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Five-year-olds are being given smart phones as birthday presents by trendy middle class Kenyan parents.
By their 10th birthdays smartphones are replaced with tablets. Just why there is a trend of high end flats announcing they have free and fast Wi-Fi.
Parents think these gadgets are the ‘in-thing’ gift accessories; child experts are warning of the consequences in wait despite the advantage of the Internet replacing evening tuition.
While parents feel very proud showing off their smart kids and their adeptness with complicated gadgets, the future of spoiling them with mobile technology is not as bright as the screen your child flips with a tiny finger that is not even three years old. You could be raising a zombie!
Prof Okumu Bigambo told The Nairobian that giving young kids mobile phones amounts to creating a crisis as a smart phone “grows the child’s mind faster and they start handling technology at an age that is below their expectation.
The child’s chronological age is different, but technological age is higher, so it raises a crisis in the mind of the child,” explains the associate professor of communications and human resource development at Moi University.
The educationist adds: “The child becomes dependent on technology, so their interpretation of normal life is affected. The human aspect of the child is rerouted and this child will not grow up normal. I call it maladjustment.”
Prof Bigambo further explains that the argument of parents justifying the giving of phones as accessories for research and educational needs of their children, who on average, barely know the alphabet well, turns children into zombies.
“The child turns out to have nothing else to do with normal relationships and interactions. They are into technological relationships,” says Prof Bigambo, whose doctoral thesis had emphasis on ‘use of interactive media skills for competitive human resource management.’
“The child is withdrawn from relating with parents, siblings and friends at a school going age and removed from human socialization. There is a contradiction and a mismatch,” argues Prof Bigambo.
Liz Khaemba, a clinical child psychologist at Transformative Learning told The Nairobian that parents need to think more about what extra access their children get when given a smartphone and the options available as opposed to an old phone model phone that is only for calling and messaging.
“I think a lot of it goes to the parenting style of that home. You don’t have to have a child who is on a smart phone,” and for educational needs then “There are still computers where you can see what they access, with filters,” said Khaemba, adding, “We can’t just say the Internet spoilt your child, because you lost control the moment you bought that smart phone.”
Khaemba blames the onslaught of smartphones and the repercussions there in on parents who have a laissez faire attitude towards parenting children who, as they grow, don’t mind being on their own and so “when they have a phone that is responsive to everyone of their desire available then they will take that option.”
Indeed, in majority of homes, kids are given phones by their parents who desire to check on their safety, needs, concerns and general surveillance and these smart phones are now the new toys.
And though deemed necessary for say, a singe parent bringing up an only child, the kind of stuff children do with their phones - which some parents buy as status symbols - can be shocking.
