These kids today, these parents today
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
In the history of humanity, every single generation has looked upon its descendants with distress over their work ethic, their commitment and their ethics. Surely, this message is recorded in petroglyphs.
To many of our grandparents, the advent of television and rock ’n’ roll were sure precursors to the apocalypse. Somehow, each generation has escaped the self-destruction predicted by its forebearers, and the basic lesson — that humanity survives, and even advances, as it encounters new technology and trends — is never passed on, maybe because our basic human instinct is to try to protect our children.
Today’s parents, myself included, worry about the impact of smartphones on adolescents and young adults. We ask how a device can be good for you when its apps are designed for the sole purpose of drawing you in to absorb more of the media they portray. We wonder how we can teach personal responsibility when apps like Snapchat allow our kids to share a photo or video that disappears from the recipient’s phone as soon as it is viewed. Is there any respectable purpose for that feature? Maybe not, but does that mean the users always behave disrespectfully?
What we forget is that children raised with values have an installed moral compass (today it’s a GPS chip), and as with every generation, it guides them better than their parents expected. Just because we can’t tell them how to navigate the pitfalls of TikTok doesn’t mean they can’t figure it out. Sure, they’ll err, but mostly they’ll grow up just as we did, to be mostly respectable.
But what about physical side effects? According to the CDC, the average 8- to 18-year-old spends almost 8 hours each day watching entertainment on a screen. This is in addition to schoolwork on a computer, meaning many are spending far more than half their waking hours looking at an electronic display. Many peer-reviewed studies have linked this trend to the epidemic of childhood obesity, and ample evidence supports its link to a ballooning dry eye and blepharitis problem in kids as well.
It would be easy to say that children with good values would curtail their own screen time, but parents are just as glued to their own phones — often while they’re driving. Smartphone technology became so enticing so fast that we haven’t figured out how to react, even though we see clearly the consequences. Whether the solution is governmental regulation of app makers (an evolving development in California), more education in schools or something else, screen time itself is a crisis that is not just imagined by parents.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get off my computer and go for a walk.
Collapse