Technologies and Children

Hello, everyone. My name is Venera Zhakhyan. And today I want to talk about technologies and children. Here is how most of children do look like today. Familiar picture, right? Nowadays, children are surrounded with technologies. Most of people do not understand clearly why technologies are so harmful for children when they use them for more than several hours a day. Today, I will explain why.

Accordingly to Kaiser family foundation study (2010), American children in the age under 10 spend about seven and a half of these hours daily using technologies. If we take into account children from the age of eight to eighteen the average time spent with technologies is already about ten and a half hours. Almost three quarters of them have television set in their rooms. But instead of using technologies for so much time they could play outside, do sports, etc.

The consequences of using technologies on daily basis by children leads to unhappy results. One of them is related to the children’ health. About 35 percent of children in the United States have overweight. This is significant issue nowadays. In accordance to an analysis in Obesity, children using technologies too much are much more likely to get obesity. Why does it happen? The answer is simple. Children spend most of their time playing video games, watching TV, using their laptops or tablets. Children do not do much sports, exercises, and movements in general. They do not burn calories and energy. Moreover, the study about children diseases which was conducted in 2014 in United States, showed that children using technologies on more regular basis eat much more than children using technologies more rarely. By this many children get overweigh. (Loop, 2017) Overweight can cause various diseases like diabetes or heart failure. (Ramey, 2012)

Except overweight, overuse of technologies by children can harm intellectual development. Playing video games, watching TV, etc. do not require high level of activity. They can just passively observe something or somebody else on the screen. But children could draw, read books, write poems or songs instead of playing at home. It will lead to more perspective and clever generation. But today they are not developed in various spheres as they basically should. While playing games or watching TV children do not develop their creativity and linguistic skills. As a result, the intellectual development is under threat.

Another issue is connected to the social development. Most of the children play alone instead of getting new friends. Even if children communicate with each other, usually it is in virtual reality and is screen-based. So, there is no real communication among children due to technologies overuse. (Plowman, McPake, Stephen, 2010)

Do you want to continue in that direction? I think that no one wants. In some places, people already started working on this issue. Have someone heard about Waldorf School of the Peninsula? Employees of companies such as Apple, Google and Yahoo send their children to this school. The reason is that there are no computers, mobile phones, tablets, even no internet in this school. Children are using their imagination, creativity, they communicate with other classmates more than now regular children do. This school teaches children in a way it is more effective. And I think this is the right way to do that (Jenkin, 2015).

Nevertheless, most of children are still surrounded with technologies not only at home but at school as well. As we already derived, this is not what they really need. This only harms them in different ways.

This is how our children can look like. Is not this exciting? So, my suggestion is to restrict screen-based hours to maximum of 2 hours per day for your children, grandchildren, for your brothers, sisters, etc. We should do that in order to provide them healthy childhood and perspective future. Thank you!