What is the impact of the Internet on our children

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Many parents worry that their child spends a lot of time on the Internet. This is bad for health, deprives him of live communication, teaches bad things and makes him unfit for real life. Let's find out how things really are.

Recently, I became a casual witness to a conversation between two women who complained that the Internet corrupts children and makes them unsuitable for life. The conversation proceeded in the mainstream "in the days of our youth, children were capable, responsive, sociable and literate, now all this is not, and one of the reasons is the Internet."

This is not the only opinion, I have already heard many times how adults condemn the emergence of the Internet. But let's remember what life was like without the Internet in reality? I will describe several episodes from my life, perhaps they will seem familiar to you.

I grew up in a closed military city, from which it was not easy to leave, let alone enter. For this reason, relatives or just new people rarely appeared in our town. I was lucky: my parents took me to my grandmother's 600 kilometers from home in the summer, and this trip turned into an adventure that I had been waiting for a whole year. The rest of the children did not know what the world looked like outside the city. And when I returned from the trip, the whole yard gathered to listen to the story of my trip.

We heard something about Disneyland, but did not understand what it really is and where exactly it is. We didn't have Google to find photos, videos, or the ability to ask someone. We made up stories ourselves and told them to each other. Disneyland, like many other things incomprehensible to us, remained shrouded in secrets and mysteries for many years.

We didn't have YouTube, and we watched cartoons, films, programs several times in a row; read the same books that were passed from hand to hand; told stories that roamed by word of mouth.

Our horizons were very limited. We were too much the same. And it made life boring. It was rare to hear something new, except that fresh yard gossip.

And what happened to people who were different from the rest in their tastes, preferences or way of thinking? They became outcasts. They had no one to communicate with, no one understood them, they felt trapped, and it drove some crazy. I remember at school we had several cases of suicide among "other" children.

My father often left for several months. Once he was gone for almost a year. There was no Skype at that time, and we talked on the phone once or twice a month. In fact, it was difficult to call it a conversation, the connection was expensive and lousy, so all communication was limited to a few general questions about health and business.

When we grew up a little, my best friend left to live in another city. It was a great loss for me. I remember how hard it was for me to come to terms with it. For a while we tried to keep in touch through letters, but soon this also stopped. We found each other only after many years, when social networks appeared.

Today I use Google to broaden my child's horizons. For example, yesterday, with the help of a camera installed at the zoo, we observed how elephants are fed in Africa. And a few days ago we had an online excursion to Niagara Falls. On YouTube we find cartoons about how things work. On Ozon.ru we select books that we read before going to bed. And if you need to leave for a couple of days, then using Viber we communicate as much as we want.

And I understand that my four-year-old child knows much more about this world in his years than I knew in my 10 years. So who among us is no longer fit for life?

I mean, it’s impossible to say unequivocally that the Internet is a universal evil. Yes, the Network can also have a negative impact on the child, but, as psychologists say, this is a consequence of the problem, and not the problem itself.

If the child spends all the time on the Internet, perhaps he lacks communication. Maybe there are problems with peers. Maybe the parents don't pay enough attention. Or maybe the child just has a lot of free time, and he does not know how to dispose of it, but this is again an omission of the parents.

I am not a child psychologist to diagnose. If you see that your child spends a lot of time on the Internet, talk to him and try to understand the reason that makes him do it. And if everything is too complicated, contact a knowledgeable specialist.

I just want to say that the Internet has opened up a lot of opportunities for the development and education of our children, and how we use these opportunities (and whether we will use them at all) is already a personal matter for each parent.