By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

Subscribe to my email newsletter and then comment below indicating which book you are interested in to win a copy of either The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in an Age of Distraction by Meghan Cox Gurdon or Raising a Screen Smart Kid: Embrace the Good and Avoid the Bad in the Digital Age by Julianna Miner! Current subscribers need only comment. Earn additional entries by sharing this post via social media and tagging Being in Community on Facebook or @pkfarag on Instagram or Twitter. Giveaway closes on October 8^th, 2019 at 11:59 pm EST. US addresses only, please.

This summer I got to read two incredibly useful books to me as a parent: The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in an Age of Distraction by Meghan Cox Gurdon and Raising a Screen Smart Kid: Embrace the Good and Avoid the Bad in the Digital Age by Julianna Miner. Both of these are books I can’t stop talking about, and both are worth any parent and even educator’s time.

Raising a Screen Smart Kid addresses many of the concerns of parents like me, who grew up when the only thing “digital” in our lives was a digital clock, phones were connected to lines and the internet was something you read about in science fiction. It is realistic about some of the real risks children are exposed to on the internet and social media without being alarmist and prompting us all to head for the hills.

Each chapter of Raising a Screen Smart Kid discusses important aspects of our children as digital natives. From online friendships to online predators, from video games to anxiety and addition, each section offers a balanced perspective from Miner’s public health background and extensive research. “One of the things that public health has taught me is that you have to solve problems in the world as it is, not as you’d like it to be,” Miner writes. She begins each chapter with the story of a personal experience from a young person using the internet—some positive and some negative—and offers useful takeaways at the end of each chapter.

I’ve highlighted half this book and I’ll be returning to it repeatedly. Some of my most important takeaways include:

1. The best way to help children navigate this new online world is to serve as a digital mentor (rather than police officer). “Digital mentors talk to their kids about how to responsibly use the Internet, social media, and technology, and they do it about once a week—meaning these conversations are ongoing and fluid,” Miner explains. We still must monitor our children’s use of technology, but research shows that banning technology use leads children to more risky online behavior when parents are not looking. At the other extreme, leaving children to their own devices (pun intended) without guiding them to their appropriate use is foolhardy.
2. As a parent, I should be modeling my smart phone use for my children. Miner suggests starting by assessing my own smart phone habits, including this scary question: “Ask your kids how much time they think you spend on social media (be prepared not to like their answer).” I also try to be transparent about what I’m using my technology for. As someone who works from home, my children see me on technology more than I would like. I frequently remind them that when I’m on my laptop, I’m working, not entertaining myself. This short episode from Laura Vanderkam’s Before Breakfast podcast, on limiting time on social media, contains great advice for all of us.
3. We are giving children access to smart phones, social media and gaming between the ages of 10-12, when “The research tells us that the age at which most kids are getting their first wireless device (about ages ten to twelve in the United States) is the exact point when their brains and bodies may be least able to responsibly handle it,” Miner writes. She suggests delaying the age of getting a wireless device as much as possible. I (strongly) suggest the same in this blog post.
4. Video games are not all negative. I admit to succumbing to some horror stories about gaming addiction that I’ve read online, but I learned that gaming can be positive for many children as long as we can recognize the signs of addiction (which Miner lists clearly) as well as monitor who they “befriend” in social games. “Plenty of research indicates that there are positive benefits to be gained from gaming. Whether it’s a waste of time depends in large part on the balance of other activities that exist in that gamer’s life,” writes Miner.
5. Children should charge devices OUTSIDE of their bedrooms overnight. Many studies that link extensive smart phone/social media use to depression in teenagers also link it to sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation itself leads to depression. Keeping smart phones out of bedrooms gets harder as kids get older. “This point, however, might be the most important advice I can give you, and it’s a mountain I’m willing to die on,” Miner says. It’s best to keep all phones in a common charging are outside of bedrooms. To model this, I switched to using this alarm clock rather than my phone alarm to wake me up. I’ve gotten one of these simpler and more economical ones for each of my children.

Raising a Screen-Smart Kid is a book all parents need to read and return to when facing some of the new challenges technology brings to raising this digital generation. Tarcher Perigree has provided me with a copy of this book to give away to one of my readers. To enter to win this book, subscribe to my email newsletter and comment about it below (current subscribers need only comment). Earn additional entries by sharing this post via social media and tagging Being in Community on Facebook or @pkfarag on Instagram or Twitter. Giveaway closes on October 8^th, 2019 at 11:59 pm EST.

