The Ipad Baby Epidemic

I’ve grown to hate my phone-and I’m not alone.

There is a rising resentment towards modern technology among kids my age. Teens today are the generation that spends half their lives on the internet-yet they’re the very ones who fear it the most.

Teens have started to gravitate towards a life less consumed by the grasp of the internet. Nokia even released a new version of their flip phone aimed at teens who want to rebel against the tyrannical reign of the modern day smart phone.

These days its rare to be immune to the internet-the shift in my life since getting a screen is undeniable. Like most kids my imagination ran wild-I would spend hours upon hours creating new worlds with my barbies, I created complex lives and social dynamics. I spent hours and hours alone, however boredom never even crossed my mind. I loved my time alone because it meant I had time to fully dive into my imagination. My barbies were ballerina dancers who secretly wanted to abandon their careers to be at stay at home moms, Barbies who got married at 18 and later abandon their cheating husbands to run away to the west coast with their best-friends to become marine biologists, whatever drama I imagined a life could have. When I wasn’t feeling my barbies I found other adventures to fill my time. I even started a newspaper in my small town a little before my eighth birthday.

My world was expansive, slightly problematic, yet beautiful.

However none of this could compare an iPhone 4-S.

On the day of my eighth birthday, I was gifted an IPhone. It made sense for me at the time. I was riding my bike all over town talking to people for my newspaper, without anyway for me to contact my parents if anything happened.

All of the sudden my eight year old self had access to more information than people born a hundred years earlier would ever get in their entire lifetime. Of course my imagination suffered. I mean, how could it not? Why imagine when it feels like every thought has already been conceptualized? The bright lights of my IPhone encapsulated me. All the entertainment I could ever ask for at the tips of my fingers.

Boredom became an apparent feeling in my life for the first time. I found myself relying on my screen for entertainment instead of my imagination.

It should be alarming that the kids of today, who are the most encompassed by the internet, are the most horrified by its effects. The truth is, we see something that a lot of older people might not see the horror in — Ipad kids.

You’ve seen them-you’re at a restaurant and look to the side, you see a little kid absolutely glued to their tablet. Cocomelon on full blast. Sticky finger prints covering the bulky colorful case.

A Tiktok with six million likes where Gen-Z user Gabesco pleas with fellow young people to not give their future kids ipads and reflects on the way iPad kids have been done wrong by the introduction to screens at such a young age, “You’ve been shoving media and screens in these kids faces since birth, they probably have no imagination-I mean they have never had to come up with any original thought. Gen-Z please, when we are older, don’t give your kids iPads at the dinner table.”

It may not seem rational for teenagers with ten hour screen times to be horrified by a child with the very addiction most of us have-but thats the thing-it takes one to know one. We are the former iPad kids. We have seen first hand the damage that unrestricted internet access at a young age can have. It isn’t a secret that short form content leaves people brain rotted and so many people my age have damaged their dopamine receptors, creating this high maintenance need to be entertained all of the time.

This goes beyond younger people, I mean, most people cannot remember a time they’ve eaten alone without staring at a screen. Why purposely set up our kids to be the same way?

But hey- internet fluency shouldn’t be something to snark at, not in the day and age where AI is starting to look more and more like an 80s movie predicting end times. Who knows the internet better than kids raised on it. We live in a technology based society! Kids need to know how to navigate the internet! And to a certain extent this is true, however society is not some abstract thing- it’s you. Ipad kids create iPad adults who create iPad babies who will probably grow up and create a real life Maximum Overdrive (1986.) You want to the world to be less reliant on technology-stop raising kids reliant on technology.

And of course, its easy for us to say this when most of us do not have kids. It is easy to scoff at millennials for giving their children a screen to shut them up, when we haven’t had a kid we needed to shut up. I am sure many of us are gonna get older, have kids and cave on a lot of the morals and no-go’s we have around parenthood, however younger people carry with them an awareness of the internet that the majority of previous generations haven’t held. And this awareness around the damage the internet could cause is something that we can only hope will be used to protect the minds of our kids, the future generation.

So for me, no thanks apple-I’m returning to the primitive-to the flip phone.