[imagesource:wonderai]

When a child, who can barely feed themself, pinches out at a butterfly flying past in an effort to zoom in, then consider the alarm bells as ringing.

This is our moment to realise that the human race is breeding and raising ‘iPad kids’.

VICE shared that story of a two-year-old who mistook reality itself as a big screen, raising concern for the new generation rising in our midst. Millennials, as it turns out, are to blame for raising “bizarre and behaved” children, glued to screens.

Ironically, there’s a whole subject on TikTok that shares in the fear of raising a generation of iPad kids. The term ‘iPad kids’ is used to refer to children who are raised without restrictions on their screen time. Think screaming when their device is taken away, having total disinterest in speaking to others, having no idea how to play with actual toys and little to no imagination.

People sharing thoughts about iPad kids: pic.twitter.com/ctS60BaPfL

— Jules Terpak (@julesterpak) November 12, 2023

Although this advice seems rich coming from a 20-something self-proclaimed social scholar, recording an impassioned front-facing TikTok, he actually makes some really valuable points.

He is ultimately bringing to light the bad parenting that is rampant thanks to the quick and easy mollifier of the iPad:

“If I’m older,” he says with youthful vim, “and I have my kids, and I bring them to a restaurant and I see fellow parents at the table next to me and their kids have iPads, in a restaurant, in public, I’m gonna scream… Can you not make your child behave for more than five seconds? Can you not give your child enough attention and actually converse with them? Why do you have to give them an iPad to make them shut up?”

Sure, the stressed-out parents who have come up close and personal with temper tantrums and prolonged sleep deprivation will say this dude has no leg to stand on, but the facts remain; Gen Alpha – AKA anyone born between 2010 and 2024 – are defined and utterly consumed by the digital world.

As a millennial, when I was 13, I got my first flip phone, which I used to make prank calls and chat with people on BBM. Today’s 13-year-olds are a whole other species.

With a 2017 study from Common Sense Media finding that nearly 80 percent of children have access to an iPad or other type of tablet, these days it’s stranger for a kid to be offline than extremely online.

Are Gen Alpha kids really “a terrifying nightmare to deal with,” as another TikTokker puts it? And are iPads and screens really to blame?

Ryan Lowe, a child and adolescent psychotherapist and spokesperson for the Association of Child Psychotherapists, said that most of the points raised in the viral TikTok “are valid and well observed”:

“The issue with screens is not that they are terrible in themselves, but that they are being used as babysitters, and to shut children up.” This means they’re not playing or engaging with the world around them, or being included in conversations.

“Really importantly,” she adds, “it means they’re not learning the basic skills of patience and containing themselves long enough to manage something difficult or frustrating.” This can disadvantage kids because “if a device is put in front of a child the minute they start to fret or find things difficult, then that’s the only way they learn to cope with difficult feelings”. This can then prompt the kind of “bad” behaviour these Gen Z TikTokkers have noticed.

Lowe mentioned that the children will have no strategies and no experience in managing their feelings or dealing with frustration, adding that their behaviour and their capacity to learn in classrooms will be significantly affected.

@squishiesophie2 my opinion on “ipad kids” #squishiesophie #ipadkids #internetsafety ♬ original sound – Sophie Puchulu

Behavioural and neurodevelopmental optometrist Bhavin Shah says there are a couple of other really important consequences of iPad use. She mentions short-sightedness as one, along with underdeveloped fine motor skills and difficulty in visual-spatial awareness, “because children are used to a 2D world instead of the real one”.

While iPads at home and in restaurants are not ideal, reports also suggest the ‘blended learning and classroom technology’ scene also does damage.

According to new research from Impero Software, a survey conducted with 2000 secondary school students found a quarter had watched harmful or violent content online while in the classroom, and 17 percent were watching it on a school device. More than one in ten (13 percent) have viewed X-rated content such as porn, and 10 percent have used gambling sites – again, all in the classroom.

There is evidence enough that we might be raising a “fleet of clumsy, myopic tyrants” that will be exposed to more scarring screen time than ever before.

“I do think we should be concerned about the amount of screen time that young children are exposed to,” Lowe concludes. “We are so careful about what we give our children to eat, we would never feed them addictive substances at a young age. I think it’s important to expand this to what is being put into children’s minds, to carefully bring up our children to be able to manage their own minds and feelings, and to carefully distinguish the difference between screens enabling them and disabling them.”

This is your cue to give your kid more face-to-face time and less screen time.

[source:vice]