Study after study has shown that if you talk to a child and listen to her – a lot – she will do much better in every way we can test intelligence, than if she is ignored. The key to growth is interaction. A study, first published in the journal Pediatrics (2009), and recently cited in a Deborah Fallows article in The Atlantic,* shows that talking to a child and listening to their response even before they start using understandable language makes an enormous difference in the level of achievement that child will attain. The cause for concern among researchers, child psychologists, educators, and others who care about our children is that we are quickly switching from our tongues to our thumbs as our primary communication organs. We don’t talk anymore, we text, and this is having a measurable effect on our children.
I don’t text. Although I receive and read text messages from others, I don’t know how to text myself. I fully understand the advantages of texting, however. It is wonderful the way folks can stay connected, even when separated by thousands of miles and vast oceans. My nephew Nathan got a text from Will Jarrell at our house last April. Will was texting from Western China. But he could have been texting from across the room.
Texting from across the room seems a pointless exercise to me, and yet one most teens, and many adults practice regularly. It seems the most natural thing in the world to some folks to communicate with someone in your immediate presence by not looking at them, not listening to them, not speaking to them, but by staring at a tiny, hand-held device while we peck at it with our thumbs.
The effects of transferring our communication from speech to texting may prove to be far-reaching, even devastating. But maybe this is overreacting. Athenian purists made similar arguments against those who would write words down at all, instead of memorizing them. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says that a thinking man will not “write his thoughts in water with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves, nor teach the truth adequately to others” (The Norton Book of Classical Literature, 1993). We have these words, of course, because Plato wrote them down. As a chronic reader I quite disagree with Socrates that the written word cannot teach the truth to others. Perhaps chronic texters would offer similar protests. But Deborah Fallows’ piece in The Atlantic seems to offer a good deal of evidence that babies whose parents text frequently will underachieve because their parents neither speak to them or listen to them sufficiently.
Our Father in heaven does speak to us – as often as we are willing to listen to Him. Each time we open His living word He speaks. Each time we watch a bee pollinate a hibiscus flower, or gaze at the density of the Milky Way He speaks (Psalm 8.1-4, 19.1-6, Romans 1.20). Each we time we speak He listens. He encourages us to speak more and more (I Thessalonians 5.17). He knows what we will say before we say it (Psalm 139.4), but wants to hear us say it anyway. This is the way we learn, the way we grow, the way we mature. He speaks to us, and we listen. We speak to Him and He listens. This interaction is the source of everything.
We have a father who communicates – not in shards of vowel-deficient phrases, a few words at a time, while His attention is really elsewhere – but in full, self-revelatory sentences with his attention fully focused on us. He gives us his full-faced attention, not just the tapping of his thumbs. That attention neither wanes nor wanders when we speak to Him. This interaction makes all the difference. As we text more, and speak less, will our children be the only ones who suffer?
photo by David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
