#TechWatch: Children and technology

Should you let children use technology? And if so, what's the limits? How much is enough? And most importantly, should schools use technology in education and if so, how do they go about it?

Bilal Kathrada

A lot of parents raised this concern: Should my child be allowed to use technology? There is no simple straightforward answer to this, but what we need to do as parents, as adults, is to look at the world around us and see what kind of a world we are living in. We are living in a technologically driven world, there's no denying.

Technology is everywhere. Our children are growing up in that day and age where we are totally surrounded by technology.

Children born after 1995 don't know a life without technology. These kids are what we call digital natives. They have been born into it, they live in it. For them there is no life without mobile phones, there is no life without internet connectivity, there's no life without social media, so they need it to thrive, they need it, in a way, to survive. But not just that...

Listen to Bilal Kathrada discuss children and their use of technology, in and out of school - Ultimately, the question shouldn’t be whether or not cellphones should be banned, but whether banning them will deal with these problems effectively.