We love to tell children how as kids we would stay out and play till dark and come back home famished and dirty while all they do these days is stare at screens. And this is exactly what’s bothering parents and teachers today. They are worried about the impact this increasing exposure to the digital environment will have on their wards when they grow up. At an extreme, dependence on technology can lead to what experts term “technology addiction”, which, they say, is a full-blown pathological condition that impairs healthy brain function and needs to be treated.
A recent UK survey of secondary school children revealed that 63 per cent of 11 to 18-year-olds were addicted to the Internet with 26 per cent spending over six hours a day online. Use of gadgets especially the smart-hone is more rampant, overdosing users with “information culture”.
To handle this, rehab centres with deaddiction programmes tailormade for children are coming up around the world. One such programme named the Young Person Technology Addiction Service has been running successfully at London’s Capio Nightingale Hospital. The lead consultant of the programme, Dr Richard Graham, says: “Mental health services need to adapt quickly to the changing worlds that young people inhabit, and understand just how seriously their lives can be impaired by unregulated time online, on-screen or in-game.”
He has devised a therapy programme where the young patients, “screenagers” he calls them, are asked to think about their relationships with gadgets and find gratification in interpersonal relationships. However, some “forward-thinking” experts and even parents argue that growing up amidst technology is not such a bad thing.
“Let your son tinker with the iPad. He will grow to be a creative and technological kind of guy, I bet,” comments one parent on the dilemma discussed on the New York Times website.
This type of “preparation” view has also encouraged school curriculum to include programming languages from very early on, which can’t be such a bad thing.
Barnaby Lenon, former headmaster of the famous Harrow school
in London and now chairman of the Independent Schools Council in the UK suggests that parents must ration their
children’s access to technology and children below 15 should not be bought smartphones.
