It’s 2020 and people have been talking and singing about the age of Aquarius for a long time, but this major cosmic event is finally about to happen. Wether you believe in astrology or not, the changing of an astrological age seems to affect civilisation and cultural tendencies (according to Wikipedia anyway).
This makes me think about myself, Arlo and our future. I sat watching him yesterday as he dished out some orders to Alexa… it’s entirely natural for him to interact with technology like this, back when I was three years old computer games were still on cassette tapes. I can still hear my mum telling me that my eyes would turn square if I watched too much TV.
It’s a crazy world in which we now live and finding the balance as a parent with how much tech to allow children to access is a challenging conundrum. There’s so much debate about screen time, not to mention all of the other aspects of parenting and there’s some parents who love to tell your their children don’t have any access to tech at all, but on the other hand there’s people like me who don’t want their children to get left behind.
As the year draws to an end it’s time now to reflect and look forwards. We live in a world where my year old can literally use a machine to access every song ever created using voice commands and even the kids version of YouTube and our tv remote control have the same functions so he can find anything he can pronounce from the comfort of our own home.
When he asks questions which begin with “why?” – I can not only look up the answer but find an age appropriate video to show which animal is “the biggest in the world” – not to mention that technology enabled me to wrk from home for the entire year. There is no limit to the opportunities technology such as that provided by IVS can provide.
Over the summer when lockdown meant that all the schools and nurseries were closed I turned to technological resources to enable me to occupy Arlo whilst balancing my working from home commitments. I never thought I would be the type of parent to give a three year old a tablet but here I am singing their praises. I’m not an expert in phonetics for example, and this is the way kids are taught to read and recognise sounds – which is totally different to my experience thirty years ago. Several Apps and online resources helped me to learn myself how to support Arlo’s learning.
Then there’s social media and blogging….. without technology I wouldn’t know where to begin. I have to credit Pinterest for providing many of the awesome play ideas and activities we have tried this year. Social media allows people to share and of course interact with other people and this year when the world fell apart it was technology which enabled us all to stay together – I have a strong feeling that the foundation blocks for building our new normal will be technologically based.
Last Updated on 3 weeks by Lavania Oluban