Sythesis 1 (full first draft)
In the year 2025, a child owning a smartphone is almost a given, with ownership of smartphones among teenagers staying at an astonishing 90% or higher. This is understandable, though; teenagers often begin to stay out more and more with school or any outdoor activities and begin to spend more time away from parents, so the phone is a good way to keep a form of communication between a parent and their child. Interestingly, though is the number of children under the age of 14 who have a smartphone; for children ages 11-13 80% of them have a smartphone, and for children as young as 8 years old, around 50% of them have a personal smartphone. (https://www.k12dive.com/news/half-of-young-children-own-a-cell-phone-or-tablet/741318/). Additionally, the average screen time for children aged from 8-10 years old is 6 hours
11-14, 9 hours, and 15-18 is 7.5 hours. These averages also don’t count time used for schoolwork. (https://www.osfhealthcare.org/blog/kids-screen-time-how-much-is-too-much?utm_source).
I want to focus on the younger demographic for this paper since there are many more reasons a person may have to spend hours on their phone as they get older.
As we all know, children are most impressionable in their earliest years of life, with the first 6 years being the best time to teach them good habits, but this can also mean that if given the wrong stimuli, children could be affected negatively in their development, with say the use of a smartphone with unsupervised consumption. In a Canadian study by Valerie Carson and Nicholas Kuzik, they actually evaluated many children from early adolescence and came away with the finding that “Higher parent–child technology interference was associated with multiple subdomains of early childhood development, including lower executive functions (i.e., response inhibition) and self-regulation (i.e., emotional) as well as higher behavioural problems (i.e., externalizing and internalizing).
Children and teenagers are known for having large amounts of energy and varying interests that branch off into many different directions. Ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, and they could give you a set of vastly different careers. “An astronaut, a firefighter, a singer, a zookeeper, a doctor, a chef,” they have much bigger imaginations and put more thought into random things compared to a grown adult who has more of their interests set in stone. Pairing this fact with the fact that technology gives you unlimited, unfilrted information at your fingertips, and this means that a child could spend hours at a time learning about these completely different topics in a “short” amount of time, if considering how long it takes normally to learn about a topic. This raises the question of where a child will most likely search for this information. The answer would be short-form and easy-to-digest content; think TikTok, YouTube, social media. These outlets of media do, in fact, have large amounts of information in them for one to consume, but often have many distractions and are dopamine reservoirs waiting to be unleashed on a child or teenager. “The same is true for the smartphone; with its bright colors, flashing lights, and engaging alerts, it delivers images to our visual cortex that are tough to resist. And the quantity is endless. TikTok never runs out. (stanford.study.edu). Now we know that our children can become addicted and get sucked into this vortex of dopamine, but what will it really do to them mentally? Attention spans- Our attention spans as a whole have been on a drastic decline in this century due to our phones and social media having a takeover in our lives. For adults and busy people in general, this may not seem as bad since we have tasks that we know must get done, so we more often than not participate in practices that limit our screen time, but children are becoming accustomed to this type of information structure being fed to them more and more by the day. As they begin to enter school and learn new topics, they will struggle with comprehending new topics and understanding existing ones because they will not be accustomed to the way of learning that a screen has given them for their lifetime. (indiatoday).
Keep in mind that social media also has negative effects on adults. However, the impact on children is much worse, as they are still developing at a rapid rate, as previously mentioned.
From my own experience with this i have my younger cousin that i visit quite frequently, his parents are often very busy with their careers but they always manage to find time to get him to do activities but that doesnt mean theyre always there to keep an eye on him, when i stayed the weekend at their house i was able to spend a lot of time with my cousin or at least i hoped too. When ever i was doing my homework or doing something for a class or speaking with my relatives he would just keep asking me to play a roblox game called “steal a brainrot” as funny as unserious and funny as the game sounuds he takes it very seriously and i wanted to connect with him more since me and him are the closest in age from all of our cousins and relatives with me being 18 and him being 8 so the 10 year gap is still large but not as large as my other cousins who are have kids that are close to my age already. One morning, my cousin woke me up at 7 am so that we could play the game together on our phones. I reluctantly agreed, but noticed that I simply didnt have the energy to entertain him at such an early hour. Later on the same day, after we had gone to a football game, karate lessons, and a restaurant, he was still glued to his phone and Roblox. I tried to call for his attention, but he would simply brush me off and keep playing his game. Even if I called his name multiple times, sometimes he would outright ignore me.
Children in the modern day and age need to be tended to differently. It is indeed inevitable that children will have technology as a part of their lives, no matter what they do, but it is important for parents to take advantage of the good parts of technology and limit the bad parts of technology as much as they can, away from their children. Parents now more than ever are tasked with finding the sweet spot when it comes to having their child have a certain amount of time and energy invested into technology and a certain amount of energy designated for things that don’t use technology. As mentioned, technology and the internet now make accessing information and learning easier and more accessible to anyone more than ever before, but it comes with he caveat of having to sift through all of the unnecessary and potentially harmful media that a child may encounter daily. As a current college freshman, I have never used technology more in my life for school work, self-teaching topics, and relearning material that I learned in class the day before has become a frequent cycle that I have grown accustomed to, but if utilized incorrectly, it could make me perform even worse. It is very important to figure out what is best for the child and the guardian of said child to know how their own child will be able to react and comprehend new things so that they know how much a child should be using technology and they should also guage how self sufficient a child is with preventing themselves from getting distracted and or diverging from what they were intending to look and and looking up something unimportant or inappropiatte for them.
https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7570428787922324767?lang=en-US&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fsiteredo.commons.gc.cuny.edu%2F2025%2F11%2F24%2Fsythesis-1-full-first-draft%2F&embedFrom=oembed
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