How to Stop Children’s Adultification on Social Media and Return to Normal Play Development
“Adultification is the failure to see the world from a child’s perspective.”
Increasingly we treat them as commodities and find ourselves “in danger of losing the child in childhood.” Instead of imposing adult expectations…parents and teachers should try to “take their blinders off” and see the world through the eyes of young children — a change in perspective that might allow us to better understand and cultivate their unique abilities. The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need From Grownups: Erika Christakis
This is a call to return to the impulse of freedom of play as a natural development and discovery of our real environment. Let’s put the screens down and cultivate hands-on three-dimensional learning in small groups and independent discovery of communication and consequences.
My goodness, I still remember at the age of 6 or 7, the big rock in our front yard where I designed a whole mystery skit between rocks, leaves and branches where the stick detective found the missing rocks under the leaves with mud pies as a special effect!
Look around our homes at all the internet-connected devices everywhere … laptops, smartphones, tablets, all…
