The Digital Parent Trap By Dockerman Summary

In her article “The Digital Parent Trap,” Eliana Dockerman argues that there are benefits to giving kids technology. Dockerman builds an authoritative tone using, logos, syntax, and irony. Dockerman begins the essay by using hard-hitting numbers. She states, "27% of them (kids ages 3 to 18) use tablets, 43% use smartphones, and 52% use laptops.” Dockerman concisely explains that the emerging young generation has direct access to technology and the internet. Specifically, an abundance of people in this demographic have technology. Dockerman emphasizes that the reader needs to accept that there is no “getting rid of technology”. Despite this, she mentions parents are trying to take away screens from their kids' lives. This can be found when she states “Some parents are even paying as much as $24,000 dollars to send their kids to month-long ‘digital detox’ programs”.

Rather than trying to avoid and restrict the problem, Dockerman believes that we must learn to embrace it and use it as a tool. To back up her argument she references a study done by MIT, which found– “students can remember only 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear and 50% of what they see demonstrated.in the virtual worlds on iPads or laptops– that retention rate skyrockets to 90%”. Dockerman– through the use of logos– gives real-world examples with tangible numbers to better help the reader digest and comprehend the argument being made. Dockerman further strengthens her argument with syntax to captivate the reader’s attention. Varied sentence length and concise writing are imperative when “students can remember only 10% of what they read”. If we applied this statistic to the whole country, Dockerman needed to make her writing clear and