Have you noticed how your phone is slowly taking over your life? It runs every aspect from politics to school work to interacting with your friends. Most of you can safely say you’ve already viewed your Snapchat stories, refreshed your Twitter feed and or scrolled through Instagram today.

My extended family came to visit over spring break and we spent most of our time together buried in our phones. As we spent Easter evening around the dinner table saying what we were thankful for, my two little cousins were preoccupied with the newest Snapchat update. With this being their only concern I realized that the more innovative technology becomes, the more our phones interfere with the way we socialize and the less time we seem to truly spend with each other.

The average person checks their cell phone 110 times a day. It’s a habit in our society to constantly scroll through our phone to text someone back, “like” a status on Facebook, comment on an Instagram picture or “retweet” a tweet on Twitter. We substitute a lot of the time we could be spending with actual people for time on our devices. Texting someone back is more convenient than calling. Instead of confronting people face to face, we hide behind a screen. We resort to looking at our phone screens to avoid uncomfortable situations or awkward silences. The use of smartphones has become the “norm” of our generation. Some have grown up with this as the only way they know how to communicate. Some children as young as two years old have a tablet to play games on. Seventy percent of children are confident in using a tablet, laptop or phone by the time they start school.

“My cousin Isabella has an iPod touch and an iPad and she’s seven years old. She is constantly playing games on them. If she whines or is annoying, my aunt will just giver her the iPod or iPad to make her be quiet and stay entertained,” said junior Kaylee Imming.

Many parents, like Imming’s aunt, may be tempted to ignore the problem at hand and distract the child with a tablet or some other electronic device. Technology has become a major diversion to the real world and is influencing the way people deal with stressful situations and relationships.

Although technology helps us connect with our friends and family through the use of sharing pictures, text messages and statuses, it also interferes with the way we communicate with others and handle problems. Our phones may tie us and our 200 followers on social media together, but it weakens the bond between those close to us in our lives. If we could find the strength to put down our phones, make the most of the time with our family and friends and confront our issues head on, technology would not change the way we interact with one another completely.