August 16, 2005
Cellphones can be bad for children, report says
Taiwan's Child Welfare League Foundation yesterday released its first report on mobile-phone use by children, which has pinpointed a number of negative impacts, reports the Taipei Times.
The report shows that cellphone addiction has become a common problem, with some children running up bills in excess of NT$3,000 a month. It indicates that children also received messages with adult content and that phones were furthermore used to play video games.
"In the same way that water can both support the weight of a boat and sink it, mobile telephones have their benefits, but can also have a negative psychological impact on children when not used in the right way" Wang said.
... The report showed that the proportion of children using mobile phones in Taiwan is higher than that in the US and Japan (53 percent of junior-high students and 37 percent of primary school students).
... The report indicated that the relationship between parents and children can be affected by mobile phones, with 58 percent of respondents saying they had been scolded by their parents for reasons connected to mobile-phone use, including for talking too long on the phone, not answering the phone or losing a phone."
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