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Raising The First Generation Of iPad-Addicted Kids

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My son is the first generation of human beings to never know a life without the iPad.

He was born in April of 2010, the same month that the first generation iPad was introduced to the world, and his first bedtime stories were told in the glow of the revolutionary device.

So, if pop research is to be believed, he should now be exhibiting advanced signs of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), have an unhealthy penchant for first-person shooter video games, and otherwise be developing into an incommunicative drone, right?

But a funny thing happened to our family when we outsourced our son’s formative entertainment and education to the iPad. Our son is turning out to be a bright, talkative, intellectually curious, amazingly technologically literate, and normal kid.  He’s also quite articulate. In fact, when he does look up from the iPad he talks seemingly non-stop, replaying back to us his accumulated knowledge from various YouTube videos, learning applications and his latest gaming conquest.

Is he a lucky anomaly, or is it possible that the ubiquitous access to technology that today’s kids have at their fingertips could actually be a good thing?

If you read academic studies and news accounts from around the time the iPad was first launched, you would think my wife and I deserved jail time for letting our son even touch the technology. A study published in the journal Pediatrics received widespread media attention for its finding that grade schoolers and young adults who play lots of video games are more likely to have ADHD or other attention problems.

In fairness to the authors of the study, they never said that video games and screen time caused ADHD, they just showed a correlation between rising numbers of kids with the disorder and increased video game usage. But that didn’t stop the media machine from creating an inextricable link between the image of a child in a public place being “pacified” by an electronic device and the forthcoming apocalypse.

As a parent and a business executive who spends his days helping companies tap into the lifecycle of innovation, the paradox between what I was reading at the time and what I was seeing unfold before my eyes – both at home and at work – was striking. As far as I could see, the technology was helping my son grow and learn at a pace that would never before have been possible were it not for his ability to have an entire world’s worth of information literally at his fingertips.

The only negative consequence I’ve observed in his five years of iPad-enabled evolution has been the occasional broken iPad. All told, between cracked screens, upgraded equipment and a litany of 99 cent app purchases, we’ve probably spent less than the cost of a family trip to Disney World on my son’s iPad experience.

Think about what we’ve acquired for that price. Over the course of his experiential evolution, from the piano app to the Barney app to Google Earth and FaceTime, he has acquired knowledge of books, music, geography and – of course – technology. At five, he understands the base premise of geometry and knows the core concepts behind the growing and trading of crops. Five year-olds didn’t know this sort of thing 10 years ago.

Which brings us back to the central dilemma of kids and technology. Is my son’s experience with technology a good thing or a bad thing?

Fact is, it’s just the new definition of normal. When I bring my car to the auto repair shop, the service advisors now greet me holding iPads loaded with my complete service history and log the entire transaction without ever touching paper. When the technician finds the problem with the car, he snaps a photo with a different iPad, appends it to my file and – if necessary – can send the whole log to the factory. These service technicians are no longer encumbered by the limitations of their individual shop. Because of technology, they are now linked to every other service technician experiencing the same questions and drawing on the communal problem solving power of them all in real time.

The same phenomenon is occurring in virtually every business around the world. Technology is lifting boundaries to what’s possible and making us smarter, faster and better equipped to handle new challenges.

Even the pop research community is starting to awaken to the more positive side of tech’s influence on kids. A recent NPR story introduced a new tablet-based video game designed to help treat ADHD!  The show’s host explained:

“In fact, the creators believe their game will be so effective it might one day reduce or replace the drugs kids take for ADHD. But this kind of goal requires a totally different business model; before they can deliver their game to players, they first have to go through the Food and Drug Administration.”

Virtually every new entertainment-oriented technology has raised the specter of rotting our kids’ brains, from the radio to the television to the iPad. But, unlike its predecessors, the tablet computer has brought our kids far more than mindless entertainment. It’s brought them knowledge of the world around them and the unbridled sense of possibility that comes with it. It will be amazing to watch what this tech-enabled generation produces in the future.