A Blessing and a Curse: Children and Technology

This week all of my readings focused on children and technology. How does it affect them? How can we better utilize technology with our kids but also keep them safe? How do kids view technology in their own lives? A lot of research has been done over the past decade or so to dig into this relationship that exists between our kids and their technology. One of the reasons scholars see this as an important area for research is because children are very susceptible to outside influences (mainly friends but sometimes others whom they meet online) and most children are not knowledgeable enough to distinguish between a friend or somebody out to hurt them online. They aren’t properly equipped to deal with maliciousness delivered through technology and this raises a lot of questions for adults and parents alike on how to keep kids safe. There are a ton of benefits to raising kids with technology. A great example that I think about is one of my four year old nephew’s toys. He is learning how to creatively problem solve with this really cool toy called the Code-a-pillar.

 It's essentially a caterpillar made up of removable segments that tell the toy where to go. Some segments make it go forward, others to the left or right. The child arranges and rearranges the segments making the caterpillar's path change each time to move about the room in any way they want to. They can even make it go around obstacles like my little nephew does! These toys are dependent on technology and yet they're teaching him some valuable skills.  Now this same nephew also knows how to navigate YouTube on my phone to find his favorite Halloween movie about Curious George. There’s definitely an act of balance that has to take place with kids and their technology and for the most part this balance is fairly easy to achieve…until that child turns about 12 or 13 and discovers the fun that is social media.

Social media is the big bad in the world of technology for both children and their parents. In some households, it’s a nightly source of arguing and bickering. “Don’t Snapchat at the table!” is something I’ve heard shouted quite often by parents while out to dinner. It keeps them connected but at what cost? Most parents view cellphones and the myriad apps that come with them as both a blessing and a curse. A 2008 study of 60 families with young people aged 11-17 and their parents revealed that both children and parents “regardless of geographical location (urban or rural) – considered that mobile phones were a benefit to young people, and helped to keep them safe.” (The Role of Mobile Phones in Family Communication.) In the event of any type of emergency, cell phones and certain apps are useful and vital to have. Apps like SafeTrek (https://www.safetrekapp.com/) are designed to help anybody feel safe by opening and holding down your finger on the app screen. If you lift up your finger and don’t enter your security pin it will automatically notify police of your location and send a type of “distress signal.” I used a similar version of this app when I was in undergrad and I always felt so much better for having it. This proves the “blessing” part of phones and technology being ever present in kid’s lives. It allows parents to feel connected to their kids when they can’t be there.

Now on to the “curse” bit. Technology is a huge distraction in everyday life, not just for children but adults as well. The average American devotes more than ten hours to screen time a day and that number threatens to grow (http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/30/health/americans-screen-time-nielsen/.) With all that time looking at a screen and being focused on social media, kids are focused more and more on maintaining those social profiles and making sure they fit in. Adolescence is already a fraught time. You have mood swings, you’re conflicted about risky behaviors you or your friends may be experiencing, and fights with parental figures is an almost constant. Online can be a form of escape for many kids during this time. Empirical evidence has even suggested that “self-disclosure through online communication can enhance the quality” of friendships children can have with each other(Coming of Age Online: The Developmental Underpinnings of Girls’ Blogs.) In a lot of cases, it can seem like social media is all about the “me” factor for youths but in actuality it’s much more about the “we.” In Sonia Livingstone’s article Taking Risky Opportunities in Youthful Content Creation she states that “social networking is about ‘me’ in the sense that it reveals the self embedded in the peer group, as known to and represented by others, rather than the private ‘I’.”  Basically it’s more about the group mentality and “fitting in” than it is about standing out and that group mentality can have some pretty harsh consequences.

As we all know, either from experience or from watching others, kids can be mean to each other. It’s yet another part of adolescence and growing up.  Cyberbullying is a huge part of children’s lives and experiences on social media. Nearly 43% of kids have been bullied online and 1 in 4 has had it happen more than once (https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-cyber-bullying.) Kids know this is happening, and some participate in it just because their friends are and they don’t want to be next. It’s a very serious issue and one that needs a lot more time and attention paid to it before we can really begin to solve it. It’s a huge “curse” of being online as an adolescent. However, happiness can be found in the darkest of times if one only remembers to turn on the light (if you got that this was a Harry Potter reference, ten points to your house!) A point of light in all this cyberbullying darkness is that technology is allowing kids to discuss serious issues with their parents or parental figures through technology. There has been a huge uptick in kids communicating with parents via text or social media messenger apps about serious topics like cyberbullying. Many LGBTQ+ children broach coming out to their parents first by bringing it up via text or social media, and even teen pregnancy has been known to be brought to parents attention via text (The Role of Mobile Phones in Family Communication.) Technology has allowed children to feel comfortable enough to communicate with just about anybody, but that also includes the people who care about and love them the most: their parents.

I don’t have children yet, but I found this week’s reading to be very informational and I will definitely remember it as I move forward with my own family someday. Only one more week left before we take the blog in a different direction. See you guys then!

Sources:

Livingstone, Sonia. “Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy, and self-expression.” New Media and Society, Vol. 10, Issue 3, 2008, 393-411.

Davis, Katie. “Coming of age online: The developmental underpinnings of girls' blogs.” Journal of Adolescent Research, Vol. 25, Issue 1, 2010, 145-171.

Devitt, Kevin & Roker, Debi. “The role of mobile phones in family communication.” Children & Society, Vol. 23, Issue 3, 2009, 189–202.