Technology is the thief of childhood
As high schoolers with adult responsibilities and looming futures, we often turn to nostalgia for a sense of comfort, longing for simpler times when our brains were not nearly as full. And yet, nostalgia is an ever-changing concept as each generation progresses. Our idea of childhood is completely different from that of our parents, and it is different for children growing up right now.
With technology being such an integral and constantly changing element of our society, the shifting image of childhood can largely be attributed to the state of technology and its role in our everyday lives. As the influence and importance of devices continue to expand and become less and less avoidable, the glow and purity of childhood is dwindling and changing into something completely unrecognizable.
In the present day, it is relatively impossible to picture a circumstance in which you are completely unreachable. Our devices come with us everywhere and there is almost always a way for someone to locate you, if needed. With so much stress and fear being fostered in our world, this tool has become critical for anxious parents. But for our parents, those growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, childhoods thrived on the freedom that came with being in their own worlds, separate from their parents. Most of us have probably heard the stories of times our parents would be gone for hours, playing with neighborhood kids, exploring nature and their parents having absolutely no idea where they were. This idyllic isolation and early sense of independence is one that has slowly died away. Kids no longer center their days around navigating things for themselves, and parents are increasingly reliant on knowing every detail about their kids’ whereabouts.
Even more urgent of an issue is the obvious detrimental effects that technology has on the health and development of kids’ brains. Our generation hardly saw a day without watching TV, playing a game on an iPad or stealing our parents’ phone. This pandemic has reached an all-time high in 2024, with a whole new world of tech available for children who have actively developing brains. With such a growing reliance on technology for entertainment, kids are losing the ability to create, explore and learn things on their own. A constant stream of stimuli and information being fed to them may sound promising, but it entirely takes away the freedom of seeking that knowledge out on your own and forming your own interests separate from a world of other opinions.
I know that there is no way to stop the constant march towards the future and the evolution of the human race. However, every time I am hit with a heavy wave of nostalgia and long for those simpler times when I did not constantly have a phone in my hand, it makes me think of the many generations of children that will grow up without a childhood like ours, and wonder what joys a childhood similar to that of our parents would have brought.
