I have recently heard about the concern that chatting online will cause kids to under-develop due to them not exercising their brain with complex sentences. I do not believe they will under-develop, but I do believe they will develop in a different way. Significantly different.

A while ago, Stef pointed me to a nice story about how a four years old kid watched TV and at some point she started to look for the mouse, because for all she knew, any working monitor should have a mouse attached.

We could say she is being silly, because a TV is obviously not a computer monitor. However, if we would say that, what we would actually say is that her point of view is not within reasonable bounds. Now that we are at it, since when are mice more than the target of cats?

The difference in points of view is not new, in particular when we talk about different generations. The term "conflict between generations" reveals how we typically notice such a difference after decades, hence "generations". This concept is still with us, the only difference being that now generations are measured in terms of years.

Sir Ken Robinson gave a great TED talk entitled Do schools kill creativity? and he argued that:

Nobody has a clue how the world would look like in 5 years, but yet we need to educate children that will retire in 2065.
Sir Ken Robinson

Given the pace of change, difference becomes the norm, and we will have to get used to it. Perhaps one step towards embracing difference is to think twice before shutting down an unreasonable point of view.

p.s. When was the last time you shut down an unreasonable point of view?