Tech
- Science happens whether or not you believe in it. If you didn’t believe in gravity, you still couldn’t break the high jump record. (To change your world by disbelief in science would make a novel superhero series.)
- Latitude is not neglect.
- I use the term “homeschool” because it’s the common label. But there was very little school in our version. The self-directed education model is mostly accurate.
- No matter how you raise your children, nothing is guaranteed; there are many influences in children’s lives that parents can’t control. However, children raised with agency will have better resilience no matter what they encounter.
- Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, and the founder of the first U.S. cognitive science department (at Harvard), Jerome Bruner, laid down the modern foundation of learning by doing. Apple’s Vision Pro is both a virtual reality device—the device dominates your senses—and an augmented reality device—your senses are enhanced. I didn’t understand augmented reality until someone pointed out that eyeglasses and hearing aids augment reality.
- You see in the news that self-driving cars are happening, but they’re traveling on only limited, well-defined roads. Self-driving is to human driving as a small school district in a homogenous community is to the United Nations.
Agency, the Only Vaccine for Big Tech
The COVID epidemic isn’t far from memory, and those of us who *believe * in science waited impatiently for each new vaccination to help ward off the most recent evolution of the COVID variant. As time went on, rather than making a vaccine for each new strain of COVID, the pharmaceutical companies created polyvalent vaccines to deal with the rapid evolution of a COVID-causing virus.
In recent years, Big Tech has brought us an endless series of personal agency-killing viruses: social media, YouTube, Google, AI, smartphones, Netflix, porn, Amazon—we’re surrounded by interests that want to dominate our attention. We’re surrounded by interests that want to influence how we spend our money, what we eat, how we’re entertained, and how we vote. And we don’t have a pharmaceutical-like polyvalent solution to deal with Silicon Valley viruses.
We could pass laws that put restrictions on these influences, that is, if these tech companies didn’t own Congress. We could take away phones from students while they’re attending school, but how would we deal with an epidemic of phantom limb pain? We could require age limits on Websites, but who gets to decide what’s inappropriate for everyone’s children? And, anyway, motivated young people find a way to route around restrictions.
COVID vaccines did not eliminate infection. They made infection less likely or the effects less severe. We need similar immunizations for the pernicious influences brought to us by Big Tech. And as with the COVID vaccines, they need to be polyvalent to fend off the move-fast-and-break-things strategy of Silicon Valley’s financial interests. For better or worse, these immunizations won’t come from the outside as they did with vaccines.
Sigmund Freud was wrong about many things, but he was right about one: we carry our childhoods with us. If we’re determined, occasionally we can chain our childhood wounds to the bed frame and sneak out the back door for some respite, but our childhood is always the troll under the bridge ready to pounce on our emotions.
If there’s an intervention that will foster agency in our children, agency that leaves them less emotionally vulnerable, it won’t come from trigger warnings, safe spaces, or an emotional support animal. They’re going to have to carry their agency with them, perhaps in their back pocket right next to their iPhone.
I’ve witnessed two general approaches to parenting: raise your children the way you were raised or raise your children the way you wish you were raised. The way you wish you were raised is often that you were given increased agency, that rather than controlling your decisions, your parents gave you latitude.
Too often (or most often), we spend our entire adult lives trying to retrieve what was suppressed during childhood. We change college majors, we change careers, we change locations, we change our politics, we change friends, we change love mates, we change therapists, all in pursuit of the self we think we could have been, if given the freedom to explore, if given the freedom to not pursue approval from our parents and cultural influences.
Alternately, we could raise children to maximize their agency and minimize a future of regrets and therapy bills.
Easy for me to say
I’m going to quote from a previous article:
Bria Bloom recently posted an essay of her witnessing an interaction between a mother and the mother’s (about) ten-year-old daughter. The mother is playing with her daughter’s hair, treating it as if it belonged to a doll, while ignoring her daughter’s repeated requests to stop. Daughter and mother both persist, until her mother finally stops and calls her daughter a brat.
If you stop reading Bria’s essay at this point, you’d probably think nothing of the incident—children and parents will be children and parents. But if you read further, Bria makes an unexpected connection: the insistent (pardon) manhandling of the daughter, despite her protests, is inadvertently training the daughter to accept that her body is not her own; that without consent, she should allow her body to be invaded by another’s behavior.
Bria’s interpretation startled me. When the above “training” is practiced by a sexual predator, it’s called something really creepy, “grooming,” getting a child used to accepting physical invasion—sexual invasion.
Notice how subtle this inadvertent grooming takes place. The mother was being playful, but by rejecting her daughter’s wishes, she satisfied her own needs regardless of her daughter’s wishes. What does that remind you of?
