Philip M. Rosenthal Speaking about Technology addiction 1

and so it's very important that we understand it now we i'm probably older than a good few of you but we who are parents already we are the digital immigrants none of us grew up with all these devices we've somehow or other found out about it because of our jobs or because we read information about them or whatever it is we do and we've come to understand to some degree what this technology is our children however they are the digital natives they don't know a world without technology and so therefore it's kind of like the first time in history that our children know more about a subject than we do my father taught me how to drive a car my mother told me don't touch the stove and burn your finger my children know more about technology than i do maybe not at my house but in most houses but so but that's the important point because you see even though they may know more about it it's still our job to protect them because they are our clay publish they are the reason that we exist and so we have to do whatever we can to protect them and we need to be educated about what all this stuff is in order to properly protect them and i can tell many cases of this of a parent confronting a child and saying look what is this why did you do the following why did you do this and the child says oh no no you're totally misunderstanding that's not this it's that and since you don't understand the technology okay and and you let them sort of um fool and fool you and we have to be very very careful uh about that in order to know when they're trying to trick us or not and children will do that you're going to hear me talk about some of the various technologies that they may be using i'm going to get into that in a minute but i want to start out by saying that there is no solution to this problem i didn't come here tonight with a magic wand that i can wave over the problem and it's going to go away i can give out a few answers i can tell you some suggestions and some tips about what to do and certainly we will talk about that but the real bottom line here at the end of the day this is a parenting issue we'll spend some time talking about that but the parents have to be parents and not you know the one of the lines i use sometimes is the internet is not your babysitter you would no more give the keys to your car to your 12 year old and say go take the car i'm busy right now i don't have time to keep your company come back in two hours and then we'll see what's doing there's no way anybody would do anything like that a car can be a weapon you can kill people sending your child to go play on the internet for two hours is like giving them away a weapon that they can hurt themselves with so you're going to hear me talk about the fact that this is a parenting issue now i'm really going to focus on two things tonight one is the computer and the internet the second thing is the cell phones now a cell phone is not just anymore a cell phone i i have any number of cell phones or black bearing and cell phone they're not just cell phones they've got internet they've got email they've got texting they've got the blackberry has bbm which is texting basically and chatting and all these phones you can have facebook on them we'll talk about facebook and twitter and blogging and all these devices can do all these things no one has to go and sit anymore at a computer and do all of this i have a very sad story to tell i was sitting pretty recently the past few months ago i was sitting in the one of the bagel shops up in muncie lunchtime a crowd of people there minding my own business actually having some soup i'm quite told to watch the bagels and uh i noticed to my left at one of the tables three buck from one of the local yeshivas they were just rebuffing there but then my eye was drawn to what they were doing and they each had one of these it's an ipod touch it's very popular probably one of the most popular devices in the world it's not just an mp3 player that you can just use it though it's an mp3 player you can play movies it can it has wi-fi so you can go online and go to the internet and do all kinds of things these three boys in front of everybody with no business were sitting and watching two months terrible stuff and i only noticed because they had their backs to me and i i was i was frozen i couldn't believe that was doing this but i couldn't believe that he was doing it in front of me in front of all these people there were there were other customers there there were women there there were some other children there the workers were there they weren't fighting they weren't trying to stay away from anybody there they were right right in front of my eyes so i mentioned to the owner he should find out who these boys are this is really not right in two seconds thought they had gotten up and left before anybody would do anything but he knew i guess they had seen them before whatever he spoke that they were to their and he wanted to know who they were so he couldn't describe exactly who they were but he remembered that he has a security camera so they went and looked at the security camera they could see who they were so the shiva called up their fathers and said somebody witnessed what your sons were doing in in the pizza in the bagel shop the um my name was mentioned and um they these three fathers called me up and they said how dare you be with the shamrock my son you're trying to to ruin his chance for a ship i said i don't know your son i don't know who you are even and all three of these fathers involved so and they were they were like so mad at me that i had gotten their sons in trouble i said all i know is what i saw that's that's all i can say is what i saw and i didn't go to the bagel shop to get anybody in trouble that day i went to have soup now first of all the ipod touch is probably the most dangerous device you can buy for but i could probably right now turn this on i could probably find a wi-fi signal from here in the neighborhood somewhere and maybe probably even get online to the internet and i can turn it on right now and lay it right here and watch a movie while i'm speaking you would never know that i'm doing it i'm not doing it by the way but the fact is that i could because it's so easy to be private about this and it's it's it's dangerous i made a comment once i'm trying to be more careful about this i don't really mean this but just to make the point if you're trying to decide whether you should buy your child one of these or not maybe you should consider buying them a gun because they can probably do less damage with a gun than they can with this thing this ipod touch is a very very dangerous button so