Look At Me by Patricia Snow | Articles | First Things - 0 views
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interaction personal tech conversation distraction robot parenting autism
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Maurice stumbles upon what is still the gold standard for the treatment of infantile autism: an intensive course of behavioral therapy called applied behavioral analysis that was developed by psychologist O. Ivar Lovaas at UCLA in the 1970s
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in a little over a year’s time she recovers her daughter to the point that she is indistinguishable from her peers.
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Let Me Hear Your Voice is not a particularly religious or pious work. It is not the story of a miracle or a faith healing
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Maurice discloses her Catholicism, and the reader is aware that prayer undergirds the therapy, but the book is about the therapy, not the prayer. Specifically, it is about the importance of choosing methods of treatment that are supported by scientific data. Applied behavioral analysis is all about data: its daily collection and interpretation. The method is empirical, hard-headed, and results-oriented.
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on a deeper level, the book is profoundly religious, more religious perhaps than its author intended. In this reading of the book, autism is not only a developmental disorder afflicting particular individuals, but a metaphor for the spiritual condition of fallen man.
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In this reading of the book, the mother is God, watching a child of his wander away from him into darkness: a heartbroken but also a determined God, determined at any cost to bring the child back
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the mother doesn’t turn back, concedes nothing to the condition that has overtaken her daughter. There is no political correctness in Maurice’s attitude to autism; no nod to “neurodiversity.” Like the God in Donne’s sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” she storms the walls of her daughter’s condition
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Like God, she sets her sights high, commits both herself and her child to a demanding, sometimes painful therapy (life!), and receives back in the end a fully alive, loving, talking, and laughing child
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the reader realizes that for God, the harrowing drama of recovery is never a singular, or even a twice-told tale, but a perennial one. Every child of his, every child of Adam and Eve, wanders away from him into darkness
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we have an epidemic of autism, or “autism spectrum disorder,” which includes classic autism (Maurice’s children’s diagnosis); atypical autism, which exhibits some but not all of the defects of autism; and Asperger’s syndrome, which is much more common in boys than in girls and is characterized by average or above average language skills but impaired social skills.
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At the same time, all around us, we have an epidemic of something else. On the street and in the office, at the dinner table and on a remote hiking trail, in line at the deli and pushing a stroller through the park, people go about their business bent over a small glowing screen, as if praying.
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This latter epidemic, or experiment, has been going on long enough that people are beginning to worry about its effects.
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for a comprehensive survey of the emerging situation on the ground, the interested reader might look at Sherry Turkle’s recent book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.
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she also describes in exhaustive, chilling detail the mostly horrifying effects recent technology has had on families and workplaces, educational institutions, friendships and romance.
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many of the promises of technology have not only not been realized, they have backfired. If technology promised greater connection, it has delivered greater alienation. If it promised greater cohesion, it has led to greater fragmentation, both on a communal and individual level.
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If thinking that the grass is always greener somewhere else used to be a marker of human foolishness and a temptation to be resisted, today it is simply a possibility to be checked out. The new phones, especially, turn out to be portable Pied Pipers, irresistibly pulling people away from the people in front of them and the tasks at hand.
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if you may be interrupted at any time, it makes sense, as a student explains to Turkle, to “keep things light.”
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Current media, and the fear of missing out that they foster (a motivator now so common it has its own acronym, FOMO), drive lives of continual interruption and distraction, of virtual rather than real relationships, and of “little” rather than “big” talk
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all it takes is a single phone on a table, even if that phone is turned off, for the conversations in the room to fade in number, duration, and emotional depth.
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we are reaping deficits in emotional intelligence and empathy; loneliness, but also fears of unrehearsed conversations and intimacy; difficulties forming attachments but also difficulties tolerating solitude and boredom
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consider the testimony of the faculty at a reputable middle school where Turkle is called in as a consultant
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The teachers tell Turkle that their students don’t make eye contact or read body language, have trouble listening, and don’t seem interested in each other, all markers of autism spectrum disorder
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Like much younger children, they engage in parallel play, usually on their phones. Like autistic savants, they can call up endless information on their phones, but have no larger context or overarching narrative in which to situate it
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Students are so caught up in their phones, one teacher says, “they don’t know how to pay attention to class or to themselves or to another person or to look in each other’s eyes and see what is going on.
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“It is as though they all have some signs of being on an Asperger’s spectrum. But that’s impossible. We are talking about a schoolwide problem.”
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it was an older generation that first fell under technology’s spell. At the middle school Turkle visits, as at many other schools across the country, it is the grown-ups who decide to give every child a computer and deliver all course content electronically, meaning that they require their students to work from the very medium that distracts them, a decision the grown-ups are unwilling to reverse, even as they lament its consequences.
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In the protocols developed by Ivar Lovaas for treating autism spectrum disorder, every discrete trial in the therapy, every drill, every interaction with the child, however seemingly innocuous, is prefaced by this clear command: “Look at me!”
