There are so many obvious benefits and opportunities in our media world today that I hate to keep sounding the siren call for balance.  Amid all the new technology, we shouldn’t forget that kids’ brains are busy wiring in behaviors.   The wiring of a child’s brain is entirely experience dependent.  Wiring of behavioral and thinking skills will not happen automatically – it happens because of that child’s experience in his or her environment.  To have a fully rich, thinking brain, a child needs exposure to a broad range of experiences that call on him or her to exercise all their thinking skills.  Remember the “neurons that fire together, wire together.”  The ones that don’t wither away.

Now what got me started?   A new study from England landed in my email box that found that the study group of fourteen year old kids today were better at the quick-fire, instant response answers than fourteen year old kids were in 1976, but when it keep to deeper thinking, problem solving, the 1976-ers beat today’s kids hands down.

What’s changed?   Probably the most obvious is the media world our children live in.   What experiences are kids having that are wiring their brains more than anything else? - the quick fire responses of video games.   And if they do not have problem solving experiences requiring more in-depth, complex skills, then those skills will never wire into their brains.

I am not anti-video games.   What kids need though is balance.  Interactive media can take over kids’ lives and make them very skilled at quick responses.   Critical thinking skills that take deeper, more complex thinking may deteriorate if we don’t give our kids practice in these skills also.  The future will belong to creative problem solvers, not to people who deal in only superficial facts.

How do you think kids can develop more complex thinking skills?

Dr. Dave