It’s 8 pm at home. Dinner is
ready. Table is set. Akhil and Ananya take their seats on their table. Their
six months old daughter Aradhya is seated on the baby seat besides the table.
Hardly a minute into their meal, there’s a scream. It’s not a six month old’s
cry. Ananya’s smartphone battery has died out. Her daughter will not eat the meal now.
Smartphone has been Ananya’s lifesaver ever since she gave birth to Aradhya. In
a nuclear family, she finds it difficult to engage the toddler. When she goes
shopping on the weekends, she never forgets to carry her smartphone.
“It serves as a sort of a peg to
hold child’s spirit on to one thing, makes them eat. Irrespective of number of
toys we buy for our child, there’s only one toy that doesn’t ever fail, that is
cellphone” says Ananya, Software Engineer by profession.
In India, dependence on
smartphones for parenting is a modern-day trend primarily due to the near
extinction of Joint Family culture. There are no more young unmarried siblings,
cousins, grandparents to take care of the kids. There are a gazillion mobile
apps on Android Play Store and App Store (iOS) dedicated to toddlers. Trancit
Lite, an iOS mobile application fills the screen with swirling colours and
images to attract the infants. Apps such as iPhoneBaby simulate the function of
an iPhone if the kid imitates his parents by dialing phone.
“It makes our job easier but you
are flooding your child’s brain with different types of images. It sort of
compensates for the lack of space around us. We don’t take our children to the
park. We take them to malls in bigger metros. How do we channelize child’s
energy in such a case? So we make them sit in front of the gadgets” says Dr.Divya Sharma, Bangalore-based Dermatologist
“The biggest con is that we are
not allowing them to imagine. You are putting ideas into their mind. It is not
their natural imagination” she adds further
YouTube and Parenting
On 9th November 2016,YouTube Kids, a special mobile application with family-friendly content was
launched in India. In addition to kids-friendly content, the YouTube Kids app
is also designed to give parents better control over the things they want their
kids to see, as well as a redesigned user interface with bigger thumbnails and
buttons so that the app is easily accessible for kids. Parents can also
put a limit on the things their child is permitted to search on the app. They
can also set a timer on how long they want their kids to use the app. In
addition, the app also offers the ability to turn off background music and
sound effects so that people around the kid aren’t disturbed, and add a
passcode to ensure that kids are not able to make changes to the
settings.
ChuChu TV is the third most
subscribed YouTube channel in India with over 1.5 million subscribers. This
channel offers animations and rhymes for toddlers.
Infobells Channels offers content in various regional
languages.
|
Channel
|
Subscribers
|
|
Infobells- Hindi
|
1.6 million
|
|
Infobells- Kannada
|
225 thousand
|
|
Infobells-Bangla
|
50 thousand
|
|
Infobells-Tamil
|
958 thousand
|
|
Infobells-Malayalam
|
10 thousand
|
|
Infobells-Telugu
|
1.6 million
|
Mobile Application developers
have successfully penetrated into the market of child care after having
established themselves in the field of smart education. Of late, academicians
have been vocal about the dissonance among technology, teaching and learning.
One can only wonder how the parents will judge their parenthood a decade later.
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