Brain Research on Nick Wang

Young Children and Screen Time

Sun, 11 Aug 2013 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Two Year Olds Deserved To Be Tied Up, Continued

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

A few days ago I wrote about the 2 year old with hands taped together in kindergarten (http://pocket.co/sZerG) and how we need to ask ourselves questions about the effects on the children because our relationship with them and the experiences we give them directly shape their neural circuitry, for life!

In my research, I’ve found that many teachers and parents do not realize the significant consequences of their actions. Some of them publicly voiced their opinions with comments like “What’s the big deal?”, “All these uproar for such a minor incident, no wonder the world is full of spoiled brats.”

Those of us who know a little about the potentially life-long ill effects punishments can have on our children, we are on the other extreme of the spectrum. We worry about whether or not we have ruined our children for life. For this specific incident, I’ve inquired Dr. JoAnn Deak about whether there will be any long term ill effect on the child, her response was as follows:

Your question is hard to answer because ‘it depends’ on many little details surrounding the incident. How harsh was the conversation, what was said, what kind of temperament does the child have, etc. Every incident is processed differentially by each individual. In general, the fear associated with such an event can wane with good care afterwards. It would be important to not have a continual layering of such events over time. - Dr. JoAnn Deak

So generally speaking, as long as these events don’t constantly repeat and the child is given good care, he should be able to recover without much long term harm. I hope that was the case with this child but if what I read in the comments were true, then this wasn’t an isolated incident. I’m guessing quite a lot of teachers repeatedly use corporal punishments. It makes me worry about all the children growing up in such an environment.

Now how should we deal with what some would call a “naughty child”? That’s a long post to write but the two words summary is this: Stay connected! (If you get it, feel free to elaborate in the comments.)

2 Year Olds Deserved to be Tied Up

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

A few months ago, a picture of a 2 year old child with both hands tightly taped together (http://pocket.co/sZerG), kneeling on the floor in an activity room of a famous kindergarten in Hong Kong, surfaced on the web and caused quite a controversy. While lots of the comments are from parents who detest such atrocity, it’s unfortunate that I still read and hear comments like these:

“Bad kids need to be taught like this, so that they will learn to behave.”

“I need to send my son to this kindergarten so they can discipline him. May be not that extreme but he definitely needs to be disciplined by a teacher.”

“Is it really that big of a deal? It’s not like the teacher had beaten the kid till he was bruised and bleeding. You can’t even tell if he was kneeling or sitting either.”

Seeing these comments made me realized that there are still a lot of people out there who don’t understand child development or simply why children do what they do. There has been decades of scientific research on child development and with the latest brain imaging technology, we are knowing more and more about what a child’s brain is doing. Much of these information is in English and I feel that perhaps they just need to be translated into Chinese and other languages so everyone can learn about them.

One key thing about this incident that all early childhood educators need to be aware of is that your actions, your relationships with your students directly affect their brains for the rest of their lives!

“Education is a key component of a child’s development. The relationships that teachers have with their students and the experiences they provide for them directly shape the neural circuitry of the next generation.”

We know from 50 years of research in neuroscience that an infant’s experience can have permanent effects on the wiring of the brain. Neurosurgeons know there are truly critical periods—stages of development—in which the brain needs certain types of experience, or the circuits don’t get put together properly. Babies’ brains need stimulation to develop their full potential. Their best learning is from being highly attuned to human stimuli—interacting with your face, voice, and touch. If children have stressful or impoverished early environments, there will be long-term implications for the building of the brain.

Eliot, L. (2006). Experts’ opinion, nurturing brain development National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. (2006). Early influences on brain architecture

I think we can safely assume that by binding this two year old’s hands, the teacher’s intention was to punish him for a certain behavior, thereby stopping him from doing it again. Do you think the teacher’s intention was achieved?

Certainly, you can teach a two year old to stop doing something by inflicting pain, fear and shame on her. However, she has only learned to stop doing what she wants to do out of fear of punishments. What we want in our children is for them to have an internal locus of discipline, and you can only achieve that by having a warm relationship with the child. Calmly but firmly communicate to her your expectations and boundaries. She will keep pushing those boundaries again and again, that’s natural for a two year old. You just need to stay consistent and keep reminding her your expectations and boundaries.

There are so many questions we parents and teachers need to ask about in this incident. How would it affect the child? Will there be any long-term effect? How would it affect other children? Their relationship with this child? Has the teacher set up an example for other children to bully and ridicule this child?

There are several topics here that I want to get to - learning to be a social being, anti-social behavior, socially acceptable behavior, an 80 years longitudinal study of Harvard men, self-worth, but probably the most relevant and urgent of all, how do you deal with a “terrible” two year old who “just don’t listen”, do the exact things you tell him not to, making you so mad you’re yelling at him at the top of your lungs? (I faced this issue with my son when he was 2 years old.)