The arrival of mobile devices has meant instant entertainment for kids and some much-needed peace and quiet for busy parents. But before you start relying too much on these digital distractions, there are a few things you should know.
For your parents, it was so much simpler. Life was very much like the nuclear family their kids watched on the tiny old cathode-ray television. Dad went to work, mum stayed at home, the kids came back from school and went outside to kick a ball around or climb a tree, then headed inside to catch Skippy or Doctor Who before dinner. Houses were cheaper, entertainment options were fewer, life was more straightforward.
Then things changed. “When Australia became a country where you needed two incomes to own a house or to pay off a mortgage or even to pay rent, then Australian parents were put under enormous strain,” says Dr Wayne Warburton of the Department of Psychology at Macquarie University, who specialises in an area that many parents today can identify with: screen addiction and the positive and negative messages contained in video games, music and other media.
For Warburton, this new economic reality has fundamentally altered the home dynamic. “It’s not the sort of world now where one parent can be mostly at home, whether it’s the mother or the father, and there’s always someone with their hand on the tiller in terms of where the kids are at,” he says.
On top of that, the communication revolution arrived, meaning that the kids’ focus was no longer simply on that TV in the corner of the living room. “I think things changed with Internet-capable mobile devices,” explains Warburton. “Even a few years ago, if you wanted to have some sort of control over how much media people have in their house, at one time you’d keep the computer in the living room or outside of the bedroom and everybody knew what was going on. The moment the computer or phone is portable, if there’s an Internet connection, it’s available 24/7, no matter where you are.
“That’s created two issues: the first is that we’re seeing kids at a much, much younger age using these devices. The majority of kids from about 12 months on are using an iPad or i-devices, so we’re seeing use of technology move into much younger age groups. The second thing is the additional amount of access means that people use it a whole lot more.”
Just how much more is astounding. According to recent Australian studies, children between the ages of 8 and 17 spend on average five hours a day consuming media. In the US, that number is more than seven hours. If you think that’s too much, you’re right. “About 10 per cent of kids have problems with how much they use (devices) and in about one per cent we think the use is pathological, where it creates serious mental health issues that require treatment,” says Warburton. “We’ve got five or six million kids in Australia, so if you do the numbers it turns out that lots and lots of kids have pathological or problematic levels of use.” Even if your child isn’t one of these extreme cases, there are a number of ways in which excess device usage may be causing them harm.
They’re Sleeping Badly
The blue light from screens inhibits the production of melatonin, a hormone secreted by the brain to help you sleep at night. What’s more, there’s a direct relationship between distance from the screen and the effect it has on a young (or even adult) brain. “With televisions it’s a mild effect, with computer screens it’s a bigger effect, but an iPad about five or six inches away has a much stronger impact,” says Warburton. “We’re seeing lots more sleep difficulties in kids than we used to see, essentially because firstly we’re spending more time with screens and secondly, the blue light is interrupting sleep.”
They’re Getting Fat
Before the advent of screens, kids spent their leisure time after school running, jumping, swinging, riding, kicking things about and generally driving the neighbours nuts. As the American Academy of Paediatrics’ 2016 policy statement, “Media and Young Minds” explains, today’s increased screen time has some predictably serious implications for young bodies, finding that “Heavy media use during preschool years is associated with small but significant increases in BMI… and sets the stage for weight gain later in childhood”. It also notes “a recent study of two-year olds found that BMI increased for every hour per week of media consumed”. The essentially sedentary nature of screen time is further confirmed through research by Leon Straker, Professor of Physiotherapy at Perth’s Curtin University, whose work has found that in terms of physical activity, playing a video game expends about the same energy as resting. That is, almost none.
Their Bodies Are Suffering
Burrowing a big hole in the sofa isn’t good for adults and it’s even less ideal for kids, with Straker’s work also revealing that hours of clutching a device is leading to repetitive strain injuries and other musculo-skeletal problems in kids as young as four. “What we’re seeing is ore kids with problems to do with poor posture, weak musculature, difficulty holding pencils or poor muscle strength in the hands,” says Warburton. “Interacting with screens and games can assist children to develop fine motor skills, but if screen use is out of balance, this can be at the expense of the gross motor skills they gain through outdoor activities like kicking balls around.”
