Kids these days are spending more and more time in front of screen than ever before. This includes includes television, gaming, computers, and their phones. What once used to be just a phone is now more a portable computer where they can check in with all their online social pages.
Kids are starting their screen time a younger age than ever before. They are building media rooms in their bedrooms with their tv’s, gaming devices, and Ipods. They are spending more time on the internet socializing virtually than they are in person, both with their peers and their parents.
Some of the problems in the relationships between parents and children are occurring because most of the time parents have a hard time understanding what their children are doing and saying because they communicate completely differently. Parents grew up with face-to-face communication, whereas their children spend more time socializing virtually.
There are also concerns that since kids are so used to sites like Facebook where they can form a friendship in one day, and destroy it the next, that they may believe that this is how real life relationships work as well. In the virtual world everything moves quickly, with one mouse click you can end a friendship. Whether or not you were really friends in the first place is beside the point.
There are some researchers that believe that this fast paced online world will lead lead to adults that find the real world uninteresting and not stimulating enough. The concern here is what these people will to to get the sense of stimulation they can get online. It has the potential to lead to extreme behavior. It also may be more difficult for teenagers who are spending all this time in relationships online to form real relationships because they don’t recognize the physical cues of nonverbal communication.