I am noticing more and more children as young as two years of age with their own iPhones or iPads. It is common to see parents engaged in social gatherings give their children electronic devices as babysitters, and this trend is disturbing.
I remember taking my daughter to gatherings at friends' homes, and I normally packed a bag with things to keep her busy, such as paper, pencils, crayons, toys and books. I am so glad electronic devices were not as popular when she was a toddler because we could share stories together. I believe electronic products rob children of opportunities to be creative.
It all comes down to how parents make use of hi-tech gadgets. If we use them as a dummy that pacifies the children but doesn't address what they want, the gadget becomes a tool of an instant gratification style of parenting that might cause children to have shorter attention spans and make them angry more easily.
A famous marshmallow experiment in the late 1960s and early '70s led by Stanford University psychologist Walter Mischel illustrated the importance of "delayed gratification", or having the child wait to obtain something that they want. The children were led into a room without distractions where a marshmallow was on a table. The children were told they could eat the treat, but if they waited for 15 minutes and resisted the temptation, they could have a second one.
Mischel observed that some children would "cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they couldn't see the treats, others started kicking the table, or played with the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal, while others would simply eat the marshmallow as soon as the researchers left".
In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for rewards tended to have better college entrance test scores or body mass index (BMI).