A bright light puts children to sleep; it is the new toy and pacifier. Children grip onto tablets before toy cars and dolls; they grow up playing on an iPad and watching TV instead of using their wandering imagination to make up games in their backyards.
Across the globe, people who grew up before 2010 navigated life solely with face-to-face interactions, relying on outdoor play and social gatherings. As technology has advanced, smartphones and tablets have become the common way to entertain children. This switched the way younger generations experience their adolescent years. Social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt describes the shift from play-based to screen-based childhoods. These different childhoods have different effects on development.
“Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and…unsuitable for children and adolescents,” Haidt said.
A play-based childhood consists of outdoor activities that help children develop coping mechanisms, resilience, and social skills.
Screen-based activities are when kids are exposed to influencers who post overall mature themes, excessive consumerism, dangerous dares, and unsafe stunts. This leads to isolation, comparison, and unrealistic expectations, fueling anxiety and depression. Screen-based childhoods rely on technology to engage the short attention span of the younger generations.
It is easy for children to stuff their faces into their technology. Picking up a device takes less work than trying to make fun by themselves outside. Naturally, humans pick the easiest way to accomplish a task.
When a child’s main form of communication is through social media, it affects their physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development, causing anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, eye strain, and many other problems.
According to UCLA Health, “Since social media took off… in the early 2000s, the rate of adolescent depression has significantly spiked. Between 2005 and 2017, depression among young people reportedly went up 52%.”
“A part of why teenagers aren’t outside as much is because we’re losing a lot of common spaces,” Family and Consumer Sciences teacher Susie Huggins said.
Even those with cell phones weren’t yet adopting screen-based childhoods. Although they had phones, they weren’t used as excessively as they are now. Teenagers’ eyes are locked onto the bright screen, and their thumbs move in the same up-and-down motion.
According to a study conducted by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, “93% of Gen Z have lost sleep because they stayed up ‘past their bedtime’ to view or participate in social media.”
“It gets bad when you are lying down and your eyes are slowly closing, but you’re still up trying to watch TikTok,” freshman Bella Plummer said.
It is impossible to reverse the past; the way to improve teenagers’ mental and physical health when involved in social media is to limit technology usage and to consider the content posted on social media.
The change is in the current generation. The future generations could have access to a safer childhood if the change happens. Toy buckets will be filled to the top, physical books will be read, and attention spans will be longer than a 15-second video.
