Given these missing voices on the commission itself, we ask the commission to immediately initiate a special effort to incorporate such thoughtful critiques and developmental concerns in its deliberations. Dr. Benoit is also the president-elect of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, although she is not representing that organization in the document that we have attached. As part of our testimony, we are also snail-mailing to the commission copies of two recent books that thoroughly document a wide range of potential developmental hazards associated with emphasizing computers and the Internet in the lives of young children. How Computers Put Our Children's Education at Risk , by Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement. Powerful economic and political forces are now aligned behind the idea that the Internet and distance-learning opportunities can significantly improve the education of students of all ages.
Some proponents even seem intent upon including preschoolers in such claims.
The Alliance for Childhood, however, is deeply concerned that this assumption ignores years of research findings, from several scientific disciplines, on healthy child development. Young children in our society need, more than anything else, stronger personal bonds with caring adults. Research shows that these are not frills but educational essentials. Emphasizing computers in childhood can easily mean depriving children of these essentials, in pursuit of benefits that are almost entirely unproved. A 1999 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation concluded that children ages 2 to 18 spend, on average, about 4 hours and 45 minutes a day outside of school plugged into electronic media of all kinds.