You are living a great life, and you are having a great day, waiting in a restaurant to get some scrumptious food, but that day is about to get ruined when a family comes in: you see parents who seem relatively normal, and then you see their kid.
A small, snotty little child, eyes glued to the Cocomelon they’re blasting off their iPad. The kid is calm, until they get sat at their table and the mother takes the iPad from its grubby little hands, resulting in the entire restaurant getting to hear the wonderful noise that is a small child’s screams and cries for an iPad.
This is what we call the iPad kid, a now common sight to the average citizen — so common that I was one of them. I was the small annoying child who would cry when my iPad was taken, and the inner iPad-kid in me still shows with my signature ‘iPad kid cough.’
It’s funny, yes, but growing up with an iPad as your closest friend has lasting effects, easily seen in today’s teenagers.
Gen Z is the first ever generation to have easy access to everything technology. With the endless access to the internet and entertainment, parents just give their children screens as a substitute to actual parenting.
Educational apps and shows have proven to be successful in teaching kids, but these apps should be used as an extension to children’s learning, not the foundation. Technology misses many points needed for a child’s upbringing; they need emotional connections to real people to grow their understanding of morals, language and emotions — without those connections, children will become stunted in their future.
iPads can be a tool. Technology as a whole can be a tool, which is why schools give students laptops and why educational apps and shows exist. But when it comes to a child, those resources should be used with supervision because what child is going to choose a math game over something like Minecraft?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying playing Minecraft is bad — it was my EVERYTHING as a child. I LOVED the game and played it at every second possible. Kids don’t understand what overindulgence is, and I wouldn’t expect them to, because that’s not their job — it’s the parents’.
Kids need limits, whether it’s direct watch from an adult or restrictions like setting a timer for an hour.
Restrictions were my WORST nightmare. I didn’t want anyone — or anything — telling me how long I could play my games or watch my shows. Even though the kid might throw a tantrum over the iPad, it’s better to have an angry kid than a screen-addicted one.
Kids need parents to teach them language and education, and they need more than a video. Tech can only do so much — even teens need more than videos — so how are toddlers expected to learn the necessary pieces of their education that way?
Kids need more. More exposure, more experiences, more exposure to vocabulary through conversations, more chances to see people being good people, more outside time. “But I’m boreddddd” — let them be bored.
With no guidance, no supervision, no restrictions and the wide web all to itself, the kid might’ve gotten on the (mostly) harmless game of Minecraft, or maybe they would’ve gotten on a Discord call and doxxed themselves to people who they think are safe even though they’re not.
The internet is scary, and it is not a place for a small child to be by themselves. I shouldn’t have been able to get to the things I had access to. I shouldn’t have been able to meet people I met. Those people knew I was a child and ignored it. I was lucky enough that my parents paid just enough attention to realize I was doing bad things and took my iPad away when they did.
Internet safety is so incredibly important, because in a child’s mind, this guy that is trying to meet up with them “is also my age and he’s going to be my friend!”
You are 10. You don’t know how old he is. Most kids wouldn’t know that though. I wouldn’t have, and I didn’t.
Even with all of that, telling a kid “the internet is scary!” is going to do nothing if that’s the only thing you do to protect them, The same way a child won’t understand why being 10 years old and meeting someone off the internet who is supposedly 17 is a bad idea, they won’t understand the good and the bad of the internet.
A child has not experienced enough to really KNOW what a “kidnapper” is — all they know is sunshines and rainbows.
Don’t ruin the sunshine. Don’t even give them the chance to get in that situation. Don’t give a child an iPad because you don’t want to care for them while babysitting or if it’s genuinely your kid. You signed up for it.
If you want a next generation that isn’t full of mentally stunted, traumatized, screen-addicted teens and adults, take the iPad from iPad kids, and let kids just be kids.
