Pretoria - They’re 10 times more likely to smile at their cellphones than a human being.
They can multitask but their attention span is short – you’ve got 10 seconds before they lose interest.
This is generation Z, children born from the year 2000, who have been dubbed technology natives.
Impressive as their tech-savvy ways may be, it can spell doom for their mental and physical development if not properly managed.
Speaking at the Southern Africa Play Conference recently, University of Johannesburg Professor Jannie Ferreira said children who spend too much time on cellphones and tablets and have little to no playtime are at risk of being physically illiterate.
The conference was hosted by Cotlands, a non-profit children’s organisation that focuses on early childhood learning.
Ferreira, whose research interest areas include learning and reading problems among children and community optometry, said physical literacy encompasses a child’s agility, speed, co-ordination and balance.
Children who did not engage in adequate physical activity in their early years would struggle to cope academically when they reached formal schooling.
“A child who is not physically literate will struggle to be numerical and reading literate and most likely be considered as having a learning disability.”
Ferreira said that considering the environment in which children grew up today, the development of their motor skills through physical activity could no longer be taken for granted. “There has to be (a concerted effort) to get children to play.”
Ferreira said the development of visual-motor skills – which cover eye-hand and eye-body co-ordination, visual concentration and adjustability – were also being hindered.
He said visual impairment meant the child would struggle to copy from the blackboard, their writing and drawing would be sloppy (the child would not be able to write in the lines) and their writing would be poorly spaced.
The child would also have trouble completing tasks on time, would respond better orally than in writing, would avoid reading and skip or read wrong words and complain about eye fatigue and headaches. Ferreira said they were also likely to suffer from near sightedness.
He said the misuse of technological devices was becoming the number one cause for preventative blindness.
“In my days, if you had three children in the whole school who wore glasses that was a lot. Now you have 10 children in one class wearing glasses. The biggest babysitters today are the iPad… and the cellphone. I already see the (impact of this) in my practice. Children are getting squints because of tablets and I’m talking about children under the age of three. Vision is more than just seeing… it covers visual acuity, fusion, depth perception… and colour vision and these are all the things you need in the classroom.”
Ferreira said the problems don’t mean that technology in its entirety was bad for children’s development, but rather that it should be properly managed without neglecting the other aspects.
“Technology is developing children that are not adapted to the demands of the school system and other demands they’ll face later in life.
“We can’t get rid of technology… the challenge is how we deal with it and use it in a responsible way. Computer literacy is a basic requirement for children to go forward.”
Ferreira said the fact that schools were moving towards loading textbooks and other study material on to tablets meant the education system must be altered to focus on activities that would develop children physically to counter the effects of using technology devices more.
“Play is much more than just play. We can’t lose it. If we lose play, we’ll lose this generation.”
Pretoria News