselves. “What if that’s the way they’re going to learn how to articulate themselves, how to live a fulfilled life, how to live an authentic life in a world that’s connected?” What did you mean by that? How can a child find and articulate himself in his device?

It’s not really that the child can find himself in a device. Nobody is hidden inside a smartphone or a tablet. And most people—even children—are already very well acquainted with themselves. That’s the easy part of being human.

The hard part—what people are describing when they talk about “finding themselves”—is learning how to show up, learning how to live your external life in a way that’s aligned with your internal being, learning how to organize the material reality of the world so that it corresponds with one’s unique emotional or psychic reality. And this is what I mean when I talk about “articulation.” We might also think of it as a kind of “expression.”

The point is that the process of mediating between internal and external human experience requires tools. But even before you can leverage those tools as an instrument of self-expression or self-articulation, you need to be able to imagine yourself in a way that’s aligned with the logic of the technology. This is something that we all learn through practice, and the best practice for this involves playing with these devices in creative and imaginative ways when you’re young.

Would you call the chair that my family uses, passed down from a great-great uncle, an “obsolete technology of family values”? It definitely tethers us to the long thread of history.

I probably wouldn’t even call your chair a technology of family values at all. It’s really a technology for sitting. But it sounds like your family has imbued the chair with a lot of valuable symbolic meaning. And I’m assuming that you often tell each other stories about your great-great uncle while using the chair. And therefore, it also functions as a “prop” in oral storytelling. That’s great! If it feels powerful and vibrant to your family, it’s certainly not obsolete.

Please understand that in The New Childhood, I’m really using the idea of “obsolete technologies of family values” as a rhetorical device. I don’t really think the old ways of communicating family values are necessarily problematic. But I do think that folks often mistake the means for the ends. In other words, we start to think that the old objects or the old rituals are what matter. When what really matters is that we help our kids feel connected to their ancestral lineage, to old values, to ancient wisdom.

Today’s kids are hyper-connected to everything except the past. And so often, grownups complain that they can’t get kids to focus on the things that once made parents feel connected to the past. I’m simply suggesting that instead of complaining, we should reconstruct some of the old things in ways that make them feel more engaging and relevant to a new era.

It seems to me that this is precisely the lesson we learn from the things that tether us to the long thread of history. Whether it’s religious, cultural, or familial, it’s pretty clear that some institutions have been able to evolve and adapt—to make old wisdom remain relevant in new contexts—while other institutions have dug in too deep, struggling to keep their messages rigidly tied to one technological and economic context. Ultimately, the latter tend to be left behind.

The experience of childhood

Photo: SparkleLab

During the initial phase of onboarding and professional development exercises with the SparkleLAB team, we spend a good part of our time remembering the experience of childhood.

Growing up in the Philippines in the 80’s and 90’s, my fondest childhood memories are those of the rainy season—the torrential downpour that marks the months of August and September. I recall huddling under a blanket with a flashlight while rain thundered down on a tin roof overhead, journeying through worlds and engaging in adventures of epic proportions as I read book after book. It’s a magical sensation similar to what a child feels on Christmas morning, or when she wakes at the break of dawn on her birthday—the delicious feeling of excitement and anticipation with the certainty that wonderful things are about to happen.

These feelings of joy, wonder, thrill, and delight are the very emotions we wish to capture and share with young people. They are at the heart of the SparkleLAB experience.

Writing in their journals first and then sharing these stories with one another, SparkleLAB teammates recount memories of their own childhood—running around barefoot, playing tag in the rain; elaborate tea parties with dolls and stuffed animals; afternoons of capture the flag; building forts with trusted allies and an armful of blankets; drawing maps of imagined worlds; battling pirates with cardboard swords; capturing fireflies in the night.

It is these memories–and their emotive qualities–that guide our team as we architect playful experiences for young people that foster learning.

A place where wonderful things happen 

“For wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”
– Plato

Photo: SparkleLab

There are many ways to describe SparkleLAB.

On one hand, the Lab acts as research and development space where new models of teaching, learning, and student engagement are developed, implemented and assessed. Our interdisciplinary team of educators, designers, and technologists develop unique STEAM education programs that provide young people with opportunities to meaningfully engage with technology and take on the roles of designers, inventors, artists and engineers.

Alongside program development, the Lab develops smart tools, resources and professional development programs for educators that support playful learning across a variety of domains. These resources help nurture the development of 21st century skills among program participants–skills like collaboration, critical thinking, empathy, curiosity and creativity, among others.

Photo: SparkleLab

To the kids and teens that frequent our space, SparkleLAB is a cozy hangout where their interests are validated, passions pursued, friendships formed, and where imagination and creativity rule the day. At times, the Lab acts as the secret headquarters of a movement known as the Resistance, where recruits hone their game design skills to restore playfulness, fun and laughter to a dystopian Philippines where play and games are outlawed in the name of productivity and progress. Other times, the Lab is home to a mad scientist named Steele and her toy-making apprentice named Cogs who have the power to travel through time and learn about the history of toys and endow them with the ability to move, speak, see, and think.

Since we opened in 2013, thousands of children and families have taken part in afterschool programs, summer camps, hackathons, and design challenge sleepovers that combine play, gamified and interest-driven learning experiences in areas such as game design and development; soft circuits, e-textiles and wearable technology; toy making, design, engineering and digital fabrication; robotics, electronics and the Internet of things; and animation, filmmaking and new frontiers in storytelling.

The Path Ahead

In 2019, SparkleLAB is founding a one-of-a-kind school, utilizing best practices and lessons learned over six years of research and development. Beginning with kindergarten and adding an additional grade each year, the school will serve as a prototype for K-12 education and 21st century learning: a space for research, product development, teacher training and school leadership.

The goal is to prepare young people for an uncertain future by transforming the world into a learning resource and testing ground for their ideas and innovations. From slums to vehicular traffic, dengue outbreaks and natural disasters, the Philippines itself becomes an opportunity for research, development, testing and 21st century learning.

Rosanna Lopez designs playful experiences that encourage young people to utilize technology and the principles of human-centered design to develop projects with a positive impact on their communities. She has worked with young people from the Philippines, Palestine, Argentina, the Caribbean, Spain, and the United States through organizations such as the United Nations Children’s Fund, the Institute of Play, Harlem School of the Arts, Voices Beyond Walls, and through a number of independent projects. She is currently based in Manila, and is Founder, Chief Product Officer, and Prankmaster of Sparklelab Design and Innovation Hub.