From Teething To Technology
Here at apt we recently discovered an article about a father who was shocked to discover his 14-month old daughter had bought him a car!
How did she do this you should be wondering? Paul Soute, let his daughter play with his phone when she accidently placed a winning bid of $225 on eBay for a 1962 Austin Healey Sprite.
Paul discovered this and quickly checked his eBay account to make sure his requests for payment weren’t phishing emails and even though the seller allowed him to cancel the sale, Paul decided to keep the car to give to his daughter on her 16th birthday.
As sweet as this gesture is, it has made us debate once again how old children (or in this case, babies) should be before they are allowed to use technology, including phones and the internet, following on from our post about the OwnFone back in May. Although there is the facility to set up parental locks, where certain sites can be blocked, children are being brought up in a technology era, where they are often learning to navigate through an iPad before they even attend pre-school.
Previously the Telegraph released an article suggesting that children shouldn’t be allowed to use a computer at school until they reach the age of 9, where they argued that technology has reduced a child’s attention span.
We are unsure about this age limit but think that children should be allowed time to look at videos of their favourite cartoons or play games. Although we agree that the amount of time children spend on technology should be limited, it is important for them to be taught important actions.
Recently a three-year-old boy managed to phone 999 on his mum’s mobile after she had fallen down the stairs, which allowed for an ambulance to be called out to treat his mum for her injuries. Read more here.
We think that it is important for children to be taught how to use technology for when incidents like this occur, but to make sure that they aren’t being over exposed to the different gadgets out there which can potentially damage their ability to learn.
