Feeding our kids’ internet addiction
Re: “Balance your ‘digital nutrition’” (You, April 29)
We are all living in a human experiment. We are surrounded by Wi-Fi and computer screens and we hope it
will be good for us in the end. But we know deep down it’s probably not.
It’s one thing for adults to be complaining about not being able to put down their social media and struggling to balance their “digital nutrition.” But what do we do for our children who do not have the mental capacity to recognize and control their excessive digital use while at the same time are required to use digital devices for their schools, to correspond with their friends, to listen to music, to study after school, for entertainment, as phones?
We, parents, are all silent sufferers watching our children become addicted to the internet and screens as we try ad hoc methods to control their usage. Talk to any parent of a teenager and we sort of laugh and complain, but we are all panicking inside about the addiction that our children have acquired. We don’t talk openly because to talk about our concern shows that we are not good parents and have let our children become addicted. (The recent series in the Gazette about Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder talks exactly about this parental shame.)
Well, I admit it — I gave my son the “drug” that caused his addiction, not through neglect or lack of love, but through naivety and inexperience (I haven’t been a mother before). I sent my child to a school that requires an iPad for schooling, and didn’t receive any real, timely advice from them as to how to manage this. I let my son build a computer because it sounded like a good learning experience. I let my son play video games with his friends because he wanted to socialize. I let him watch movies because he wanted to chill out and relax. I gave him a phone so I can contact him.
Unfortunately, now he and his peers don’t know what to do if there isn’t a screen involved.
I suppose 40 years from now we will all look back and see how this was an experiment gone bad. But right now, my son and his generation are suffering.
Mira Katnick, Westmount