Essentials
theDiagonal is a personal blog by Mike Gerra, skeptic, technologist, psychologist, artist, humanist, collector of grand, eclectic ideas.theDiagonal blog connects the dots across multiple disciplines for inquisitive, objective and critical thinkers, exploring the vertices of big science, disruptive innovation, global sustainability, illuminating literature and leftfield art. It is on this diagonal that creativity thrives, big ideas take flight and reason triumphs.
Tag Archives: family
Monday, March 26, 2012
Our Children: Independently Dependent
Why can’t our kids tie their own shoes?
Are we raising our children to be self-obsessed, attention-seeking, helpless and dependent groupthinkers? And, why may the phenomenon of “family time” in the U.S. be a key culprit?
These are some of the questions raised by anthropologist Elinor Ochs and her colleagues. Over the last decade they have studied family life across the globe, from the Amazon region, to Samoa, and middle-America.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Why do American children depend on their parents to do things for them that they are capable of doing for themselves? How do U.S. working parents’ views of “family time” affect their stress levels? These are just two of the questions that researchers at UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families, or CELF, are trying to answer in their work.
...read moreTuesday, November 8, 2011
The Evils of Television
Much has been written on the subject of television. Its effects on our culture in general and on the young minds of our children in particular have been studied and documented for decades. Increased levels of violence, the obesity epidemic, social fragmentation, vulgarity and voyeurism, caustic politics, poor attention span — all of these have been linked, at some time or other, to that little black box in the corner (increasingly, the big flat space above the mantle).
In his article, A Nation of Vidiots, Jeffrey D. Sachs, weighs in on the subject.
From Project Syndicate:
The past half-century has been the age of electronic mass media. Television has reshaped society in every corner of the world. Now an explosion of new media devices is joining the TV set: DVDs, computers, game boxes, smart phones, and more. A growing body of evidence suggests that this media proliferation has countless ill effects.
...read more