The Dara-Abrams family was featured in a special issue of Newsweek. The special issue was co-produced by Score! (a subsidiary of Kaplan).

Another picture of Drew (more than just the one below) can be found in the magazine itself.

The following was taken directly from the Newsweek website.

Return to the front page...

Meet Generation Net

In the most heavily wired households, children have become even more tech-savvy than their parents. But generally even they need guidance.

By Bronwyn Fryer
Spring 2000

In June 1997--the day before her family was due to board a plane for their Hawaiian vacation--Benay Dara-Abrams was frantic. Hustling to pack and desperate to tie up loose ends at work, the Silicon Valley mother of two had forgotten to reserve a rental car. Daughter Cassie, then 7, volunteered to take care of it. Cassie fired up one of the family's 20 computers, clicked on to their wireless Internet connection (that is always on) and found the Dollar Rent a Car Web site. The girl compared prices, picked out a sleek black Dodge Neon and filled out the online forms. Benay double-checked the form and nodded her approval. Cassie clicked the submit button and the rental-car problem was solved: reservation confirmed.

The ease with which Cassie uses the Net is hardly surprising. Her parents are computer scientists who originally used Arpanet, the precursor to today's Internet. When he was 10, brother Drew, now 16, already had built his own computer. Before Cassie was a year old, she was drawing with KidPix on one of her parents' high-powered Sun workstations; by 5 she had learned to type. Today she's programming in Basic, building Web pages and raising money on the Net for her school's Jog-a-Thons while other kids her age are still looking for the escape key. Presumably, Cassie's talents are the result of good DNA, but she's also a product of a family environment in which computers are practically as ubiquitous as light bulbs. Net-generation kids like Cassie--call them Gen Netters--have learned to deal with computers both at home and in school, and they have absorbed digital information and skills almost by osmosis. Theirs is a super-cyber-confidence that amazes their friends, cows their teachers and gives them a superb sense of self-esteem.

Certainly, educators and parents want children to be computer-literate, but a few kids who have had early access to computers quickly leap past mere literacy into something decidedly more expert. They are availing themselves of instantaneous resources that their parents never dreamed of. Gone are book-bound encyclopedias, pens, pencils, crayons, typewriters, LiquidPaper and painstakingly glued photographs clipped from Dad's stash of National Geographic back issues. Cassie's fourth-grade, book-style report on Spanish missions in California, formatted in her favorite "Comic" font in Microsoft Word and generated in multiple colors on Mom's laser printer, incorporated information and photographic JPEG files downloaded from Web sites run by some of the historic missions themselves.

Then, there's round-the-clock help that can be found on the Web for those nasty math and grammar problems. Last year, when she was in seventh grade, Chrissie Wells of Wapakoneta, Ohio, found herself unable to grasp the concept of positive and negative numbers. So she e-mailed a problem to one of dozens of sites offering to help kids with tough homework issues. A resident automated tutor, who takes in questions from kids, "didn't give me the answer, but he helped me in how to think about it," she says. "When we had a test a week later, I did OK."

Getting homework help and doing online research, of course, is low-tech stuff that any kid with an America Online connection can accomplish. Many Net-savvy children also build their own Web sites, to the amazement and admiration of their less-wired friends. Sixth-grader T. J. Munro of Danbury, Conn., impresses his pals with his site for Pokemon fans--complete with bouncing yellow characters and strategies for winning card games.

Even so, T.J. (the initials stand for Trevor Joseph, names he prefers not to use) is beginning to think his site is a little juvenile. So the 11-year-old is getting interested in online stock trading, like his older sister Katie, 14. "I've got $40 in my savings account, and I want to invest in the stock market," he said when he was interviewed early this year. "My dad and I sat down one night and went through some stocks. I like checking them out." Though he hadn't plunked down his money yet, he was busily looking for something to buy. "I was disappointed that Nintendo wasn't public," he said. Finally, T.J. settled on his favorite stock: Blockbuster. "He was annoyed with me for not buying any when it went up more than two points yesterday," his father said. "I'll cool him off tonight when he sees they went down 1 3/4."

Like Cassie Dara-Abrams, T. J. Munro has noodled with computers since infancy. His dad, Jay Munro--who works as senior project leader for PC Magazine's testing lab--built four of the five machines on the family network from scratch. T.J.'s 17-year-old brother, Jayson, writes software and helps administer his school's network. Katie is the Rosie O'Donnell of her online-chat circle. Taking technology for granted, all the young Munros have had to deal with adults who know far less about computers and the Inter- net than they do. Jayson fields tech-support calls from his grandfather and uncle; Katie guides her grandmother through the intricacies of AOL.

