VISIONS OF THE future

If this sounds “down” on tech, we should share a success story. Tablet use has revolutionised the lives of some families living with nonverbal children, some of whom have managed to communicate dramatically beyond their verbal abilities using an ipad and a communication app. See the Nieder family’s story on niederfamily. blogspot.com/search/label/ipad as an example.

“Benefits for typically developing children are limited, but of course diaries, tables, apps which help with structure, communication and learning can be of some value to children with specific needs,” admits Prof Andre Venter, a paediatric neurodevelopmentalist and professor at the University of the Free State. Families affected by autism or ADHD, deafness or speech delays, and other conditions can use tablets judiciously, and the potential to revolutionise a child’s life cannot be ignored. Please do targeted research if you believe your child may qualify.

We might imagine technology that will one day operate intelligently with the brains of its users. An ipad game of the future might regulate its output in response to the dopamine levels it reads as it scans the player’s brain. In the lessdistant future, especially now that we understand the problem, games may be produced that aim to help children develop social skills, not hinder them, a game that delivers the yearned-for dopamine hit every time a character reacts in the “best possible” way when solving social problem, for instance.

A game that reads cues from the gameplayer and amends itself – sounds crazy, right? Well, we just don’t know what the future holds – and we regularly get our predictions wrong, as author Jennifer Senior points out in a TED talk (available on Youtube), where she recalls how her parents’ generation believed that learning Japanese was what would give their children a competitive advantage when they grew up – a prediction that proved completely false. It’s worth remembering just how many of our parenting predictions do.