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closeI live close to Atascadero High School, so during the school year I see students driving and walking to and from the campus with a cell phone pushed against an ear or fingers fluttering across those miniature keyboards.
So I applaud the action by the Templeton Unified School District trustees to drastically limit cell phone use on the campus, even between classes.
The whole electronic gadget thing has gotten out of hand. Some friends of mine thought it would be nice to take their two pre-teen grandchildren to the Grand Canyon. When they got there, they had to force the grandkids out of the car to go peek over the edge of the canyon, sans their video games.
A visiting granddaughter spent a great deal of time text messaging her friends when she could have been having a delightful one-on-one conversation with her grumpy old grandpa. And I saw a report on television last week where one teen said she wakes up at 1 or 2 in the morning and checks her cell phone to see if anyone has sent her something see needs to see.
I hadn’t even thought of some of those other uses of the cell phone, such as unauthorized pictures in the locker room or text messaging answers to a quiz from a campus bathroom.
I’m also concerned that these electronic devices reduce real interaction between today’s children. I observed another grandchild, this one 5 years old, sitting with a friend on the couch, and they were both frantically punching buttons on separate hand-held controllers. There was no conversation between them.
When I said something like, “I thought the neighbor boy came over to play,” I was told, “They are playing. The games are electronically linked together. That’s how kids play now.” I read somewhere that modern children request video games or cell phones and other electronic devices far ahead of that first bicycle.
I would endorse anything that reduces and even eliminates cell phone use by kids until they are adults living on their own. It seems to me extremely mentally unhealthy for kids to think they have to be that connected to one another 24 hours a day.
The practice is bad enough among older Americans, too. In spite of the new law, I can certainly report that at least one out of every 10 cars that passes me on the road has an adult driver with a cell phone pressed against his or her head. How wonderful it would have been if those grandparents at the Grand Canyon had thrown the kids’ video games over the edge.
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