If concerns about screens and technology with children still make you anxious, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction by Meghan Cox Gurdon is the antidote. I admit that Gurdon was preaching to the choir with this book, as I am already an enthusiast for reading books aloud to my children—and even my older children who now read independently. I always knew reading aloud to young children was important, but The Read Aloud Family by Sarah McKenzie opened my eyes to the benefits of reading aloud to the whole family. I have seen the positive results with my own eyes. Reading aloud, in Gurdon’s words, “needs to be recognized as the dazzlingly transformative and even countercultural act that it is.”

Gurdon’s readable yet rich book shares all the evidence, scientific, emotional, and socio-economic, for the benefits of reading aloud for everyone. I highlighted almost every page of this book, excited to read about the amazing “neurochemical bouquet” that occurs when adults read picture books aloud to children. I was also alarmed to learn about what happens to young children’s brains in front of screens. A chart of brain behavior during a study with children by Dr. John Hutton of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital showed the immense neural activation that occurs when children are read aloud to, and the inactivity when children watched videos. “It’s like all the color was stripped away,” Gurdon observed on the charts, “as if nothing is happening in their heads when they’re watching the video.” Too much screen time at the ages of 2-5 could result in brain atrophy – but reading aloud is proven to exercise children’s brains.

Even more astounding are the studies that link reading aloud to children at young ages with their “life chances” when they get older. Gurdon cites Adam Swift:

“The evidence shows that the difference between [children] who get bedtime stories and those who don’t the difference in their life chances, is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those who don’t.”

I can attest to this. In my years in education policy social science research, the question asked to children on surveys to stand in for income was “number of books in the home.” This indicator controlled for children who are economically advantaged and those who are not. I would chuckle every time I came across this survey question. My own home was not at all economically advantaged growing up, but the number of books in the home were literally through the roof. We might not have had high-incomes, but being surrounded by books (and being read aloud to as children) gave us the same advantages as children with much greater income in their families.

This information may contradict the advice above about becoming digital mentors to our children, but it actually aligns. In Gurdon’s words,

“Children and parents can have full lives in cyberspace and in unplugged reality and find time to meet in literature. We don’t have to give up our devices. If anything, reading together allows us, and our children, to live in easier harmony with our machines. It gives us a time every day when we can reconnect in a low pressure way and enjoy a little bouquet of neurochemicals, even as the books we read fill our children’s minds with ever more sophisticated language. Making time to read together is almost an obstinate act of love. The mutual effort—the sacrifice of time—becomes part of the reward.”

This “obstinate act of love” allows for emotional connectedness between children and their parents, as early as during the first few days of life. Every family has stories they’ve read aloud together that they think of fondly for the shared experience. We all still talk about A Night Divided by Jennifer Nielson, which we listened to on audio on a long drive back from Montreal.

Gurdon shares an amazing story about Kevin, a father in the military who read to his two year old son Jack by recording videos of himself reading stories while he was deployed in Afghanistan. His wife played the videos to their son while he was gone. When the boy’s father came home for a two week vacation, on the very first night, “Jack pulled Curious George out of his bookcase—it was the last book his father had “read” to him electronically—‘then ran back to Kevin, turned around and backed into Kev’s lap, sat down, and handed him the book.’” The stories kept the family together, and they experienced none of the common reintegration problems military families face when a member returns from deployment.

A fantastic resource for read aloud book recommendations is Sarah McKenzie’s Read Aloud Revival podcast. Megan Cox Gurdon was recently interviewed on the podcast, which you can hear by clicking here.

The Enchanted Hour may become my go-to baby shower gift, along with some wonderful children’s books. Every parent needs to read this book and make the time to read aloud to the family, starting as early as possible, and continuing on to the teenage years. Harper has provided me with a copy of this book to giveaway to one of my readers. To enter to win this book, subscribe to my email newsletter and comment about it below (current subscribers need only comment). Earn additional entries by sharing this post via social media and tagging Being in Community on Facebook or @pkfarag on Instagram or Twitter. Giveaway closes on October 8^th, 2019 at 11:59 pm EST.

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