How to feed a mind

The children are now back in school, probably a bit bleary-eyed from an unaccustomed early rising after the happy lack of routine of the holidays.  Many of us sat in strangely silent homes this morning, wondering where the time went and trying to reconstruct the whirlwind of happy winter activities and social events of the past couple of weeks.  In spite of a new dose of austerity produced by the uncertain economy, many of us likely still spent more than we meant to so that our children could have some of the games and toys on their wish lists. Was it worth it?  What do our children need to keep growing and learning?  What should we be providing for children who are trying to find a path to adulthood in a world that is nothing like the one that we knew just a few short years ago?

    When I was a young university student, one of the first hands-on research projects I ever put together took place at a new type of interactive playground in a Toronto amusement park.  The idea was to try to move beyond the traditional swings-and-slide concept by giving children a range of materials that they could use to build their own structures.  It seemed a marvelous idea to me and I turned up one sweltering summer day with a clipboard and a stopwatch to document the fun, convert the children’s activities into a nice presentation full of tables and graphs, and nail myself an ‘A’ in the course.  Although some children did spend some time with the pieces of wood, the tools, and the paint that was provided for them to build their own kid villages, the big surprise for me was that the most popular toy of all was nothing more than a large nautical bell.  Not only would children line up longer for a chance to strike the bell than for any other toy, but they showed a marked reluctance to give it up once they had acquired it.  What seemed to fascinate the kids about the bell was the fact that they could use it to announce their existence.  As they hammered away at it, they looked around at the surrounding crowds of adults to see whose attention they grasped.  It was as if the toll of the bell was their way of saying “I am here!”, defending some deep need for feedback, proof of their own existence as a causal agent in the world.

    In our world, children of all ages beyond toddler-hood spend a significant amount of their time immersed in virtual worlds of one kind or another.  Club Penguin, Runescape, Facebook all encourage children of different ages to engage with one another in a cybernetic landscape.  What are they looking for there?  Is it the same kind of feedback that I saw my bellringers trying to obtain?  One morning last week, I was gobsmacked by a question my 5 year old daughter ask her 4 year old brother on a tour of his Club Penguin site.  “How come you have so many friends here?” she asked.  “Because I do interesting things,” he replied.  But when our kids get that kind of positive feedback from worlds that aren’t really anywhere, are they just continuing to slip out of place?  How bad is it that the gathering place for some of my little son’s friends is defined by a URL rather than by the gnarly old apple tree in my grandmother’s back yard that I remember as the social hub of my own early childhood?