Technology Takeover

Babies born before 2005 are the last babies to be born having a normal childhood. Being born in 2000 I always say that my generation had the privilege of growing up still with a semi-normal childhood. While I was still young when technology took over our everyday lives, I still wasn’t surrounded by it as a child the way that kids are today.

I really began to notice the huge difference when I started to see technologies aimed for toddlers. Technologies made to keep kids busy in situations where their parents don’t want to have to be entertaining them (like at dinner, sports events, etc). I remember being forced to go to my sister’s soccer games when I was younger and having to sit on the sideline for hours forced to make my own entertainment. If kids today aren’t forced to use the same restraint that previous generations had to show in any public scenario, will they have a harder time dealing with keeping themselves composed in situations where the reward isn’t immediate? According to an infographic posted by the cdc, children ages 8–10 spend about 6.5 hours on entertainment technology everyday and toddlers ages 2–4 spend about 2.5 hours a day. Kids today have entertainment at their fingertips 24/7, they don’t have to develop the same kind of patience kids of past generations have.

People always talk about how damaging social media is to mental health so imagine what it will do to the minds of children who have had that strong influence from birth basically. There is already a huge pressure to grow up too fast from magazines and television shows but now it really is everywhere and almost unescapable. Having internet from a young age also has consequences because everything you post can be found in the future. Having accounts from a young age basically means that there are a bunch of snapshots of who you were as a person over time that aren’t going to go away. Since this is the first generation that will grow up fully being raised on technology, it will be interesting to see the repercussions of that during their adult years.