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this is so chaotic and in character it was my obligation to draw it

can we like…. talk about what a healthy relationship with technology looks like? not just for us, but for future generations: its super easy for us to accept tech unquestioningly bc many millennials and gen-Zers grew up alongside the growth of tech, and had a naturally evolving level of exposure to it. but what about the 5 year olds with tablets? the 8 year olds with perfectly curated instagrams?? i’m as obsessed with my phone as the rest of us, but can we please stop simply bemoaning how none of us read as much as we were kids and start exploring how all these screens might be affecting the kids growing up right now?

owlmylove

i work in customer service and please know that i am not baby-boomer aggrandizing when i say i have seen so many children, literally toddlers, dead-silent and completely, utterly absorbed in tablets bigger than their heads. i’ve seen a shitton of pre-pubescent girls posing for pictures together, planning their angles and backgrounds, and checking what shots their mom took bc they’re worried “they might look fat.” like. i’m talking 7 year olds. this isn’t meant to be some holier than thou bullshit, this is me being legitimately terrified about a problem i really haven’t seen any of us discuss or even acknowledge

In one of my psychology classes the teacher told us about a study that showed that toddlers nowadays have a hard time learning how to write and do fine motor things because of the skip the stage of learning with their hands and all they do is swipe and click.

owlmylove

oh!! my god!!! that is an incredibly literal/physical symptom of these newfound techno-reliances we’ve formed. a professor of mine referred to it as our “tech fetishization,” this expectation that all updated forms of tech are innately and unquestionably good things. we see technology as an amorphous, abstract concept vs. a substantive influence in our mental, emotional, and physical states but holy shit it really, really is

mixingpumpkins

@ y’all in the notes completely missing the point and thinking this is about millennials turning into the ‘Thomas Edison was a witch!’ or ‘kids these days!’ crowd…

Look, I fucking love technology. I love what the advancements in my lifetime have been able to make possible. The sheer amount of information and communication and creative tools available is incredible, and I often wonder how different my life would be now if I’d grown up with all these things available and accessible. (How many more things would I know how to do? How much more music could I have written? How much more art could I have produced? Could I have started my own businesses sooner? How many more people from how many more places would I know?)

But the things in the above posts are problems. I see plenty of bitching now about the effects that ‘TV / video game babysitting’ had on you - you think handing a 2-year-old a tablet to shut them up isn’t just another incarnation of the same thing?

We bitch about how fucked up algorithms are all over the internet, and you don’t think kids having nearly unmonitored access is a problem? You don’t see a potential for how this could be fucking someone up? Open a YouTube page as a new user (with zero history, cookies, etc.), click on an innocuous video, and let autoplay run for a bit. It gets weird real fast. (Even with filters.)

As difficult as ‘don’t worry about looking like the people in the magazines, they don’t look like that either’ was for us, you don’t think there’s a potential for more damage with social media etc. now? Everybody has access to filters and photoshop etc. The whole ‘influencer’ thing is that ‘anybody can be a star, you can make yourself, you don’t have to wait for a studio etc. to discover you.’ Seven-year-olds obsessing whether they look fat or if their instagrams can compete with some random person who’s edited the shit out of their photos (and they’re not a movie star, just a random person, so it must be real!) is messed up.

Kids coming into schools with lower vocabulary levels because they haven’t heard as many words from people by a certain age - because it’s easier to sit them in front of a pretty, addicting game to keep them occupied and behaving than spend the time interacting with them person-to-person - is messed up.

There are so many amazing tools we have now that are awesome for helping kids learn and grow. (I would have killed to be able to have ‘how to’ videos on YouTube when I was a kid - there were so many things I wanted to learn that if my parents didn’t know or the school / library didn’t have resources on, I was SOL.) But I’d love to see actual conversations about the problems growing up with tech is causing - without it devolving into the usual thinkpieces and comments that do just break it down as ‘tech is bad!’ or ‘tech is fine, ya loser dinosaurs!’ There’s absolutely a healthy balance here somewhere. I just don’t think people are all that invested in finding it.

sableaire

This is an absolutely vital conversation to have, and it often gets shut down as a “fear of progress.” No, we need to acknowledge that technology evolves exponentially faster than our biology, and we need to examine what that means and what kind of repercussions that might have on our future generations.

learning how to reconcile these things is important! i have kids, and i love technology, and this is a daily struggle! kids, especially young kids, NEED face to face human interaction to learn those fundamental skills that will carry them forward for the rest of their lives! for ANY kids in your life, you have to be really cognizant about how you utilize that technology to work for you in terms of supporting their development, not working against it. Here are the american academy of pediatrics’ recommendations for screen usage for young children, based on science:

Younger than 18 months, avoid use of screen media other than video-chatting.
Parents of children 18 to 24 months of age who want to introduce digital media should choose high-quality programming, and watch it with their children to help them understand what they’re seeing.
For children ages 2 to 5 years, limit screen use to 1 hour per day of high-quality programs. Parents should co-view media with children to help them understand what they are seeing and apply it to the world around them.
For children ages 6 and older, place consistent limits on the time spent using media, and the types of media, and make sure media does not take the place of adequate sleep, physical activity and other behaviors essential to health.
Designate media-free times together, such as dinner or driving, as well as media-free locations at home, such as bedrooms.
Have ongoing communication about online citizenship and safety, including treating others

From the report: “Today’s generation of children and adolescents is growing up immersed in media. This includes platforms that allow users to both consume and create content, including broadcast and streamed television and movies, sedentary and active video games, social and interactive media that can be creative and engaging, and even highly immersive virtual reality.

‘Even though the media landscape is constantly changing, some of the same parenting rules apply,“ said Yolanda (Linda) Reid Chassiakos, MD, FAAP, lead author of the technical report. “Parents play an important role in helping children and teens navigate the media environment, just as they help them learn how to behave off-line. The AAP wants to provide parents the evidence-based tools and recommendations to help them make their children's’”media experience a positive one.’”

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