No pity here

With the advent of the daycare in the 1970s, the boom period when women began working to provide second incomes for families, (I know that WWII is the usual marking point for this, but the 1970s solidified the trend because after that point the workforce shared with women never fell below the 60% point of women who opted to stay home instead of working), an argument arose over television's affect on children.  Some said a lasting detrimental effect would happen, that children would be dependent on others to do their thinking for them.  Parents were no longer providing trips and play for their children.  TV was raising children rather than parents.

We're at the half-century mark since that time, but one can easily see that the reaction then was an over reaction.  Children didn't have lasting damage from watching TV.  Children learned to control TV when they became adults.  They didn't sit mindlessly waiting around for someone to tell them what to do.  They invented TIVO and DVRs to record only the shows that they really wanted to see.  They invented HULU and other sites to stream to them only what their interests were.  They invented games to play on TV monitors and skip the programming altogether.  They invented cable in order to make available the specialty types of programs they wanted to watch.

Today, I hear a lot of talk about the use of the cell phone and how children will not learn to communicate with each other like people should do, face-to-face.  The last time that happened was with the advent of the telephone and people said that the younger generation would stop going to visit their families and friends, opting instead to talk on the telephone. Ha, ha.  Those children developed faster cars and more airplanes to handle their travel needs.  They actually increased the number of friends and family that they can see.

There's a lesson from the last 50 years.  Both examples above tell us what to expect.  Today's children are very capable and will learn to control the smart phone environment.  Already there are some really good apps to control the environment.  The most recent is Apple's "Pay" app.  Use your phone to pay for goods at any store.  Paypal has the same ability with their app.  Apps already exist to control cars and houses.  That will both increase, become cheaper, and get better and easier.  Drone delivery of items ordered from Amazon will soon have an app.  Order in the morning and come home to what you ordered sitting on your front porch.  Personal apps accessing camera shots of intersections, residential blocks, stores and other public places is in the offing.  This is the tip of the iceberg.

Children are not going to become more and more stupid, texting and leaving voicemails all of their lives.  They already know how to share, very specifically, what they want with all of their friends on various social media venues, in addition to their normal fraternizing as they always have.  They're just better at it because they know how to control their environments.  What will they do in the next 20 years?  I can safely say they will not to sit idly by and let their lives waste away.  People are industrious.  Survival of the fittest dictates it so.

I don't pity modern teenagers.  They will take the world to a new and much better place than at anytime in the world's written history.  I would love to join them.  And may - if they concentrate their energies  on longevity of life as some predict they will.  I hope they do.  I'm with them.