Influence of Smart Gadgets on Pre-school Children

Abstract: Over the past few decades, the role of smart gadgets in our daily life routine has increased and it has become an integral part of human development. Though gadget usage creates a lot of negative impacts on human life, people still refuse to come out of the gadget world. People belonging to different age groups including teens, adults and even preschoolers (children between ages of 2-5) are attracted and addicted to the usage of smart gadgets. The fact that the preschoolers are addicted to gadgets is a serious issue that should be taken care of. Children, being the future generation of the world are addicted to these gadgets and the parents should understand that this results in impairment of the child's growth development. In the present work, a survey has been conducted among a group of 50 parents to study the impact of smart gadgets in the day-to-day life of their children. From the survey, various important data like the vastly used smart gadget, time spent on the gadgets and negative impacts of these gadgets on the children have been elucidated. It has been observed that most of the children are addicted to television and mobile phones. An alarming 30 percent and 10 percent of the children are enjoying a screen time of more than 5-6 hours of television and mobile phones respectively per day. This is observed to be against the American Academy of Pediatrics. This has caused negative impacts such as adamancy and sleeping problems in children. Further, it has been observed that in a few cases parents expose the children to smart gadgets so that they can have some time for themselves and other household chores.

Keywords: Smart gadgets, preschool children, mobile phone, television, impact.