Smartphones, tablets and laptops are now the most common meal time hijackers and are leading to less quality time among families.
When children are playing games on their iPads or iPhones, they completely block out the world around them. And the frightening degree to which they do so has been proven in a new video by Dolmio, which highlights the increasing disconnection between families at dinner time.
In the UK, 67% of parents have found that family arguments stem from technology and one in three households has tried unsuccessfully to ban tech while eating.
Frustrated parents decided to test just how distracted their kids were at meal time, by taking part in a hidden camera experiment.
Watch the video. It’s almost creepy.
Four children aged between eight and 10 were filmed shortly before dinner as they immersed themselves in their tech at the table. In the clip, major changes begin to occur around them without their knowledge. In one home, a bouquet of roses is replaced with yellow flowers and a family photo on the wall is swapped with a black and red painting right in front of the child.
In another home a man in a viking helmet arrives and places a yellow zebra painting on the wall.
The children are so absorbed, they are also completely unaware that their parents and siblings have been replaced with strangers. One of their sisters is replaced with a little boy carrying a tree who sits down at the dinner table while another young brother is swapped out with a man who appears to be in his thirties.
New Sister?
By the time the wifi is switched off, each of the children look up to find themselves surrounded by a completely different family. The confused children leave the table in shock before they join their family and begin to laugh at the bizarre situation.
The line ‘sometimes we need to disconnect to connect’ then appears on the screen. ‘Family time is important,’ the voiceover says. ‘Let’s not ruin it with tech.’
The experiment was conducted after it was found that 63 per cent of Australian parents agree that family arguments at the table stem from technology and one in five families said they were disrupted by technology at meal times more than five times a week.
Singer and WAG Louise Redknapp who is fronting the campaign in the UK, says devices ‘creep back in’ even when they are banned over dinner.
Sourced from Daily Mail, Featured image courtesy: www.citynews.ca
