The future of our youth is at stake.
No, this is not hyperbole.
If you’re reading this, chances are you remember a time in your life when the internet did not exist.
Cell phones, if they existed, were either the size of bricks with two-foot antennae, or — at best — T9 texting was on the precipice of technology.
The internet, if it existed, sounded like a dying animal when your desktop was forging its connection and tying up the only phone line at the house, or — at best — you had early broadband that netted a paltry 10 megabit per second download speed.
If that recalls any memories, consider this: the iPhone itself is only 17 years old.
That may make some feel old, but in the grand scale of technology, the connectivity we have now compared to just two decades ago has come at an astonishing pace.
It’s come so quickly, we are just now learning the effects these devices in our hands every day, and the effect it is having on our kids cannot be overlooked.
I plan to address this topic in a series of columns, at least three, in the aftermath of watching the documentary “Childhood 2.0,” which the Cassville school district showed at the FEMA Event Center last week.
If you have children, whether they have access to smart devices or not, I highly encourage you to give the 90-minute documentary a watch. It is not an easy watch, but a necessary one.
The overarching conclusion is this: our children being connected to the internet all the time, and to one another all the time through apps or texts or calls, is lessening their ability to handle face-to-face social situations and leaving them in a state of frequent anxiety and depression.
This is happening via multiple avenues, but what sticks out most is that our children with devices are never apart from one another. What happens at school frequently continues at home. Social media, while it has its benefits, is an avenue for direct bullying outside the school premises. Disciplinarians at Cassville say nearly every day they are called on to deal with out-of-school situations affecting in-school hours.
Kids can’t escape this new normal. I am only 35, just on the other side of Gen X and consider myself a Millennial. Graduating in 2006, I was on the cusp of this technology. I got a Facebook midway through high school, when it was first made available to people under 18 and you had to have a school-affiliated email address to sign up.
When I entered college, I had a Sony Ericsson flip phone that could record its own ringtones, but did not have access to the internet.
Now, children as young as third grade carry the entire internet in their pockets. Parents and guardians, especially those who are a bit older and less familiar with apps and social media, simply do not understand the power that device can wield if left unchecked.
Not only does having a wide open device allow a child to search up whatever the desire — yes, think worst-case scenario — that same device operates as an access point for predators, scammers and other criminals to prey on unsuspecting children — again, think worst case scenario.
My wife and I have a child in third grade, and we gifted her an iPhone for Christmas. While we believe it’s a bit early for her to have such a device, we also won’t allow her to be ridiculed for lacking one. It’s a balance we do not enjoy but must try to handle.
Because of our knowledge of the dangers inherent in the situation, we opted to sign up for Bark, a $100 per year monitoring and device control app that allows us to keep a very close watch on what is coming into and going out of her device. It’s costly, but it’s worth it.
We also enacted a rule from the very start — no devices allowed in the bedroom overnight. Part of this was to deter her from the temptation of playing Toca Boca all night long, but another part was to protect her from any mischief coming her way.
Only two weeks after her phone was activated, she got a call from an out-of-state number at about midnight. We had her phone in our bedroom, and my wife answered. It was a kid, probably middle-school age or younger, who obviously dialed the wrong number and hung up when my wife began asking questions.
Minutes later, her phone was bombarded with prank calls from at least three different numbers — all sounding like kids the same age — spewing vile language and harassing us to the point we finally blocked the numbers.
I can’t imagine how traumatic a situation like that would have been for my daughter if she had to deal with that situation. It quickly exemplified why the bedtime rule needed to be in place.
After that day, we also adjusted her setting to where she may only send or receive calls to or from contacts in her device, which require a password we created to add or delete.
This is just one example from our lives how dangerous a device can be, and it happened within a month.
The stakes are a thousand times higher as children get older.
From cyberbullying to sextortion, mindless scrolling to metal health hurdles, we as parents have to be better educated and better-prepared to manage not only what our children can see and hear, but also how they adapt to what they may encounter that is out of our control.
Cassville schools is making an attempt at providing this education to its patrons, and I commend them for shedding the fear of the taboo and bringing this to the community’s attention.
After the screening last week, five Cassville High School students participated in a panel, answering questions relating to the documentary and their experiences at Cassville schools.
Their experiences, as well as statistics from a poll the Cassville counselors opened for grades 6-12, will be the focus of part two of this series next week.
Spoiler alert: our tweens and teens are dealing with every bit of what “Childhood 2.0” says they are. If we are to raise our children so things like mental health issues, exposure to sexual content and even suicide rates drop, we have to take action.
Kyle Troutman has served as the editor of the Cassville Democrat since 2014 and became Publisher in 2023. He was named William E. James/Missouri Outstanding Young Journalist for daily newspapers in 2017, and he won a Golden Dozen Award from ISWINE in 2022. He may be reached at 417 847-2610 or ktroutman@cassville-democrat.com.