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If absence of relationship is a defining feature of autism, connecting with the child is both the means and the whole goal of the therapy. Applied behavioral analysis does not concern itself with when exactly, how, or why a child becomes autistic, but tries instead to correct, do over, and even perhaps actually rewire what went wrong, by going back to the beginning
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Eye contact—which we know is essential for brain development, emotional stability, and social fluency—is the indispensable prerequisite of the therapy, the sine qua non of everything that happens.
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There are no shortcuts to this method; no medications or apps to speed things up; no machines that can do the work for us. This is work that only human beings can do
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it must not only be started early and be sufficiently intensive, but it must also be carried out in large part by parents themselves. Parents must be trained and involved, so that the treatment carries over into the home and continues for most of the child’s waking hours.
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there are foundational relationships that are templates for all other relationships, and for learning itself.
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Maurice’s book, in other words, is not fundamentally the story of a child acquiring skills, though she acquires them perforce. It is the story of the restoration of a child’s relationship with her parents
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it is also impossible to overstate the time and commitment that were required to bring it about, especially today, when we have so little time, and such a faltering, diminished capacity for sustained engagement with small children
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The very qualities that such engagement requires, whether our children are sick or well, are the same qualities being bred out of us by technologies that condition us to crave stimulation and distraction, and by a culture that, through a perverse alchemy, has changed what was supposed to be the freedom to work anywhere into an obligation to work everywhere.
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In this world of total work (the phrase is Josef Pieper’s), the work of helping another person become fully human may be work that is passing beyond our reach, as our priorities, and the technologies that enable and reinforce them, steadily unfit us for the work of raising our own young.
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in Turkle’s book, as often as not, it is young people who are distressed because their parents are unreachable. Some of the most painful testimony in Reclaiming Conversation is the testimony of teenagers who hope to do things differently when they have children, who hope someday to learn to have a real conversation, and so o
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“It is not necessary to settle this debate to state the obvious. If we don’t look at our children and engage them in conversation, it is not surprising if they grow up awkward and withdrawn.”
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we have approached what Turkle calls the robotic moment, when we will have made ourselves into the kind of people who are ready for what robots have to offer. When people give each other less, machines seem less inhuman.
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If human conversations are endangered, what of prayer, a conversation like no other? All of the qualities that human conversation requires—patience and commitment, an ability to listen and a tolerance for aridity—prayer requires in greater measure.
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this conversation—the Church exists to restore. Everything in the traditional Church is there to facilitate and nourish this relationship. Everything breathes, “Look at me!”
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there is a second path to God, equally enjoined by the Church, and that is the way of charity to the neighbor, but not the neighbor in the abstract.
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“Who is my neighbor?” a lawyer asks Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus’s answer is, the one you encounter on the way.
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Virtue is either concrete or it is nothing. Man’s path to God, like Jesus’s path on the earth, always passes through what the Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade called “the sacrament of the present moment,” which we could equally call “the sacrament of the present person,” the way of the Incarnation, the way of humility, or the Way of the Cross.
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Both of these privileged paths to God, equally dependent on a quality of undivided attention and real presence, are vulnerable to the distracting eye-candy of our technologies
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Turkle is at pains to show that multitasking is a myth, that anyone trying to do more than one thing at a time is doing nothing well. We could also call what she was doing multi-relating, another temptation or illusion widespread in the digital age. Turkle’s book is full of people who are online at the same time that they are with friends, who are texting other potential partners while they are on dates, and so on.
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This is the situation in which many people find themselves today: thinking that they are special to someone because of something that transpired, only to discover that the other person is spread so thin, the interaction was meaningless. There is a new kind of promiscuity in the world, in other words, that turns out to be as hurtful as the old kind.
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Who can actually multitask and multi-relate? Who can love everyone without diluting or cheapening the quality of love given to each individual? Who can love everyone without fomenting insecurity and jealousy? Only God can do this.
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When an individual needs to be healed of the effects of screens and machines, it is real presence that he needs: real people in a real world, ideally a world of God’s own making
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Nature is restorative, but it is conversation itself, unfolding in real time, that strikes these boys with the force of revelation. More even than the physical vistas surrounding them on a wilderness hike, unrehearsed conversation opens up for them new territory, open-ended adventures. “It was like a stream,” one boy says, “very ongoing. It wouldn’t break apart.”
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in the waters of baptism, the new man is born, restored to his true parent, and a conversation begins that over the course of his whole life reminds man of who he is, that he is loved, and that someone watches over him always.
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Even if the Church could keep screens out of her sanctuaries, people strongly attached to them would still be people poorly positioned to take advantage of what the Church has to offer. Anxious people, unable to sit alone with their thoughts. Compulsive people, accustomed to checking their phones, on average, every five and a half minutes. As these behaviors increase in the Church, what is at stake is man’s relationship with truth itself.