Technology: Helpful or Harmful?

We have all heard the phrase (or even utter it ourselves) "when I was a child..."  Yet time have changed from when we were children and when our parents were children.  Why is it that things are so different?  Technology.  We now have more child rearing gadgets than they did even 20 years ago.  Think about it I am 33 and when I was growing up there were was not half the baby items that you would find today.  I wonder how my parents even made it with out the pack-n-play that served me well with my daughter.  This handy devise allowed me to have a bassinet/ crib where ever I went.  Or even better yet what did they do without the bobby pillow!  That was my best friend when I had my daughter.  Although we love the modern convenience of today have we ever stopped to think about how this is affecting our children's development?  Take the walker for example.  This was an invention that was around when my mother was little as well as when I was little.  Yet today you do not find many of them unless you happen to be at a garage sale.  Studies have shown that children today are walking sooner than previous generations.  Could this be because of the walker and it's lack of use today?  I guess if you look at it from the stand point that when children of a younger generation were using the walkers that they had to learn how to support their body weight even though they had the idea of how to walk.  Now with the lack of use of the walker the children are not only learning to move their legs but they are learning to balance their weight at the same time.  This could be one explanation for why children seem to be walking sooner than in previous generations.
Then what about cognitive development?  The newest thing that I see commercials for on TV is the reading system for children as young as 6 months.  Where the child is shown a card with "feet" on it and then they grab their foot.  How can this affect our children's development?  What are our children missing out on if they are reading at age two?  My pediatrician once told me that there was no reason to be alarmed if my daughter seemed to be lacking in one area but excelling in another.  She stated that her brain could only work on one thing at a time and that she would get to it.  My daughter was more of a climber than a talker.  She would climb on anything, jump, run, and what she thought was skipping sooner than others her age.  Yet she was not talking understandably until later on. 
I think as parents we have to be careful about what technology that we latch onto and what we don't.  There are some things put into place for safety reasons such as safer cribs and toys.  Yet there are some things that we have found out that we really don't need such as walkers.  Knowing who to listen to is also important.  Always question why?

Brain development

Life is amazing!  We develop from microscopic cells into living, breathing animals that are capable of abstract thinking.  The brain is fascinating to me.  This one organ is what allows us to learn, speak, feel, and allows movement.  For the infant brain there are studies that are looking for the answer to how we learn even the most simple tasks such as grasping or walking.  We have seen one such study conducted by Esther Thelan that looked at how babies are able to learn to grasp and object that is put in front of them.  She was able to see that even though each baby started out taking different paths to reach the toy dangled in front of them they all began taking the same path in the end.  It was as though their brains were using trial and error to figure out the correct sequence to be able to grasp the toy.  Me typing right now is because my brain learned the correct sequence to have my thoughts and hands to communicate!  The reason that I can type over 100 words per minute is because I have had lots of practice and use this skill every day.  Nature allows us the ability to be able to learn and nurture allows us to be able to fine tune that skill.  Last week, during a weekly group, we had the girls watch a HBO special about teen drinking.  We started out talking about how these teens had made choices that put them in the situations that they were in.  The video was pretty graphic and I even had to turn my attention at one point.  What was interesting to me about this video was one boy who came in because he had drank a case of beer and ran his four wheeler into a tree.  He had swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel and hit the tree so hard that he split it in half with is head.  Don't get me wrong it was amazing that he survived but what really amazed me was that later he had to relearn every thing.  His brain had been thrown around in his skull causing swelling.  Several weeks later he was having to not only relearn how to eat and talk but to control his emotions and movements.  It was again his brain firing and firing to try and get the right sequence.  The sad part to this story was that we he was able to go home and seemed to be back to normal he continued the same things he was doing before his accident.  We are all continually learning throughout our lives yet the infant brain is like a clean slate.  Babies absorb so much information from the world around it yet it is their brains that help the process that information and make sense of the world around them.

Genes

In looking at my daughter it is amazing how genes work.  My husband and I both have blond hair.  If we get one allele from each parent then our daughter was destined to have blond hair as well.  If we look at my cousin and her family she and her husband both have brown hair.  They have three children, two boys and one girl.  You can definitely tell that they boy are her kids because they look just like her.  The boys both have brown hair yet their daughter has blond hair.  This leads us to believe that both parents are carriers of the dominant gene for dark hair (brown) and the recessive gene for light hair (blond).  This means that they have a 75% chance of their child having brown hair (the two boys) and only a 25% chance of having a child with blond hair (the girl).  If they were to have another child they would have a better chance of that child having brown hair than blond.  As we further our stud of genes and our understanding of the genetic make up of humans the more we know about our offspring.  At some point way into the future we may even be able to decide for ourselves what our children will look like.  We may be able to pick not only hair color but eye color and other physical features.