Thirty million infected; almost one million dead; economies in tatters; incomes and livelihoods devastated worldwide. Then there are the children. And the first thing that comes to mind is how much knowledge they have lost. But I say think first how much of their social growth has been retarded.
Since last spring, schooling has been mostly on line. This fall, children are returning to classes but even when instruction is in-person, social distancing will continue to keep children from meaningful face-to-face and activity-based interaction.
Social isolation is not a natural condition for humans. The experts warn us that being deprived of social life can afflict us with anxiety, depression and irritability. But if socialization is a source of pleasurable living to grown-ups, it is an indispensable ingredient to the growth of children. At some basic level, we all understand that. But there is more to it and it goes beyond the limits the coronavirus imposed on the socialization of children.
First, why is the socialization of young children important? Because it helps them understand who they are and thus become aware of their identity; come to love people outside their kin; understand what friendship and trust are and how to make friends; learn to build networks of people that matter to them and use cooperation to achieve goals; experience the good and bad effects of in-group bias and aversion to those outside; and take advantage of social learning and teaching. All these dimensions of socialization constitute the social suite, as physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis calls it in his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of A Good Society.
The upshot of Blueprint is that, genetically wired with some pro-social instincts, humans managed very early to build social systems that helped them survive the challenges of their natural environments. In turn, successful social patterns favored those living in them to propagate. Therefore, humans, as biological and social creatures, are products of a shared genetic and social code.
By the time children are ready to start kindergarten, they bring with them a degree of social maturation that helps build their social suite. In his book Becoming Human, psychologist and neuroscientist Michael Tomasello shows that 5-year olds have developed a normative sense of do’s and dont’s that is informed by a sense of obligation to others. By the age of seven, children have started to regulate their behavior not only according to their own sense of what is right or wrong but also according to the standards of society. And they have enough reasoning skills to make ethical judgments. Thus, children enter their school life with foundations of morality and social awareness. As they go through elementary and early high school, children develop a sense for loyalty and trust and then for commitment, empathy and affection.
Of the various social venues, children can find themselves, the school and the playground are arguably the most important for their social growth because they are the testing grounds where children try out and hone their social skills. In the process, they learn how to adapt to the demands of social life. Unlike children of past generations, today’s children are mostly deprived of the rich social interaction with members of extended families living in proximity and coming together in frequent intervals. The preponderance of the nuclear family (just the parents and children) has significantly reduced the richness of this human-based transmission of social histories, experiences and lessons.
So, when we take out the social life of schools and playgrounds, what are children left with? Of course, we know the answer since it has been around for quite some time before the onset of the pandemic: online games and social media. Means of virtual socialization which, of course, have intensified in use with the pandemic. Therefore, the building-up of the components of the social suite has been already affected by forces beyond the pandemic.
Over their long history, humans have stumbled on discoveries that gave them no clue in advance how they would change human life and nature. The discovery of the digital technology is such a development. It raises the question: Can the transmission and acquisition of social skills and experiences through digital means instead of human interaction change any of the components of the social suite that Blueprint claims is at the heart of a good society? Can you trust that a bot has your back? And as far as the process of becoming human is concerned, can we leave that task to Artificial Intelligence?
Around 2005, people reported that the average number of their strong friendships had dropped from three to two and 25% in the survey said they had no one they could truly trust. If this has happened to adults, imagine the deficit of friendship in children. Of all the components of the social suite, friendship is particularly important because it does not rely on kinship or reciprocal altruism. In online games, players are replaced without much emotional cost and on social media “likes” do not convey the warmth of real bonding with another human being. Another collateral damage is children developing the habit of verbally abusing bots, like Alexa, that could potentially transfer to abusing fellow humans.
Although bots and robots can be designed to have a positive impact on how humans interact among themselves, the author of Blueprint N. Christakis has argued (The Atlantic, April 2019) that ill-designed interactions through digital and AI technologies can stunt emotional growth and inhibit human connections.
From a different standpoint, we could argue that the social isolation brought upon us by the pandemic has been less traumatic thanks to the presence of social media. They have allowed us to stay in contact with relatives, friends, and the society at large. The fact that social media-related firms outperformed in an otherwise negatively impacted stock market is evidence of where people turned when all tangible in-person contacts were shut down.
Grown-ups though have already developed the social suite prior to the advent of the pandemic and thus they can easily return to normal human interaction. This cannot be said for the children living through the pandemic. That’s why schools closed to in-person instruction and contact may prove to be the most important loss for children and by extension for us all to the extent the disrupted social growth of the young hurts the sustenance and quality of our social suite.
Let's Reason 