Yves here. While the idea that device-focuses children are poor at conversation is no surprise, if anything this article is insufficiently concerned about this development. How will anyone negotiate if they are deficient in basic communication skills?
The remedy proposed is to force conversation at dinner by forbidding phones. Having grown up in a “Children should be seen and not heard” household where we were not allowed to speak at dinner, as in subject to the negative of not having this as part of my communications diet, I am not confident that this level of practice is adequate, even if obviously better than the status quo.
By Estrella Montolío Durán, Catedrática de Lengua Española. Universitat de Barcelona, Universitat de Barcelona. Originally published at The Conversation
Social media and mobile phones are major disruptors of face-to-face conversations. Recent research has conclusively demonstrated that the indiscriminate (and borderline addictive) use of mobile phones has a direct impact on the quality of our interactions.
Our compulsive relationship with these devices drains our attention, preventing us from listening and sustaining meaningful conversation. Studies have found that the mere presence of a mobile phone, even if it is on silent, divides people’s attention. It reduces the likelihood of starting and sharing interesting conversations, as participants subconsciously anticipate the device demanding its owner’s attention at any moment. Accordingly, people often decide to “skim” the topics of conversation rather than exploring them more deeply.
Children and young people growing up in households where family meals have been colonised by screens (television, tablets and the ubiquitous mobile phone) show a clear deficit in communication and conversation skills. They struggle to interpret non-verbal cues, activate fewer mirror neurons (the cerebral basis of empathy), and fear exposing themselves to real, “unedited” conversation.
They know how to speak, but they struggle to comfortably navigate the cooperative exchange of ideas that allowed humans to reach the 21st century.
Learning to Converse
Articulated language is a genetic, intrinsically human ability – any human being, no matter where they were born, can speak. Everyday conversation comes very naturally to us, but it is also a skill that can be taught. We learn how to enter conversations appropriately, how to maintain a friendly tone, and how to approach difficult dialogues with empathy and assertiveness.
Put simply, language is an innate ability, but conversation is culturally acquired.
This means that families play a vital role in educating and developing children’s conversational abilities. Just as our families provide us with a certain amount of economic capital – some people, for example, inherit a house while others do not – families also provide us with linguistic capital.
A child can therefore inherit access to a broad, sophisticated and perhaps even multilingual vocabulary, while those less fortunate are endowed with a simpler, more limited one. The same can be said about syntax: childhood contact with complex syntactic constructions allows some children to develop more sophisticated thinking, while others receive only simple, disjointed structures from their verbal environment.
In the same way, our families also grant us a certain amount of conversational capital. We have all witnessed this: children who can calmly engage in conversation with adults, even those senior to their parents, while others struggle to respond appropriately. Some young people learn to refrain from speaking over others and to wait their turn, while other children (and many adults) never receive this guidance.
Ideally, schools should level the playing field by allowing children who have grown up with simple linguistic and conversational practices at home to come into contact with richer and more stimulating linguistic models. This can enable them to better recognise and express their emotions, feelings and arguments. However, this process of equalisation does not always work as it should.
Your Conversational Fingerprint
Being educated – and educating ourselves – in language and conversation is crucial for many reasons, but it boils down to the fact that the way we converse has a decisive impact on the way other people perceive us.
Our conversations define us, shape us as individuals, and can create or destroy our social relationships, personal and professional alike. The sociologist Sherry Turkle puts it this way in her metastudy on conversation: “The quality of our conversations is directly tied to our personal happiness, and to our social and professional success.”
Why We Need Conversational Literacy
Different human habits – breathing, eating, speaking, and so on – are treated with striking inequality. While issues like nutrition have become a public health priority, we know very little about the extraordinary human capacity that is articulate language.
Many of us do not understand how to confront an awkward conversation. We struggle to engage in dialogue with people who are different from us, and often forget to listen to others when they speak, which is the bedrock of empathy and cooperation.
For this reason, we urgently need to make conversational literacy a matter of public interest. This skill enables us to be more reflective and aware of the extraordinary potential of everyday conversation, and helps us to identify when we are faced with harmful conversations that, like junk food, damage instead of nourishing us.
When we have a human conversation – one that takes place in the here and now, where our bodies are present and our attention is focused – fascinating things occur.
First of all, the bodies of people interacting synchronise, adapting, unconsciously imitating and coordinating with one another. And it’s not just bodies – scans also show synchronisation in the brains of people engaged in conversation. The deeper and more meaningful the conversation is for those talking, the more intense their synchronisation.
You can start building conversational literacy today, with something as simple as having dinner at home with no mobile phones or other devices in sight. Engaging in genuine conversation will have a huge impact on the success and development – both personal and professional – of the youngest members of the family.
Creating a device free dinner zone is a great start, but it seems that even just a family dinner is a dying concept. When my kids lived at home in the late 90s – late 10s, we always tried to have one distraction free meal together. In the beginning it was no TV, then no Gameboys, then no phones. I think it worked out pretty well. It was never something we “started”, we just always did it.
However, one of our dinner time conversations over the years was how many of their friends and acquaintances ate together as a family (regardless of device restrictions), and it was a very low number. Contrast this to my childhood (70s), where we all had to be home for dinner or we didn’t eat.
Not sure what the lesson here is, but teaching your kids how to talk to each other and to grownups is never a bad idea. Even if it is just one short meal, at least it’s something.
It’s an interesting question here in Hawaii, in that conversation often involves the question of using so-called “pigeon”. In conversation, pigeon is an instant marker in regard to background, historically referred to as being “local”.
There was a time, around statehood, where Oahu (urban Honolulu) developed a test-into set of schools known as “English standard”. Whether one “wen grad” McKinley or Roosevelt HS was an immediate social marker. That of course led to charges of discrimination (though studies showed that attendance in English-standard schools was roughly proportional to ethnic proportions; if anything ethnic Chinese were slightly over-represented).
From the centennial of the overthrow which helped foster a renewed interest in “Hawaiianness” there has also been the issue of the use of Hawaiian in the schools. There have been arguments that Hawaiian was forbidden in the public schools, but there is significant written documentation that the Dept of Public Instruction was following the demands of Hawaiian parents for teaching in English rather than forcing it top-down.
I don’t even have real anecdata, but it seems to me that young people today don’t have quite the same fluency in pigeon (this involves pronunciation/accent as much as syntax or vocabulary). Maybe social media/text related?
Pigeon or pidgin?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
To me, sharing a meal is a big part of what being a couple or a family is all about. When I was growing up, my father loved to repeat “Children should be seen and not heard” — EXCEPT when directly addressed by an adult: “How was school today?” or “Tell us something good about your day” required a polite and somewhat informative response. My dad died suddenly when I was 13 and things loosened up a little bit after that, but we still shared one or more meals every day, always with conversation and never with a TV or radio playing. Even now, my life partner and I often say during the day “I’ll tell you all about it at dinner.”