Impacts Of The Digital Age On Our Kids

Frankly speaking, it's just so sad that there are things that are going beyond our power in this era and generation. A lot of things are changing, and not just changing but rapidly changing. So we have to be extra careful when it comes to making choices in almost everything we do.

We can't be too harsh on the kids; they also can’t be left out without discipline. It narrows down to the way the children happen to be in their ways.

This is the digital age. Compared to the stone age most of us and our parents lived in, things are extremely different now. It was in the past that we used match sticks or stones to teach our kids how to go about arithmetics. Now everything is done with the calculator. If you ask a child back then to answer some multiplication, they will give it easily. But nowadays you just have to see them seeking the aid of calculators.

I was a little surprised when one of my cousins, a little child not up to 3 years of age, could operate her mother's Android device. She knows how to navigate to her favorite games, if she wishes to watch videos she knows where to go and play movies or listen to rhymes.

I guess she must have been learning how it's done every time she is with her mum and now she can do it on her own. I cherished my aunt for using it to the advantage of the kid. She knew it would be so tough to stop her from operating the device. What my aunt did was to clear off everything that would bring destruction to the kid on her phone, then installed many other useful apps that can aid the kid’s intelligence.

The kid got used to those things and that's what she always requested. Had it been there are some other things on the phone too that could be toxic to the kid that’s the same way she would be exposed to them at her very early stage of life.

So, if I am to decide whether to allow our kids to use the smartphone or not at an early age, I will surely succumb to such decisions but with a clause. There should be adequate monitoring of such children and what they do with the device till they come of age so that they won't get swayed by it.

The reason is that if we try to hold them back from experiencing what's going on in the digitized world today. There are many other ways they could get in touch, they meet with friends, peer groups, at school, in society, and a lot more. Then they could be influenced the wrong way since they don't have prior knowledge about the right and wrong of it.

At that point, if we try to stop them then it won't come easy. It would be a battle without end because they already felt the taste of it, and now it would appear like we are trying to prevent them from staying updated with the outside world.

A lot of kids today get swayed, not by the device itself, because the device is just a tool, whatever way you handle it is the result you get from it. If you channel it the wrong way then it will give the desired results, and for those who channel it the right way then it will also give the desired results too. It's left to us, whether we want our kids to get the best from it or not.

There are a lot of kids today on the internet and the media putting out their talents and making a lot of revenue from it, thereby there are some that are out there spending their last pennies just trying to derive fun from the internet. The smartphone has always been screaming “Be smart”.

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This is my response to the HIVE LEARNERS weekly prompt in the hive-learners community for the Week 167 Edition 1, and the topic to be discussed is SMARTPHONE AGE

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