All you need to know how addictive cell phones and pads are is to look around a subway car and count how many people have their faces down staring at a screen, oblivious to their surroundings, texting, playing games, reading messages, scrolling and lost in high-tech space.
They have been captured by what scientists call “brain hacking,” a technique application designers learned to get them too, building apps that offer rewards, surprises and trigger the release of a chemical in the brain called dopamine, to make them tune in, turn out and drop out of their environment, locked onto the phone or pad.
Now look at your toddler, two or three years old, and see the same scary scene: they’re swiping Netflix looking for Word Party, the Octonauts, Disney Junior and PJ Masks, the tiny screen their preferred playground, which should worry parents but doesn’t, at least not enough.
CBS’ 60 Minutes has featured the danger of too much screen time, especially for adolescents and pre-pubescent teens and now has focused on the trickle-down effect of the devices implanted in the hands of toddlers, who become qujckly adept at how to use them and don’t want them taken away, even to go outside to play, or read a read book inside of a tablet.
It’s estimated that children spend as much as 4 ½ hours a day looking at their phones and with the proliferation of the devices and parents distracted by work, errands, household chores and other activities, they are increasingly relying on the phones and pads to be electronic babysitters.
That worries Dr. Dimitri Christakis, lead author of the latest screen time guidelines for children by the American Academy of Pediatrics, who was featured on the program talking to reporter Anderson Cooper about why parents should be spending more time with their toddlers.
Christakis said toddlers are increasingly using mobile devices to self-soothe, rather than learning to do that on their own. He warned that interaction with a parent or caregiver is being replaced by technology, and his guidance for parents is simple: Toddlers “need laps more than apps.”
It’s not just his opinion or anecdotal evidence that’s being offered about the impact of screen time on children’s brains, as the effect was shown in a government looking at the e-world gadgets hypnotic grab.
The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study will follow more than 10,000 children, with Dr. Gaya Dowling of the National Institutes of Health explaining it was initially designed to gauge the impacts of alcohol, drugs, sleep patterns and sports injuries.
“I think the screen time component really came into play because we were wondering, what is the impact?” Dowling said. “I mean, clearly kids spend so much time on screens. And they’re very engaging, very interactive. The likelihood that they have an impact on brain, and cognition, and social development is pretty high,” she said.
National Institute of Health researchers let 60 Minutes to visit test centers in California and Maryland as they began their first MRIs and interviews with nine and 10 year-olds and they were surprised by the results from the scans of 4,500 participants that showed evidence of differences in the brains of some of the heaviest users of electronic devices.
“We have these snapshots of their brains now. And then we’ll be able to see as they escalate their use, and they come back and get their brain scanned again, whether there have been changes,” Dowling said.
“And when you’ve got 12,000 kids, you can then control for a lot of things. So in order to figure out if it’s really screen time that’s causing it, you can look at kids who spend a lot of time on screens, versus kids who don’t, kids who spend a lot of time on screen, and participate in sports, versus kids who spend a lot of time on screens, and don’t. So you can tease apart some of the impacts on what you’re seeing in terms of outcomes in the brain.”
The information provided by the ABCD study has also already revealed that kids who spend two hours a day or more on screens scored lower on memory and language tests no matter how adept they were at figuring out how to use devices even if they couldn’t read the letters or numbers but learned from repetition and understanding visual cues of apps such as photos of their favorite games and TV shows.
The report said it could take years to understand what’s at work – too late for the current generation of toddlers to be weaned off phones and pads and taken to a playground to ride a swing or go down a slide instead of swiping for the newest app luring them.
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