Last month, a New York Post article about video games being like “digital heroin” for kids caused a bit of an uproar. The article describes a young boy losing interest in reading and baseball in favor of Minecraft, increasingly throwing tantrums until late one night his mother finds him in a catatonic state. Many have refuted this article as based on suspect evidence and even as a plug for the author’s addiction recovery center, noting the human tendency to treat new technologies—especially those used by children—with hysteria. It’s just the latest in the “screen time” debates.

But beyond scaremongering, what does screen time and immersion in digital worlds actually mean in terms of child rearing? I ask this question not just because it is anthropologically interesting, but as the parent of two small children who are growing up in a digitally transforming world. In keeping with my last two posts in this series, I turn to the work of Margaret Mead for ways to think about technology and child rearing. Perhaps Mead’s most interesting insights are about the decline of respect for elders’ knowledge—and thus, a loss of knowledge about traditions and life wisdom—in situations of rapid cultural and generational change. She felt that American children had markedly different lives from their (often immigrant) parents, with access to more resources and technologies, and the potential for upward mobility. This, she argued, meant that:

“In a country where the most favoured are the ones to take up the newest invention, and old things are in such disrepute…the world belongs to the new generation…. In the past there have been societies in which the elders have been craftsmen in life, wise in its requirements, loving in their use of precious materials…. But in…America, life is not viewed as an art which is learned, but in terms of things which can be acquired” (Mead 1930: 214-16).

Here, Mead argues that in societies that value facility with new technology over life experience, children lack humility or appreciation for skills learned over a lifetime. This is a comment less on how virtual game play affects children, and more on how the privileged place of these digital creations in our society affects kinship structures.

However, I do not think that Mead would consider television or video games inherently bad for children. Mead studied childhood in many places—perhaps most famously among different groups in the South Pacific—and compared their practices to American child rearing. Later, she was considered one of the first “experts” on parenting, along with her friend and family pediatrician Benjamin Spock. As an early contributor to the “nature-nurture” debates, she believed that certain cultures create specific personalities and that this happens early with children. Mead’s work reminds us that parenting is infinitely varied, and thus one should keep an open mind to new variations.

I will come clean now, and admit that I am not a gamer. My parents never allowed video games, although I watched my male friends play some of the games of that era. I didn’t join in much partly because of perceived gender divides, and because I was terrible at these games, having no experience. I was intrigued by the world of the Legend of Zelda, although I always felt I had more in common with Link, the industrious (male) protagonist, than with Princess Zelda who must be rescued. As for Mortal Kombat, I remember asking, “What good is it to know how to knock out a monster with a double kick in this game if you can’t do it in real life?” (My friends would say, “That’s not the point.”) However, thinking about virtual worlds anthropologically—and the variation in these worlds now as compared to when I was a kid—I realize the moral judgment in a wholesale rejection of the play, exploration, and socializing possible in digital spaces.

I think Mead would understand virtual worlds as “real,” and make distinctions about different kinds of virtual experience. For example, in a typical video game, there is some room for flexibility and agency (and increasingly so, from what I understand), but the visuals and rules have been pre-programmed, thus lacking the chaos and surprise of the physical world. A computer program has yet to simulate the world, but there are digital spaces that allow more creativity. Tom Boellstorff argues convincingly that places and social relationships in Second Life are “real” and provide a space for people with certain interests or medical conditions to meet.

Minecraft, which appeals enormously to children, allows players to build structures with other players in a virtual space that does not include an overall goal with challenges to overcome. Some argue that Minecraft encourages children to think like computer programmers and engineers. Minecraft has provided a platform for children with autism to meet and socialize and, as Mimi Ito demonstrates, can be a creative route to education. Gaming communities lead to relationships between people, who may meet face-to-face or not, while Casey O’Donnell shows that game developers have their own cultures. And of course, Pokémon Go is the most audacious attempt yet at creating an “overlay” between real and virtual worlds.

Mead would probably argue that virtual worlds are part of the “real” world for our children in the same way they are real for adults. Let’s be honest: I spend the majority of my weekdays staring at screens. Yet the activities I do on screens vary—I email mainly for work, I use my phone for texting with friends and family or to scan social media, I use the Internet for research, I write on a computer, and increasingly I read articles and books online. At night I might watch a “brain candy” TV show. As I’ve said, I’m not a gamer, so I do not have immersive experience in this kind of virtual world, although I enjoy a good science fiction novel or TV show here and there. I can understand the appeal. However, I limit my two-year-old’s screen time to a weekly Friday family movie night, when we all watch a half hour of a cartoon movie. He asks for movie night during the week now. He also talks to his grandparents using Facetime on my phone, and sometimes I let him look at photos of himself and family on the phone. He already knows how to swipe the screen and sometimes cries when I take the phone away. It’s a slippery slope, but is it a bad one? This will become ever more complicated as my kids get older and want to play virtual games. I do think it is important to spend time in the physical world, in face-to-face social situations. I also realize this is a moral argument in many ways.

I think Mead would say it is important for children to explore their worlds including virtual spaces, but not at the expense of exploration of the rest of their worlds. She would probably be the first to argue that more ethnographic research is needed. What do these games mean for how children learn roles, rules, norms, socializing, and trusting themselves? How does this compare with learning from physical play that teaches them rules of the physical world—such as climbing and falling from a play structure—and face-to-face social interactions? Of course, as noted above, some anthropologists are doing this work already. Certainly, games can help children develop empathy; Mead herself, with Gregory Bateson, invented a card game that sought to teach how democratic leaders and dictators think differently. The nonprofit Games for Change specializes in video games with “social impact.” Further, learning depends on the virtual space. Can we make these spaces even more flexible and inclusive, especially in terms of gender or parameters of the game?

Finally, Mead would likely turn the lens back on American society. What does it say about us that we judge parents based on their screen time policies? This is a moral and gendered stance that judges parents and especially mothers. However, I think there is more to it than mommy shaming. In a world that feels increasingly uncertain, the debates over screen time seem to reflect broader cultural anxieties about preparing children—and adults, by extension—for an unknown and unknowable future. Giving our children varied experience in the world, including but not limited to virtual worlds, may be the best we can do.

 

Mead, Margaret. 1930. Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education. New York: William Morrow and Company.