Five Reasons Why Your Kid Should Collect Stamps

So very true.

I think if you involve them young, you can get that hook in them. My girls (5-year-old twins and their 4-year-old sister) can hardly be called collectors. At the moment their interest in stamps is that they make "pretty" stickers for their art projects. But they are in it, learning to use tongs and hinges, learning about the world, and enjoying time with stamps. It may be they wander away, but in time they may return when they get a little older.

An interesting side note to encouraging kids. A couple of weeks ago I was at Indypex and was looking through the material of a postal history dealer. Nothing cheap in his boxes. As I looked, I was being nosey and listened to him talking to someone else. He was saying encouraging kids does him no good as they won't be customers of his for another 30 or 40 years.

I'm not saying his attitude is right, but there is an interesting perspective there. As I thought about it, I was in my 30s and REALLY, my 40s before I had income to really invest in my collection.

Hungary,

The deleterious effects of multitasking/video gaming/websurfing etc.--all the way up to evidence of rewiring of the brain--are being substantiated by neuro-scientific and social science research.

I also have noticed the effects in the college students I have been teaching for 40 years now (inability to focus, concentrate,analyze, compare). The differences over the last 5-10 years have been dramatic. Please don't shoot the messenger. It's not the message we want to hear but we will never be able to do anything about it as we cannot diagnose the problem.

Donate your extra stamps to the boys scouts, Girl Scouts, boys and girls club and the like. If we can get one kid to collect out of a hundred, the hobby will survive slowly

Hieronymus,

I'd be curious to see some references citing the detrimental effects of moderate screen time, be that video games, internet, TV. The numerous studies I have read typically indicate a moderate improvement in children for low usage versus no usage (< 1 hr a day) and benign effects for moderate usage. No one would argue that excessive usage of digital devices/TV have a detrimental effect, and studies I've read are most concerned with those spending 30+ hours a week. I warrant that excessive time spent in any one type of activity would be detrimental, including 30+ hours of stamp collecting a week, or 30+ hours of French Horn practice etc.

I am not arguing that unsupervised children that spend a ridiculous number of hours on devices would not benefit from ANY other activity. I am suggesting that in a normal environment, at least normal for my community, parents regulate screen time, and children have other activities which are not digital and are equally beneficial when compared to stamp collecting and possibly more important.

My point in calling out your criticism of digital activities is that such an attitude is typical of a generation gap. You want children to take an interest your activities but cast aspersions on theirs. Open minded adults and parents accept that children in younger generations have other interests and if they are smart, they engage in them as well, along with the children. This helps keep tabs on what they are doing, improves communication, can be fun and sure as heck makes them more likely to do find the parent's activities acceptable. For example, I play video games with my children and in return they play board games with me. Also, we require they practice piano before video games. In return they are rewarded.

The first step to increasing interest in stamp collection among the younger generation is to accept that there are legitimate competing interests for their time and not immediately conclude that their minds are being warped by the digital age. Times change. let's not foster the same generation gap that my parent's generation did with my generation (e.g., horrible loud rock n roll music versus that lovely raucous big band stuff). Let's be honest. Stamp collecting is pretty low on the excitement list these days for children and rightfully so. Its a pretty boring activity from most children's perspective. With increased demands of school (my kids do way more homework than I did), organized after school activities, organized sports, reading and other scheduled activities (music, foreign language classes, whatever), my kids need time to unwind. An hour of video games a day and maybe a TV show are just rewards for 10 hours of work.

This doesn't mean children can't be introduced to stamp collecting; hopefully some will find it compelling and others will take a small interest. Then when they get older and stamp collecting seems less boring compared to competing activities, they will take it up again. One thing I know for sure is that bridging the gap between adult and child interests can make a world of difference and prejudiced viewpoints are only detrimental.

Dear Hungary,


http://www.wired.com/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/

Yes, it's 4 years old. Yes, I'm sure it has been disagreed with. But it's an example of what I had in mind. I know there is social-science and neuroscience research on both sides of the debate.

I notice you qualified your response by specifying "moderate" digital activities. Who would disagree, once that qualification is inserted? And who would disagree that immoderate activities are deleterious?

So the issue boils down to how much moderate and how much immoderate activity is going on by whom when and where. The devil, as always, is in the details.

My anecdotal evidence from 40 years of teaching is just that, anecdotal. But convincing, to me. College students are less analytical, less able to see behind the "form" that they encounter because they are used to having the whole, virtual reality instantly in their face. They are adept at pushing buttons to gain a result but less aware of what lies behind the vitual reality on the screen. The virtual is the real, to them.

Analogously, they are less, not more, capable of analyzing a paragraph of writing, a chapter in a book (whether E-Book or cellulose book doesn't matter). To them language, words are a whole package (icon), not put together with skill by a writer. As a result, they cannot pick out the main point in a paragraph or in a chapter. They can get an overall impression, the "gist" of the chapter. Or so they think. But often their "gist" is incorrect. They are much more susceptible to manipulation by propaganda, if it's skillfully enough presented "on screen."

To give another example: over the years I have noticed decreasing ability to know what individual words signify. On exams, when I specify, "two letters in one blank space" to try to help them do a matching problem, they will often misread it as "two letters in all blank spaces" or something like that. The "icon" world they live in permits one to get by with general impressions. So, when they read sentences in a paragraph or a chapter, the individual words, adverbs like "merely" which may be crucial in establishing the meaning of a sentence, tend to get skipped over as minor details. But of course then they fail to "get" the point of the sentence.

Of course, this might be as much the result of whole word reading methods rather than immoderate screen time. I'm not claiming scientific proof for this. I'm just saying that I have seen deleterious developments over time. Perhaps I attribute them to the wrong cause. Yes, I am aware that there are studies both defending and criticizing distracted "multi-tasking" and digital saturation.

That's all anecdotal. Blame it on generational bias, if necessary. Perhaps I'm just an old geezer out of touch with the rising generation, unable to see the wonderful new world that has come into being.

On the other hand, what if, in this case, the new trends are actually deleterious?? What if the newest is not better? It is possible for cultures to fall as well as rise, for trends to be deleterious as well as better and wonderfuller. Often the unintended negative effects do not appear until long after the initial positive effects have become ineradicably established in people's minds.

Finally, let me return to my main point in my initial comment: the article on which this thread is premised offers evidence that even high school students find stamps intrinsically interesting rather than boring, as you have claimed. This is confirmed by a number of SCF threads and comments from those who work with school stamp clubs on the elementary school level.

The authors of the article merely claimed that (1) students found stamps interesting (after initial, typical adolescent feigned disinterest) and that (2) this seemed to them to be an antidote to deleterious effects of (immoderate) digital activity.

Perhaps your disagreement is as much with the authors of the article, not me.