> These devices are quickly changing childhood for children. Playing outdoors, spending time with friends, reading books and hanging out with family is happening a lot less to make room for hours of snap chatting, instagramming, and catching up on You Tube.
I feel like this rhetoric also existed when I was in middle school, well before smartphones. The villain then was TV and violent video games, and there were similar campaigns to “cut the cord” (I remember my school having a giant fake plug a bunch of kids pulled of of a socket symbolically). The idea then, as now, was that kids are spending less time outdoors, reading books, etc.
I think this is a perennial reaction of parents to a changing world and the disparity between their childhood and their children’s childhoods.
I feel like this rhetoric also existed when I was in middle school, well before smartphones. The villain then was TV and violent video games, and there were similar campaigns to “cut the cord” (I remember my school having a giant fake plug a bunch of kids pulled of of a socket symbolically). The idea then, as now, was that kids are spending less time outdoors, reading books, etc.
I think this is a perennial reaction of parents to a changing world and the disparity between their childhood and their children’s childhoods.