There were a multitude of changes our society had to adjust to during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, whether they had been educational, stylistic or social changes. 

One of the biggest changes was the way young children became heavily dependent on their technological devices due to their parents using them as a means of distraction. 

Growing up as a Generation Z, my parents let me use our family computer after school.  

My mother let me play on a tablet every so often, and the day we went to the computer lab was my favorite part of my school week, but I was never fed constant stimulation. I had other toys that I was more interested in than a screen. In more recent years, specifically coming out of the pandemic, a dependency on technology has risen in growing children.

According to BrightCanary, the term “iPad kid” was coined by concerned social media users to describe said children who are glued to their screens. iPad kids are part of Generation Alpha, children who were born after 2010, and they “want technological stimulation at all times, and become upset when their devices are taken away.”

iPad kids can be seen in just about every public space, from restaurants to airports — their device is always at max volume and they’re usually playing some sort of overstimulating game or watching a show or movie while their parents soak up some alone time to the best of their abilities. 

While it is natural to need a break from the kids every so often — especially during the pandemic — parents who rely solely on technology to distract their children create potential risks to their children’s behavioral and emotional coping skills, creativity and motor skills.

This creates a much larger, much more difficult-to-conquer problem in the long run.

A child stuck in front of a screen during their most crucial developmental periods poses possible threats to their physical abilities, interpersonal relationships and their educational success, which in turn affects their success as adults, physically and psychologically.

An analysis of the Quebec Longitudinal Study on Child Development found that for every hour two-year-olds watch television, their participation in class decreases by 7%. Other studies have backed up this analysis by finding that the more time children spend in front of their screens, the lower their academic performance proved to be, such as a Cureus study that found that “increased exposure to television, even in the background, can affect children under five’s language use, executive functioning, and cognition.”

So not only do screens harm the lives of the children who watch them all hours of the day, but they also pose a threat to the educators in the classrooms. A child who cannot be separated from their screen without freaking out about it will not feel comfortable sitting still at a desk for hours at a time, surrounded by students who lack the communication and behavior skills to interact with, all while listening to a teacher. When these kids refuse to engage in their education and with their peers they will struggle and this will ultimately fall to the educators and the administrators.

To put it more lightly, screens should be used as a temporary distraction for children, not a permanent one. Otherwise, the more iPad kids there are, the greater risk there may be to the education system and how our society interacts.