Clustered Evidence and Reflection

• Per data from 2016, nearly 92% of children have digital footprints at the age of 2 and by the age of 5, they are spending a staggering average of 4.1 hours on daily screen time. Starting at the age of 8, children spend nearly 6-7 on daily screen time, followed by further increases as they age more. Nevertheless, the high-tech corporations continue to exacerbate this digital epidemic by enhancing marketing efforts via incredulous addition of deceptive phrases, such as “educational” or “cognition- improving” to their products, in order to increase the amount of time the product spends in the eyes of children, the sole measure of the product’s efficacy and success.
  • This fact is interesting because it demonstrates the conniving nature of technology moguls.
  • In an effort to reap in as much profit as possible, many companies label their products with the term”educational/e-learning/cognition improving”to attract parents to buy
  • however much of these term labellings don’t even have the scientific approval/backing to support it
  • thus these companies perpetuate this digital epidemic that’s plaguing children nowadays

 

• Per Dmitri Christakis, a Seattle Children’s Hospital physician-scientist, a child’s brain development during the critical period is directly linked to the stimuli genre received during the first 3-4 years of life, when the brain size triples. If a developing child is exposed to an excess of rapid-movement stimulation, as found in many entertainment videos like Baby Einstein, then the child’s neural synaptic activity will condition him or her to expect and consistently seek hyper-stimulating activities, which Christakis puts, “for the child, then, the slow-pace reality of life will be met by extreme boredom and avolition”. Known as the neural overstimulation hypothesis, such conditioning associated with entertainment technology’s visual stimulation predisposes young children to attention deficit disorders in later years of development. Seen in multiple neural-medical longitudinal studies, the constant bombardment of visuals offsets the delicate cerebral cortex and basal ganglia balance, an area that is critical in attention and distraction regulation.
  • I think it’s interesting to investigate Christaki’s notion here:
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbMF6zBzaKI
  • Baby Einstein, a near billion-dollar franchise, coined by the layman phrasing “crack for babies”, supposedly enhances cognition via synaptic construction. However, as depicted in the clip, roughly 8 scene changes occur in 25 seconds, equaling about 1 change per 3 seconds. Adults who watch this face mental exhaustion and encounter a nonsensical representation of a real farm as they attempt to construct a coherent narrative of what they see. Yet, young children are not trying to make sense from the video, simply because they lack sufficient cognitive processes to do so due to their age. For them, it’s all about the screen change and the visual hyper-stimulation that keeps them engaged to the screen.
  • this idea is very interesting. makes sense why young children love watching such nonsensical show

 

•  Entertainment technology is known to inhibit the development of the parietal lobe of the brain, an area that regulates our touch and spatial sensing. In the paper, “The Impact of Technology on Child Sensory and Motor Development”, Rowan resonates with this and adds that, “young children require 3-4 hours per day of active rough and tumble play to achieve adequate sensory stimulation of their proprioceptive tactile systems for proper development”. However, those 3-4 hours of recommended touch-stimulating activity are now being used to touch around with tablets and phones, which is not sufficient for proprioceptive tactile development.

• Look at this child climbing a tree.
• We see the complex synchronization of his body with his mind and tactile senses. With each movement of the limbs and the arms, there are neural sensory propagations that finely coordinate information from all over his body. Children who virtually experience tree climbing by watching through technology miss out on this multi-modal experience. Sequestered to only thumb-to-eye interaction, digital children are deficient of complete, integrative muscle-body-brain activity.