Technophobia — Will Somebody Please Think of the Children?!

Technology is evolving at a incomprehensible speed. The brakes are shot and there’s no stopping it now, and many people feel they are blinded by the headlights. I get it, change is scary. It takes us out of the known and into the inevitably unsettling unknown, pulling out our safety net. No one has the time to stop and fully understand the capabilities of their phones, tablets and laptops, and the tech changes so fast anyway the only way to stay up to date would be to work in Apple’s R&D dungeon. When it’s just a personal choice we’re usually fine, the potential risks that we don't really know about are completely outweighed by how cool, shiny and useful our technology is.

However, when it comes our children, even the tiniest bit of unknown is too much. Seeing the zombification of your kid, sprawled on the sofa ignoring the blaring television and staring unblinkingly at periodically vibrating phone screen, can be pretty unnerving, especially if they are still growing and developing.

It doesn't help that the television your kid is ignoring is barking hyperbolic reports on how video game violence is connected to school shootings, internet ‘trolls’ driving people off twitter and how too much screen-time can liquefy your child’s brain. I know there’s a strong temptation to take the hype and run with it, but to me these kind of reports feel like cries for attention, a boy crying wolf in a village with high tech wolf scanning technology (I wonder if the escalating of anti-technology rhetoric negatively correlates with the fall in print sales?), but their arguments do seem convincing; how can a child experience the outside world if his face is always looking down at a screen instead of out at the world?

These claims are given more weight by cherry-picked quotes and statistics plucked from what we just accept as being trusted and verified scientific reports. In reality, however, research into the negative effects of technology is largely inconclusive. Studies frequently fail to take into account other crucial environmental factors that are proven to have a bigger effect on levels of childhood obesity, IQ and attention span than technology, such as social class, the family’s wage and the children’s diet and lifestyle, which leads to largely irrelevant numbers that don't really prove anything. The problem is, to truly research how children are affected with technology in a conclusive way, you would have to isolate all other factors that influence development, monitor them closely and have a control group of children who were denied technology for a comparison. Just proposing such a study would get you kicked out of a funding pitch quicker than you can say “ethical minefield”.

So even if we don’t know the true facts for sure, it’s comforting to know that these crazy claims that our children’s natural life progression is being perverted by ADD-inducing, anti-social iRobots is at least unfounded if not false. But we are still left with the feeling that we still don't quite know how this constant consuming is going to affect our children, or what we can do about it.

Certainly removing technology from our children’s lives is clearly not a viable option if we want to raise our children suited for a future that will be increasingly technological. If they are not comfortable and fluent with the technology they will need to use for their jobs, their education, and their leisure time, they could be at the risk of being left behind by those who are. And while there are already many existing tools that allow parents to control how their children use technology, for some parents, that level of control may not be enough, especially if their children are tech-savvy enough to circumvent these measures.

It’s pretty clear that it’s going to be a while before we fully know how are kids are using their smart-phones or tablets and how this might affect them. But we cannot stand idly by ignoring the proven advantages of technology because we are scared of potential ones. It’s obvious (from watching the Jetsons) that our lives are going to be increasingly technological as we go forward and it’s going lead to an unpredictable storm of new wonders that will shape the way we live.

Therefore, we should stop being restrained by the question “is technology good or bad for our children?” Rather we should be thinking more positively: “how can we make sure our children are using technology to their full advantage”, or, “how can we adapt the technology to most benefit our children?”. Remember that science and technology is funded by the consumer and the technology will follow the money. If parents embrace technology and how it can be used to educate as well as entertain their children, the investment will hopefully follow.

The worry in my mind when I see a child to just sitting there and passively consuming entertainment from their devices is not that they are going to grow up brain-dead but that they are wasting the potential for creativity built into to these same devices.

So, in my view, lets step away from technophobia and instead, let us take positive steps that move kids away from consuming technology created by others and towards how they can use technology to create themselves. We should work with technology rather than against it to exploit its rich and exponential potential for learning and development in both adults and children alike.

For tips on how to turn your children from consumers to creators, click here.