Is this your kids brain online? UPDATED

A very interesting second-parter over at CBS in their excellent three-part series on teenagers and the internet. Today – what is happening to your kid’s brain when they’re online.

This is particularly interesting to me, as my Elder Son is super-connected, so to speak and has been fascinated by all manner of computer and ‘net technology since he was toddling around. While he’s an affable young man, sometimes I do feel like he’s a little disoriented with the “real world,” that he is rather like a submarine in permanent “dive” mode, who only emerges into the give-and-take of life when school or work deem it absolutely necessary. That’s an exaggeration, of course, and his temprament and nature have always been dreamy and preoccupied, so it would be unfair to lay it all on computers. But I do wonder, sometimes, if our kids are going to evolve quite differently from the rest of us, if the hustle-and-flow, the demand for immediacy and the incessant noise of the internet will not simply steal from them their last chances for lives that are more laid back, more peace-ful, more ambling.

You know…life as it used to be, when a summer was a thousand years long and still too short, when little kids were free to roam about a neighborhood and play and swim in ponds and explore, where 24-7 parental hovering was unheard of and one could take a great deal of pleasure in sitting back with friends and sharing a cold Coke on a sticky afternoon. That world is being lost to a “stay-inside-and-online, preferably-in-a/c” world and I don’t know if our kids – or theirs – can ever appreciate what they are losing by embracing it. And we parents, we’ve been so frightened by everything the “experts” have told us could assail our kids, by faces staring at us from milk cartons for 20 years, we’re helped take the simplicity of life away from them…under the guise of “keeping them safe” we’re quite happy to keep them home rather than let them wander.

But they’ll get hurt either way, I think. Home or away, in a cardboard fort or in their fortified bedrooms. There is no keeping our kids away from harm, or from strangers.

Today’s piece at CBS is good, but I always take these reports with a grain of salt. They always give us “experts” who can’t wait to tell us all the dreadful things that can or might happen – that’s what experts are paid to do, or course, and the news business thrives on it – but they never really know. Notice in this piece, toward the end – as is often the case in such stories – there are other voices suggesting that no, the sky isn’t falling this time, either. In that respect, I give CBS credit for putting forth a balanced piece.

But you know what? In the end, all of the experts can’t tell you much about your kids that you don’t already know inside yourself.

Look at your kids. Are they happy? Do they laugh and smile? Are their moods appropriate to an occasion? Do they have friends? Do you like the person your son or daughter is? Then screw the magazines and the “experts” and all of those “perfect” storms or “perfect” families they might highlight. Any writer trying to tell a story can make any scenario credible by giving a tiny snippet of someone’s life. Anyone’s life can seem “perfect” or perfectly lousy seen in a snip.

Here is real life: You love your kids and your kids love you, but you still lose your patience with each other and yell and scream sometimes. Teenagers bellow on impulse and then come back ten minutes later and hug you and say sorry, then they ask for money. Or car keys. People get PMS – even the male people. People slam doors. People brood. People get selfish. There is give; there is take. There are good days and bad, and with mercurial teenagers there are good hours and bad.

You ask your son to plant the zinnias for you and he makes so much noise about it you say the heck with it and do it yourself. When he sees you later, limping around on your arthritic knees, he wonders why you’re hurting, and you say, “well I planted the zinnias.” Then he frowns and says, “why didn’t you wait for me to do it? I was going to do it!”

Then you remember the parable Jesus told about the sons who were told to work in the field – the one who said “yes” didn’t do it and the one who said “no” did – and you realize that an old Jewish father may not have had to deal with the internet, but he still had to deal with teenagers, and there really is nothing new under the sun.

All you can do is love your kids. Just love them. If you get that part right, the rest of it should work out.

UPDATE: Dick Meyer, in a typically smart and thoughtful piece thinks it’s still early to know whether GenTech will be adversely affected by it all, and he admits that the teens he sees tend to be bright and functional – but because he is a journalist, he seems to be anticipating the worst! :-)