Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we're too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone. Steven Spielberg, movie director
Few incidents are more irritating than trying to converse with anyone who can not lift his eyes nor brain from the cell phone. Real conversation between two people still tops electronic shorthand and emojis.
However, recent news reports about children and smart phones are more alarming than irritating. Researchers, both those who measure brain activity using technology and those who spend hours observing children - teachers for the most part - sound that alarm. According to research conducted by Dr. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William and Mary, creativity in the United States, our country’s greatest resource, has been declining since 1990. Kim writes, “Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority.”
Jon Hamilton with National Public Radio (NPR) reports on a study of young mice exposed to six hours daily of a sound and light show resembling a video game. According to Dr. Jan-Marino Ramirez, director of the Center for Integrative Brain Research at Seattle Children’s Hospital, “the mice showed dramatic changes everywhere in the brain. On the plus side, these mice stayed calm in an environment that would have stressed a typical mouse. But also they acted like they had an attention deficit disorder, showed signs of learning problems and were prone to risky behavior.”
I first took note of this very real concern about electronics rewiring the brains of our young while listening to a report on NPR six months ago. Since then, similar reports from various sources have sounded the alarm. The observation of two teachers in the NPR report especially caught my attention.
First, an art teacher called in to report that the ability to create and to solve problems have declined dramatically in her students over the course of her career.
Secondly, a teacher from Savannah called in to report that some students in her class would rather take a zero on a test than put away their smart phones for the class period. How scary is that?
When I returned to the classroom in the mid-1980s, many a teacher told me that students were different from the ones I had taught in the early 1960s. Of course, fashion was certainly different between the two generations; In the 80s, more students had automobiles than at midcentury; the later generation also had more expendable money. However, I found the level of creativity to be comparable. Both generations needed nudging not to settle for first thoughts; but with encouragement, their creativity flowed.
Today’s children may literally be different because their creativity has been stifled and they have not been required to use their brains, instead of a smart phones, to solve problems. If I were still teaching I would hope with more pushing and prodding, we might be able to spark buried creativity. Hopefully, it’s not dead. However, I would have real problems with any student who could not put his/her smart phone aside for an hour.
According to the Mayo Clinic, The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) offers guidelines to parents about children’ access to “screen time,” whether it be television, computer or smart phone. It discourages any media use, except for video chatting, for children younger than 24 months. For children ages two to five, it limits use to one hour a day of high-quality programing.
The Mayo report writes, “Unstructured playtime is more valuable for a young child’s developing brain than is electronic media. Despite the fact that many digital media programs claim to be educational, children younger than two are more likely to learn and remember information from a live presentation (interaction with parents) than they are from a video.”
If this information seems surreal, a study from Britain finds that 56 percent of children between the ages of 10-13 own a smartphone and 25 percent of children between the ages of two and five have one. By the age of 14, 90 percent of children have their own phone.
I certainly understand the safety features that parents see in children having their own phones. But, all the research indicates that children need guidance in learning to use the phone as a tool and not as an extension of themselves.
As children grow, AAP warns that too much screen time has been linked to obesity, irregular sleep schedules, behavioral problems, loss of social skills, and violence.
Time and again, experts state that face to face interaction remain the primary way that children gain knowledge and learn. Dr. Jenny Radesky of the Boston Medical Center says, “Children learn language, they learn about their own emotions, they learn how to regulate them. They learn by watching us how to have a conversation, how to read other people’s facial expressions. And if that’s not happening, children are missing out on important development milestones.”
Some research shows that there are positives in children’s ability to use a smart phone. They become capable of rapid cyber searches; they make quick decisions, they develop peripheral vision.
But most research reminds us all that children must be taught moderation in the use of a cell phone. And the best teacher? All of us, parents especially, must model sane use of technology. Children emulate our actions far quicker than they heed our words.
2018
Comments