Digital Technology and the Lives of Children and Adolescents
Imagine sitting on your couch watching your favorite T.V. show and during the commercials, an advertisement for a mouthwatering cheeseburger cooked to perfection, served just the way you like it comes on the screen. As it makes your stomach grumble as if you have been starving for a week, hunger sets in; so, you decide to text your friends and ask them if they could come pick you up so all of you can enjoy that next level cheeseburger; plus, you do not have a car so they need to pick you up in order to fulfill that enormous desire for a juicy burger. So, you take your phone out from your jeans’ front pocket, unlock it and then get distracted by Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, basically anything on your phone that you are capable of being distracted by. Next thing you know, twenty minutes have passed before you even start the text and now, you have realized that twenty minutes ago, all your friends had to leave for soccer practice. It is a shame, you have missed your opportunity to feed your craving for a perfect cheeseburger, all because technology consumed and distracted you.
Since the creation of computers, digital technology has made modern life luxurious. Men and women all around the world benefit by using it in their jobs, in their home and even in their everyday lives. As it relates to adolescents and their growth, students ages five through eighteen use digital technology to do their homework every day. They also use it to communicate with whoever they want, whenever they want. Basically, teenagers bask in a much-desired freedom that they receive from digital technology, a freedom that adolescents would not be privileged enough to exploit if there were no computers or internet.
While positive effects of digital technology apparent in the lives of children and adolescents, there are two sides to the equation: positive and negative. On one side, digital technology helps children and adolescents in their everyday lives, and on the other, it hurts their ability to progress in life. While it displays positive effects, the use of digital technology carries a negative effect on children as they progress into adolescence, specifically in developmental, physiological and interpersonal aspects of life. Unfortunately, these aspects of life are where it is becoming increasingly apparent that digital technology usage diminishes their quality of life. It is imperative to understand the negative effects of digital technology on today’s youth and adolescence because they are the future of modern society, and if modern society will be successful, these future adults have to avoid the negative effects and learn how to use technology as a resource, rather than a source of entertainment.
Adolescents’ quality of life from childhood on is highly impacted by their enormous use of digital technology throughout their lives. The modern generation of children are immersed in an environment of technology that acts as a pivotal role in their lives because it is unescapable. Children and adolescents use technology for school work when they attend school, when they return home to help them with homework, and then use it more on the weekends to entertain themselves. Clearly, children growing up in the modern technology emphasized world are at somewhat of an advantage, but the way they develop in this technology ridden environment is diminished in different domains of development. Because “an individual child may develop unevenly in different domains (Cooper 289),” it is clear that digital technology improves some domains of development and detracts from others. For example, if a child plays video games every day for around an hour per day, he or she would be missing out on an hour-long opportunity for outdoor experiences like playing catch or even simply running. In this example, the child would be progressing in hand-eye coordination through playing video games, but would then fall behind in overall physical ability because of the outdoor opportunities that were neglected. Since children are immersed in an environment so rich in technology, and since digital technology helps progress only certain types of development, children start to fall behind in specific domains, i.e. physical ability or fine motor skills, which then leads to an overall delay in development if enough domains are affected, negatively impacting their quality of life.
While a children’s development is negatively affected by the absorption of the technology heavy environment around them, development is also greatly impacted from results of digital technology usage. This usage displays a multitude of results such as a decreased sense of awareness, or an easier path for bullying to happen. These products of digital technology usage cause a child to not realize what is going on around them, as well as an increased risk for depression, both of which will negatively impact their skills and their quality of life. While results such as these can be used as evidence as to why development is delayed in certain domains, the most imperative in considering the negative effects of technology usage is the “displacement of other activities” (Subrahmanyam 124). Most basically, this means that the use of digital technology is encouraging children to stay inside to play more video games or watch more television when what they need is physical activity. Children today grow up in an unavoidable, digital technology centered environment. Since technology consumes a great amount of time in the lives of children and adolescents, they are less likely to perform enough physical activity on a daily basis, which is imperative to cognitive and physical development. In addition to delaying cognitive and physical development, children’s lack of physical activity places them at a much higher risk of childhood obesity, which would clearly decrease the child’s quality of life, if they become overweight in childhood; the life quality would be diminished because if a child is overweight, they would not be able to physically keep up with their friends when they are playing at recess, and they are less likely to be physically active, which only adds to the same problem. The modern world ridden with digital technology negatively impacts how children develop into adolescence because, while it progresses some aspects, it hinders most other domains of development by encouraging the displacement of physical activity.
Undoubtedly, the use of digital technology negatively effects a child’s development within different domains, however, physiological aspects of children’s lives are impacted in just the same way. Just as the negative impacts on development are seen through the lack physical activity and therefore a delay in physical development, the use of digital technology negatively effects adolescents’ lives physiologically, observable their dietary habits and sleep patterns. Children and teenagers spend much of their time on digital technology, whether it be social media, television or video games. Because of this they are exposed to advertisements and commercials that encourage them to eat unhealthy foods; thus, it is important to understand the magnitude of the relation between the use of digital technology and adolescents’ dietary habits. In their 2014 study, Jennifer Falbe and her coworkers came to the conclusion that for “each hour-per-day increase in television, electronic games and DVDs/videos,” adolescents consumed an increasing amount of unhealthy foods such as sugar-sweetened beverages and fast food, and a decreasing amount of fruits and vegetables (Falbe 1173). Using digital technology promotes the displacement of physical activity, thus creating a higher risk for childhood obesity. And while children are inside letting digital technology displace those other activities, they are exposed to many advertisements and commercials that promote the consumption of unhealthy foods. Thus, adolescents are placed at an even higher risk of childhood obesity because of this increased consumption, caused by media and technology. Since using digital technology produces these two closely related problems, the risk of obesity in children and adolescents is exponentially heightened and becomes a serious issue that needs to be managed through individual regulation of screen time by parents or guardians.
