This Is Why Childhood Is Broken
Does this sound familiar?
- More children are struggling with fine motor skills.
- More children are not making eye contact.
- More children do not know how to interact with peers.
- More children have speech delays or communication difficulties.
Even more challenging is the dramatic increase in the number of children who struggle with behaviors that challenge adults. More children demonstrate a lack of impulse control and self-regulation. To get their needs met, they scream, hit, throw things, have tantrums, or express themselves in other ways that might be developmentally appropriate, but are surely not socially acceptable.
And it’s not just the increase in the number of children that demonstrates these behaviors; it’s the dramatic increase in the intensity of the behaviors.
Teaching has changed
Being a teacher of young children today is so different than when I first started teaching 30+ years ago. The number of regulations and requirements has increased. Expectations of parents and policymakers can be in direct contradiction with developmentally appropriate practices. Research on the science of learning and brain development has changed rapidly in the past 20 years.
But more than that, childhood has changed. It’s easy to say that children have changed, but that’s not true. Children still follow a predictable developmental trajectory. The pace of development hasn’t changed. What’s changed, and what makes teaching so hard right now, are the opportunities, or lack of opportunities, young children have.
It’s easy to blame the pandemic and its aftermath, and that is a contributing factor, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. COVID did change the way we teach and interact with families. However, our field had seen increasing challenges in early childhood classrooms for several years prior to the pandemic.
What is the reason for this shift?
Why has there been such a dramatic increase in the number of children who display these behaviors? In my opinion? It wasn’t the pandemic. Sure, lockdowns and masks contributed to what we see now, but that does not explain the increases in behavior challenges that started pre-COVID.
So what is the number one contributor to the challenges we face today?
Technology!
AI generated photo
Consider what happens at drop-off and pick-up. Parents rush into your program, talking into their phones or earpieces. They might greet you and make eye contact, or they might not. They might slow down to greet their child, or they might not. And if they don’t give their child a tablet or phone to play with while they pack up their belongings, they almost certainly give the child a device when the child is buckled into their car seat.
Parents aren’t making eye contact with other adults or their children. They aren’t engaging their child in conversation. They aren’t slowing down to take the time to play with their child.
But what is most impactful is the lack of consistency in parent-child interactions. The parent who rushes in one day, drops and runs in the morning, or scoops up their child in a mad dash in the afternoon, may very well slow down and pause for a hug before leaving the next day, or they might stop and chat with the teacher, other parents and children, and their own child at pick up. It’s this lack of consistency that is so confusing for young children.
What would you do?
Think about it. How would you respond if one day your friend or significant other makes eye contact with you, asks how your day was, and takes the time to just be with you, and the next day they can’t look up from their phone to say hello, they walk past without acknowledging you, or they barely respond with “uh huh” when you ask a question. You’d probably be wondering what’s going on. You may be thinking, “Are they mad at me? Did I do something wrong?” As an adult, you might even ask or demand, “What gives?!”
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