I hope to point out that early denials of agency can be innocent and even loving, but the experience of being manhandled (sorry) is felt regardless of good intentions. Influence largely takes place below one’s awareness.
Now carry this denial of agency to the countless experiences children are subjected to—“for their own good”—and your child is being conditioned to being swayed by all the “influencers” on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit. Add to the above social media influences, school cliques, and campus culture. Let’s not forget our most recent addition, chatty large language models such as ChatGPT. **
How to foster agency
Blah, blah, blah. Even if I agree with you, what can I do? How can I guard my children’s agency?
As I implied above, not taking away agency has a lot to do with what you don’t do. As a parent or any adult authority, stifling your agency-killing behavior is hard and takes practice. It takes, initially at least, awareness of your habits and motivations and awareness of your effect on children.
But before I go on, I’ll add that, as you practice restraint with those whom you have authority over, you are increasing your agency. How we treat our children in turn bounces back to us. We see the effects on them and feel good rather than the too-common feelings among parents of regret and guilt.
As a bonus to ourselves and others, we might even develop more restraint in trying to control the behavior of our mates and coworkers. As a second bonus, we become better models for our children and possibly better models for family members and friends.
How-to
You don’t need me
—Professor Robert Suczek
I had a therapy supervisor who fit my personality perfectly. Perhaps he saw that I was allergic to authority.
You don’t need me was Suczek’s guiding principle in working with clients. He treated them as individuals who were competent but had lost confidence and needed to be reminded of their competence so they could take back their agency.
Following the Suczek principle, it would be paradoxical for me to create a how-to manual on how to raise your children. But I’ll offer suggestions specifically around agency based on my experience as a parent and family therapist.
My wife and I kept our kids home from school and allowed them as much agency as felt safe in accordance with their age. Most parents have neither the inclination nor the practical situation to homeschool, but there are other ways to foster agency.
In any conflict with authorities, we didn’t take the side of the institution. When necessary, we took our child’s side by being a problem-solver. You have to be here and get along with authorities who may be unreasonable. How can we deal with this conflict in a way that will bring you less stress?
The problem-solving mindset helped our kids deal with any situation, but more importantly, gave them a tool for the long run.
You don’t need to be a parent to growing children or a parent at all to foster the agency of others. You can be an older sibling, aunt or uncle, grandparent, teacher, boss, or an individual someone looks up to.
Raise your children to maximize their agency and minimize a future of regrets and therapy bills. Raise your children to maximize their agency and they will not worship the shallow “influencers” on social media. They will be less prone to a life of anxiety and depression. They will not join a cult or support authoritarian politicians. They will be less likely to regret their choice of careers or their choice of mates.
If you think it’s too late because your offspring are 15 and 17, remember, people attend therapy to retrieve their agency well into adulthood. It’s never too late to foster agency. If you attempt to shut off influences aimed at your older teenagers, what happens when they leave home without your shield? Don’t eliminate, vaccinate.
Notes
Resources
The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik, Emeritus Professor, UC Berkeley, is a developmental psychologist, and the above book is the best book on raising your children with agency (though she never uses that term). While the carpenter crafts to a desired end product, the gardener nurtures with love and protection.
Peter Gray writes a column in Psychology Today and writes a newsletter. Peter Gray is a research psychologist at Boston College. He’s the co-founder of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, which assists homeschoolers and the homeschooling curious with resources.
Bria Bloom’s newsletter. Bria’s focus is on the emotional life of children. She illustrates with her experiences raising her children to keep their agency intact.
My essays, Hard Fun, and Habitability, part 3: Unintended Consequences.
That's not immersion, you have a fucking helmet on your head!
I am reminded of a passage in Tocqueville where he noticed that America seemed to be on a trajectory that would have it erecting “an immense tutelary power” that wants only what is best for us, and is keen to “save us the trouble of living."
—John Naughton
In my childhood home of Los Angeles, when TV antennas still dotted rooftops, we had the most TV channels in the nation: three national networks and four local channels.
The local channels couldn’t finance their own shows, so they filled the airwaves with old movies. This was the media era of bloodless violence and post-World War II American dominance. In those movies, John Wayne won world wars and defeated American Indians. James Arness put down villains with quick draws, Errol Flynn wielded pirate swords, and armor-clad Robert Wagner fought with a knight’s flat-edged sword. Those were the days.
In the fifties in the San Fernando Valley, new housing tracts sprung like backyard weeds, and on weekends, I’d walk through the framed but yet-to-be walled homes to liberate discarded wood scrapes from which I assembled weapons inspired by the above shows. A favorite was a rubber-band gun, because it shot real (but harmless) “bullets.” I’d saw ten inches off a two-by-four and hammer a small nail into a spring-enabled clothes pin. As I further searched through the not-yet houses, I was rewarded with additional fantasy tools hiding in plain sight such as wood trim to create swords. If I were lucky, I’d find a scattering of nickel-sized punch outs from electrical boxes—perfect for pirate gold. If I were unlucky, I’d bring home the unwanted souvenir of a nail that punched through my shoe and punctured my heel. In those days, kids were expected to get injuries, so my only consequence was a trip to the doctor for a tetanus shot.
