Have you noticed how instead of princess dresses and rainbow leggings, children today are decorated with Lululemon, Stanley cups and a bratty attitude? Throughout the last 14 years, Generation Alpha has been exposed to new technologies, parenting styles and pop culture. The effects of this new era are shown in how children today act, as well as how they interact with others; children today have declined emotionally and intellectually.
Generation Alpha began in 2010, the same year as the invention of the iPad. Since its creation, parents have given their children tablets in order to distract, amuse and occupy them, but this has caused significantly harmful consequences.
Screen Dependency Disorder is characterized by an addiction to devices. According to NeuroHealth, symptoms of addiction to screens include “insomnia, back pain, weight gain or loss, vision problems, headaches, anxiety, dishonesty, feelings of guilt, and loneliness.” It can even result in permanent brain damage.
“My parents didn’t give me an iPad when I was little because they wanted me to stay away from the screen, but when my Gen Alpha brother was a few years old they gave him one,” sophomore Hanna Vernenkar said. “I can see [its] effects a lot, because he’s always on a device and I think it has lowered his attention span.”
Some people might claim that Generation Alpha acts the same as any other generation and has not been influenced by technology or social media. Those people clearly do not have an 11 year old brother.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been the biggest factor to date to influence Gen Alpha. With so much free time and nowhere to go, kindergarteners’ days were filled with iPads and phones instead of classroom learning and iPads were placed in the hands of little children to keep them busy. The education that children should have been getting at their age was replaced by video games, TV shows and Youtube videos. This launched an era of addiction.
Snow days are a time for playing outside, playing board games and watching cheesy movies with your family, at least that’s what I believed at 11 years old. According to my fifth-grade brother, however, snow days are now for YouTube Shorts and Fortnite. After asking my brother if he wanted to build a snowman and being hit in the face with the answer “No” I started to question how much the childhood of Gen Alpha differed from my own.
It is easy to see this change reflected on social media. After scrolling on Tiktok for a couple of minutes, five-year-old girls with a closet full of makeup and skincare appear, as well as boys with collections of Prime bottles or Feastables. Products are being marketed to children who don’t have the ability to resist it yet.
The sad reality is that addiction is an epidemic. Generation Alpha and the generations that will follow are the future of the world, and it is important to preserve this future by finding a cure for the addiction. Possible solutions include avoiding the use of screens before 18 months, setting screen time restrictions or even setting boundaries with your child about what they are allowed to do on their devices.
