Foster Care Training

Our society is presently engaged in the largest experiment on young people’s attention (without an ethical review board) in the history of humanity. Young people’s moment-to-moment experience of reality is increasingly mediated by their devices, which have in many ways become inextricably linked to their sense of self. Teens would rather text than talk. They are exposed to an ever-increasing amount of information and fragmentation of attention by an internet that has profound power to acculturate young people in ways very different from the value systems of most of their families and caregivers. 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. What do we think about all of this exposure to 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? What do we know about the developmental impacts of all of this technology? 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?