Essay

Stop Teaching Girls to Code

Kids under 10 should be playing outside instead of interacting with devices inside.

Idon’t want my daughters to learn to code.

This is heresy to some. I live in San Francisco, and part of my professional life involves counseling tech startup founders about their company messaging. I repeatedly hear that these leaders are desperate for engineering talent. They preach that the avenues of opportunity broaden for the kids (girls in particular) who learn computer programming in childhood. Pointing to job growth projections, they announce that there’s nothing but blue skies for computer science graduates. They believe they can solve the gender and diversity gap in tech if young kids are encouraged to learn code. Take advantage of their sponge-like brains and start early, they say.

So parents sign up kids as young as five for after-school engineering classes and send them to coding summer camps. At even earlier ages, they buy programmable talking dolls and robots that surreptitiously insert the fundamentals of programming into their play. They see coding as the lifeboat taking their young daughters to the shores of feminist achievement, and their boys to a clutch position at Google. Everyone from President Obama to Willi.i.am to NBA player Chris Bosch is cheering kids on from the learn-to-code bandwagon.

I recognize the progressive intentions behind youth coding programs. In particular, organizations like Girls Who Code, Code.org, Latina Girls Code, and Black Girls Code offer training that can launch kids with less means into a prosperous future that changes the economic game for their families. That’s a good thing.

But I still feel queasy thinking about what coding education would mean for kids who start on the tech path early, including my own daughters, aged seven and four. Until recently, I was like most parents in the San Francisco Bay Area who casually offer phones to their kids to keep them quiet in restaurants, and regularly indulge them with amusing apps and YouTube clips. I even sent my older daughter to a Minecraft camp last winter break.

However, spending time at startup offices and venture capital firms has convinced me that

tech is leading humanity down the wrong path.

When I consider the status-quo lifestyle of software developers and the working culture at tech companies, teaching coding to five year olds seems akin to showing kids how to smoke. It’s probably even worse for their health.

Kids who code and go on to programming careers will spend most of their lives — including their childhood — indoors, sedentary and interacting with machines.

Though we’re quick to ignore their messages, health experts increasingly warn about the dangers of excessive screen time for attention span, vision, sleep, metabolism and even Vitamin D levels. Sitting in front of a computer all day is just plain bad for you. There is also a growing consensus that our engagement with the virtual world for hours a day constitutes a true addiction to digital devices, which can elicit the same dopamine responses from our brains as recreational drugs, and can cause a nasty withdrawal response.

Yes, video games = cocaine.

And screen time doesn’t just mean smartphone games and TV. It’s also educational videos, computer science classes and classroom iPads, which can all be excellent instructional tools used in moderation. But added together, these technologies drive us further away from our evolutionary path.

We Homo sapiens evolved to spend our days outside being active and social, encountering stimuli that engaged all our senses and challenged our minds and bodies. It is that particular context that regulates our hormones and optimizes our brain chemistry. But now we’re like rats in tiny basement cages. We spend over 90 percent of our time inside under artificial lighting, missing opportunities to move our bodies and socialize. This is devolution. Is that how we want our kids to live?

They will miss out on other healthy, pro-social extracurricular opportunities.

Due to the addictive nature of digital devices and games, unless kids are given limits with technology, research has shown that they will spend more and more time with screens, less time outside and less time socializing. That means that if parents aren’t vigilant, one hour of code could trigger a habit of several hours of pre-bedtime gaming, and encourage a child’s preference to interact with devices instead of people or the environment.

They will be indoctrinated into a way of thinking that is future-oriented, relentlessly logical and can hamper social-emotional skills.

The basics of coding require breaking a big objective into small parts that can be threaded together. These small, technical problems often require painstaking, laborious rounds of trial and error in which the coder must stay committed to a future solution. Sure, you can make the process fun for kids with new apps like Hopscotch, Tynker and MIT’s Scratch. But the reality is that a professional coder has to do it the hard way, and it’s best if the coder’s personality is suited to this task.

Not everyone has the patience, focus and logical prowess to code well.

In fact, the majority of us don’t.

A child who naturally thinks with metaphor, analogy and color will get stressed when asked to do tasks for hours that only involve logic and numbers. Furthermore, prioritizing unemotional, abstract analysis over a more integrated and compassionate worldview can be detrimental for how we get along. The relationship-based part of the brain evolved to guide and restrain the singularly focused, analytic part of the brain, and requires greater processing power. When we over-train our logical capacities, we often diminish other social and emotional skills that promote cooperation, compassion and non-violence.

What’s to stop us from building AI solutions that prompt and regulate our social interactions? Imagine a digital assistant that reminds you to call your mother on her birthday, and even pre-orders a present for you.

People lament how navigation apps have decreased our natural ability to find our way, and we may be about to lose much, much more, including our ability to empathize with one another if we start relying on AI to run our relationships. Again, is that what we want for kids?

Above all, kids who code have to buy in to the belief that building more apps and programs is a worthwhile pursuit.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that tech can and does make the world better, I just think that most of the time it doesn’t. Rather, the tech industry primarily creates more demand for tech. That promulgates this unhealthy lifestyle and contributes to environmental degradation, which could be the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced.

Do people suffer less if we have another app for food delivery? Do we curb the effects of climate change with yet another instant messenger?

People who weren’t immediately baptized into the digital world at age five will be valuable critics of the system, keeping it in check.

I don’t intend to deprive my kids of competitive advantage. Sheryl Sandberg is right when she said: “Our children — including our girls — need the opportunity to learn computer science.”

My question is just at what age, and under what circumstances? Every industry of the future will require apps — after all, software is eating the world — yet by the time my kids have reason to build an app, there will likely be a code-free way to do it. I hope my daughters can choose to learn computer science after age 10 if they want, once they have been exposed to pursuits that harmonize with their developing brains and bodies like art, music, sports and exploring nature.

If the grand push to get toddlers coding is about introducing them to computational thinking, then there are plenty of non-screen, non-stationary ways to do that. On a hike in the woods you can learn to recognize patterns and sequences through observing plants and animals. Any complex building project with LEGO bricks will require finding and fixing errors. And algorithmic understanding can be gained from discussing all the steps you need to complete in order to do any basic task, like getting ready for school.

So if my daughters aren’t coding or hanging out with screens, what are they doing?

We’re still figuring that out, since we haven’t always been this way. As a toddler, my older daughter obsessively watched Dora the Explorer cartoons and played Monkey Preschool Lunchbox on her dad’s iPhone for hours on end. Taking the iPad away has caused tantrums. I know we are taking an uphill path away from the lifestyle of our peers, and I have a lot to learn about guiding my kids’ code-free childhood.

I think we start by opting for archery, watercolor or jiu jitsu over javascript. We interact IRL (in real life) during family time. We get to know the flora and fauna of our area, take delight in making things with our hands and, most importantly, understand that our need for movement, sunlight and a real-life community should not be undermined by technology.

I hope that the tech industry will course-correct in the coming years, and transform work culture with liberal flex time, biophilic office design, and communication devices that aren’t addictive and planet-killing. If any industry can rapidly change how we live, it’s tech. But until that happens, my family is going out for a walk.

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