Technology has played a significant role in society, especially for working parents who need to balance both work and parental care. As a mother of three boys and an employee, I have continuously engaged with technology, which has helped me to create enough time for my work and my children. Some advantages of engaging in technology include monitoring the children even if I am not around the house. Sometimes work gets the best of us, and we find ourselves working for long hours, and less time is created for our children. In this case, technology has a system that can help monitor children even if one is not in the house and, in some cases, hold a Zoom conversation that helps to communicate with the children and make them feel that you are still around.
Technology has made education easier, especially if the parent is not readily available to assist their children with homework. With the help of technology, they can quickly carry out research and analyze it, and in the end, children can gather the concept with just a little help from their parents (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020). Some tasks are also not easy, and parents, via voice and video calls, can guide their children no matter the distance between them. They can communicate like people in the same location but via technology. This eliminates the fact that children feel lonely because their parents are not always around.
Even though technology has positive impacts on working parents, it also has a negative impact on children, which includes children always accessing things and information that is not good for them. As a result, they develop bad habits and characters that might affect their academics and social life (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020). As much as technology is there to fill the niche, parents must be careful and conservative with their children when using technological devices. They should be able to monitor all activities their children carry out on their phones and tablets and also what they watch on television.
Based on the sociological theories, technology can be classified in the functional theory, which states that society is in a state of balance through the functions of society components (Calhoun et al., 2022). As a mom of three sons, society expects me to provide for them and, at the same time, be there to see my children grow and never lack my attention. In this case, I have to find a way to help me achieve all of these simultaneously to fulfill and create a balance in society’s duties. If one is unable to achieve the rule of the society, they are considered a failure, which makes the society undermine them and blame them for the failure of their children.
In conclusion, in the future, people will be busier, and there might be more need to improve technology and come up with a system that will enable the parents to be always present for their children. In the future, technology will play a significant role in ensuring that the bond between parents and children is not determined by how often they are physically available but by how often the children are able to interact with their parents. Also, as working parents, the use of technology might bring about ghost parenting, which might impact the children negatively and affect their future as much as you are trying to build one for them.
References
Calhoun, C., Gerteis, J., Moody, J., Pfaff, S., & Virk, I. (Eds.). (2022). Classical sociological theory. John Wiley & Sons.
Livingstone, S., & Blum-Ross, A. (2020). Parenting for a digital future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives. Oxford University Press, USA.