Consider this: At the turn of the millennium, what technology issue worried us? Y2K. Our kids listened to CDs on portable players. Laptops and lap dogs weighed about the same. If you wanted to watch a TV show after it aired, you had to program a VCR. AOL ruled email, which most of us accessed through dial-up. Kids surfed the ocean, not the Web; they played games on Game Boys and used their phones to talk, not text; and social networking happened at the mall.
The first decade of the twenty-first century has been packed with innovations and entertainment that have forever changed childhood—and parenting. Some of these have been fabulous. Others? Not so great. But all have revolutionized how our kids communicate, create, learn, and play.
Here, in no particular order, are the best and worst of the last decade—the stuff that we at Common Sense Media feel has truly rocked our kids’ world.
Ten Best of the Decade
1. Google
Okay, technically, Google started in the ’90s. But mass use didn’t begin until the 2000s. Now, just about every child knows how to find just about anything by Googling. It’s opened the world to our children—sometimes bringing in too much, too soon—and parents found out it was up to them to teach their kids to surf safely and responsibly.
2. Harry Potter
Four hundred million books. That’s 400,000,000 readers. Most of them kids. Reading isn’t dead, even if this is all PK (pre-Kindle). (FYI, those statistics came from Google, which returned results 1–10 of about 659,000,000 in 0.20 seconds.)
3. Facebook
More people exist on this social network than live in the United States. MySpace kicked off this world of self-expression and communication, causing parents to scramble as they tried to get their kids to understand the importance of self-reflecting before self-revealing. Kids learned the hard way that anything they posted could be copied, pasted, and shared, making cyberbullying one of the worst inventions of the decade. (Honorable mention here goes to Club Penguin, where little kids hang out online with their penguin avatar friends ... until they get old enough to lie about their ages and start Facebook pages of their own.)
4. Wii
PlayStation 2 came out in 2000, which revolutionized gaming. Xbox followed halfway through the decade, bringing with it an explosion of online gaming (Halo, anyone?). PlayStation 3 offered gold-standard gaming and more. But Wii brought video games back into the family fold, offering age-appropriate play for kids 5–95. And its revolutionary motion sensor got families off the couch and moving!
5. YouTube
How to tune a guitar? Helpful. Cat videos? Hysterical. 421,000 search results for videos on girl fights? Not so funny. Fifteen seconds of fame comes home to every kid. And kids 3–11 now stream more video than their parents.
