Noor selfie no party. Just take a look at each parent’s phone to stumble upon a gallery of photos with their “puppy”. The children became content to show off to liven up chats, receive likes and increase views: what harm can it do? Also because, a great cliché, our children are digital natives, this is how we tell them. And since they were born with technology, it is useless – we tell ourselves – to think about protecting them. Indeed: they can do even more with smartphones than we do, just watch how they handle them. Or not?
Smartphones for children because “they are digital natives”. But it’s a false myth
«Many, too many parents are not aware of the effects linked to their children’s exposure to digital devices», explains Stefania Manetti, President of the Cultural Association of Pediatricians.
Tablets and smartphones are used as effective tools to share children’s achievements and experiences with the outside world. But also how early learning places for children themselves. “And instead learning – in very young, but also in older children – it only comes through the relationship: the real one and not mediated by any device”.
The web runs fast. But children need another, slower time
Clearly, adults first of all “are surrounded by stimuli that work with increasingly faster and shorter timescales”, observes the ACP President. But our children would need to “live” another rhythm, much slower. «A book leafed through together, listening to good music, a joint drawing, or even a simple walk – concludes Manetti – require time. AND this slow time is very important, it must be cultivated as a protective factor able, in the long term, to balance the other, much faster, situations that our children will have to face.” Providing them with moments of low intensity will also allow them to “buffer, in the future, the effects of complicated situations, helping to develop resilience”.
The Carolina Foundation denies the cliché about digital natives
“They are digital natives”, they say of today’s children and teenagers. But it’s a false myth. The experts who make up the Carolina Foundation Study Center they archive as a cliché the idea that children born in the internet age have innate technological or digital abilities. The newborn who flips photos on his smartphone he’s not a little Steve Jobs: he is simply doing something he is capable of doing, that is, “feeling out” and seeing what happens.
The same gesture he would make in front of a tactile booklet, but with many other side effects. Children are children, not miniature adults, and they always need people to educate them, in all fields. Digital included.
There Carolina Foundationborn in memory of the fourteen-year-old Carolina Picchio (the first known Italian victim of cyberbullying in Italy), is today committed to the all-round protection of minors online, with activities at national and international level of awareness-raising, training, advocacy, research and emergency response. From the Research sector, the importance of information on digital and children for caring for the health of one’s children emerged as a priority. Not only with reference to adolescents, but also to protect babies with respect to the correct and conscious use of device, which have now entered everyone’s daily life. Carolina Foundation has created various awareness and information tools for parents, all accessible from the site Minorionline.com.
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