Patrick Schulz
Dr. Michener
Proposal
4/2/13

Children Growing up With Technology Children find it very easy to be engaged and stay engaged when using touch screen technology; such as tablets, I Phones and any other devices that use touch screen technology and always seem to be around it. These youngsters find it so enticing, because the child can control the action when he or she touches the screen and is also addicting, because there are so many apps that have games that catch his or hers attention, but what are some of the effects that this has on a young child’s brain and life? Could this be a positive thing and provide the child with a better way to learn and obtain knowledge, or could it have a negative effect by interfering with the child’s natural growth. Would you want to take the chance with your child? As I sit on the couch with the family at the last Christmas party exchanging stories, telling jokes and taking in the Christmas vibe, I couldn’t help but notice my 2 year old niece playing on her personal tablet that her spoiling father bought her. She sat there glued to her device playing fruit ninja for about an hour. If anybody tried to take the tablet away from her she would throw a fit until she was back to slicing fruit. Shouldn’t she be interacting with the family rather then playing games on her tablet? I asked my sister how much time she usually spends on her I-Pad during the week. She replied. “She is only allowed to play educational games during the week. Only on the weekends can she play what she wants. She usually spends about an hour or two a day on her tablet, but no more than three hours a day.” I thought to myself, what outcomes could come out of spending all this time on tables. Spending hours on end, inches away from the screen, playing games and watching movies. I always will remember when my parents would tell me, “Quit watching T.V. so much, you will go blind.” Today, I realize that they wanted me to be more active and do things that would involve exercise, interacting with kids my age, and to just be a playful energetic kid. Why would the I-pad be any different than watching T.V.? According to a study in the May, 2013 issue of Pediatrics, “Characteristics of Screen Media Use Associated With Higher BMI in Young Adolescents” (published online April 8), The amount of attention youth pay to screen technology plays a key role in the link between their media use and body mass index (BMI). In other words, spending all this time with technology (tablets and I Pads) kids will become more prone to not exercise and gain weight. This could defiantly lead unhealthy living and resort to health problems; Type II Diabetes, asthma, sleep apnea, social discrimination, high cholesterol and/or blood pressure. We have all tried to get our dads attention while he’s watching T.V. and end up with no response. It seemed that he was in a “zombie state” or a trance of some sort, like he wasn’t coherent to reality. I like to call it selective hearing. “An early strain of research claimed that when we watch television, our brains mostly exhibit slow alpha waves—indicating a low level of arousal, similar to when we are daydreaming (the touch-screen Generation, The Atlantic). Also a parent recalled that their child was in this state where you’d call his name and he wouldn’t respond to it, or you could snap your fingers in front of his face and still get nothing. A child that is so in-depth and addicted to his new I Pad, defiantly more grasping and entertaining then T.V. would certainly loose connection with nature and loose his or her creative thinking, Due to the ease of access to the internet, kids now expect things right away and rely on the internet to give them all of the answers. They expect answers before they take time to think about solutions. Dr. Rosen said, “The newest generations, unlike their older peers, will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and won’t have the patience for anything less.” “They’ll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have had growing up,” she said. This is a common problem of kids of this generation and kids are losing the value of learning from their mistakes. The educational advantages are one of the most prominent advantages that we see. There are a lot of apps out there that are educational. Though they can be educational they can make the childs attentions weak and promote him to become less likely to recall that information in the future. As Jim Taylor states that technology conditions the brain to pay attention to information very differently than reading. The metaphor that Nicholas Carr uses is the difference between scuba diving and jet skiing. Book reading is like scuba diving in which the diver is submerged in a quiet, visually restricted, slow-paced setting with few distractions and, as a result, is required to focus narrowly and think deeply on the limited information that is available to them. In contrast, using the Internet is like jet skiing, in which the jet skier is skimming along the surface of the water at high speed, exposed to a broad vista, surrounded by many distractions, and only able to focus fleetingly on any one thing (How Technology is Changing the Way Children Think and Focus).