Adam Whittington
The emergence of technology on children development
Reminiscing about the nice old days once we were growing up may be a memory trip well worth taking when trying to grasp the problems facing the kids of today. A mere 20 years ago, children were accustomed to playing outside all day, riding bikes, playing sports, and building forts.
Masters of imaginary games, children of the past created their style of play that did not require costly equipment or parental supervision. Children of the past moved. A lot and their sensory world were nature-based and straightforward.
Within the past, family time was often spent doing chores, and youngsters had expectations to fulfill on a daily. The dining room table was a central place where families came together to eat and discuss their day, and after dinner became the middle for baking, crafts, and homework. According to Adam Whittington, Today's families are different. Technology's impact on the 21st-century family is fracturing its very foundation, and causing a disintegration of core values that way back were what held families together. Juggling work, home, and community lives, parents now rely heavily on communication, information, and transportation technology to create their lives faster and more efficient.
Entertainment technology (TV, internet, videogames, iPods) has advanced so rapidly, that families have scarcely noticed the numerous impact and changes to their family structure and lifestyles. A 2010 Kaiser Foundation study showed that elementary-aged children use on average 8 hours per day of entertainment technology, 75% of those children have TVs in their bedrooms, and 50% of North American homes have the TV on all day.
Add emails, cell phones, internet surfing, and chat lines, and that we begin to work out the pervasive aspects of technology on our home lives and family milieu. Gone is dining room table conversation, replaced by the "big screen" and remove. Children now depend upon technology for the bulk of their play, grossly limiting challenges to their creativity and imaginations, further as limiting necessary challenges to their bodies to realize optimal sensory and motor development.
Sedentary bodies bombarded with chaotic sensory stimulation, are leading to delays in achieving child developmental milestones, with subsequent impact on basic foundation skills for achieving literacy. Hard wired for top speed, today's young are entering school battling selfregulation and focus skills necessary for learning, eventually becoming significant behavior management problems for teachers within the classroom. So what's the impact of technology on the developing child? Children's developing sensory and motor systems have biologically not evolved to accommodate this sedentary, yet frenzied and chaotic nature of today's technology. The impact of rapidly advancing technology on the developing child has seen a rise of physical, psychological, and behavioral disorders that the health and education systems are just starting to detect, much less understand.
Child obesity and diabetes are now national epidemics in both Canada and also the US. Diagnoses of ADHD, autism, coordination disorder, sensory processing disorder, anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders may be causally linked to technology overuse, and are increasing at an alarming rate. An urgent closer study of the critical factors for meeting developmental milestones, and therefore the subsequent impact of technology on those factors, would assist parents, teachers and health professionals to higher understand the complexities of this issue and help create effective strategies to cut back technology use.