The Big Disconnect Quotes

“Just because your baby can tap a touch screen to change a picture does not mean that he should, that it is a developmentally useful or appropriate activity for him. In fact, research suggests that the process of tapping a screen or keypad and engaging with the screen activity may itself be rerouting brain development in ways that eliminate development of essential other neural connections your child needs to develop reading, writing, and higher-level thinking later.”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“When texting begins to take the place of substantive in-person conversations for any of us, we are training the language and speech centers of our brain for a new, unnatural, and superficial model of connection. When that training starts early, as it does now for young texters, they get so used to it at such a young age that, unlike the newborn baby who innately knows something is missing and complains about it, our older tech-trained children don’t even know what they have lost.”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“But unlike grown-ups, whose fully matured brain should be able to tell right from wrong, a joke from bullying, and tasteful content from trash, and should be able to exercise impulse control and mature judgment in how we use tech, our children are not there yet. They are still children.”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“As for trust, at best all you can trust is that they are good kids who will inevitably roam into bad tech terrain. But unlike grown-ups, whose fully matured brain should be able to tell right from wrong, a joke from bullying, and tasteful content from trash, and should be able to exercise impulse control and mature judgment in how we use tech, our children are not there yet. They are still children. Our”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“nine minutes of SpongeBob SquarePants can lead to aggressive behavior after you turn the TV off.”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“That we can feel angry, too, and work through that feeling rather than be defined by it. There’s”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“conversation within themselves—the capacity for reflection—that enables them to sit alone, think about things, and come to insights. To”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“Family creates our first experience of ourselves in the world, and it becomes the foundation of our view of the world,” writes”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“Our children are growing up immersed in a culture where it is cool to be cruel, where media influences encourage it and social networking facilitates it.”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“In addition to the issue of distracted supervision putting children at risk for injury, at some point distracted, tech-centered parenting can look and feel to a child like having a narcissistic parent or an emotionally absent, psychologically neglectful one. In nonclinical settings, most notably in focus groups in schools around the country, the take-home message I am hearing from children of all ages is this: They feel the disconnect. They can tell when their parents’ attention is on screens or calls and increasingly they are feeling that all the time. It feels “bad and sad” to be ignored. And they are tired of being the “call waiting” in their parents’ lives.”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“Doctors and researchers, from local emergency rooms to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), link the growing use of handheld electronic devices to an alarming increase in injuries to children, especially when parents or caregivers are distracted and fail to properly supervise young children in the moment. The Wall Street Journal, in a roundup of research and interviews with experts on the subject, noted that injuries to children under age five rose 12 percent between 2007 and 2010, after falling for much of the prior decade, according to the most recent data from the CDC.”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“All the wisdom in the world about child-rearing cannot, by itself, replace intimate human ties, family ties, as the center of human development . . . the point of departure for all sound psychological thinking. —SELMA FRAIBERG, THE MAGIC YEARS”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

“Every time our child’s texting, TV, electronic games, and social networking take the place of family, and every time our tech habits interrupt our time with them, that pattern is broken and the primacy of family takes another hit.”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair EdD., The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age