My 2-Year Old Knows How to Use an iPad

I must have been about six when I first sat in front of a computer. Our good, old Apple 2E. Then it was middle school where I made shapes with the little “turtle” with simple DOS commands. In high school we got an AOL account for the family to use and I had my first email address. I got my very own desktop computer in college. It was the first time I used Ethernet and didn’t have to listen to the annoying sounds of a modem dialing in, but even then, my computer was where I wrote papers primarily – I never thought of it as a communication device.

I never realized how un-rooted my youth was in technology until my own daughter came into the world. She’s almost two. She can locate her folder of apps on our iPad and access the videos we have saved for her as well. She asks for the iPad when she wants to play games. She knows what Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds are. She won’t be able to imagine a word without mobile technology. How did she pick up the skills needed to use technology before she could even form sentences?

Is my daughter going to laugh at me when I tell her about when I was kid? Is she going to look at me like I’m crazy when I explain to her what a VCR was and what a big deal it was when my Dad brought one home when I was five? Will she appreciate the pieces of life that don’t center around technology or will she be bored by the lack of stimulation from just simply looking at the world around her?

Comparing the past with the present is a scary thing. You worry that the simplicity of your life and what you learned from it won’t translate to your children and they’ll miss out on something. But, the pattern is always the same I guess. My parents can remember when film shifted to color, my grandparents were just children when the radio came into regular use, yet these were two pieces of technology I grew up with from the start. There was no awe in them for me, they’d just always been around, so my life has been infinitely more changed by technology that my parents’ lives. It just feels like it’s all moving so fast and you have to work hard to not let technology take over.

My big hope is that my daughter will always want to set aside the computer or phone to sit down to a meal with her parents and that she’ll never let a wonderfully, sunny day pass her by without going outside to enjoy the fresh air.