Children outdo adults in digital savvy

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that even Hollywood relationships last longer than the average smartphone battery. However, what Saillesh Jeswani did not know was that there were ways to prolong it, other than keeping all phone conversations under 15 seconds. It was only recently when his 13-year-old son Aditya downloaded the app called Juice Defender on his Android phone that "both of us realized such features existed," says Jeswani's wife, Anjali.However, like many parents of the young, restless and tech-savvy 'Generation Y', Jeswani finds such moments both flattering and scary at the same time.
Hetal Shah learnt how to Facebook from her 13-year-old son Rajiv. "Besides the basics, he also taught me about privacy settings and gave me tips on social networking etiquette," says the homemaker who is now an active citizen of the networking world. But that's not all Rajiv taught his mommy. "He showed me how to download a YouTube video too and how to align documents to make them fit for printouts," she adds recalling the days when even using a mouse was a big hurdle for her. And like Jeswani and Shah, a whole generation of parents is learning important tech how-tos from their perpetually wired children.
"I would need an instruction manual to learn all the things the iPad can do, but my son just used it a couple of times and knows it inside out," says Elsie Gabriel, mother of nine-year-old Ridge Ferns. When they were vacationing in Sri Lanka last year, he used GPS on his iPad to locate every new place he visited.
"I would then Google the name of the place and read up about its history and other attractions in the area," he says. "I love downloading apps and using them to do nifty things like calculate the time it would take to reach a new place," says the student of Bombay Scottish School, Powai.
When confronted with a technology glitch while most parents fumble, their teenage kids are adept at using digital interfaces and even have a knack for troubleshooting. Intuitively attuned to technology, kids are much better at handling devices and software than their parents who freeze when confronted with a problem. It's like they were born with a wireless mouse in their hands.
While Tanzeem Memon doesn't use the computer, her five-year-old son Ahmed is constantly on it. "Because he can't spell every word yet, he asks us the spellings of cartoon characters and writes it on a paper. He looks for them online and watches shows on the computer," says Tanzeem. "He saw his uncle use a smartphone once and learnt how to use it instantly."
According to antivirus company AVG, the average 11-year-old child has "adult skills when it comes to technology". As per a 2011 study titled 'Digital Diaries' by the firm, younger children are more likely to navigate with a mouse, play a computer game and increasingly-operate a smartphone-than swim, tie their shoelaces or make their own breakfast. The survey that interviewed 2,200 online mothers of children between two and five years old in countries including the US, Canada, UK, France and Italy found that 58% of children aged two to five know how to play a 'basic computer game', compared with 52% who know how to ride a bike. While 63% could turn a computer on and off and 69% could use a mouse, only 20 per cent could swim unaided and 11 percent could tie their shoelaces without help.
"After a point, technology becomes a part of the child's DNA. The device or the software stops becoming a thing and becomes a way of life," says Rohit Tikmany, director, Universal Education Group whose schools use iPads and Macbooks for teaching. "In schools, teachers want kids to write good-ol' essays, say, about Mahatma Gandhi, while kids wants to create a presentation about him using images, a piece from his Wikipedia page and a YouTube video. And while teachers want kids to do notebook homework, students want to email in their work," he says pointing out that it is because "today's kids have never seen a world without Facebook, 24x7 TV, SMS, hypertext and MP3 music. Their teachers and parents on the other hand, grew up in an environment where direct face-to-face social interaction was the norm."
Inputs from Sharmila Ganesan Ram