Negative Impacts of Technology in Young Children

Wherever and whenever we go, we see children are playing with their parent’s I phone or phone, psp or video games in their hand, playing online games or facebook with their parent’s laptop and so on. The invention of technology had greatly taken over our lives, so is in the lives of the children. Children nowadays are being expose to technology at a very young age, even a 3 years old child also know what is an I phone and know how to play with it compare to the olden days of ours. We can say that they are very lucky to live in today’s world whereby everything is so modernize and gadgetry. What are the impacts of these devices on young developing children?

1. Reduce pro-social behavior 

Children surely will be pro-social when they spend most of their time in front of the T.V., video games and computers because they have abandon their childhood to socialize and play with one another. In fact, this will make them to become being withheld and shun from the outside world.

2. Difficulty in distinguishing fantasy from reality

Children will have the problem distinguishing fantasy from reality because what they see in the computer games or T.V., they might think that it is true. For example, superman really exist and people will live happily ever after.

3. Health problems

When children spend most of their time in front of the T.V., or computers, sooner or later their will encounter health problems like eyesight, their back or even obese.

 

From all the above comics, we can see that technology indeed had influenced the lives of children. With the invention of more and more technology and cool gadgetry, we can see for ourselves that children nowadays don't run around in the backyard playing police and thief, playing "masak-masak" using leaves, playing hide and seek, and even just playing in the playground. All the childhood games that we used to play are slowly diminishing, and what more can we say about traditional games (congkak, kites/wau)? Some children don't even know what is congkak? It's sad to say that technology indeed had taken all the childhood games that we used to play. For us, we still think that childhood games are the best. It's fun and it's definitely better than all the video games/computer games. Children nowadays spend most of their time inside the house watching T.V. shows, playing video games/computer games and some even have facebook. Yes, of course living in 21st century, we cannot be outdated in terms of technology and we know that parents care and love their child very much. They try to give them the best thing in the world and make sure that they have everything that the world is having but we would like to encourage the parents to share their childhood games with their children or even play with them. Let children have the childhood that they should have (run around and hide) and we can guarantee that children will never forget their childhood like how we never forget about it. Childhood is always the best memories of all time!!!


* We as educators or parents should be careful when choosing the right technology or right programs/computers games for the children. We must always think of and put the positive impacts first when choosing technology.*