What children and adolescents eat is a main aspect of their lives that displays how using digital devices keeps them from reaching their full physiological potential. Similarly, adolescents’ sleep patterns can be examined to determine the effect of digital technology on their lives. Through looking at what digital technology does to sleep, it can be determined whether or not its usage is harmful to adolescents’ everyday lives. This is because, in general, if children do not get enough sleep, they will not perform as well as they could during the day. According to a 2016 study of adolescents sleep patterns and the “impact of technology use before sleep on daytime function,” adolescents ages thirteen to twenty-one only obtain an average of about seven and a half hours of sleep per night, while the needed amount is eight to ten hours (Johansson 1-2). The cause of this loss of sleep is primarily attributed to the use of technology before going to sleep. In the same study, researchers found that ninety-seven percent of all respondents to the 2011 National Sleep Foundation’s Sleep in America Poll used at least one “type of technology in the hour before sleep” (6). Additionally, “approximately 67% of the [same] sample responded that they ‘woke unrefreshed’ a few days a week to every day” (5). Thus, through the use of digital technology before going to bed, adolescents’ have effectively decreased the speed at which they fall asleep, lessened their quality of sleep and reduced their duration of sleep. Because of this, adolescents have impaired their ability to carry out common daytime functions as they are unable to perform or learn skills that are needed in adult life, which hinders the majority of high school students from reaching their full potential in and out of the classroom.
We have now reviewed two areas of life that the negative effects of digital technology are displayed in: developmental and physiological. Next, we will examine how interpersonal skills are effected by technology in the same way. I have used the example of a child staying inside because of digital technology, explaining how that is harmful developmentally and physiologically. I have also disclosed that the usage of digital technology before sleep is detrimental to how fast they fall asleep, how well they stay asleep and how long they sleep for; and through this, it is clear that using technology before bed causes adolescents to be less productive in their daytime functions. This is where the interpersonal aspect of adolescent lives comes in as it is one of those skills that is imperative to life as an adult. Having established the first two aspects as developmental and physiological, the remainder of my argument in this essay will now focus on how digital technology negatively impacts adolescents’ interpersonal skills.
As interpersonal skills are learned through interacting people in general, they are illustrations of activities performed in the daytime that adolescents are required to know if they wish to succeed in the real world. Some might ask, “what are interpersonal skills?” the best way to understand what these skills are is to think about them as communication skills, the words are interchangeable. Basically, these are the skills that help each person communicate with those that form their environment.
While interpersonal skills are a daytime function that become impaired when a teenager does not sleep enough, the negative effects of digital media is displayed through the ways the modern adolescent generation communicates with each other. As digital technology has advanced years past, it has enabled all people to communicate through a screen, over text and through social media. Since using digital technology to communicate with others is so easy, it consumes most adolescents, only hindering their interpersonal skills, which then will degrade their quality of life. Adolescents have become increasingly prone to use their digital devices as a mask to hide who they are because of the numerous choices as to how each person would like to communicate; this is seen through teenagers’ ability to portray themselves as what they consider ‘perfect,’ whether through texting, posting or Snapchatting. Each teens’ ‘perfect’ self-image is only attainable because digital technology provides a way to “edit, delete and retouch” anything they text or post (Hart & Hart Frejd 93). This ability allows adolescents to say exactly what they want to say, exactly how they want to say it because each person is able to proof read their texts and posts before they put them out into the digital world. Considering the fact that digital technology allows adolescents to say and do what they want online, it weakens their ability to communicate in person as they have not learned enough interpersonal skills to do so because they have spent all their time behind the comfort of digital technology, avoiding messy, real life conversations. Little do they know; those messy conversations are the ones that will prepare them for situations where there is no screen to hide behind.
As a result of messy real-life communication that does not provide a way for adolescents to proof read and edit what they say and do, teenagers choose to interact with other people over digital devices. Face-to-face conversations are “hard work,” “time-consuming” and “unpredictable” (93), which is why teens primarily select the more controllable conversations behind a screen. Adolescents prefer texting over any other form of communication (Underwood & Ehrenreich 3). In this preference, teenagers only prove their desire to stay comfortable behind digital technology knowing they possess the ability to proof, edit and retouch the entirety of their digital lives. This preference, then, would lead to a lack of the interpersonal skills that each person needs as they progress into adulthood. These skills will bolster an individual’s ability to obtain a job later on in life, as well as keep that job through being well spoken and confident when communicating with a boss or a coworker. The interpersonal aspects of adolescent lives are negatively impacted by the use of digital technology as it keeps teens from practicing communication skills that are highly needed later on in life.
So, while many positive effects of digital technology are seen in the lives of children and adolescents, by considering three areas of life that negative impacts of technology are clearly displayed: developmental, physiological and interpersonal, I hope that I have been able to fully explain why using digital technology harms the lives of children and adolescents, if the usage is not managed and regulated. I also hope that through this explanation, I have demonstrated why digital technology should be treated as a resource that serves us, not a source of entertainment that consumes us. Whether I have successfully argued this or not, it is still to be seen how the modern society handles new advancements in technology, if the consideration of the negative effects that digital technology carries will come in to play. The way to solve this technology problem is clear, but the question now what will the generations that have grown up in the technology ridden environment do about it