Kia Ora ladies and gentlegeeks,

If you are in NZ, I hope the school hols are treating you kindly.  Today has been a great day for a warm fire, baking and puzzles.  Soon I shall get serious about creating a delicious dinner for my crew.  Till then, I gotta lotta quality links to share.

Shall we?

First, I’m a little into the whole notion of Technology Shabbats, brainchild of Tiffany Shlain.  I heard about them via promotion for the upcoming webinar from the Children’s Screen Time Action Network.  Those webinars tend to be pretty awesome.

There are a great many reasons to try something like a tech shabbat, to declare yourself a member of the resistance.  We are part of a mass experiment and our brains are changing as a result …. or should we say, our brains are being changed.  There is something intentional and manipulative at play, although many will deny it.  Like Google.  Jeez, Google. You do WHAT?  Profit from pedophiles with your crazy recommendations and asymmetric algorithms?  Taste the shame. 

What to do?  If you’re New York rich, you might hire a coach to help raise phone-free kids,  which would be lovely, because all sorts of suboptimal outcomes are associated with too much tech … like these things in this blog post by Rae Pica, and read about diminishing physical skills in that there Australian article.  Pals, tech insiders don’t use the stuff like we’ve been coerced to.  Children are being predated on by the tech companies as well as the weirdos on their platforms.

Sigh.  Too much tech gets in the way of lots of other important things that children need to do.  They have WORK to do (they need “love, attention and plenty of free time”), if they are to be allowed to be thought “ready for school” at the appropriate age.  They gotta figure out how to make sense of emotion, they need adults helping them to process trauma before it gets lodged in their bodies, and they gotta climb trees.

I mean, we all gotta get outside more, preferably to dig in the dirt.  We are going to have to continue to raise a little hell, like this mama in Maryland who I salute from afar as she advocates for saner screen use in her school.  Put books in all waiting rooms!!