Children of the past moved a lot, and their sensory world was based on nature and was very simple. People used to spend a lot of time working together as a family in the past. Children had to meet their goals every day. When families were together for dinner, the dining room table was the place where they ate and talked about their day. After dinner, it was used for baking, crafts, and homework.
It was just 20 years ago that kids used to play outside all day. They used to ride bikes, play sports, and build forts. Children of the past were experts at playing imaginary games. They came up with their own form of play that didn’t need expensive equipment or parents to watch.
Today’s Generation & Technology: The Relation
Today’s families are not the same. Technology is causing the foundation of the 21st-century family to be broken up and the values that used to hold families together to fall apart. Parents now use a lot of communication, information, and transportation technology to make their lives easier and faster. They have to balance their school, work, home, and community lives.
Entertainment technology, such as TV, the Internet, video games, iPads, and cell phones, has progressed so quickly that families haven’t even noticed how it has changed their family structure and lifestyles, even though it has. A 2010 Kaiser Foundation study found that kids in elementary school use entertainment technology for 7.5 hours a day on average. 75% of these kids have TVs in their rooms, and 50% of North American homes have the TV on all day. We don’t talk about our meals anymore. Instead, we watch TV and order takeout.
How is technology curbing the physical and mental growth of children?
According to experts providing dissertation help service, today’s kids spend most of their time playing with technology which is bad for their creativity and imaginations and bad for their bodies. Sedentary bodies with chaotic sensory stimulation are causing children to miss out on important milestones in their development, negatively impacting their basic foundation skills for learning to read and write.
- Today’s kids are born with a hard drive for speed, but they don’t have the self-control and attention skills they need to learn. As a result, teachers have a hard time controlling their students’ behaviour in the classroom.
- Since technology has an effect on how children grow up, we’ll talk about that now. A lot of modern technology is sedentary, but it is also very fast and chaotic. Children’s developing sensory, motor, and attachment systems haven’t been able to adapt to this.
- Rapidly changing technology has caused a rise in physical, psychological, and behavioural disorders that the health and education systems are just beginning to notice, and they don’t even know how to deal with them yet.
There are more and more people getting diagnosed with things like ADHD and autism because they use too much technology. These things, like unintelligible speech, learning difficulties, anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders, are all linked to too much technology use.
Parents, teachers, and other people who work with kids would benefit from taking a closer look at the important factors that help kids reach their developmental milestones and how technology affects them. This would help them better understand the issue and come up with effective ways to cut down on technology use.
4 effects of technology on child development
-
Harms attention spans
Many people worry about how technology can affect a child’s attention span. This means that their brains might quickly scan and process a lot of different sources of information. This is a problem for young people because their brains are still developing. In contrast, older generations may have spent a lot of time reading, imagining, or doing things that required a lot of focus attention.
-
Reduces self-soothing and self-regulation
Anyone who has raised a child would agree that distraction is a great way to calm a child who is having a tantrum. But today, parents have the technology to keep them from doing things they don’t want to do. In research, kids who are constantly distracted by mobile devices may not be able to learn how to self-soothe and regulate when they are angry or stressed.
-
Increases aggression
One study by the Seattle Children’s Research Institute and another by the Journal of Youth and Adolescence found that people who play video games that simulate violence are more likely to be aggressive. It was found that people who were exposed to violence were more likely to fight with their friends or teachers and less likely to be empathetic and hurt by real violence.
-
Stagnates physical activity
People who spend a lot of time with technology have to spend a lot of time sitting down. Even if people have mobile devices, they still have to stay mostly still when they do this. In the most extreme cases, kids or teenagers might not do other important things, like eat or sleep, when they’re playing a video game or other media.
The Takeaway
It is critical for parents, teachers, and therapists to work collaboratively to help society “wake up” to the detrimental impacts of technology on our children’s physical, psychological, and behavioural health, as well as their capacity to learn and maintain personal and familial relationships.
While no one can deny the benefits of technology in today’s world, reliance on these devices may have led to a detachment from what society should value most, children. Rather than hugging, playing, roughhousing, and speaking with their children, parents are increasingly supplying them with additional television, video games, and the latest iPads and cell phone devices, so creating a deep and irrevocable schism between parent and child.
