When I was a kid, my family was among the last in the area to get cable TV, a computer, a video game console—the Atari 5200, thank you very much—and most other forms of technology. [related]
That doesn’t necessarily mean I was outside running around the neighborhood from the time I got home from school until the time we ate dinner every night, especially since most of my discretionary income at the time went to buying new tapes and the latest baseball cards and Strat-O-Matic sets.
If that last paragraph felt a bit like a foreign language to you, you’ll understand how I feel when talking to my 10-year-old daughter about what she’s doing and watching on her hand-me-down phone that doesn’t make calls or send texts and the tablet she got from her grandparents for Christmas.
To be fair, my daughter is an avid dance student who takes enough classes to make me nervous she won’t have enough time to finish her homework every night, so it’s not like she’s sitting around for hours watching crafting videos on YouTube or making short stop-motion movies with her Legos.
That said, technology is the first thing to go when she does or says something she shouldn’t, so it certainly is the thing that has the most “value” in her life in terms of free-time activities.
Still, I certainly wonder how much screen time is too much—as I’m sure most parents do. That said, I couldn’t ever imagine telling my daughter she wouldn’t have any access to technology until eighth grade, as one parent group now advocates.
Kids and Technology: A Delicate Balance
Technology is a learning and communication tool, although don’t get me started on how texting, emojis and acronyms are killing young people’s ability to actually talk to real people, an issue that becomes even more pronounced when they graduate and enter the real world where they’re forced to talk to other humans rather than sending them memes, GIFs and LOLs.
Like most other things in life, when it comes to kids and technology, it’s all about moderation. I certainly proved my parents wrong when they told me I was spending too much of my hard-earned money on buying new tapes and baseball cards since clearly there’s a huge market for both these days, right?
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Now if only I could do a better job of applying that philosophy of “everything in moderation” when I’m traveling and faced with an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet.
Here’s a more PG-13 look at the conundrum of kids and technology by foul-mouthed comedian Lewis Black:
