Recently, I watched Comedian Louis C.K. discussing children today and the effects of technology. You would think that with the advancement of technology, society would be evolving into a better place, but instead, too much technology has become a crutch and is hurting more than helping our children. Technology is castrating our children's humanity.
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We've given birth to a generation that's lost the ability to look one another in the face and express or feel empathy. Thanks to the worldwide web, bullying has gone viral and our children don't care. There are no immediate ramifications for bad behavior and the ripple of the cruelty can be felt around the world. It's a scary place to raise a child. It's too easy to be mean when you never have to look your victim in the face and see the hurt and devastation that you are causing. It's cold and impersonal, almost robotic.
Our children have lost their ability to recognize or appreciate privacy because they have never experienced it. Many of our children have had every moment of their lives since birth documented on the Internet via a mommy blog. No privacy is the norm for them. They have no expectation or experience of it. They have a habit of making private conversations very public.
Children are so busy looking down at their cell phones and connecting via the Internet and social media that they have absolutely no idea of how to interact with people in person. They have 2000 Facebook friends and no one to talk to in person and are crippled by loneliness. They don't even try. The sad thing is that in the trying, the interacting, the muddling through the growing part is what makes us into empathetic adults. We develop our humanity and compassion by living in a world fraught with complicated human interactions.
By the time our children are teenagers, they've already been on the Internet for 10 years. They've been raised on educational websites, iPads, iPods and smartphones. It is not unusual to see elementary school aged children with cell phones and by the time they reach the teens they are sitting next to one another texting rather than actually speaking face-to-face. I don't want that for my daughters.
I want them to know real intimacy and human connections. I want my children to know that the Internet is a vast space and once something is out there it is forever and the ripple can reach places and people they never imagined. I want them to notice that there are real human beings, right in front of them. I want them to thoughtfully speak and live in the real world not in the iWorld..
As parents, we need to unplug from technology and invest more time into our children. They are learning from us how to disconnect from one another; from us. This is not what I want for my girls.
Embedded content: http://youtu.be/5HbYScltf1c
Image via Flickr/ Picture Youth
