By Alleen Erchoff-Costet
Whether you’re an adult or a teenager, are you aware of how often you check your phone every day? According to a study by Adolescent Brain Cognitive Devel-opment (ABCD), teens pick up their phone 100 times a day, which is far more than what adults do. As new generations grow up, we can see the excessive amount of screen time and its impact on how younger children speak and act. Recently, younger children have been acting a lot more mature and older for their age which is a great difference from children just 10 years ago. As someone who’s Gen z, I can definitely see a difference between my generation and Generation Alpha. A Kaiser Family Foundation study reports that “children spend more hours engaging with various electronic media — TV, games, videos and other online entertainments — than they spend in school.” Why is that?
Have you ever been told “back in my day …” or “when I was your age …”? I’m sure we all have. Before we had Snapchat, Instagram, Tiktok, and Facebook, teenagers used to call people, read books, write handwritten notes to each other, hang out in person with their friends, and more. Things used to be a lot different with teenagers and how they interacted with their friends. Of course there are still people who do these things, but it’s less common now within the younger generations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, younger children were apart from their friends and families for months, causing lots of people to lose their social skills. The pandemic shaped children’s identities, thoughts, and personalities as it lasted for a few years while they were still growing up.
COVID-19 isn’t the only thing changing the way children act. Social media has played a huge part in not only the way teenagers and children act, but also their mental health. According to the National Institutes of Health, there has been a significant increase in depression and suicide rates, and 1 in 5 children are depressed. Kids play outside a lot less, causing them not to get enough sunlight which can cause health issues and depressive thoughts. Instead, they are inside on their phones doomscrolling or watching brain rot content. Social media has changed drastically over the last 30 years. There are a lot of unsafe things that can happen online, especially with children. They can easily believe things they see online and talk to people who are much older than them. Children can also be exposed to the idea of many inappropriate things. There is a ton of unfiltered content online that kids can easily run across just by scrolling through youtube or tiktok. Not only that, but they have access to shows that are for older teenagers and have super mature content in them and are being revealed to have lots of bad images and language.
Part of the problem with children being exposed to so many bad things includes the fact that parents don’t monitor their child’s device as much as they should. A lot of adults just think “Oh I’ll just download a few games for them and they should be fine!” which is completely wrong. Kids can figure out how to download other apps and search up inappropriate things. Children can also be introduced to inappropriate language, such as swear words, which is not something they should be saying. Kids will be on their devices all day long, and having them be on a screen all day can trigger emotional outrages once taken away and will cause them to grow up stubborn.
There are a lot of other bigger topics that I did not touch on, such as peer pressure, the takeover of AI, underage drug abuse, cyberbullying, and more. There has been a significant change from how children act now from how they have acted in the past. The damage done to younger generations will only get worse over time and will affect the generations to come. So what do you think? Is modern culture ruining childhood?
Alleen Erchoff-Costet is a Spring Grove High School student, one of 10 area students participating in the Journal Writing Project, now in its 27th year.
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