Kids and smartphones: stop this overprotection madness now!
We live in fast-changing times, fast than our minds are able to deal with. A sign of this is that many people still see technology as dangerous and that we need to be protected from.
A group with around $2 billion in Apple shares has written an open letter to the company, calling on it to “Think different about kids” and redesign its terminals to limit their harmful effects on children, ranging, according to them, from distracting them to depression and even an increased risk of suicide.
The company, which could do little else, has answered by coming up with some ideas that would allow parents to exert greater control over their children’s use of their smartphones in the future. Others critics, like Tristan Harris, compare smartphones with slot machines, claiming they are addictive, and recommending us to change our screen to grayscale, a solution that has not convinced everybody. Others go as far as to say that Facebook should be regulated in the same way as the tobacco industry. Some studies say internet use has risen from 3.3 hours a week in 2000 to 17.6 hours, saying it is negatively impacting on our social lives and relationships and that children “addicted” to their smartphones are not as happy as those who play sport and live in the “real world”.
We’ve been here before, and while it might be true that the technological pendulum has swung too far in one direction, we don’t seem to have learned anything from the mistakes of the past.
Can the pundits and so-called experts please take the time to think about what they are saying and what their scientific evidence is before sharing their views with us? Everything, absolutely everything, can produce negative effects in excess. As Shakespeare pointed out 400 years ago, you can have too much of a good thing.
But there simply can be no comparison between technology drugs: we all like to receive “Likes” when we publish something, and yes, this can generate something similar to dopamine in our body, but that is no more addictive than any other activity and has nothing to do with the alterations that drugs cause, however attractive the analogy. This is not about about drugs, but about factors that define the environment in which we live. Treating factors that play a big role in our lives as though they were drugs that need warnings, stickers and precautions is absurd, a new benchmark in overprotection. My generation was repeatedly told we watched too much television, but… here we are. Technology is not tobacco, and fortunately, addiction to technology has not been recognized as a psychiatric condition, so let’s stop blaming others for our own failings. If your child is depressed, it’s not because she’s been overusing her smartphone: the reason is much more likely to be to do with parents who are not interested in her life, and who have handed their role over to a device or technology.
Whichever way you look at it, the problem here, regardless of whether we are Apple shareholders of Apple, it is not technology, social networks or the internet. Demonizing technology is the last resort for parents and teachers who don’t understand the potential of the internet. Obviously something is wrong when a kid spends all her time glued to her smartphone to the exclusion of all other activities. But surely anybody can understand that. But the problem is not in the smartphone, and nor will it be solved by putting it on greyscale or by creating more parental controls: it’s about education. Parental controls allow parents to abandon their responsibility in bringing their children up properly by ticking a few boxes on a form. I repeat what I have already mentioned on many occasions: common sense dictates how smartphones should be used. If we don’t let our children play at all hours, eat sweets at all hours or whatever else, why do some parents allow them to use their smartphone at all hours? Contrary to popular opinion, this generation of children are not “digital natives” if they know more than their parents about technology, it is simply because their parents have not been interested enough to learn more about an extraordinarily simple-to-use technology.
Again, contrary to popular opinion, children need more screen time, not less, because not all screen time is created equal. It is not the same to spend time looking at music videos or playing pointless games as it is to use a smartphone for learning or develop new skills that may be important in the future. There is nothing wrong in allowing our children to use social networks, but having no idea what they do on them in the desperate search for a Like is just plain irresponsible. Instead, can we behave like adults: we don’t need to put useless labels on what is plain to see. The biggest danger our children face is not spending too much time with a smartphone or on the internet. The biggest danger is not having access to a smartphone or the Internet, and not being able to prepare properly from an early age for the world they are going to live in.
I still remember during my first year of life in the United States when someone brought me a plant, a poinsettia with bright red leaves, and in the pot was a label warning “not for human consumption.” Could anyone really think that hat plant was edible? Had anybody ever been dumb enough to try it and poisoned themselves, subsequently suing the company that sold it? Were we really so idiotic a society that we needed those kinds of labels? We are now doing exactly the same thing: issuing a warning about Facebook, a smartphone, or the internet just highlights our failure as a society: we are too stupid to see what is staring us in the face, to control our environment, to see what is actually a huge advantage.
Requiring Apple on the grounds of corporate social responsibility to warn that its smartphones are dangerous and to design ways to discourage children from using them is outrageous. Smartphones are not dangerous. But parents lacking in common sense, and above all, those who want technology companies to make up for their shortcomings, their ineptitude and their irresponsibility when it comes to educating their children are a danger to society.
Life kills. Soon, someone on her deathbed will report his government or whoever for not having been warned of this, and we will all have to carry a label that on our forehead to remind us. And worst of all, someone else will see this as a achievement. Before that happens, can we all just grow up and move on?
(En español, aquí )
