Kids Today
And What Technology is Doing to Them …
In today’s present culture, members of generations above the millennials strongly rely on their surrounding millennials to help them figure out the ever growing and advancing technology. It just so happens that the millennials were given a stigma of being utterly lazy, self absorbed, social media nuts with a brain so informed on technology. As time goes on however, that does not exactly seem to be the case. What about the generation post 9/11, where the kids are really growing up with technology in their hands, creating a demographic so dependent and reliant on technology most of them know how to work and use technology better than the millennials themselves. Is it the post 9/11 generation that is going to show the world exactly what technology is capable of? Or is technology consuming and affecting their everyday lives in a more negative way than people originally thought?
Think about it, today rather than giving a child a coloring book at a restaurant, the restaurant provides kids with tablets on the table to play with. Even further, rather than carrying around a book and hundreds of unsharpened crayons in a diaper bag, a mother carries an iPad for their child, in order to entertain them in the car or on a plane. The existence of chalkboards and textbooks in schools are way long gone, now kids carry around laptops, chrome books, iPads, with digital electronic books on them. Teachers even write on fancy electronic boards giving them the ability to save their notes and forward them to their students. Students in elementary school are not being forced to handwrite their notes anymore because the technology surrounding them takes the notes for them. No wonder member of the post 9/11 generation, Layne Abadrabo has the the ability to text 200 words a minute and send 36 snapchats all at once and accumulate over 2000 followers on Instagram as easily as an adult can say “no.”
Technology today surrounds children. Yet what does that mean for how their brain is developing mentally? Today children find it easier to communicate online rather than face to face. Is technology ruining the basis for their social development skills? Some researchers have found that the technology limits young children’s ability to develop motor skills needed for math and science. Others claim that learning through technology rather than building blocks stunts vocabulary and social development skills needed for approaching school and future social engagements (Tablets). However, are the children of the post 9/11 generation so accessible to technology that their ability and mental capacity to figure it out benefit the world going forward? Who knows what these kids, who are not be able to talk to one another, will create in the future.
References
“Our Dirty Little Secret…My Kids and Technology.” Kids and Company. N.p., n.d. Web. 21. Sept. 2016.
“Tablets and Smartphones May Affect Social and Emotional Development Scientists Speculate.” www.theguardian.com. N.p., 2 Feb. 2015. Web. 20 Sept. 2016
Generation Next & Technology Obsessed 