Raising "Digital Natives" with The Family iPad

Finally, a parenting piece in The Atlantic has validated my parenting choices, whoo hoo! There's a great article in the April issue by Hanna Rosin (having typed that, I'm pretty sure hell might have just frozen over) that just arrived in the mail but I can't seem to find a link to anywhere online, called "The Touch-Screen Generation." Reads like a very well-intentioned parenting blog post, like a more in-depth, reporty version of something straight out of Ask Moxie. But, of course, the cover photo is creepy - and, um, it happens to looks just like my kid, complete with the iPad covering up her face (I mean, it's The Atlantic, what else did I expect?)

In it, I learned some new-to-me terms: Digital Natives - they are the first generations of children growing up fluent in the language of computers, video games, and other technologies. Everybody else are Digital Immigrants, just struggling to understand. Of course, we all know exceptions, but from where I set these monikers generally fit.

The Hush family is the proud owner of one sole, cherished, iPad. It gets a lot of use by all of us, preschoolers and adults alike. For now, we have just the one in our house. Kind of like there was just "The Phone" singular, or "The TV" singular when I was growing up in the 1980s. My parents and I often had to wait our turn to use it. (I'm thinking of that Louis C.K. bit about having only one of something in the house growing up, and how awesome things are now by comparison.)

We let the kids play educational apps on the iPad at home pretty much whenever the mood strikes them (except bedtime, when we all take a tech time out - on the presumption it might inhibit sleep, but I wonder about that). More on those specific apps after the jump. We each happen to use the family iPad somewhat differently.

I use it only to watch The Walking Dead on Netflix while I run on the treadmill (and let me tell you, there's nothing like zombies to encourage you to pick up your pace.) DH uses it for sales pitches at work, and to do his online shopping. Funny, we also have a desktop iMac in my office, but I'm pretty much the only one who ever uses it. We rarely allow the kids to touch our phones - DH has an iPhone, and I have a Droid but I now wish I could travel back in time to 2011 and pick an iPhone instead. Oh well, my decision made sense at the time. Compared to my peers, I hardly ever upgrade my cell phones, and I have only had a lifetime total of 3 cell phones since I was forced (as in, personally called in to the boss' office and told to pick one up ASAP) to get my first, for work, in 2004 - and by then I was super late to that party.

Anyway, our youngest was born in the fall of 2009. The iPad came out in April 2010. We got ours sometime in 2011, and it is hard to remember life as a parent without it.

These days, you'll pry our family iPad out of our cold, dead hands!! I know, I know. But isn't this just another iteration of that dreaded "screen time" the APA urges us to limit because it rewires children's brains? My luddite friend who is training to be a Waldorf teacher thinks we're doing our children irreparable harm. I think she means well, but she's drinking the Kool-Aid and does not have children of her own yet. I, too, was an awesome parent before I had kids.


I absolutely love the ("educational"? yes, yes, absolutely) apps our kids use. Our three-year-old loves the Starfall ABCs app, Memory Train, and Montessori Crosswords.  Our five-year-old is currently fond of Stack the States, (and Stack the Countries), Star Walk, and Slice It!.  Let's just say I'm utterly convinced my kids are benefitting from having these apps occupy some space in their childhoods. I might not feel that way if they were on the iPad each and everyday, but they're not. They use it with about the same frequency as they use any other "toy" or activity at our house. Sometimes they go way more than a week without asking for it.  Should we as parents be treating the iPad any differently than we treat, say, books, art supplies, Montessori works, TV, or sports equipment? What role does screen time generally have in your family life?



And I'm always on the lookout for more app recommendations, so if you've got them, please leave them in the comments.

On Innovation and Yahoo's Telework Ban

As the old saying goes "Give the people what they want" (aw, shucks)... here's my defense of the Yahoo CEO's decision to enact a blanket ban on all telework.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (I've previously blogged about her here) was a fantastic recent hire. But it seems folks just can't resist tripping the proverbial prom queen. Unlike pretty much the majority out there who get off on second guessing every move she makes**, I, for one, am convinced she knows what the hell she is doing.

If anyone can right the sad, sinking ship that is Yahoo today, it's her. Informal poll time: show of hands, who uses Yahoo on a daily basis? Yeah, I thought not. I still use a Yahoo mail account and people actually make fun of me for it.

So when Mayer (the well-compensated tech genius expert) tells us (the technically-inept masses) she has mined Yahoo's employee VPN data and it has told her in no uncertain terms ALERT - the folks you have been paying to do the work aren't doing the work!, then she had the responsibility to do something about it. And she did - her move was a decisive, drastic one that has made her very unpopular in the press: she decided nobody at Yahoo is allowed to telework anymore.


