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How slime can save kids from becoming digital zombies
By Karol Markowicz
February 26, 2017 | 6:47pm

If you’ve recently tried to buy Elmer’s Glue in your local store, you may have found that it is, unexpectedly, sold out. It turns out there’s an explanation: Kids are combining it with cornstarch and glitter and forming a substance they call “slime.”

The DIY slime is so popular, stores can’t seem to restock Elmer’s fast enough.

That’s right, the digital zombies — the generation that supposedly never stops looking at a screen, the one we’re all worried will become even more obese while they drool on themselves playing video games — is busy making low-tech slime.

Thing is, this should stop surprising us. It’s the latest craze gripping the nation’s kids, but it’s not the first time in the last few years that kids are shutting down the computers and living in 3-D.

A few months ago, the addiction wasn’t Battle Galactica 5 or whatever hot video game we assume would have been occupying kids’ attention. No, they couldn’t stop flipping bottles.

Specifically, they were playing a game the point of which was to flip a half-full water bottle in the air and have it land upright. It was so popular The New York Times wrote a story on its ubiquitous soundtrack slowly bleeding parents of their sanity: “Gurgle. Thud. Crunch. Gurgle. Thud. Crunch.”

Before that, kids were tying up bracelets for their friends using Rainbow Loom, a kit that turns a collection of rubber bands into bracelets. Everywhere you went, kids had them up and down their arms.

It’s almost as if they’re trying to send us a message that, really, they’re OK. They can put down the iPad by choice.

Last July, an industry-tracking group reported that total consumer spending on video-game products fell 22 percent. Game-related hardware sales suffered an even deeper drop of 42 percent. In Britain, the popularity of a show called “The Great British Sewing Bee” has caused a 500 percent spike in knitting and sewing kits for kids.

There’s a message here — and we’re not hearing it because we’re too busy yelling hysterically about how much screen time our kids get. They’re choosing other activities.

In fact, the big video-game sensation of the last few years was Pokémon Go. Yes, it’s played on a cellphone — but outside. And requires much walking and wandering. Kids “capture” Pokémon monsters that appear on their phone’s GPS-enabled map as they walk around their neighborhoods.

Is it possible we’ve been needlessly worrying about zombified kids with Vitamin-D deficiencies from lack of sunlight? Well, yes and no.

Not all kids, of course, will find themselves obsessed with slime or crafting, and it may be the province of kids who have parents willing to go to the store and stock up on Elmer’s. That might mean these crazes trend toward parents who are trying to keep their kids off the screens in the first place.

A Pew study from 2015 showed that wealthier parents fill their children’s time with activities, sports and other extracurricular organizations at a far higher rate than poorer families. And the obesity epidemic still affects nearly 30 percent of America’s children, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

But these bottle-flipping, slime-making activities do seem like a step in the right direction after such prolonged hysteria that we have completely messed up the next generation with an abundance of computer use.

And that’s an important lesson. Most things are OK in moderation, and as parents, our job is to make sure our kids aren’t overdoing it. But we’re also susceptible to overwrought headlines about how our kids are in peril all the time and the constant predictions that things are only getting worse.

In the late 1800s, horses were the main method of transportation in cities like London and New York. “One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure would reach the level of Manhattan’s third-story windows,” recalled The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert. In 1894, “the Times of London forecast that by the middle of the following century every street in the city would be buried under nine feet of manure.”

The predictions turned out to be so much horse — well, you know. We worry too much about things that will never happen because we underestimate society’s ability to adapt. With regard to screen time and the challenge technology poses to creative experimentation: Don’t look now, but our kids are adapting

http://nypost.com/2017/02/26/how-slime-can-save-kids-from-becoming-digital-zombies/