Three Notes: On Baby Walkers,Video Games, and Sex

Stephen L Talbott

This article in its original form was published in NetFuture #96 (October 14, 1999). It is now a chapter in Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines, published by O'Reilly Media with a release date of spring, 2007.

Beware the Baby Walker

The revelations in recent years about the risks of baby walkers ought to be a wake-up call for those parents eagerly buying educational software for their children. The revelations concern those cute little mobile seats with wheels that allow infants to move around in an upright position, with their feet touching the ground, so that they can propel themselves with their own legs. There may be perfectly good reasons for employing such devices in particular situations, and infants seem to delight in them. But my concern now is with the satisfaction many parents take in seeing their little ones “develop strong, well-coordinated legs for early walking.” The general thinking seems to run like this: “The child must sooner or later learn to walk; if we put him in a walker so he can practice using his legs, maybe he’ll learn faster, and surely this would be good.”

Not so — and the reasons ought not to surprise us. Here’s how the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics summarized one study:

Walker-experienced infants sat, crawled, and walked later than no-walker controls, and they scored lower on Bayley scales of mental and motor development. (Siegel and Burton 1999)

Another study, this one published in the British Medical Journal (Garrett et al. 2002), found “strong associations between the amount of baby walker use and the extent of developmental delay.” Children who spend time in walkers tend to be slower in “achieving normal locomotor milestones.”

The decisive point here ought to be shouted from the rooftops: Devices intended to speed up development of a child’s legs and improve locomotor performance can turn out to have exactly the opposite effect. In a society obsessed with giving its children a head start, this truth flies directly and rudely in our faces.

But the baby walker research interests me less than certain questions one might be prompted to ask just on the surface of things. These turn out to be questions we could easily re-phrase and apply to the growing library of software designed to jump-start little kids:

** Why would we ever assume that exploring the world on hands and knees is less important to an eight-month-old than exploring the world on feet is to an eighteen-month-old? What possible grounds are there for trying to speed the transition from one stage to the next? What essential experiences are we denying to the eight-month-old if we do speed things up?

** If the aim really is to give the kid stronger, more coordinated legs, why would we assume that the way to do it is to encourage premature walking — that is, to get the legs working in a way those legs were not designed to work? Isn’t it fairly obvious that this might just as well hinder future development as help it? Might it not be some wholly “unrelated” activity we should encourage in order to reach our goal?

** Even if the walker, contrary to the evidence now presented, turns out to help children walk sooner, why should we assume without further inquiry that this has no adverse effects on other capacities, including mental ones? The complex developmental processes of the human being are a unity far beyond our current understanding, and about the only thing we can say for sure is that a change induced in one aspect of development is almost certain to produce ripple effects elsewhere. It is well-established, for example, that the young child’s use of his hands is related to the development of intellectual capacities.

In sum, if a child normally learns to walk at a particular stage of his development, and if this walking relates one way or another to everything else in the child from the use of other limbs to the structuring of nerve connections in the brain, then why should we expect good to come of throwing a wrench into the complex developmental sequence? It is sheer craziness to force a use of the legs before the muscles, bones, and nervous system have prepared themselves for it. Far better to find ways to encourage the fullest expression of the urge to crawl so long as that urge prevails. The child has no difficulty letting us know when he is ready for fundamentally new developments such as walking.

It is only misguided adults who find cause for prideful joy in “early development.” The child knows nothing of such joy; he is delighted to discover whatever properly belongs to each moment. What the child needs is not that each phase of his development should be hurried up and brought out of sequence, but that it be deepened in the time and place where it belongs. We then work with the developmental process rather than against it. It is amazing, in a society that makes such a song and dance of “evolution” and “development,” that the anti-developmental, “earlier is better” notion could have taken such root.

It is also remarkable that, after trying to force the development of the infant’s muscles and legs before they are ready, we turn around and set the growing boy and girl — who now desperately need vigorous movement and active play — in front of video screens where they remain nearly immobile for countless hours. And in this we contribute further to an epidemic of obesity.

There is probably no tool that offers a wider variety of ways to distort and “force” the normal processes of growing up than the computer. Despite the fact that the young child thinks with his body long before he learns to think with the adult’s detached mind, a great deal of computer-based education is premised on the idea that we can safely constrain, alter, or ignore that bodily expression in the interest of speeding up the development of certain abstract mental processes that are more or less alien to the child.

“We may think ... that we need to get children to memorize the idea that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points,” John Alexandra writes in Mephistopheles’ Anvil: Forging a More Human Future (1996). “But even one-year-old children already know this: when frightened, they will run to their parents in the straightest of straight lines.” Alexandra goes on:

At that age, however, they know it only in their legs, where this knowledge is unconscious, asleep. The mathematics teacher’s task is to draw out and make conscious what children already know unconsciously, rather than to push concepts into their memories. Teaching through movement and art does not reduce the accuracy of the resulting intellectual concept. It enhances the concept so it can be experienced through the whole human being. (p. 156)

The transformative wisdom at work in the child's organism is far beyond our current understanding. We have no business trying to reduce it to the terms of our adult notions of cause and effect.