It’s Impacting Development
In very young children, says Warburton, “the biggest concern is a number of studies showing possible delays in cognitive, language and socio-emotional development with heavy screen use. I don’t think there’s ever been a study showing clear benefits to a child under the age of two that involves simple screen use. If there are any educational benefits at all, they lie in parents reteaching what infants see on screens. Now the American Academy of Paediatrics is saying really we’d suggest no screens before 18 months.” Warburton says the research also suggests “there is a reduction in parentchild interaction when the television is on, and poorer family functioning when there is heavy screen use. Nought to two years is a time when it is crucial that children have good quality (and quantity) interaction with their caregivers, rather than time relating to a device.”
They’re Watching Bad Stuff
There’s a huge amount of violent and pornographic material on the Internet and if they choose to, any semi-digitally literate kid will know how to find it. Sadly, this unfettered access is proving to have long-reaching consequences, says Warburton, “with kids aged eight, nine and 10 accessing extreme content and we’re seeing those kids in clinics – there are some specialist clinics in the UK for example, and they’re finding that kids who are accessing extreme material at a young age are then struggling to have normal relationships as they move into their teenage years.”
Their Attention Span is Shortening
Where previous generations of kids had to use their imagination to come up with ways to entertain themselves, the digital generation is conditioned to the reality that a huge range of information and entertainment is just a few key strokes away. “They’re expecting to be stimulated externally, rather than seeking things that interest them and I think that’s probably changing fundamentally the way human beings think,” says Warburton. “There are a number of studies now coming out of the US, for example from Craig Anderson’s lab at Iowa State, showing the more you play video games or engage in screen-based activities, the more you see attention problems. For example, Doug Gentile and colleagues have done a big longitudinal study in Singapore showing over time an increase in attention problems that goes with an increase in video game playing.”
It’s Not All Bad News!
Of course, there are a huge number of positives about media, not the least of which is that it acts as a social glue for kids: they talk about culture, games, movies and music. “Friendships are formed and identities are formed around the things that interest you,” says Warburton. Educational media has helped to make learning fun rather than dry and video games aid in developing skills, even in adults: pilots sharpen their performance on simulators; laparoscopic surgeons who play games perform surgery better than their counterparts who don’t; racing drivers who’ve never seen a track can learn it in the virtual world before turning up to tackle the real thing. “The benefits are endless,” says Warburton. “The secret for me is to grab this middle ground where you maximise some of the good things and minimise some of the bad.”
Getting the Balance Right
“I think of media like food and I think the same principles need to apply,” says Warburton. “The three basic principles we apply to eating are the right amount, more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff and it needs to work at your age.
“In terms of amount, a healthy diet probably has 2300 calories a day and if you start to exceed that by too much you start to gain weight. With media, once you get past two or three hours a day (see “Set Some Time Limits”), things start to get out of balance – lots of time in front of the screen, less activity outside, less time with your friends, more time that you’re not interacting with human beings, the list goes on.
“In terms of content, every child understands that there are sometimes foods and all-the-time foods – Healthy Harold tells them that, even in infants’ school: don’t eat lots of chocolate biscuits but eat lots of fruit and vegetables because that’s the stuff that’s good for you. It’s the same with media. If kids have a diet that includes lots of educational content and pro-social media and stuff that’s helpful for them and that balances out some of the violent or anti-social stuff that they see, then it’s better than a diet that doesn’t give them any helpful messages or much of the good stuff.
“In terms of age-appropriateness, full-cream milk is great if you’re two years old and have got developing bones but if you’re 90 and your arteries are full it’s not so great. It’s the same with kids and media. Young children, for instance,just get scared by the way things look because they don’t have the abstract reasoning to think things through, and so there’s stuff that’s just going to scare them. Why would you expose them to that sort of stuff? So, you have to have some sort of regard to the child’s age and whether it’s appropriate.”
For Warburton, part of the strategy is for busy parents to help train their kids to self-manage their media consumption: “You really want more of the stuff that makes you feel good and teaches you how to treat people well and less of the stuff that’s unhelpful. I think if you work with your kids towards that, you’re going to end up with a generation of kids who are smart users, who self-monitor how much and what, and look to have this balanced lifestyle where they do lots of things outside of screens and when they’re on the screen their use is moderate and within the bounds of stuff that we think is okay.”