Since the information revolution, smartphones have proliferated and made our lives easier, but smartphone addiction is causing mental and educational problems, especially for children and adolescents. Parents need to carefully manage their children’s smartphone use, and schools and society need to strengthen education.
The world has been changing rapidly since the information revolution. This change is also evident in mobile communications. In the early 1990s, beepers became popular, and a few years later, in the late 1990s, the first commercially available cell phones became commonplace. About a decade later, in the 2010s, old cell phones became obsolete, and smartphones rapidly proliferated, with the majority of South Koreans using them. According to wireless communication service subscriber statistics from Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT, there were approximately 71.27 million mobile phone lines and 52.59 million smartphone lines in Korea as of the end of April 2021, exceeding the total number of people registered with the Ministry of the Interior and Safety at the time, which was 51.7 million, suggesting that each citizen owned at least one smartphone.
Furthermore, according to a survey by Gallup Korea, the smartphone usage rate among adults in Korea reached 97% as of July 2023, showing that smartphones have become an essential tool in daily life. This trend is expected to continue in the future, and smartphone penetration is expected to increase even further.
There are so many things you can do with your smartphone: play, love, and business. Whether you’re playing games, listening to music, watching videos, or texting with friends, the possibilities are endless. For this reason, it’s become a common sight to board the subway and see most people on their smartphones. This has made it possible for people who have to constantly use public transportation to travel distances that take more than an hour to get around, to spend that time in an informative and entertaining way. In addition, there are many other net functions of smartphones, such as rapid dissemination of information and convenient remote communication.
Benefits and impacts of smartphones
There is no doubt that smartphones are a technological breakthrough for mankind and have allowed us to live a more advanced lifestyle, but the problem is that while they have become ‘smart’, the people who use them are becoming the opposite of ‘smart’. Smartphones are like candy in your mouth, instantly entertaining and addictive. Smartphone addiction is causing people to lose sight of the fun and happiness that comes from higher-order things like friendships, exercise, and most people have long since forgotten the pleasure they get from reading.
Smartphone addiction is worse among children than adults. According to statistics from the Korea Information Society Agency, the rate of smartphone addiction among children is higher than that of adults. As a result, unlike children who used to go out to the playground and play small games with friends or kick a ball around, today’s children are more used to playing with their smartphones indoors. This shift has serious implications for their emotions and education.
The impact on children and teens
Children and adolescents who are addicted to their smartphones have difficulty concentrating when they are studying because they feel like playing with their smartphones, and their ability to control and inhibit their impulses is impaired due to prolonged exposure to stimulating videos on their smartphones, leading to impulse disorders. They become numb to reality because they are used to only stimulating things, and they get bored easily with quiet and static things. In addition, smartphone addiction affects their school life. According to Ji-Cheol Lee’s study, “The effects of smartphone addiction on school adjustment in children: focusing on the mediating effect of mental health,” the more severe the smartphone addiction, the more negative the effects on school adjustment and mental health.
Additionally, studies have shown that the more addicted a child is to their smartphone, the worse their relationship with their parents, the lower their self-esteem, and studies have shown that students with low smartphone use have higher academic achievement than students with high smartphone use.
Another problem is that smartphones take away opportunities and time for reflection. People don’t have much opportunity to reflect and be curious these days because smartphones are so entertaining that they don’t have time to be quiet, and everything you want to know is just a search away. To expand your thinking and come up with new ideas, you need to enrich your own thinking, but you don’t have time to reflect because your smartphone is like a teacher who can answer your questions instantly, and you can only reach for your smartphone when you want to reflect. Since Korea’s education is tightly organized with an emphasis on efficiency, this is an even bigger problem for Korean children. According to a paper titled ‘Effects of smartphone addiction on career barriers and career undecision among adolescents’, the more severe the smartphone addiction, the more often adolescents are undecided about their career path. This can be seen as a result of smartphones robbing children of the opportunity to reflect.
How to address smartphone addiction
These serious problems are caused by smartphone addiction, so parents shouldn’t take it lightly when raising children. However, many parents don’t see smartphone addiction as a big problem and use it as an easier way to appease their children. When kids aren’t listening in public or need motivation, smartphones are incredibly tempting because they provide instant gratification, but this attitude only confuses kids. Instead of rewarding kids with smartphones, you should take them away from them once and for all. If you give them a smartphone as a reward, they will think of studying or doing household chores as a pain that they have to endure in order to have a smartphone, and they will become inactive.
Another option is to free up their leisure time, for example by reducing the number of excessive academies they attend. One of the reasons kids choose smartphones over playing with friends is not only because they are fun, but also because they are convenient. They don’t have a lot of time, or they’re playing in spare time, such as during recess at school, or in the late evening when they’ve finished their schoolwork and have some leisure time, so they use their smartphone, which is less constrained by time and space than going out and playing.
Many papers have proven that smartphone addiction is mentally and educationally harmful to children and adolescents, so parents need to take the issue of smartphone addiction in children and adolescents seriously and recognize that the problem of smartphone addiction in children and adolescents is more serious than smartphone addiction in adults, because if children and adolescents become addicted to smartphones from a young age, it can have a huge impact on their lives after a long time. To spread this awareness, schools should educate about smartphone addiction, and broadcasters should educate children and parents about smartphone addiction through impactful methods such as public service announcements.
