How You Can Help Your Child in the Electronic Age When You Don't Own a Home Computer

The National Children's Book and Literacy Alliance

How You Can Help Your Child Operate in the Electronic Age When You Don't Own a Home Computer

As a young family with three children on a limited budget, it was years before we could afford a home computer. Our financial situation didn't stop our children from wanting one either. As home computers proliferated and our children entered school, we worried that they would fall educationally behind other children. We worried that without a home computer to reinforce their school based computer skills, those skills would diminish. We needn't have worried; our children did just fine. In fact, they taught us that there are many ways that kids can bridge the digital divide - even when they don't have a personal computer at home.

Our middle child, Emily, was, and is, totally computer obsessed. Emily wanted a computer so badly that as a four year old she made one for herself out of a shoe box lid and large cardboard box. She had seen computers in her father's office and had found a photograph of a computer there. Referencing the photograph, she drew alphabet letters on top of the shoe box lid, drawing circles around each letter, turning her box lid into a "keyboard." Then she drew a large rectangle on the front of the big cardboard box, drawing many knobs beneath her "screen." She played with her pretend computer continuously, playacting out all kinds of office and business scenarios. Her game progressed to the point that she began to change the images on her screen to meet her many imaginary business needs by drawing new pictures and letters on separate sheets of paper, then taping them to her pretend computer screen.

Lessons I Learned from Emily:

• If you don't have a home computer, take your child to your place of work, or a friend's place of work, and show them what computers are and what they can do.

• Make your children aware of how often computers are used in our daily lives. Bring your child with you when you run errands. Point out the many ways people use computers at the grocery store, restaurants, the doctor's office, the post office, the bank, the dry cleaners, etc. Ask your children how they think computers can be used in different occupations, jobs, and work situations.

• Encourage your preschooler to make their own "computer." Help them if they ask you to, but after supplying paper, crayons, scissors and a glue stick, leave them to their work. Encourage them to play pretend games imagining themselves in different occupational roles and to use their pretend computer in their play.

• Teach your child to visually recognize the letters of the alphabet and numbers 1-10. Get an old computer keyboard or an old typewriter. Show your child the letters, the space bar, and all the auxiliary keys on the keyboard, then explain what the keys mean and what they do. Let them play and pretend with the keyboard.

• All three of our children have played with old discarded keyboards long before they used computers in school. Consequently, typing and computer usage was considerably easier for them once they began using real computers.

• It was Emily, of course, who made me aware that libraries offered free access to the Internet. Libraries are a great place for kids to learn and practice computer use. Librarians can also be wonderfully helpful to your children. Kids need to learn how to research and evaluate the information they obtain from the Internet. School and public librarians can often do a better job teaching our children how to surf the Internet for the information they need than we can do at home. Remember to ask your librarian which hours have the least traffic at your library. Those are the times to visit the library with your child if you have computer use in mind.

Don't despair if you cannot afford a home computer. Essentially, your child needs the same skills for computer use that he or she needs to use one of the oldest forms of interactive communication, a book. The best way to help your child prepare to meet the needs of the new electronic age is to help them to be great readers and writers. The rest will follow easily.