Look To The Future: Why Is Technology Great For Kids?

Some people claim that children should be kept away from technology. It’s been argued that handheld devices like ipads are preventing kids from getting out into the real world – people are harkening back to a golden age of children playing in the street and spending all their time outside. But did that age ever really exist? Kids these days are better off now than ever before – and technology is one of the reasons that’s the case. Find out more…

Image source

Technology helps children to problem solve and research. Understanding how to use the internet means that they rarely get stuck and need help from adults when they’re learning how to do new things. Tutorials on YouTube and other sites can help kids to learn to do pretty much everything, and WikiHow also provides tutorials on pretty much everything you might need to know. Understanding that you can find information out for yourself instead of having to ask an adult to look through an encyclopaedia can also increase kids’ independence.

A lot of games help children to socialise. The recent Pokémon Go phenomenon is a prime example of that – although it wasn’t just children, as adults flocked to parks and outdoor spaces to enjoy the summer sun and catch Pokémon. Games like that provide children with activities to do during the day that they can involve their families in and it’s also a way for them to connect with other kids their age. Common interests can pull people together – at school they can talk about the latest Pokémon Go news along with the ever-popular Minecraft, and make friends with kids they might never have spoken to before who share similar interests.

Image source

Technology is the future. That’s an indisputable fact. Kids who don’t learn to use it will face significant disadvantages through the rest of their school careers and later on in the workplace. Jobs involving coding pay excellently and have great futures ahead of them – training in an area like that or joining a coding club can be greatly beneficial to young people. Software is the new language of our world, and thinking in terms of computers is also very useful. It helps people break down big issues into a series of more manageable problems, allowing you to tackle them more efficiently.

Technology can often be good for you. It can help improve literacy skills, as looking at websites and playing online games tends to expose children to a lot more text than they otherwise would encounter. There has been evidence that fast-paced video games can help dyslexic children to read faster, and it’s also been proven that gamers make excellent surgeons.

Image source

It’s particularly important to get girls involved in technology and science – just as it is to emphasize to boys that the arts are valid and interesting career paths. It’s time for us to break down gender norms and to encourage girls to move towards computer science degrees and fields that are currently male-dominated. Encouraging them to use technology from a young age, therefore, is empowering them to understand that they can do whatever they want to as an adult.