Eye Contact & Technology

Technology seems like a boon to us all and has made everyone quite adept at multitasking. Now, you can push your child on the swing with one hand and text with the other or send an email while having a meal. All of this sounds perfect, but while trying to juggle everything in the name of multitasking, working moms and dads often forget that they are neglecting the most important thing in their life, ‘their children’. Kids constantly desire undivided attention from their parents and may feel really dismayed when they don’t get it. Sherry Turkle, a renowned psychologist, emphasizes time after time the importance of ‘unplugging’ oneself for some good, wholesome conventional face to face interaction and eye contact that is quickly meeting its demise at the hands of communication technology.

Turkle also highlighted a crucial fact that parents, and not children, are the ‘greatest abusers’ of technology. Parents often complain that their children are always occupied with their phones, but what they don’t realize is that they have sub-consciously started to emulate them. Children nowadays are deprived of the bliss of parental eye contact because technology is helping them carry their work around everywhere. Multitasking seems like the easy way out, but it further underlines the need to prioritize your life. Children crave attention and approval from their parents all the time. However, when parents give children attention with one eye on them and the other glued to the phone, then it is only a matter of time before the tables turn on them.

Source:

TED Talks. Sherry Turkle – Connected, but alone? http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html