Imagine spending a year or more of your childhood almost entirely at home: no time in a classroom, no chance to join friends on the playground, and very few opportunities to enjoy favorite pastimes and experience new places, people, and activities. The worldwide lockdowns that helped limit the spread of the coronavirus created a kind of twilight zone for children that put much of their environment off-limits and kept them separated from everyone but their immediate families. However, not all was lost. What vestiges of their pre-COVID life children were able to maintain were made possible by a range of technologies that kept them learning, interacting with friends, and entertained.
The growing presence of technology in children’s lives, from their first year through their teens, is a double-edged sword. While technologies are neutral, how they are applied and how children are exposed to them can be either positive or negative. The impact of children and technology becomes increasingly difficult to gauge as the pace of technological innovation speeds up. This guide presents a snapshot of the many roles that technology products and services play in the lives of children. It balances the pluses and minuses of the effects of technology use by children on their development, social interactions, and prospects for the future.
Evolution Of Children’s Use Of Technology
From the earliest electric model trains in the early 20th century through the first home video game systems and remote-controlled toys, children’s introduction to technology has been through their toys. What were marvels of technology three, two, or even one generation ago seem almost quaint by today’s standards. However, the progress from Pong to Oculus virtual reality games occurred in a relatively brief period of time.
Early Examples Of Children And Technology
Children have been interacting with digital technology since the earliest days of the PC revolution. One of the first electronic educational toys was Texas Instruments’ Speak & Spell, which was released in the late 1970s. This relatively simple device was a precursor to the first PCs designed for children in the 1980s. It also presaged the growth of computer-assisted instruction hardware and software in the pre-World Wide Web era.
- The first Speak & Spell toys debuted in 1978 to teach children ages 7 and older how to pronounce and spell 200 commonly misspelled words. It relied on electronic speech synthesis and bubble memory (a precursor to RAM) and was the first such product to use solid-state circuitry to replace all moving parts.
- While Magnavox’s Odyssey was the first gaming console upon its release in 1972, the device was soon eclipsed by the home version of Atari’s Pong arcade video game, which began shipping in 1975. This was followed by the Atari 2600 game console in 1977 and similar devices from Nintendo, Mattel, and Coleco, among other vendors. Sega and Nintendo came to dominate the home video market through the 1980s, along with Commodore, Atari, and Sony’s PlayStation, which was released in 1994.
Evolution Of Technology Designed To Educate And Entertain Children
The arrival of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s changed that nature of tech toys and education hardware and software. Smart Toy Lab, an Intel and Mattel joint venture launched in 1998, developed the first web-connected interactive toys, or smart toys. Among the first toys the lab developed were the QX3 Microscope, which featured a built-in video camera that sent images to a PC via a USB link, and the Me2Cam, which let children play interactive games using gestures to move objects on the screen.
Some early internet-connected toys and educational devices were criticized for violating children’s privacy by collecting personal information without parental consent. For example, Hello Barbie was released in 2015 and featured a built-in microphone and voice recognition software, as well as a Wi-Fi connection.
- A recent study published in Children and Youth Services Review identified problematic smartphone use (present in 16.4% of high school students surveyed), daytime sleepiness (20.2%), and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (6.9%) as spiking during pandemic lockdowns.
- A study published in the Italian Journal of Pediatrics found that 66.3% of the children and adolescents surveyed used their smartphone for more than four hours a day during the pandemic, compared with 16.3% who did so before the pandemic. In addition, 56% of the children and adolescents surveyed used their smartphone after midnight at least three times each week, compared with 30.4% before the pandemic.
Positive And Negative Effects Of Technology On Children
Children can benefit from technology by gaining new learning opportunities; it’s especially important for children who are physically or developmentally challenged. However, technology use has also been found to contribute to poor self-esteem and isolation in some children. As digital technologies become more ubiquitous, parents struggle to find the optimum amount of technology for their children’s lives.
Positive Effects of Technology on Children
All the rules about children’s access to computers and the internet were rewritten by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to parenting expert Anya Kamenetz. Technology provides children with easy access to information and boosts their creativity. Tech hardware and software helps children develop social skills and introduces them to various arts and sciences.
These are among the less obvious positive effects of technology on children:
- Technology allows children to connect with their family, friends, and others in ways that enrich their relationships, especially when using video chat and other real-time interactions.
- Parents and caregivers are learning to slow down and tone down the applications, games, and other content children use to avoid overloading their senses. This teaches children how to moderate their own use of technology.
- Rather than trying to eliminate all risk to children when using technology, the goal should be reducing the risk and adapting when problems arise, such as preventing children from accessing devices at specific times of the day.