Pianists and Video Game Players

However disgusting the video game, you can be sure someone will remark that “at least it improves hand-eye coordination.” I have no idea where this cliché comes from. It is, at the very least, odd, given that any healthy childhood — indeed, almost anything a child might naturally want to do (before his instincts have been deadened by technology) — will lead toward proper hand-eye coordination. And, regarding the child glued to a video screen, why aren’t we also concerned about leg coordination? Or about whole-body coordination?

But another issue is, for me, the decisive one. Physically coordinated performance becomes admirable in the fullest sense only to the degree it is caught up within a higher expressive purpose. Without this purpose, we have only a descent toward the automatic and reflexive — in other words, toward the machine-like. By means of an artistic aim, on the other hand (think of the achievement of the gymnast, dancer, and instrumental musician) the physical skills are ennobled. They rise from the merely effective to the beautiful.

People often suggest that the manual skills gained from video games are not unlike those required by the piano player. The comparison can be revealing. Certainly muscular training and coordination are essential to the pianist. Even something rather like automatic and reflexive behavior is required. It would be impossible to play if the artist had to direct the movement of each finger consciously.

However, this, too, is a rather shallow cliché. The pianist does in fact direct each movement consciously. That’s what gives us the distinctive performance — the musical interpretation and artistic expression — we may either rave or groan about. While a kind of lower-level, muscular memory is very much at work, every motion of the fingers adapts, however subtly, to the artistic intention of the moment. This intention may be quite different from what it was in the last performance, depending on the setting, the audience, the performer’s mood, and so on. So the level we like to think of as automatic is continually being disciplined and shaped from a higher, artistic level. This power of shaping constitutes the real mastery of the pianist.

The difference between the piano and the shoot-em-up video game is that, for the most part, the latter trains our reflexes to operate independently of our higher, more artistic sensibilities. The aim is merely to maximize a score or otherwise to win. Where the pianist is pursuing a sense of a coherent whole and is trying to produce an esthetically unified performance, the video game player is simply responding to one damned thing after another. Bodily grace and expressive content hardly figure into the picture as conscious goals — although I suspect there are few if any imaginable activities where the truly superb performer is not required to develop some aspects of grace.

All this, by the way, bears on a science born of technology. Looking at a world whose nature is as far removed from mechanism as it could possibly be — a world of streams and trees and clouds — it seems we can do nothing better than imagine infinitesimal mechanisms behind the scenes while we ignore the higher, expressive gesturing that gives rise to, disciplines, and masters whatever else is going on. We can, of course, say that in our search for mechanisms we are “being rigorous and quantitative.” And it’s true that a concert-goer adopting such a stance might become wonderfully precise in measuring the pianist’s intervals, pitches, tempos, and dynamic changes. But he would miss out badly if he mistook this disjointed data for the music.

That the world is full of music no one would deny — no one, that is, who is not busy philosophizing or collecting data. Watch a sunset, sit beside a stream, or wander through a field and something in you will acknowledge the music whether you wish it or not. The mechanistic stance in science grew, not from an original conviction that nature is not an artist, but rather from the choice to attend to other things. The measurable parameters of nature’s performance became the sole concern. It is not surprising that, after a few centuries of this single-minded choice, the philosophical conviction emerged that the music is some sort of human illusion or invention — that nature is less an artist than a video game engineer, and that everything going on amounts to little more than one damned thing after another, without aesthetic unity, without feeling, without meaningful expression.

This conviction, however, is the true illusion, and I doubt whether those raised from childhood on video games — however wondrous their hand-eye coordination — have anywhere near as good a chance of escaping the illusion as do those whose games take them out into the natural world.

Sex, the Internet, and Educational Reform

“One of the most thorough reports ever produced on protecting children from Internet pornography has concluded that neither tougher laws nor new technology alone can solve the problem” — so the New York Times led off a story headlined, “No Easy Fixes Are Seen to Curb Sex-Site Access” (May 3, 2002). The mentioned report, “Youth, Pornography, and the Internet,” was issued by the National Research Council.

Former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, chair of the committee that wrote the report, owned up to the fact that

it’s not nearly as easy for an adult to supervise children who might seek or be inadvertently exposed to sexually explicit materials online as it is when such images are available in books or on the family television set.

In fact, the authors of the National Research Council report, while trying to sound helpful, seem nevertheless to have thrown in the towel. They offer this analogy:

Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks, put up fences, and deploy pool alarms. All of these measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing that one can do for one’s children is to teach them to swim.

