The Badger recently witnessed a young mother struggling to deal with the noisy, stamping feet tantrum of her infant son at the school gates. The reason for the boy’s tantrum became clear on walking past; his mother had confiscated his mobile phone! The Badger felt rather sad that such a young child had and was so attached to a mobile phone. It was also sad to see the lad’s mum making as much noise as her son by deploying shouting from the arsenal of parenting skills. My, how the world’s changed.
Should infants have their own mobile phones? Has modern tech infiltrated our lives to such an extent that it’s become unhealthily addictive for infants, children, and adults? Will society descend into anarchy if the internet suffers a catastrophic outage, for example, as a result of a solar superstorm? When tech has become such an important tool in our day to day lives then the answers to such questions are not as straightforward as Yes or No. Tech was a boon during the pandemic, but the Badger senses that the more we used it the more we’ve come to appreciate that a) it’s a tool and not a lifestyle or ideology, b) it can be corrosive to well-being if used unwisely, and c) that we need real rather than virtual social interactions in our lives because they’re more important to our holistic well-being. The use of tech during the pandemic has opened the eyes of adults, parents, and children to the downsides of letting it dominate our lives.
One opinion expressed in The Register’s recent weekly debate on the motion ‘Technology widens the education divide’ was that ‘‘tech’ has massively overreached the point where it’s helpful, and is now obstinately wedged into every single corner of our lives, to the detriment of our ability to think and act as independent human beings’. Harsh, but it’s a growing sentiment. Another interesting contribution to the debate came from Maria Russell, an early-years teacher in North London, who observed that when her young pupils returned to school, their attitudes had changed due to mixed experiences with technology during the pandemic. Technology has lost its association with ‘fun’ and become less compelling for her pupils who now crave completely different things like climbing, playing with their friends, reading physical books, and having stories read to them.
Does this mean we might see infants with mobile phones as the exception rather than the norm in the future? Who knows, but when early-years school children don’t consider tech as much ‘fun’ as they used to pre-pandemic, then a seed of change is germinating that could blossom into significant shifts in attitudes towards the tech in our lives as this generation grows up. Time, as they say, will tell.
