Smartphone Usage in Children - Essay Sample

Thesis: Deciding when a child is ready to begin using a smartphone is a parent's personal decision. Even though parents link technology to mostly adverse outcomes in children, they should embrace it in a smart way and familiarize themselves with the impacts it has on children and how to make it work as we are in a digital world. Parents should be the best judges to know when their child is ready as kids are different, and circumstances for need vary in various households.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

Introduction

Innovation has done a ton to make our lives simpler and more effective. Among these are smartphones that have become widespread. Their dispersion has spread from grown-ups to high school students, middle school, and now even elementary school (Akimoto). The pattern has prompted the inquiry on when and by what means should kids use smartphones. Research has found that it highly depends on the child and that there is no arbitrary age for when a child should own a smartphone. However, parents have to be aware of what the platform is capable of doing. The most significant issue may not be the time of inception for a smartphone but rather how we help our youngsters use it, keep rules, and earnestly work to evade addiction throughout everyday life.

The use of smartphones has become rampant because time after time, educators and guardians will utilize it as an advanced pacifier and an approach to taking a break so they can do other things. Parents believe they must continuously keep kids entertained and never bored. Therefore, when in line for anything, or when bored, children receive smartphones to keep them busy. Parents are supposed to be the primary influence in a kid's life and what they are modeling in their own experiences with their phones reflects positively on how their children behave with their smartphones.

According to the Ofcom research on Media Use and Attitudes, the main reason that parents get their children smartphones is for safety purposes. It is for them to communicate and keep track of their children wherever they might be. Parents get smartphones for their kids for educational and research purposes, for their kids to be tech-savvy and to keep the children entertained. Peer pressure and the need for them to distract their children as they engage in other activities encourage smartphone use.

On the other hand, children mostly use their smartphones to play games, live videos, engage in social media, do their homework, and communicate with friends and relatives. Children also broadly use their phones to listen to music and in taking photos and videos.

Innovation, including smartphone utilization, can be essential for effective educating and learning techniques (Brooks). Toddlers are not prepared to utilize applications alone; however, they can be acquainted with sharing, alternating, and using innovation to energize development and gross-engine aptitudes with assistance from grown-ups. Inventive play and rising innovativeness are a vital aspect of preschoolers' turn of events. As opposed to prevalent thinking, screen time does not need to smother imagination. Puerling has discovered that specific applications can improve this age gathering's creative play (Brooks). Smartphones have also proved to help children do homework and research, read online during a commute, and record classes.

Despite how great smartphones are, they have several shortcomings. A recent report of eighth-graders by Jene Twenge found that heavy smartphone users are 56% bound to say they are miserable, 27% are bound to be depressed, and 35% are bound to have an anger factor self-destruction. Studies have shown that youngsters lack mental health at their age to have the option to explore the precarious social circumstances that accompany online media (McInerny). Nighttime cell use can disrupt sleep, cause anxiety, and sometimes depression, emotional fragility, and sometimes acting out. Phones in classrooms also speak to a tremendous degree of allurement for students and therefore cause distractions (Brooks)

Smartphones are a door to an immense word brimming with content that youthful eyes should not see. Online, children can easily access adult content. The news is overflowing with youngsters' accounts associated with web wrongdoing or turning out to be casualties of harassing on informal communities (Akimoto). Also, the amount of time smartphones take away from parent-children interactions impact on the quality of their relationship. Smartphones also affect kids' social lives. They can hardly have face-to-face interactions as everyone is looking at their phones and sharing too much information online—a concern as there is the worry that companies are collecting information about the children's activities.

According to research, kids' utilization of versatile and intuitive media has quickly expanded over the past decade. Ongoing assessments uncover that most guardians own smartphones on which they permit their kids to play games or watch recordings. Up to 75% of little youngsters have their tablets, and newborn children begin handling smartphones during the preceding year of life (Radesky et al.). On a survey done to 1000 Americans, including men and women of all ages, when the ideal age for children to start using smartphones, 40% responded by saying kids should wait until middle school to get one. 33.3% said high school, 17.7% older than high school, 5.9% elementary school, and 2.4% younger than preschool, while 0.9% stated preschool.

Most adults believe that even though most children begin requesting and getting smartphones as early as elementary school, teens have more extracurricular and social exercises that make having a smartphone valuable and helpful. They may require a phone to impart drop-offs and pick-ups and arrange activities with companions along these lines. A ton of their companions will have telephones now, so they begin getting forgotten about undeniably on the off chance that they are not ready to keep in contact with them (Brooks).

