Children and Technology

Questioner: I am a mother with young children, so could you just give me some words of advice – how can I help my children?

Sadhguru: One thing you need to understand is, your children are not exclusively under your influence. There are so many other forces that are influencing them every day. When I say this, don’t think of the teachers; they are a very minimal influence. There are friends, there are Facebook advisors, there is television, and there are various other things which are influencing them. So you are slowly becoming a minor influence.

The natural trend used to be, up to four, five years of age, the mother was the exclusive influence on the child. Between five and ten years of age, the father started playing a role. By the time they were fourteen or fifteen, friends and others came in. This used to be the order of things, but it is no more so. Your three-year-old kid is glued to the television and we do not know how he understands what is going on there. One moment they are advertising tooth paste, next moment they are advertising something else. Somebody is talking about creating a beautiful world, next moment there is a bombing happening, next moment something else is happening. If you simply watch, you will see it is such a chaotic mess. For a two- or three-year-old kid, staring at the multiple things that are happening on television does not have good consequences on his future life.

One of the things that we have done for our children in the rural [Isha Vidhya] schools that we run is, we bring in computers when they are six years of age. Education is given to the rural child to climb out of the economic and social pit that he is in; it is a survival process. Education should not be survival process, but right now, there is no other way to equip him for survival, so education is handled as survival there. But with your children, it is not for survival. Education is for expansion, to enlarge the horizons of one’s life.

At the other school [Isha Home School], which has children from well-to-do families – almost 30% are from outside the country – kids do not get to touch a computer till they are 14. They are not even allowed to send e-mails to their parents. They have to write a letter. Is this archaic? No, because we made sure the school has 100 acres plus and we are next to a 10000 km² forest. There is enough to observe, there are enough inputs to take from nature and bring oneself to a certain development.

With kids who grow up with us from six years of age, there is absolutely no issue. Some children who came from Mumbai and Delhi schools at the age of 12 or 13 initially rebelled, “Why no cell phones? Why can’t I use my iPhone?” After some time, they settled. Now, this one batch is finishing their twelfth standard and leaving. Ninety percent of them are saying, after their graduation, they want to come back to the school and teach at least for one year. By themselves, they want to offer this to the school. One kid from a very wealthy family in Delhi had huge problems when he came.

Later, he wrote an article saying, “If I had not come here, I would have been lost. By now I would have been a drug addict and would have done all kinds of things, because I already started at the age of 11, 12.” And today, the boy has the wisdom to say, “If I had not come here, I would have become something else. Today, I am like this because of the things people did which are generally unpopular with the children.”

Would you give a sharp knife to your infant? No. The technology that you have today is sharper than a knife. You must choose an appropriate age and an appropriate level of maturity before he handles it. Just because you have a computer, do you have to teach it to your four-year-old kid? It is a very silly idea that being modern is simply doing what somebody else is doing in the West, and they are suffering. Today’s statistics say, in the United States, the male population between the age of 26 and 30 spends a minimum of six hours playing video games. Between 26 and 30 is a time when a man should make his life. At this time, he is playing video games six hours a day, shooting some non- existent soldiers and winning competitions that are just ridiculous kids’ stuff.

In one family, I saw this boy who was about 28 years of age and who has become so big because he has learnt to invest on video games. He is making money, so you cannot tell him anything. He is earning half a million to one million dollars per year just investing and playing games, literally 24 hours. Food has to come to his room; he just plays. For this 28-year-old youth, a physiotherapist has to come and move his limbs, otherwise he cannot move them; they are all stuck. This is the worst thing that can happen with wealth. If wealth does not lead to wellbeing, what is that wealth for? Journeying from poverty to affluence is a very hard journey, whether it is for an individual, a society, or a nation. If this is what you get after getting there, what is the point?

Right now, this is also happening to our country in a big way, but we are not addressing it. For example in Tamil Nadu, last Diwali, on a single day, 127 crores’ worth of alcohol was sold. In this, 22 crores’ worth of alcohol was sold in one town called Tirupur alone. It is a hosiery town which is much more prosperous than most other towns because of the export. In this town with a population of six lakh people, 22 crores’ worth of alcohol was drunk on one Diwali day. Who is going to enjoy the evening crackers, I do not know, because they are already drunk in the morning. Another example, doctors are predicting that 42% of Tamil Nadu’s population is going to be diabetic in the next four years’ time.

If wealth comes, and you do not know how to translate it into wellbeing, that is a horrible thing to happen. If wealth has to become wellbeing, you need a spiritual element within you. If there is no inner dimension in you, this is what will happen to you – your very success will work against you. You heard that proverbial story – a man is cutting the branch, sitting at the wrong end; if he succeeds, he falls.

– Excerpted from a Q&A with Sadhguru at the “In Conversation with the Mystic” event with Infosys Chairman and ex-ICICI Bank CEO K.V. Kamath on 26 March 2012 in Mumbai