Reality Gets Blurred
Parents and teachers beware: Google is planning to make your jobs a little bit harder. Influencing a kid’s decisions is already tricky, and with Google’s new Project Glass, it may become almost impossible unless your methods get an update. Google has combined the functionality of your iPhone and iPod with its popular features and put them into glasses. While the technology is cool, imagine how much harder it will be to attract a kid’s attention if escaping the here-and-now is as easy as putting on a pair of glasses. 
Without the ability to choose when to put them on and when to focus on life, the challenge of sitting through a difficult math class or saying ‘no’ to play when work needs doing will get even harder. Right now, most adults are still struggling with the traditional carrot and stick method to coerce kids into following rules and behaving well. Threats and punishment alternate with bribery and rewards to funnel a kid into an ever smaller range of choices—choices deemed acceptable by those holding the carrots and sticks.
It’s not working and it’s leaving our kids vulnerable. Take smoking for example, according to the Surgeon General’s recent report, Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults, we still can’t seem to help kids stay away from cigarettes.
Continued on the next page“Most young smokers become adult smokers. One-half of adult smokers die prematurely from tobacco-related diseases. Despite thousands of programs to reduce youth smoking and hundreds of thousands of media stories on the dangers of tobacco use, generation after generation continues to use these deadly products, and family after family continues to suffer the devastating consequences.”
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