Can the "Anxious Generation" become a maker generation?

Can we restore a play-based childhood for kids who grew up with a phone-based childhood?

Educators might have read Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation over the summer as a way of understanding the mental health of today’s schoolchildren. Even if you haven’t read the book, you can grasp its key points in this presentation by Haidt at an educational conference.

The basic premise of his book is that the “Anxious Generation” is what happens when you replace a play-based childhood with a phone-based childhood. Moreover, parents and others want kids to “avoid risky play and conflict,” and kids miss out out on what Haidt calls the “thrill” of playing. “We went from this childhood where kids were out on their own,” said Haidt, showing a picture from ET with a nine-year-old kid on a bike with a hidden extraterrestrial in the cargo basket. “By 2015 that had become impossible because in this childhood today a child is sitting alone with a device this decimates their social life.”

I’ll let you get the details from the charts in Haidt’s presentation but he shows how a serious decline in mental health of boys and girls starts around the time that Instagram launches in 2012, well before Covid. Haidt says “you have to first roll back the phone-based childhood before we can restore the play-based childhood.” A lot of Haidt’s talk is about policies such as eliminating cell phones at schools and creating social norms that parents might agree on, such as not allowing kids on social media until they are sixteen years of age. He notes that pushing against the tide is hard to do for parents and educators but there is increasingly more and more agreement that schools should be “phone-free.”

Haidt says that just removing or limiting usage of phones is not sufficient; you have to replace phone-time with something else. He makes the case for introducing more “free play and independence.” It could be as simple as opening the playground before school for 30 minutes or more. He says that “kids are starved for play.”

I don’t think Haidt knows about makerspaces or how they can be places for play. Instead he focuses on the playground but he envisions a “play club” after school. “You put out loose parts, you put things out for them to play with not just the swing set and they will invent stuff. If you just give them stuff, junk boxes, they'll invent stuff; … they'll have such a good time.”

Most maker educators realize that making is playing and that playing is learning. (Type: “Play Make Learn” into Google and you’ll see conferences, papers, books and more devoted to overlapping connections between all three.) Therefore, playing can and should take place inside school, not just on the playground.

I hear from educators and parents that getting students interested in anything other than social media or video games is difficult, but this is the challenge ahead of us. We can create the conditions for playing and learning in the makerspace and in classrooms. Making things can foster open-ended and self-directed experiences that can be fun, meaningful and quite possibly thrilling. Students will be engaging with the real, physical world and each other, and learning from that. This mindset rewards doing and thinking for yourself, becoming productive, independent and collaborative.

I can’t help but think that making is just waiting for this generation to grab on to it with their own hands. Let’s help them find it.

Reminder about MakerEd Educators Forum coming up in September

The 2024 annual VIRTUAL conference for maker & STEAM educators, The MakerEd Educators Forum, gives maker educators the opportunity to find each other and share ideas, resources, and experiences. The two-day virtual event will consist of 30-minute presentations on Friday, interactive workshops on Saturday and unconference conversation opportunities both days. This variety ensures that participants have access to both structured learning opportunities and informal, participant-driven discussions.  Sessions focus on practical workshops, examples of successes and struggles, creative uses of AI in the classroom, new ideas and tips and tricks you can use with your students. Presentations include bridging literacy and computer game design,  exploring Tinkercad's newest interactive features, AI and storytelling in the classroom and much more.

The MakerEd Educators Forum (previously the Make: Education Forum) will be held on Friday and Saturday, September 27 & 28.  To see all the sessions and to register click:

https://makered.org/

The fee to attend, and receive all the recordings (so you see it all even if you can't join live) is $65. If you need a scholarship, send your request to info@Makered.org