Feature Story: The Outline
https://www.unicef.org/parenting/child-development/babies-screen-time
For this blog post, I want to stay on theme with my feature story and use this as a place to further develop an outline for the piece. As I’m beginning to combine my Digital Communications major with my Education Studies Minor, I developed a strong interest in examining the crossroads between these two fields. Education technology is such a broad topic, including anything from using tech as a teaching aid (laptops, iPads or similar to complete school related work), to assistive and adaptive technologies used where accommodations and modifications are needed (text-to-speech softwares, e-readers, braille laptops). The world of technology is vast, but for this piece I’ll be focusing on how our society’s dependence on screen time is impacting child development.
First, it would be impossible to address the topic of children’s screen time without mentioning Covid. The pandemic and lockdown forced us to adapt our daily routines — and very suddenly. This shift in itself was incredibly stressful, and additionally we now have a generation of kids that spent their prime social development years hiding behind a screen. Obviously in 2020 we didn’t have much choice in the matter, but that in-person learning is back up and running, we’re beginning to see the detrimental effects distance learning had. Kids aren’t able to hold face-to-face conversations, they meet friends on the internet rather than at school. We’ve become so dependent on technology that people in some of my education classes are reporting that students they observe for their internships aren’t able to read at grade level because their computers read to them. Of course, there are situations in which audiobooks can be a great alternative or accommodation for students receiving special education services, but this shouldn’t be the default or favored over reading a physical book.
This leads into the health impacts caused by increased screen time and social media usage. As someone who started using social media at a fairly young age, I firmly believe that social media age restrictions should be more strictly enforced. Kids under age 15 or so just aren’t emotionally mature enough to understand that social media isn’t always authentic. Only seeing perfectly curated content leads to many negative impacts, including FOMO, body insecurity, depression and anxiety, and cyberbullying. Not to mention the physical health implications, including text neck, and an overall lack of physical activity in favor of playing on our phones.
To conclude my feature piece, I plan to include possible ways to combat these unhealthy tech habits. Be that limiting screen time, only using devices for schoolwork, and even suggestions on how social media algorithms could be taking the user’s age into account when displaying content.
