The Digital Age
-----an essay by Gabbi Nitti
​
Your eyes dreary from the sun, your hair smelling like grass and your feet covered in pollen and mud from the ground. Running after your brother and his friends in a neighborhood game of tag you get tired and use water from the hose knowing that if you went inside mom would make you do a chore. You and your brother stay out until the streetlights are on and your stomachs are empty grumbling, searching for one of mom's home cooked meals.
This lifestyle is left as just a dream for the newest generation. Going outside is seen as a punishment and screens take up nearly every moment of everyday. Now more than ever kids are glued to their screens; screens are seen as a need not a want. They are used during eating, bathing and in the car. Most parents give their kids a screen as distraction in an attempt to settle them down when they are too busy to care for them. This action is sending the youngest generation into a distorted adult world giving them way too much freedom in a world of possibilities.
According to the New York Times, “Social media platforms often include graphic and scary content that young kids are not ready to see.” Children are being exposed to adult humor and trends making them more interested in growing up and what's the new trend on apps like youtube, instead of enjoying their time playing with their friends and getting dirty.
“Mom, why can't I look like her?”
“She's so much prettier than me mommy”
“She doesn't even try to be perfect daddy, she just is.”
​
Statements like these are used in households by young girls everyday. Filters and heavy makeup are used behind the scenes to make these girls look airbrushed and almost unreal. Young and naive minds fail to recognize the hour and hours of time spent on getting ready for a ten second clip. Their minds automatically shift to a negative approach about themselves which automatically tears down their confidence and strong self esteem.
Young girls are at their most impressionable age in their pre-teen adolescent years and Bryn Austin from Harvard believes that “Platforms like Instagram—have very harmful effects on teen mental health, especially for teens struggling with body image, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. From experimental research, we know that Instagram, with its algorithmically-driven feeds of content tailored to each user’s engagement patterns, can draw vulnerable teens into a dangerous spiral of negative social comparison and hook them onto unrealistic ideals of appearance and body size and shape.”
Hours upon hours are spent on Tiktok and Instagram. Eyes glued to older, more mature girls like Alix Earle and Monet McMichael who are young, wealthy and gorgeous young women. Young girls aspiring to receive even a slice of the attention that these big creators are receiving in effect they try to be like them. Acting older in an attempt to please others and validate themselves.
“Adolescents are moving into this messy digital world at a time when they desire social attention most — and are not yet wired for restraint.”(New York Times) Young girls want the attention created through the stigma of social media without the want for the outcomes and negative attention. The digital age has ruined young girls' confidence through social media stigma and ideal beauty standards.
Instead of playing with barbies, young pre-adolescent girls are trying to be barbie.
Social skills, a simple conversation, is something so difficult for the newest generation. New parents use devices like Ipads and Iphones to distract their kids when they are too busy or overwhelmed. This one time fix slowly turns into two times but ultimately ends in an awful downward spiral of their kid being addicted.
Parents think about the short term solution of their problem: the ability to have their kid be quiet and stay in one place, and tend to forget about the negative cognitive deterioration they are playing with in their toddlers' heads. Jennifer F. Cross, M.D., a pediatrician at New York-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital and an professor of clinical pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, states on Health Matters that “According to data, using a validated screening tool, 1-year-olds who were exposed to more than four hours of screen time per day showed delays in communication and problem solving at ages 2 and 4. Also, more screen time for 1-year-olds was associated with developmental delays in fine motor and personal and social skills at age 2.”
​
Who would think a simple distraction and easy way to keep your kid busy could be ruining their brain and will continue the downward spiral of underdeveloped children? During the pandemic everyone was home, there was nothing to do and no way to connect with your friends and family without technology. The surge of parents using technology to keep their children busy skyrocketed during this gruesome time. Technology was being used for everything. It was used in school, keeping in touch with friends, games, religious functions and physical activities. There was no escaping it. The come up of technology in the year twenty-twenty also brought up shorter attention spans. Sibley et al. (2021) found that American youth with ADHD reported exacerbated problems with depressive behaviors and school avoidance in the early days of the pandemic. Shuai et al. (2021) studied digital media use in Chinese children with ADHD during quarantine and reported connections with several social-emotional risk factors, such as increased symptom severity, motivational difficulties, executive functioning problems, and family environment problems.”
​
Exacerbating social skills and the rise of ADHD due to technology gives our newest generation hardly any positive resources to rely on themselves and ability to live in the world. Without proper social skills the newest generation will be without the proper ability to communicate with each other. This does not provide them with a very bright future.
​
There is a counter-argument to this down-side of technology. Young minds have access to websites like Raz Kids, IXL math and Khan Academy that are websites that were created to further help children get better a education and become smarter. Technology has given children a new outlet for creativity, giving them a way to draw and create music. Giving kids these outlets gives these children the ability to figure out what they like from a young age and gives them a chance to express themselves freely. Children can explore new ideas and find people they relate to online.
​
But the fact remains, grass is on its way out and technology is on its way in. With parents using technology as a distraction and teens using it as an outlet for identity the uprise in technology will continue to climb. Many parents are looking for ways to limit their children's time on technology by using features like screen time which only lets the child go on the device for a scheduled amount of time locking them out when the time is up. Keeping young children away from screens will improve their mental state and communication skills. Features like screen time can help children get off their devices, out of the house and back on the streets where a game of freeze tag is waiting to be played.
​