For starters, nobody in her peer group is more data-driven and evidence-based in their processes than she is. Mayer made the decision by checking the data showing how much teleworkers were actually logging in to Yahoo’s network – and well, case closed. From the SF Chronicle:

“Likewise, we’re hearing from people close to Yahoo executives and employees that she made the right decision banning work from home.
“The employees at Yahoo are thrilled,” says one source close to the company.
“There isn’t massive uprising. The truth is, they’ve all been pissed off that people haven’t been working.”

There you have it: folks were not doing the work. Why her middle managers couldn't have effectively managed their own employees in the first place is of course, another story, and one that probably speaks to Yahoo's lackadaisical cultural problems that Mayer is trying desperately to correct. I prefer to call it strong, unflinching leadership on her part, but her critics are calling it some other unflattering things.

Her critics, such as Lisa Belkin in Huffington Post.com, are saying, "I had hope that as a new mother, she would use her platform and her power to make Yahoo an example of a modern family-friendly workplace"... it's a warning for everyone "that their lives don't matter." Seriously, Ms. Belkin? That sounds awfully hyperbolic. @Cloud, Wandering Scientist has a great analysis of why we aren't holding male CEOs to these same feminist standards.

Mayer's role is to lead a lagging company within the context of unforgiving American tech company capitalism - where it's survival of the fittest out there. Which, like most of corporate American life, is onerous hell to folks who need to take some time out of it for various reasons, but hey that's our system, and while I can't think of a better one either, I know we can do a few things better (uncoupling insurance from employment, universal child care, guaranteed paid maternity leave etc etc). But, as Mayer is not an elected official I would submit these concerns are not her primary problem. Instead, her focus is right where it should be: on building a collaborative workplace that will create and deliver inspired, innovative products. Buy into her vision, Yahoos, or get out. I can respect that, but I may not like it. And if I'm a recent Yahoo hire whose employment decision was predicated on my ability to telework, then yes, I have a legitimate grievance - but I'd wager that's a small subset of Yahoos. Certainly, there are also Yahoos out there who are grateful to have a leader with a snowball's chance in hell of saving their jobs.

As I've commented elsewhere, "productivity" alone is no longer the name of the game. There seems to be a dichotomy between productivity and innovation. Everyone's gut intuition about it and the current research seem to agree that telework improves productivity. But surprise, surprise telework is actually bad for innovation:

"Studies show that people who work at home are significantly more productive but less innovative, said John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University who runs a human resource advisory firm. "If you want innovation, then you need interaction," he said.  "If you want productivity, then you want people to work from home."

Mayer was hired last year with a direct mandate to alter Yahoo's stagnating culture. A decade ago, Yahoo was a place where the best and brightest Internet hires came together to innovate. For too long, Yahoo has been coasting along on auto-pilot, losing market share while maintaining existing business lines rather than growing new ones (i.e. being "productive" rather than "innovative"? hmm....). Yahoo has obviously been outpaced by Google and Facebook - two companies which, by the way also frown upon telework, albeit in a less extreme way than Yahoo's anti-telework policy. Which ought to tell us something.

If this anti-telework trend catches on outside of the tech-specific domain, that will be a crying shame. Because we know for a fact telework is great for productivity at fixed jobs. At Yahoo, and at this specific historical moment for the company, I can totally see how Mayer made the correct call. So, please, let's all stop questioning Mayer's intelligence in these matters.

** By the way, they call this "Tripping the Prom Queen" (great book, BTW) wherein the strongest females are attacked by the weakest females - the exact opposite of the treatment of strong males in our society. I happen to think this explains most of the anti-Mayer and Sandberg rhetoric out there.

"PC Load Letter!!!???!!!"

Why can't we ever manage to find a basic, bare-bones inexpensive home printer that actually works? As in one that like actually prints documents and doesn't get an "out of paper" or "paper jam" message every 5 minutes? I don't need one that can fax or print photos. Scanner and basic printing capabilities will do.

Here's what I'd like to tell all the home printers I've purchased and hated before.

To our newest shitty printer purchase, the H-Pee AWFUL-ice-jet 4500, I say: Go eff yourself! Unfortunately, we have to live with your broke ass a little longer.

To its shitty predecessor, El Ep-Sun Style-less See-Ex 4450, I say: We had you for like a month because you were included for free with some other equipment we got. (The fact we paid nothing for you should have been our first clue.) Eff you very much!

To the O.G. printer we got back in like 2004, the H-Pee All in one 6210: Thank you for some shits and giggles. We got to talk to some guys in India about your issues on two occasions. Eff off!

Tomorrow I take 2 useless printers to the recycling place; the other I must keep until a better replacement can be found at a reasonable price point. Oy.

The good news is DH and I have date night tomorrow, and we get to see an actual movie in the theater. Maybe it will be at the same theater where I went into labor with DD 17+ months ago while watching "Zombieland." Good times!