How much Internet access should children have?
The year since March 2020 when schools and colleges shut down in response to Covid-19 protocols has been horrifying for parents.
It did not help that the education ministry favoured online learning, affording children and teens unprecedented access to the internet.
But as parents scratch around for survival during these hard times, young people have been left to their own designs, with a strange companion— the internet—which is here to stay.
Consequently, parents have been under pressure to provide both the device and connectivity for homeschooling.
For all the possibilities the internet avails, monitoring and management of its use is a must for parents. But whether that is even possible is the question.
With the internet, young people are in a carnival mood because they love social media.
Once connected, they plunge into Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, videogames or Facebook where they can socialise and operate independently.
In the book titled Plugged In, Valkenburg and Piotrowsky provide a detailed account of properties of social media that are appealing to adolescents.
They say social media affords users real-time communication- either anonymous or linked to true identity.
It also allows free self-expression, unlimited access to information, contact with others and freedom of choice of nature and size of audience, with copy-share capabilities, or storage and retrieval of multimedia.
With those privileges, adolescents find in social media a platform for autonomy, independence and a strong sense of free will, which parents would ordinarily reprimand.
Most important for them, but rather uncanny and disturbing for parents, is the split personality social media permits.
It may not surprise that a single teen would project an image at home or school totally different from multiple other images of them on several social media accounts.
However, the biggest casualty of internet connectivity among the youth is print media, specifically books.
Parents almost everywhere complain their children no longer read books. Already addicted to information packaged in audio, photo, video, short text or blog forms, young people simply have no interest in books.
It seems they lost the patience and endurance of flipping through pages to the instant gratification these formats provide. Surprisingly, young netizens don’t like eBooks either.
The decline in reading print is worrying since young people won’t develop their writing skills without it.
Reading print stands in stark contrast from reading online because it appeals to different senses and skills.
At the launch of the iPhone in 2007, then Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the smartphone would change everything, and it has.
With the smartphone’s global penetration which now stands way above 40 per cent - four times higher than in 2011, possibilities for social interaction has been taken to a whole new level!
Parents who eagerly acquired the device for their children, and were probably upbeat about it, now begin to helplessly countenance changes it has brought into their lives.
At home, teenagers are locked up in their rooms watching, browsing or chatting. They no longer have time for conversation and household chores.
Addiction to social media has been found to come with strange habits like social isolation and mental health problems.
The question in every parent’s mind right now is what to do? Tied to that problem is how to deal with the rebellion that follows if they try to withdraw devices and connectivity they already privileged their children with.
Research has proven that taking away devices, disconnecting TV, or disabling Wi-Fi isn’t the solution.
Rather, parents should first keenly understand offerings of the internet vis-à-vis needs and interests of their children.
For instance, to make young people read books for pleasure, parents should ensure interesting books are available at home, and at strategic places.
For young people who love fiction, entice them with short story collections before introducing full length novels.
Last, but not least, try to read yourself so that you come across as the ideal model for the habits you want your children to pick up. — The writer comments on topical issues