Clever as they are, wired kids can quickly get lost in cyberspace. "Kids in the Net generation have a sense of instant, worldwide information and communication," says Malina Koplin, a math and computer-resource teacher in Maukesha, Wis. "That sense is unique to them, but they need to learn to manage it. There's more to life than what they see on a screen." Pornography-peddling Web sites aren't the only threat to Generation Netters. They can also face challenges in school. The problem there, says Jay Munro, is that their knowledge of technology "far outstrips the teachers'." Indeed, children who grow up with computers and the Internet can get quickly bored with technologically challenged teachers, says Dr. Tracy Heibeck, a child psychologist who teaches at Harvard and heads research for an after-school kids' Internet project called ePlay. "The traditional classroom model of listening to a lecture doesn't do much for kids who've grown used to sitting in the driver's seat of the computer," she says. "They thrive on interactivity, and they are used to multitasking--playing a game, chatting with their friends and researching a project all at the same time."

Even paper-paged books can be anathema to Generation Netters. "They're so used to finding information instantly that getting them to dig into a standard encyclopedia is hard," Jay Munro says of his children. "They want to research online, or use the latest [Microsoft] Encarta." It's all too easy for well-wired kids to use the Net instead of the library, search engines in place of card catalogs and Web sites instead of books. The trick is to get children to apply a critical eye to what they read online, says Koplin. For this, children who use the Net to look up information for their report on dinosaurs still need plenty of adult guidance. "They think anything in print is the truth, and they need to learn to sort the wheat from the chaff, fact from opinion." (Her advice: read the "About Us" section of the site to check credentials, and stick with Web sites whose names end with .gov, .edu or .org.)

Sometimes, superwired kids need parents to run interference with schools in order to keep frustration at bay. By 10, Drew Dara-Abrams had grown so disappointed by his teachers' inability to teach him to program that he wound up taking computer-camp courses at Stanford. At 7, his sister Cassie was old enough to start working in her elementary school's computer lab, but mousing around with beginning computer games was just too irksome for her. "We asked the computer teacher if he could do something else for Cassie, so he gave her an eighth-grade programming exercise," says her father, Alec.

Parents of wired kids need to intervene at home, too. "Kids who adopt technology early can develop a sense of self-esteem, but there's danger in using it too much or in isolation," says Heibeck. "Parents need to use common sense. They should think of their children's use of technology as an opportunity to learn something together and to talk about what they learn. They need to be aware of what kids are doing on the Net, just as they monitor what their kids watch on television. And they need to drill into kids how to use good judgment online, just as they teach them to deal with peer pressure, drugs, alcohol and sex."

Of course, the Internet isn't just something to use as a research tool, a message center or a game-playing toy. In ultrawired houses, computers hooked up to networked appliances and machines can also act as invisible handmaidens. These networks use software programs like IBM's Home Director and computer-based light controlling devices plugged into standard electrical conduits to make inanimate objects act like a horde of well-trained English butlers. If this equipment becomes popular in homes, more and more children will grow up in futuristic cybercastles.

Justy Currid, 16, of Houston, already lives that way, thanks to her mother, Cheryl, a technology-industry analyst and unabashed gadget geek. Every morning since Justy was 11, the house "Genie"--a huge home network linked to every light, pipe, electrical outlet, screen and appliance in the house, which is run from a server in the basement--has awakened her at 6:30 with a chirpy, recorded "Good morning." The drapes pull open, drawn by an invisible hand. While Mom's in the bathroom brushing her teeth, the Genie reminds her to check the prices of her stocks. The Genie switches on the kitchen lights, the coffee maker and the waterfall in the master bathroom and sets about watering the indoor plants.

And what of that lowly appliance, the personal computer? Has the old beige box been relegated to the attic? Hardly. There are 22 of them scattered all over the house, hiding behind ferns, attached to touch-screen and flat-panel monitors and wireless keyboards, snuggled into bedroom corners, humming in the family room, awaiting grocery orders in the kitchen. (The Genie's voice comes from a $29 piece of home-automation software, Microsoft Agent 2.0, running on a $500 no-name PC.)

Living in a wired house hasn't always been easy for Justy. Surveillance cameras prevent late-night escapades. Mom can also check up on any dates she regards unsavory-looking. "Once Mom went to a government site listing criminal records, and found the name of this guy I was seeing," Justy recalls. "The criminal just happened to have the same name, but it was kind of scary anyway." How does Justy feel about her mom's snooping? "It used to be a drag, but now I'm kind of grateful," she says.

For the members of Generation Net, the question is not whether their world is too wired, or whether other kids aren't wired enough. Rather, the question is how intelligently they will be able to use the Net. "My generation is already engulfed in technology," says Justy. "I never see us as too wired. For us, understanding the Internet and knowing how to use it is superimportant." Kids say if you're not "wired smart"--intelligent about using technology-- you won't get anywhere.

Fryer writes frequently on technology.

Return to the front page...