The New Childhood Quotes

“Our resistance to digital play is just like Socrates's resistance to writing. It is futile. Your kids need your help. And it's easy to provide. Parents, children, and families just need to start playing in the digital world together.”
― Jordan Shapiro, The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World

“If grown-ups want to prepare children to analyze the memes, videos, and ideas they encounter on the internet and in video games, they will need to encourage more digital play, more creative online activities, more computer-based projects. This is the best way to address the issue of fake news.”
― Jordan Shapiro, The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World

“consider what’s happening in this book when I describe sandbox play as the beginning of the age of the individual, dinner as the ritualized celebration of industrialization, television as a new hearth, clockwork mechanics as the foundation of twentieth-century developmental health, penmanship as up-skilling for a burgeoning capitalist economy, and card catalogs as a representation of an obsolete epistemological attitude. I’m situating the familiar technologies of the past in a hopeful story about a digital future—a future that requires folks to understand information in a drastically new way. If the old education cultivated habits of mind for a card-catalog world, then the new education needs to build habits of mind for a world of nonlinear hyperlinks. Luckily, situation theory can help.”
― Jordan Shapiro, The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World

“It was the mid-1800s when family members began to face one another during mealtime. Before then, they ate side by side, quickly and quietly. “Food was fuel,” according to Abigail Carroll, “socializing was secondary—if it happened at all.” Dinnertime conversation did not become “a standard expectation and eventually a carefully cultivated and highly prized art” until the nineteenth century.”
― Jordan Shapiro, The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World

“My son is afraid of getting eaten. Not only by me, but also by a big, scary, two-deaded monster. He is twelve years old and struggling to learn how to show up simultaneously in the physical and the virtual worlds. Both threaten to devour him. Both constantly attune him to the fact that his private sense of self is not necessarily aligned with the way others perceive him. He sometimes gets in fights with his friends. He gets in trouble with his teachers. He pisses off his younger brother and frustrates his father. Each situation is unexpected. He doesn't see it coming. What's going on inside his mind is not the same as what's happening around him. Like all tweens, his internal and external experiences are way out of sync.”
― Jordan Shapiro, The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World

“while it’s certainly no fun to be the disciplinarian, we need to be persistent. Eventually, the pestering parental influence becomes the internal voice of a child’s conscience.”
― Jordan Shapiro, The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World