Digital Age Or Digital Slave??

I have a confession to make...every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is to reach for my phone to check if I had any messages or pings through the night. From there I skip to twitter, instagram and finally to facebook all these before i get up from bed…..hmnnnnn right???

However I am 70% sure if I took an opinion poll on this, quite a number of us are guilty as well so where does this leave us in terms of technology excesses or dare I say addiction?

It's no more just kids who are overdoing screen time, adults are often just as guilty of spending too much time on smartphones and when we relate this to parents, the consequences for their children can be troubling.

A pediatrician who specializes in child development, Dr. Jenny Radesky, said when she worked at a clinic in Seattle, she started noticing how often parents ignored their kids in favor of a mobile device. This led her to conduct a study on this matter with fifty five different groups of parents and young children eating at fast food restaurants.

According to her most of the parents immediately brought out their phones and were scrolling through while seated at their various tables to eat, in fact some even continued typing on it while eating. Precisely 40 of the 55 parents used a mobile device during the meal, and seemed to be more absorbed in the device than in the kids (sounds familiar right?)

Now let’s direct this to relationships between adults themselves, you realize that nowadays it is being conducted via Smartphones especially through the social media platforms. This I must say has seriously affected face to face interactions which should be a vital part of human relationships. In communicating through mobile devices you find it difficult to read people’s facial expressions or even have an accurate idea of their emotions.

Meanwhile for parents who focus on their digital world first ahead of their children,there can be deep emotional consequences for the child because your actions indicate to the children that they don't matter, they're not interesting to you or that they are just disturbing you hence a disconnect between you and your kids.

You might think this is no big deal and that you can control it but recent occurrences have shown that it could get out of hand if not monitored. Just last week 24 year old Cody Wygant in the US killed his 16month old son because the boy’s crying distracted him from playing a video game.

Rather than attend to his son’s crying, Cody used his hands to cover the boy’s mouth, dumped him in his playpen and covered him from head to toe with a blanket so his crying won’t distract him from the video game!

Unfortunately by the time he finished playing the game and checked on the boy he was already dead…Cody has now been charged with third degree murder and child neglect will that bring the dead child back to life??

So in as much as mobile devices and technology have got their advantages let’s not allow it totally take over our lives to the detriment of what should really matter around us.

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