It’s harder to imagine a life without ‘screen’ but the alarmingly increasing time that the kids spent in front of them, narrate a different tale.

A recent research that surveyed kids of age eight to sixteen years has studied the changing roles of the new technologies and their impact on teenagers. These concluded that they are daily spending almost six hours on an average in front of screens. Televisions, computers and games consoles have replaced books, friends and even parents to an extent.

What’s more, their ‘essential requirements’ also include personalised mobile phones, MP3 players or iPods which could ‘engage’ them all through the day. The parents are forced, even emotionally blackmailed to an extent, to get their high rising demands fulfilled. But this free hand has resulted in an inappropriate freedom to access the advancing technologies like the internet.

Gone are the days when children viewed the internet as the best archive for all their home assignments. Now, empirically proven, assignments and projects are the last thing on their agenda. Kids today need internet access in their rooms for appeasing their need for online socialising. The escalating attractiveness of Social Networking Sites (SNS), blogs and chats has made children addicted to the World Wide Web.

Almost ninety percent of the students surveyed had an online ‘profile’ on at least one of the SNS like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Classmates, Orkut etc. and about fifty percent maintained their blogs. Friendships have broken all geographical barriers and the latest trend is to flaunt a bigger list of ‘friends’, most of whom are unknown faces.

Addiction to instant messaging, or chats, have augmented so much that on one click of the television remote is ESPN for the latest action on the football field while the other hand is telling a different story altogether. Today’s tech-savvy generation has a better understanding of websites like YouTube, Bebo and flickr etc.

However, in a larger perspective, this could have negative implications on their lives. An increased exposure to the screens not only widens the communication gap between them and their parents, but also makes the youth prone to various diseases and disorders and makes them psychologically weak and vulnerable. In addition the language that the children frequently speak, even on formal occasions, is gibberish and highly slanged.

However as the technology advances furthur, the trends are only gonna modify and not supersede.

More than three years of nomadic uncertainty, many of the children of Hurricane Katrina are behind in school, acting out and suffering from extraordinarily high rates of illness and mental health problems. Their parents, many still anxious or depressed themselves, are struggling to keep the lights on and the refrigerator stocked.

For some boys who are expelled from their schools are now awaiting their turn for a G.E.D. program, to retrieve what may have been lost. For others, recovery may lie in other neighborhood schools near the New Orleans duplex where families may have found their home. The government on its part is trying to nudge the poorest, least-educated and sickest evacuees toward self-sufficiency — or at least toward agencies other than FEMA.