When you see a nine-year child locking herself or himself in a room for a couple of days in the company of a phone what will you do? When you see a nine-year-old child watching pornographic materials what will you do? Well, these are among the adverse effects of mobile on present children. Cases of phone addiction are anything to go by. You find a young child who cannot do anything himself in an absence of a phone. A phone determines their waking up and their sleeping time. Time to eat there is a phone at their fingertips. They get games and any other kind of entertainment from mobile phones. All their habits are centered on mobile phones. Mobile phones are very essential for one to have but we have a long way to go for them to be used for right purposes especially by the children. What has to be made clear is that parents should strictly play the role of ensuring that they know the content that children access in the mobile phones just the same way they choose for them what food to eat, what cloths to put on and which people to interact with. Research shows that cases of children communicating with strangers and ending up into scary situations are often. Some of those strangers are kidnappers who exchange contacts with the children. They plan to meet the children in places where they will buy for them nice things. An innocent child will very easily fall into their trap. This is a very easy way that kidnappers have been using to lure children. In an event where the parents of the children were responsible for what communication a child does then this would have been avoided. Children following internet games to the extent of killing themselves using phones are frequently noticed. The games usually come with procedures that should be followed step by step.
Phone use is a major cause of depression among the children. Too much work without play makes jack a dull kid.
Children innocently do that little do they know that they are in the process of taking away their lives. The human mind is made to manufacture information and ideas by itself through practice. When children get all the information from the phones, they don’t put their brains to work hence poor thinking and reasoning capacity. Instances of getting answers for their exams and getting assignments done from Google are also common among the school going children which should be highly discouraged. Pornography videos are all over on the phone. Those are videos that should not be watched or made to access by children because they have age limit. Because of curiosity children will want to see those videos and end up corrupting their minds to physically doing what they saw being done which may eventually lead to teenage pregnancies and spread of sexually transmitted diseases, mental health and stability. Phone use is a major cause of depression among the children. Too much work without play makes jack a dull kid. This is where for a child their eyes are always glued to phone and they never get time to play or socialize physically with other children.
(The author is pursuing at ASCOMS Medical College Jammu. Views are his own)