Don’t look now, but children’s social skills have been ruined by modern technology.
Technology
Once upon a time, children went outside to play and actually interacted with each other. They also called each other on the telephone or spent hours at each other’s homes talking about boyfriends and girlfriends or sports or fashion.
Now, those days are dead — and so are children’s social skills.
Today’s kids would rather text than talk and, in fact, consider conversation as an inconvenience rather than a legitimate communication tool. They don’t want to use their iPhone as a “phone” and demand: “If you MUST call me, text me first.” Kids today could also spend hours in the same room together but never utter a single syllable to each other because their attention span is locked into a game of Fortnite. Some kids will text rather than talk when they’re sitting only 2 feet apart.
So, what’s behind this dumbing down of America’s youth? The iPhone, video games, and other technological advances, that’s what!
“The children of the nineties; such as myself, did not have cell phones or any of the latest and greatest technology. We talked to friends in school and from the house phone. We were often found outside after school riding our bikes, playing with our friends in the neighborhood, and playing with actual toys, if we were not outside,” said author Danielle Campbell.
“They don’t know how to handle conflict face to face because so many things happen through some sort of technology,” said Melissa Ortega, a child psychologist at New York’s Child Mind Institute. “Clinically, I’m seeing it in the office. The high school kids who I do see will be checking their phones constantly. They’ll use it as an avoidance strategy. They’ll see if they got a text message in the two minutes they were talking to me.”
Interestingly, the late 1990s weren’t that long ago, but it seems as if 100 years have passed since the dawn of our newest forms of technology.
For example, kids in 1998 used home telephones, frequently checked for voicemail messages left on their home answering machines, depended on a street payphone for communication while away from their base, used paper maps for directions, listened to cassette tapes and CD’s, and looked forward to getting home to watch their favorite TV show recorded on the home VCR. Although some “fancy” adults had car phones and some cool kids carried a beeper, neither practice was the norm.
Then, technology grew faster than we realized and suddenly, communication and social skills died a horrible death.
Now, children’s social skills are virtually kaput and we’re left with a generation of kids who are socially awkward and unable to hold even a basic conversation.
Kids who have grown up with headphones glued to their ears who are used to blocking out the rest of the world for hours at a time — or kids who only know how to write sentences in short text bursts that are all lowercased and badly misspelled will grow up to find their futures horribly handicapped.
If a child has never practiced writing in complete sentences with correct verbiage, how will they be able to write a cover letter to secure a job interview or a proposal in the workplace? If a child has never learned how to hold a conversation and the art of casual banter, how will they ever succeed on the job as a team player? If a child only knows how to text instead of talk or stare at a video game for hours at a time instead of into the eyes of another human being in order to communicate, how will they ever have successful future relationships with a spouse or children of their own?
While technology continues to grow and evolve in the blink of an eye, it’s too bad such growth is at the expense of our children’s social skills.
The cartoon with those kids playing it on there cell phone says it all lol.