One day I happened to be watching a little girl, about three or four, taking pictures with a camera. When she was done taking the picture, she wanted to see it so she started touching the screen to get it to go back. The camera was not a touch screen, but she was acting like it was. She expected to be able to just touch it and, viola, it would show up. The children of the technology generation are being affected by all the technology around them. But they are not being affected positively. Technology is negatively affecting our youth. The current Technological Revolution is a negative change for society because it is negatively affecting the way children are maturing and acting.
Video Games and Computer Games are interfering with reading and exercise. Children play on the computer or video games more than they read or go outside and exercise. This affects the health of today’s children. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention: “Obesity now affects 17% of all children and adolescents in the United States – triple the rate from just one generation ago.” Much of this has to do with diet, true, but much of it also has to do with no exercise and sitting in front of a TV or computer for hours on end. The other health affect related to this is that children don’t talk to other children as often. This does not help the mind with social interactions or with intellectual pursuits. According to a quote from an article by the Institute of Education in the UK which quoted the Alliance of Childhood: “the damage being done by immersing children in electronic technologies is becoming clearer. Increasing numbers of them spend hours each day sitting in front of screens instead of playing outdoors, reading, and getting much-needed physical exercise and face-to-face social interaction — all of which, it turns out, also provide essential stimulation to the growing mind and intellect.” Children who read instead of playing video games tend to have a more active mind than children who play games all the time.
Inventions such as the tablet and iPhone are training young children to be dependent on technology all the time. Children are attached to their devices. Many young children, around the ages of three or four, already know how to work an iPhone better than some adults do. Children as young as five have cell phones, which in turn makes them act older than they are. You cannot go anywhere without seeing children playing on DS’s, phones, or tablets. They bring them everywhere and play on them all the time. They use technology to talk to their friends, to look up answers to questions they have about something at school, etc. Many children don’t even know what it is like to not have a computer, a phone, or a tablet.
Technology is not one hundred percent safe. A good example of this is a computer. You can do anything or look at anything on a computer. Children get in bad situations online due to online dating or meeting people who aren’t as they seem. This leads to increased kidnapping and raping. Information is so readily available that children find things they really shouldn’t be looking at.
The current Technological Revolution is negatively impacting our children in many ways that we do not see outright. Technology can be a good thing and has been used for good, but when things such as what are mentioned above are happening, then we have to ask ourselves, is it really worth the price?
Further links:
http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/
A Window Into My Mind 