Heads up: This post is 13 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
Last week, the advocacy group “Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood”, whose allegations against “Baby Einstein” videos eventually led to nationwide consumer refunds, declared in a complaint urging federal regulators to examine Fisher-Price and other companies’ mobile apps like “Laugh & Learn”, “Baby Hear and Read” and “Baby First Puzzle”, which claim to help babies learn. The Boston-based group says developers are trying to dupe parents into thinking apps are educational for babies, which researches have proven ineffective. This reminded me of the discussions I had on a Facebook parenting group.
Some parents said they were worried about their one year olds staring intently at the iPads, iPhones, TVs… etc, and asked what other parents do with screen time. Most parents intuitively guessed that it’s addictive and bad for children, (“even adults are addicted to their mobile phones, so must be worse for the children”) while some argue that it should be treated like anything else, let them play in moderation.
Light emitting screens are really stimulating to a young child’s brain, according to brain research, it lights up all the pleasure areas of the brain, the pattern is the same as drugs such as cocaine! The trouble with that is the insidious nature of the pleasure areas, it’s addictive and the brain ask for more and more. There’s also the saturation problem, if video stimulation happens too early too often, then the same amount isn’t enough to satisfy the brain, the kick isn’t as strong and it’ll take more to satisfy the same urge. (JoAnn Deak, PhD of Psychology)
The brain is designed to do, to interact with the real world, during the formative years, and screen time is time taken away from real life experiences. For example, handwriting - the act of concentrating on moving a pencil, it improves the parts of your brain for very narrow focus. Children who spent too much time in front of screens develop issues with motivation in the future. We don’t have a TV at our home and we limit the time Luc is allowed to watch videos on our laptops. As with most things, the key here is to do things with them and in moderation. I often see parents use their mobile phones to play videos for their children at the restaurants so they would sit still, and then the parents would spoon feed the kids, nagging them to “chew and swallow the food”. It’s an easy out for the parents in the short term, but what happen when the iPads have to be taken away, are you prepared to be thrown off the plane because your child cannot calm down without the sedation of an iPad?
One more thing, the time away from real life issue is also true for time spent on transit to schools. For some children, it takes one to two hours sitting on a bus to get to school, that’s three to four hours taken out of their daily lives, time which they could’ve spent playing outside. I believe children deserve to have good schools in their neighborhood, so they can spend more time playing with their friends. I don’t see why we can’t make all pre-schools equally great so children don’t have to travel far to get to a “good” school.