Going out to eat at a sit-down restaurant in America, it’s not uncommon to see a young child with their face buried in a phone or tablet while the meal goes on around them. Some parents have found it’s the easiest way to get their kids to behave while out in public. Technology is loaded with algorithms built specifically to keep people engaged, so it’s no mystery that an iPad with a colorful game keeps a kid more focused than conversation.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been growing discussion regarding the prevalence of technology with young children and how it’s impacted their behavior. More and more frequently, educators from charter, private, and public schools have taken to social media to speak out on their experiences with increasingly difficult children to manage. With teachers leaving the profession at an unprecedented rate, it’s crucial to discuss responsible factors in the issue to shape a better education system for the next generation.
While studies are still being done on the matter, it’s impossible to deny the way technology has shaped the lives of the younger generation. Children today have easier access to devices at far younger ages than kids even a decade or two ago did. Consoles focused on educational games like the LeapPad fell out of popularity while overstimulating TV shows like Cocomelon and Peppa Pig became more popular than ever.
Discussions regarding the state of the education system and the students within it rise and fall in popularity on social media apps like TikTok every few months. In early September of this year, many teachers serving multiple different grade levels from across the nation took to social media and #teachertok to share the fact that many of their students are vastly underperforming from grade level and lack basic life skills. There’s also been a rise in extreme behavior cases from more and more students.
From the discussions circulating online, the blame seems to shift between poor parenting and poor teaching, depending on who’s speaking out. So little of the focus points to an obvious, new factor that students of twenty and thirty years ago had no access to: cell phones and technology.
Many parents, when called out by teachers, seem to believe it comes down to poor classroom management when students underperform in school. But with more than 30 kids crammed into tiny rooms with harsh lighting for seven hours a day, teachers already struggle to keep their students engaged without phones, let alone setting them up for success down the line or catching them up to where they should be.
Most teachers claim it’s a lack of support that is leading to unrest within classrooms, both with administration inside the school and parents at home. When a behavioral issue occurs within a classroom, not only does it distract the class, but many schools have opted for more lenient discipline plans that keep students inside the classroom with the hope that it’ll maximize learning, unaware of the disruption it causes for all parties involved. Additionally, a rise of hands-off, gentle parenting style has risen in popularity with younger parents, leading to more kids who don’t respond well to discipline or parents who don’t support the school’s decisions when their students need to be redirected somehow.
It was easy to blame the pandemic for these mounting issues in student performance, but they’ve been rising for as long as the iPhone has been out; the quarantine only expedited the problem. Unregulated internet access leads to children being exposed to concepts they are not developed enough to engage with, along with a variety of documented issues that higher screen time brings to developing minds.
The simplest solution, writing this as a college student with no kids, would be to prevent access to devices for as long as possible, though I know that isn’t feasible. A more practical way to handle technology with children is to teach internet safety and limit what a child has unrestricted access to on their devices until they are old enough to be responsible with the content they consume.
Technology can be used as a tool for learning when handled appropriately, and as it becomes more and more woven into everyday life, it’d be cruel to deprive kids of it. Safety, however, should be at the forefront of every parent’s decision for their children, that includes long-term effects. It may not be too late for the younger part of Gen Z and the newly growing Gen Alpha, but regardless, it will be interesting to see how this rise in technology has impacted them.