Foster Care Training

Our society is presently engaged in an unprecedented experiment as young people are exposed to an ever-increasing amount of information, screen time, and fragmentation of attention as a result of digital intrusions.  A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2012 found that the average American teenager is sending/ receiving 100 texts a day, and spends in excess of 7 hours per day in front of some kind of screen.  In this training, we’ll examine the role of all of this technology in the lives of young people and those who care for them.  We will examine young people’s relationship with their smartphones, with relationship to screentime, with relationship to the prevalence of texting, with relationship to social media, and with relationship to its impacts on young people’s attention.  What do we know about the developmental impacts of all of this technology? How is it changing our relationships to ourselves, one another, and the world around us?  How is it benefiting young people and how is it harmful to them?  How is it conditioning and changing ours brains and nervous systems? What do these changes lead towards? And more importantly, how can we strategically counter-act the impacts that are negative?