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(this post used to contain something else but you must examine the history to find it)

Most Recent Working Title: Why Technology Isn't Causing the End of the World

Source Title: The Impact of Technology on the Developing Child

Author: Cris Rowan

Rowan, Cris. "The Impact of Technology on the Developing Child." //The Huffington Post //. The Huffington Post, 29 May 2013. Web. 23 May 2014. .

(This was three-fourths of a page on Microsoft Word when double-spaced.)

In “The Impact of Technology on the Developing Child,” pediatric occupational therapist Cris Rowan argues that the recent onset of technology has had highly negative impacts on the growing children of this generation. Her viewpoint is quite common, as Americans tend to believe that millennials have recently lost touch with reality thanks to technology. Rowan begins by appealing to her own generation, where children “created their own form of play that didn’t require costly equipment or parental supervision,” when children “moved… a lot,” and in which “their sensory world was nature based and simple.” These statements are intended to invoke in an older reader nostalgia of their own childhood. Rowan then moves on to lambast the current generation. She claims that technology is “fracturing” the “very foundation” of “the 21st century family,” which is “causing a disintegration of core values that long ago were the fabric that held families together.” Rowan’s next claims are a series of supposedly valid information which are meant to somehow prove that use of technology is directly tied to various conditions such as “ADHD, autism, coordination disorder, developmental delays, unintelligible speech, […] depression, and sleep disorders.” She offers little scientific evidence as to exactly how, instead following this with outlining why she believes that technology is causing these disorders by establishing what she sees as core necessities for the developing child. These four “critical factors” are “movement, touch, human connection, and exposure to nature.” Rowan’s claim is that technology is directly depriving children of all four of these core factors, ultimately resulting in their development of various abnormalities. Her claims, however, have little factual backing, and are based mostly off of her own biased observations; her article therefore fails to fully convince the skeptical reader.