ENG 115 Personal Essay: Exploring Technology's Impact on Toddlers

This personal essay delves into the effects of technology on toddlers, focusing on the author's personal experiences and observations. The essay's central argument is that excessive technology use poses significant concerns due to problematic behavioral patterns, including insufficient sleep, impaired social skills, and delays in learning. The author uses their own child's experiences with phones, video games, and TV to illustrate these points. The essay identifies three key reasons for concern: poor social skills, delays in learning, and health risks such as obesity. It discusses how technology replaces physical interactions, detaches families, and potentially leads to attention deficit disorders. The author references research to support the negative impacts of screen time, recommending that children should spend more time interacting with peers outside. The conclusion emphasizes the need for parents to teach self-control and limit children's time on electronics, while also acknowledging technology's inevitability in modern life and the need for balance.

Running head: PSYCHOLOGY
Psychology
Name:
Institution:
Date:

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Introduction
In today’s society, every child especially in developed countries has some technology in
their hands. Monitoring is done by the use of technology. This is a great thing but also could
change to the worst in some cases. Most of the parents don’t always watch their kids while with
these technological devices.
Thesis statement
Technology is a major concern because of the behavioral pattern that are problematic
like not having enough sleep, poor social skills and delays in learning. Monitoring toddlers is
therefore a concern.
Three reasons
The reasons include; social wellness with the childrens peers(Poor social skills), delays
in learning and health risks like obesity.
In my case, my baby uses the phone every day for games and fun. She also has access to
TV content including movies and video games (Connell, et al, 2015). This has exposed her to a
lot of violent and aggressive content. The violent content do scare skids. Most of the parents
believe that their children can never be influenced in a negative way by the technology.
Effects of Excessive technological use by children
Due to so many hours that the toddlers use in sitting down, most of them have developed
health problems like obesity. Most of the parents want their children to be stay focused in their
school work but most of them spend a lot of time playing video games, they will not spend
enough time in learning. Electronics has replaced the physical contact that causes social
interactions to being children’s best friend. Children using a lot of computer and technologies
constantly interact less with their peers (Franco, Malhotra, & Simonovits, 2016). The family
has also been detached to each other and also have trouble initiating any interactions with their

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peers and their parents too. As a family, it is the duty of the parents to ensure that there is
connection. Parents are also using technology to keep their kids occupied when they are busy
driving, shopping, working etc. this can easily escalate to unhealthy habits persistently even in
adulthood. Physical interactions is reduced by constant use of technology.
The American Pediatric Association recommend that children below the age of 10
should use four days per week playing outside with their peers. The kids in this age bracket
spend more than five hours a day on big screens which is worrying (Takacs,et al,2015).
Excessive playing of video games and watching Televisions affects mental processing abilities
in this children. The cause of loss of attention and focus or ADHD is mainly because of
technology use at a very young age. Children who watch more than 5 hrs. of television a day
tend to have more symptoms of ADHD than children who spent only two hours.
Conclusion
In conclusion, children ought to be taught at an early age to build healthy
relationships building with the society. As parents we know that we need temporary relief
and TV provide the break that we need. However, the electronics cannot substitute social and
emotional connections between the parents and their kids (Thompson, 2016). Technology is
also impossible to avoid it since it is available everywhere. Overuse can cause harmful effects
to the children and they should be taught self-control and how to limit the time spent on
electronics.

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References
Connell, S. L., Lauricella, A. R., & Wartella, E. (2015). Parental co-use of media technology
with their young children in the USA. Journal of Children and Media, 9(1), 5-21.
Franco, A., Malhotra, N., & Simonovits, G. (2016). Underreporting in psychology
experiments: Evidence from a study registry. Social Psychological and Personality
Science, 7(1), 8-12.
Takacs, Z. K., Swart, E. K., & Bus, A. G. (2015). Benefits and pitfalls of multimedia and
interactive features in technology-enhanced storybooks: A meta-analysis. Review of
educational research, 85(4), 698-739.
Thompson, M. (2016). Unboxing toddlers and technology: An ethnographic case
study. International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and
Development, 1(5), 49-60.