The March of Technology
The influence of technology is all around us, and is become more apparent with each passing day. Some of the biggest advancements are currently around how technology and gadgets are aimed at children. In many respects, children are the final frontier for many technology companies. Gadgets and gizmos have been tailored for pretty much every other age group, right up to elderly people in a lot of cases, leaving children as the only group left to cater for.
Technology is able to sell itself to children – or more specifically, the parents who buy the gadgets for them – on the promise that they will learn things that will help them later in life. Technology marketers just love to tell you that by getting your child the latest gadget, you’re setting them up to be a success in later life.
With many mobile applications now aimed at children, and even specific tablet devices recently launched aimed at the child market, we looked at whether these are really a positive thing in the development of children.
Added Value
Our children go to school, where they learn. When they come home they might have some homework, which we will help them with perhaps, and they learn some more. With a technological gadget, they will be learning even more, so of course it’s a great idea for a child to have one.
The bottom line is that when today’s children reach the point where they are heading out to work, even more tasks than today will be reliant on technology for completion. Therefore, surely it is a case that the sooner a child can get to grips with these things, the bigger an advantage they will have when it comes to competing for jobs and university places.
Being computer literate is the new rich, after all, right?
Dangerous Habits
On the flip side, there is the danger that by immersing our children in technology, they are missing out on real social and emotional development through spending time interacting with people. After all, what good is having 1,000 Facebook friends and being a social media whiz if you can’t hold a conversation in real life?
There is also the danger of parents using technology as a kind of “digital babysitter” – they know their child will sit for hours doing whatever, so that gives them the time to do what they need.
Simply giving a child a Nintendo DS from the age of three, and then graduating them up to a laptop, iPod, or something else as they get older may seem like a good idea, but is a child really benefiting from this anymore than they would from a traditional toy, such as a doll or an action figure?
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