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In the Netflix era, there are more streaming services than the bygone TV antenna era had individual channels, and the popular services have an avalanche of shows. A writer (whose name I don’t recall) suggested that this oversupply of manufactured fantasy puts a damper on the development of children’s imaginations. In the pre-streaming era, just one of those movies or network TV shows could sustain a young child’s fantasy play, as it did mine, for years. But, today, why role play from memories of an old show when dozens of new shows are a click away?
Faux
I backed off when I realized I was invading singer Alicia Keyes personal space. She was on stage performing, and I was nearly draping her from the front. Weirdly, she didn’t notice and continued to sing. It felt like a dream, but I was actually in a crowded Apple store. My head was strapped into Apple’s new virtual-reality helmet, the Apple Vision Pro, and I was near the end of the demo.
The make-believe closeness with Keyes was the finale of the demonstration. The wild animals that passed mere feet from me before I ducked into the safety of the nightclub were intimidating, but the encounter with Keyes felt worse. Better to be mauled than commit a faux pas.
While Apple touts the Vision Pro as a viable productivity device (which currently only works as such in conjunction with a Mac), hardly anyone who’s tried one views it as anything but an entertainment device. At $3500, it’s a really expensive entertainment device, a really expensive entertainment device that can be used by only one person at a time. This doesn’t mean that future versions won’t be far cheaper and may evolve to a productivity device, but despite engineers’ passions and management’s prognostications, devices find their users. Apple thought the iPad would replace the Mac and that the Apple Watch would compete with smart phones, but the iPad is used mostly to consume video and the watch has become primarily a health aid.
Apple is trying to save us the trouble of living
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, promoted the motto, a “bicycle for the mind,” that is, a technology that augments an inborn human capability, as the guiding concept for Apple products, and Jobs favored commercials for Apple that emphasized their products as tools for creativity. If he believed that, he was fooling himself. His favorite term of derision was “bozos,” which meant those who weren’t the best of the best. The Apple commercial, Here’s for the crazy ones, didn’t feature you and me making something with an Apple product, it featured (voiced by Jobs himself) the likes of Picasso, Einstein, Gandhi, and Earhart who, by the way managed their creativity and excellence without an Apple product. But apparently, you can’t sell a billion devices if you restrict your sales to “the crazy ones.” In contrast to the “bicycle for the mind” motto, most of Apple’s products since the 1980s have been designed as an easy chair for the mind, designed for entertainment not for creativity.
As everyone knows (or should know), ignore what people say, watch what they do. Since Steve Jobs retirement from Apple and subsequent passing, Apple’s marketing has implied that Apple product buyers are the “crazy ones,” in this case, they mean to flatter their users as the creative ones, who in another of their former ad campaigns, “think different.”
It’s wax-on, wax-off all the way down
One of the most iconic scenes in movies is from the original Karate Kid movie. Mr. Miyagi begins his instruction with his teen student, Daniel, by having Daniel perform repetitive tasks such as painting a fence with up and down and side-to-side strokes. After days of this seemingly irrelevant task, Daniel objects. Miyagi demonstrates that the painting motions were the same as karate blocks and have become installed in Daniel’s muscle memory. It is, of course, not muscle memory, it’s nervous system memory earned from learning by doing, which now goes by a fancier term in modern cognitive science, embodied cognition.
Our mind map (what we call reality) is assembled from experiences, experiences of movement that we interpret to ourselves using language. Medical students, interns, and residents engage in patient rounds that make meaning from anatomy and chemistry books. Cooks prepare food to make recipes come alive. Even when just reading, your mind is moving— interacting with words based on experiences.
We’ve got so impressed with improvements in displays and computer graphics, in shows as well as on computer screens, that we don’t appreciate how far away they are from creating a more than superficial cognitive experience. No matter what Apple claims, the Vision Pro isn’t a virtual or augmented reality device, it’s a fancy 3D screen you wear as a helmet. If there’s a virtual reality device in our future, its future is on the same timeline as the ubiquitous, go-anywhere self-driving car, the timeline of “in the future.” I believe the Vision Pro is already being used in flight and surgery simulations to teach. That specialized use case sounds about right. To that, I hope and expect an eventual replacement for graduated lenses in eyeglasses, where the whole lens changes instantly to your directed object distance. I can’t be the only one who hates walking down steps because graduated lenses moves the perceived distance when you glance downward.