Sagar Basisth (Sharma)
Sagar Basisth Sharma is a known face in the Comedy industry. He is a writer and is presently working as research and data analyst at a Siliguri based portal The Cord.
- Sagar Basisth (Sharma)#molongui-disabled-link
- Sagar Basisth (Sharma)#molongui-disabled-link
Finding an answer to your questions is not tough in modern times. You have many smartphones and inside that, you have the whole of the universe. Your answers are just a tap away, but have they made us lazy? or less intelligent? or less enthusiastic?
Let’s go back to the 90s when smartphones were not available. What would you do if you like certain music? You would roam around the streets of town for hours in search of cassettes and if you found one the amount of satisfaction would be inexpressible in terms of words. How about a movie? Go looking for its CDs all around. What if you felt like playing a certain video game? Travel to the town again into the café paying 10 rupees for one hour or so. The point is if you liked something then you had to put in an effort and since it was not available to you all the time it gave you ample reasons to do something else that was easier, like playing cricket or football with your friends on Sundays. If you didn’t know the meaning of some word then you had to find it in a dictionary by flipping pages unlike now where you can google everything. Most importantly we lived our own lives because we had no access to other people’s lives as there were no social media platforms and that for some reason made our life so happy and peaceful.
Now with smartphones in our pockets, we can talk to whomever we want, watch and listen to whatever we want and we have been so deeply into it that we cannot live without it even for a day. We keep checking our screens even if there is nothing important and in such circumstances, it gets so difficult to convince our children not to use it because we are addicted ourselves. But are we doing enough to keep them away from screens? We are not doing it for the following reasons–
- We have our hectic schedules and never have enough time for them. So give them a gadget and keep them busy.
- You have to be constantly there for your child otherwise they will keep doing mischievous things and may end up hurting themselves. They will cry, and keep demanding your time or something to eat and the best way to escape from all of these would be to give them a phone.
- There are rhymes, and alphabet songs available on Youtube so why not give them a phone so that they learn things faster?
- It is easier to feed them when they are glued to the screen because they don’t run here and there.
- There is a fear that your child may not be able to compete with other children as you feel your child too needs to have knowledge of gadgets just like any other children otherwise they cannot get along with their friends and may get isolated.
As a parent one needs to be aware of the detrimental effects of mobile phones on children. Here’s a list-
- Addiction to the gadget.
- Depression, because your child is glued to the screen at one corner of the room all the time. They have lost communication skills, they don’t talk to anyone, not even share things with the parents.
- Attention and hearing skills, because they are so focused on the screen that they don’t notice what is going on in the surroundings. You call them and they wouldn’t respond even after it falls on their ears because their brain is too busy concentrating on the contents being shown on the screen.
- It affects the nervous system. It may lead to dullness.
- Sleep disturbances because they don’t sleep on time due to addiction. They keep staring at screens even when they fall sleepy.
- Access to adult explicit content may have a very bad impact on their life. Adult and abusive contents are readily available and accessible because whether it be Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube all have gotten polluted especially due to the introduction of certain features such as reels which are highly addictive.
What is the best thing that parents can do?
- Manage ample time to play with them. Take them outside to a park or a playground. The children are mostly confined to their rooms and with nothing to do smartphones become the only option.
- It is believed that children simply copy your steps. The best way to keep them away from smartphones would be to not use it in front of them.
- Give them books instead of smartphones. Let them learn from books. Books are enough as books these days are innovative and have amazing visual illustrations to make things easy for them.
- Get them puzzles and other playing toys that would help in developing their brain. If you can keep them busy with other things and give them phones only for a limited fixed time a day with strict restrictions then things would improve because smartphone addiction among children should be a serious topic of discussion analysing the current scenario.