Sounds healthy, doesn’t it? The only problem is that the analogy doesn’t carry over to the Internet very well. Here, by the authors’ admission, the locks, fences, and alarms can’t be made to work in a reliable and socially acceptable way, and the remaining advice (“teach them to swim”) amounts to this: force these children to become like adults as fast as possible. (Well, presumably not like all those adults who keep the massive online pornography industry in business.) Exactly what does it mean to teach a fourth grader to stay afloat in the sordid world of online trafficking? The authors of this report offer us a solution that doesn’t apply to the people we were initially concerned about — namely, children suffering the lamentable backwardness, naiveté, and misfortune of still being children.

It invariably seems to happen, when someone expresses concern about children on the Internet, that someone else replies, “I prefer not to shield my children artificially from reality.” This always puzzles me. Why is it so difficult to see that protecting children is exactly what we must do? In fact, the need to shield the child from the fatal consequences of premature exposure to the world — and to do so for an extraordinarily long time — is one of the things that distinguishes humans from animals.

The relation of the nurturer to the one nurtured is not symmetrical. It means one thing to receive nurture and quite another to give nurture. Moreover, receiving nurture is not merely an unfortunate necessity, to be gotten over as quickly as possible. That end of the relationship will, by its own qualities, determine the eventual fullness of the life of the adult.

As the diffuse, all-embracing consciousness of the young child slowly contracts from the wide world into its narrow, sharp, wakeful focus in the mature ego (“out of everywhere and into here”), how much of its native world wisdom will it bring with it? Actually, the “shielding from reality” isn’t that at all. It is an attempt to preserve, before it fades away entirely, the fuller reality that adults in our era all too often lose. It’s an attempt to cultivate the childlike, playful, innocent, and imaginative qualities of human life so that they can produce their fruit for the adult.

Certainly the child must increasingly confront ugliness, pain, evil, and falsehood. Virtually all human growth comes through suffering. Almost everything worthwhile in the world is the fruit of suffering. I am the last person to say we should protect people from the grace of their own suffering. But if the sufferer was not allowed to discover what is every child’s birthright — the truth, beauty, and goodness that stand prior to and above all suffering — and if he was not allowed to thrive within that bright kingdom, where will he find the courage to endure his suffering?

The problem with the Internet as a classroom tool is that it has been conceived as a universally accessible, public medium. Very little about it conduces to the organic emergence of a local, intentional environment with the sort of character that an intimate, place-based community can nurture and protect. When a Virginia law made it illegal to send pornography to children over the Internet, a U.S. District Judge threw the law out on the ground that you cannot effectively deny this material to children without in practice also denying it to adults. As the ACLU put it while arguing against Ohio’s effort to install software filters in 700 public libraries to protect children from obscene material: “There is no software on the market that can target pornography and leave legitimate material alone.” We might have some control over the kind of environment we create in our homes and on our streets, but we can forget this when it comes to the Internet.

Why not draw the obvious conclusion instead of walking around in circles with our hands in our pockets, whistling innocently, and gazing vaguely skyward as if to say, “Gee, isn’t this a terrible puzzle? I wonder where we’ll find an answer?” The real puzzle is why we have so resolutely turned away from the simple answer that is being shouted at us: the Internet just doesn’t seem to be a good candidate for mediating a child’s education. It makes no sense to shift our educational system over to a medium that, by its nature, allows none of the distinctions, none of the rootedness, none of the stability and predictability, none of the security, and not even any of the diversity that can so readily be fostered in places. There is, after all, no true diversity (as opposed to chaos) when there are no stable and distinct places in which different cultures can take slow and deliberate root. And, to put it bluntly, there is no sanity in an educational environment unpredictably subject to the extreme of pornographic invasion.

All of which brings me to this. Aren’t we about due for a new, multi-billion-dollar educational fad? Well, I happen to have a program in mind that is neither faddish nor costly. In fact, it would reduce educational spending by many billions of dollars, simplify the classroom, remove from teachers the crushing burden and distraction of special training unrelated to their educational interests, give students much more time to occupy themselves with educational content, increase teacher pay, allow for higher teacher-student ratios, and, incidentally, put an end to the absurdity whereby parents are asked to sign off on legal immunity for schools that deliberately put children in harm’s way.

Think about it. Educators could breathe again. If anyone had realistically offered such an array of benefits ten years ago — before the Internet hit the educational scene with full force — it would have been considered an unparalleled gift from heaven. Of course, the gift couldn’t have been offered ten years ago. We needed a decade of collective insanity first. But now the gift can be offered, it is perfectly realistic, and it requires only the simplest imaginable reform: take all those computers out of the classroom and send them back to the manufacturers for recycling.