Children and Technology

The article, “What Do We Know About Children and Technology,” discusses the different effects that technology can have on children, both positive and negative. There is more of a focus on talking about situations of technology usage by children that refer to negative implications and then trying to analyze those implications with research such as the affects of video games, the affects of blue light and sleep patterns, and the effects of not having access to internet and social media and how that affects child depression to name a few. The article ends with talking about how schools can be used to support students with understanding healthy uses of technology and showing students that classrooms can effectively use technology to provide “an” experience.

An insight that I learned from this article is that there is a lot of attention to how technology is affecting children. I feel that from an outside perspective looking in, I feel that children nowadays tend to have way too much screen time, but it appears that there are some positive impacts with children having screen time. What I gather from the article, though, is that for the screen time to be effective, the screen time must be somewhat monitored. Either children shouldn’t have excessive screen time on their own or if a child is going to have a lot of screen time that they should have screen time with others to interact with at early ages. This goes back to what has been discussed in class because in this article, it is emphasized that interacting with others when experiencing screen time seems to be “an” experience as opposed to just interacting with screen time individually. By interacting with another person with screen time, the article argues that children can gather other insights and perspectives from the people they are interacting with with the screen time.

Questions from the Article:

1. Can the conclusion that there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that video games negatively impact children be applied to when government tries to blame violent acts from people on video games?

2. Why is it that girls have a negative feeling about not having social media access substantially more than boys?

3. If parents try to use the night mode on their children’s devices at night to try and avoid the lack of quality sleep, do the kids ever turn the night mode off when the parents aren’t looking, which could cause issues with data?

4. There was data that said for children ages 3-4, 1% of the children had social media accounts. What positive outcomes could there be for a child between the ages of 3-4 to have a social media account?

5. The discussion was made if there are any connections between screen time and obesity. It makes me wonder if the connection between screen time and obesity would have any other connections to the concerns including sleep, interactions with others, depression, or feeling bad if not connected to the internet?

My Thoughts on Two of My Questions:

1. I think that the lack of evidence for video games having a negative impact on children could have heavy implications that video games cannot be connected to violent acts of those that play video games. Time and time again, government looks to blame mental health issues on video games, but if there isn’t enough research to support that there is a negative impact on children, I think conclusions cannot be made for other negative implications that video games could have on people.

3. I think when gathering evidence for if night mode on devices affects a child’s sleep, I think what the child is doing on the device needs to be monitored heavily. Children are very smart, and I think if the color issue that night mode can create upsets a child, I could see the child trying to learn how to turn the night mode off. This could lead to poor data results, let alone gather poor insights on how night mode affects sleep patterns.