I stumbled across a video the other day and was genuinely troubled by what I saw. It is not unusual to see children riding in grocery baskets holding a tablet encased in a thick purple cover, completely mesmerized by what is on the screen. We see them in strollers at the mall, in the family van, at the Dr’s office watching……….what?
As it turns out there are these videos of a pair of hands unwrapping a chocolate egg and revealing the toy inside, and then repeating the exercise over and over and over and the videos can last as long as 7 minutes or more. Some of these videos have hundreds of thousands of views and as it turns out, children will watch them for hours on end.
Why? Because views equal dollars. Simple as that. Except we have to ask if indeed it is all that simple.
Are we programming young minds to click and accept what they are shown? And what about autoplay? These seemingly mindless, harmless videos can progress through the thousands of Youtube choices and end up in some very weird, scary places. Here is the concern. We don’t know who or what makes these videos and we don’t know what kind of impact it has on a child’s mind. If we are concerned about the impact of Facebook and Twitter on us, perhaps we should think very seriously about what we are allowing our children to watch.
You can go to our website and find a link to the TED talk mentioned here and you can find it on our Facebook page as well. It may well be worth the few minutes you take to watch and form your own opinions about what our children are watching and why.
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