Kids Have No Fear and thus Learn at Lightning Speed

Some random thoughts on this excellent post:

I'm thirty-four. However, I was introduced to a DEC mainframe at age eight and had my own personal Apple II in sixth grade. Castle Wolfenstein was the best game of the day. VisiCalc was fun! While the Atari provided hours of enjoyment, the strategy offered by the PC games just “felt right” even to a sixth-grader.

Last month I took my father-in-law to CompUSA and he blew $5,000 on tech toys to support him in his retirement as he boats around the world. He’s got the remainder of his life to figure out all the things that are easy for me to adapt to in minutes and my sons (ages 4 and 2) in seconds. He calls about once a day for tech support. My four-year-old showed him how to take a photo on his new digital camera.

My sons fight over my cell phone. My graveyard of old cell phones, PDAs and other computer widgets is their special toybox.

Both sons have their own .com domains. I registered effectively at their births. (Note: We DID NOT choose their names on a WHOIS lookup for availability; however, it did cross my mind.)

I’ve observed over time that people fall in to two types of mobile phone talkers when upright and in an open space. There are the folks who pace back and forth and then there are folks who walk in a circle. I’m a circle walker myself, and whether it’s genetic or socialized, both of my boys walk in circles when on a mobile phone. I guess I’m proud of that as I surmise right-brained people are circle walkers.

I send pictures of me to Mom’s cell phone when I travel on business. The boys fight over it. When traveling, I send video from my Web cam to Mom’s e-mail for the boys. When my eldest first got one, he tried talking back to me and got frustrated. After he figured it out, he makes video for me.

Then three years old, my eldest could navigate the overly-skinned WindowsMedia Player to find the “Play” button when my wife could not. He made the simple association from pressing the play button a hundred times on the remote control or the portable DVD player to the player interface on a computer in .05 seconds.

Both boys have taken to the mouse like they’ve taken to sugar. My elder boy has at least 10x the dexterity of navigation than my father-in-law (Lawyer with engineering degree) who’s worked with computers since the '80s. Kids have no fear and thus learn at lightning speed. Anyone who was ever taught to “be careful” with a computer was taught to “learn at a snail's pace."

With hundreds of hours of digital video and 20 gigs of photos already, I now refer to my (still-far-away) retirement as “post-production." This is when I will sit down for years and edit down all that video and photography into the stories and memories that I hope will survive me for generations.

Power Rangers has something figured out that if ever applied to general consumer marketing would end up being illegal.

I’ve decided to hold off of getting my boys a Xbox/Playstation until they are socially tormented for not having one. That may be next year, but for now, they still enjoy the outdoors more than the indoors. Just mention “camping” or “fishing” and they’re bouncing to go. I like that.

I hope that the Whereify watch catches on enough that it gets improved. I’ll buy one for my dog first. I see the risk of becoming lazy in keeping a careful parental eye on my boys while relying on technology for something that has too much at stake. I’ll probably change my mind the next time I hear of a child getting abducted.

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