Should Children Use Smartphones?

張貼日期：Jun 25, 2018 9:13:6 AM

Nicholas Yang

I joined the English teaching camp with my friends last winter and had the rare opportunity to teach English to children in Yang Min Shang Elementary School. As I was thinking it would be a very happy experience for me to teach in the elementary school, I found it all wrong after the three-day English camp. All the kids were using expensive smartphones! I also found out that almost every kid in the class had glasses on their faces. To be even worse, many of the kids even made sex-related jokes that they learned from watching bad YouTube videos on their smartphones. I was really upset about this terrible phenomenon and what kids nowadays suffer from by misusing their smartphones. I personally think a smartphone a is a wonderful tool that helps us handle tasks in our daily life. However, I believe children have high risks of misusing them and cause damages to themselves. Accordingly, I think it is a bad idea for children to use smartphones and there are three reasons to support my opposition: the prices of the smartphone, the negative influences of the Internet, and the physical problems smartphones bring to children.

Nowadays, smartphone software changes and develops so fast that our smartphones need to be replaced frequently in order to keep up the paces with the changing software. The idea of “buying an expensive smartphone and use it for decades”is impossible because durable and reliable smartphones will not bring benefits to companies. To make this business more profitable, smartphone companies strive to convince, sometimes even force customers to buy new models by making older models less compatible with the latest software. If more and more children involve in this money-eating ecosystem, parents will have to pay more to buy smartphones for their children and it will be a financial burden that only gets heavier for parents.

The Internet can bring many negative influences to children, although it is a wonderful tool that can bring us sources of knowledge. It is too easy for children to have the access of bad information on the Internet by tapping their fingers on the smartphone screens. Videos are one of the most effective types of media to convey negative contents to children and the most popular video platform is YouTube, a very popular video application on any smartphone. There are many YouTube channels that post stupid, meaningless, sometimes even sex-related videos that are inappropriate to children. Sadly, age restricting mechanism of YouTube is not well-developed so that there are so many loopholes for underage children to watch videos that they should not watch. In other words, the smartphone is the most “effective” tool for children to find inappropriate contents.

The overuse of the smartphone poses damages not only to our eyes, but also several other parts of our body. The deadliest weapon of a smartphone is LCD screen. The blue lights in LCD screens will damage our retina, causing permanent damage to it. And we will suffer from several side effects, including sleep loss, anxiety, and erratic behavior. Beside eye problems, overusing the smartphone will also create many health problems to other body parts. Neck, shoulders, and chest pain are the most common symptoms among all the smartphone users. People tend to turn their face down for many hours just to read the palm-size screen on their hand. This will result in neck spurs, pulled shoulder muscles, chest tightness, and several other physical problems. Children are in their growing stage, and it is not wise to let smartphones do any damages and interruptions while they are growing.

Smartphones not only create extra burdens to parents’ finance, but also bring negative effects to children physically and mentally. Even though a smartphone is a really helpful tool if used right, it is very easy for children to misuse this tool and cause damages to themselves. Therefore, I believe that it is not a good idea for children to use smartphones.