In Ofcom's research, most children who owned a smartphone were between 12-15 years old, while some kids as young as three-year-olds owned smartphones. The results of the research areas indicate below:

Fig. 1: Rate of smartphone ownership among children between 3-15 years (Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report 2019).

Parents who fear the implications of smartphones on their children consider other alternatives like the basic telephones. Telephones with limited usefulness permit children to associate with their companions yet then not be sucked into a portion of the show that happens on social media. Another sure about a starter telephone is it is trying things out. On the off chance that the children can exhibit that they can deal with such a phone mindfully, they can step up to a smartphone at that point in the long run. As children are getting more established, parents need to give them more self-rule. The self-rule is a significant formative thought so that children can develop to be dependable grown-ups (Brooks).

The limitations to alternative means are that even though basic telephones might be useful to younger children when their friends upgrade to smartphones, online socialization turns into an incredible draw. Also, guardians may need their children to become computerized educated and to fit in with their young companions who likewise have the most recent devices (Akimoto).

Children need to earn the privilege of owning a smartphone, and just because a parent is getting their child a phone, it does not mean they get to have unmitigated access to it. Grades, emotional regulation, and behavior have to be in line both at home and at school. Training has to come when a guardian gives their child a smartphone. They have to know the dangers and the safety procedures that come with owning the device to ensure that they do not fall into destructive patterns.

Parents need to be clear about what their desires and limits are. Limits should be a discourse so that the kids can comprehend that there are results of misuse. As a rule, these outcomes should include losing admittance to the smartphone for a specific timeframe (Brooks). Some of the limitations include limiting the amount of data and voice children have and not allowing smartphone use at certain times. Parents can also come up with a central charging station at night to ensure youngsters do not sleep with their phones. The American Foundation of Pediatrics suggestions are still genuinely severe, restricting screen time for children ages two to five to only one hour out of each day (Brooks).

Certain limitations may come with parents trying to monitor their children's use of smartphones. There are applications accessible that guardians can use to build security on their youngsters' cell phones. Regardless of whether the guardians are technically knowledgeable enough to introduce these, their children are regularly more astute still and skill to overcome the limitations. Parents may also find it hard to screen content when kids utilize handheld gadgets independently since exposure happens in small bursts, which are more averse to be recalled than more extended interactions (Radesky et al.)

We should embrace technology and use it in a manner that supports inventiveness and cooperation in kids. With a little exertion, it is possible to utilize insightful techniques that help youngsters' development. Parents are advised to pick intuitive, age-fitting applications and projects that they can use with kids to support their learning. In spite of the fact that nobody can anticipate precisely how innovation will keep on extending, Puerling accepts that innovativeness, joint effort, critical thinking aptitudes and coding capacities will work well for kids as they develop more established—all abilities that are being created in grade-schoolers. This is additionally a chance to support youngsters' rising pro (Brooks).

Some of the factors a parent should consider before buying their child a smartphone are their sense of responsibility to take great care of the phone and need to be in constant contact for safety reasons. Parents should also consider whether easy accessibility to their child’s friends would be beneficial. Children should be regarded as responsible in terms of how they behave with others. Before a phone is handed to them, they have to show willingness not to bother others in their use. Their adherence to rules is also a significant factor to consider (“What's the Right Age for Parents to Get Their Kids a Cell Phone?”).

Conclusion

In conclusion, there is no legal rule for a parent to decide when a youngster might be prepared for a smartphone. When and how guardians and parents introduce smartphones to their children will consistently be an individual choice for them and their families. It will always demand the parent's longstanding consideration and track. It is essential for parents to know and understand how their child behaves when accessing smartphones to make the right decision.

Works Cited

Akimoto, Akky. “The Pros and Cons of Kids Owning Smartphones.” The Japan Times, www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2014/07/12/digital/pros-cons-kids-owning-smartphones/.

Brooks, Ashley. Kids and Technology: Age-Appropriate Milestones to Aim For. 17 Sept. 2018, www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/technology/blog/kids-and-technology/.

Brooks, Mike. “At What Age Should I Get My Child a Smartphone?” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 30 Oct. 2018, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/tech-happy-life/201810/what-age-should-i-get-my-child-smartphone.