flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:

benignmilitancy:

yardsards:

I hate it when people say technology is taking away kids’ childhoods
If anything, it’s actually giving kids more of an opportunity to let their imagination out

A lot of times when I let kids play on my phone, they go for the drawing app.
I watched a girl on the bus write a silly poem about her friends and then laugh as she made Siri read it
I hear children say to their friends “hey, FaceTime me later” because they still want to talk face to face even when they’re far away.
I see kids sitting, who would feel lonely and ignored if it weren’t for the fact that they’re texting their friends who are far away.
Children still climb trees. They might just take a selfie from the top to show off how high they’ve gotten.
They can immediately read the next book of their favorite series on their Kindles.
Most kids would still be up for a game of cops and robbers. Or maybe they’d google rules to another game they haven’t played yet.
When children wonder why the sky is blue, they don’t get an exasperated “I don’t know” from tired adults. They can go on Wikipedia and read about light waves and our atmosphere.
They show off the elaborate buildings they created on Minecraft.

Technology isn’t ruining childhoods, it’s enhancing them.

Love this post so much to counteract much of the pessimism surrounding technology and kids. It’s not stealing kids’ innocence, just another means of expressing it. And so often do I hear that all kids do these days is “play on their phones” instead of doing other things, it’s starting to sound like a broken record. >.>

Heck, it reminds me of the first time our family got a computer; sure, I was on it all the time, but it afforded me a chance to talk more often with my best friend at the time. It filled in that boredom that would have otherwise been filled with TV and made me curious about the world.

Whenever an adult starts complaining about technology taking away kids’ childhoods they should stop and consider what they’re doing, as an adult, to keep those childhoods safe. Or if they’re maybe not actually obstructing their kids in the pursuit of their needs.

‘Get off the computer’ and ‘turn off your phone’ but no real understanding of what the kids are getting from technology that their adults fail to provide for them.

Like, privacy from monitoring by their parents. Like interaction with their peers. Like a limitless world where they can make their own space without being fenced in, chastised, restricted, criticised. Like finding new knowledge. Like fun. Like creativity.

It’s an adult guardian’s responsibility to try to understand that world instead of blaming it for being more welcoming to their kid than they are.