A year ago the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published the latest recommendations regarding the use of electronic displays and devices by young children and many people thought it was an exaggeration, or they did not quite understand what the risk was.
"Do they go blind? Do they lose vision if they spend many hours in front of the TV? Aren't they supposed to learn more with these stimuli? With the beautiful videos on YouTube!"
Well, that's what we are talking about today, about how the screens are robbing children of the desire to learn things in school. Or wherever.
What the AAP recommendations say
Just so that you have the basis of what we will explain below, I summarize here the recommendations of the AAP in this regard:
- No screens before 18 months: unless it is some video chat with family or friends.
- High quality content between 18 and 24 months: with supervision of the mother or father and always limited time.
- High quality content no more than one hour between 2 and 5 years: also with parental supervision, helping the child to understand what he is seeing, and generating learning that can be positive.
- From 6 years balance and common sense: a balance between screen play and free play, between sitting time and communication with other children and adults, with times away from electronic devices. If they are eating, avoid TV; If they are playing, do not leave the background TV, etc.
Sedentary play is affecting the overall development
Experts have been warning for some time: the game with screens, which is sedentary by definition, is affecting the children's sleep, and that translates into worse conditions during the vigil.
In addition, it affects the psychomotor development, because they spend less time playing outdoors (children now are slower running than we were, for example), and it has an impact on your social and emotional skills (those that are only achieved through the relationship with other children and adults).
YouTube is ending the curiosity of children
Well, more than YouTube, the misuse of this and other tools, for abuse. The good development of a child is achieved by offering appropriate stimuli to their age, free play time, boredom time to develop their creativity, communication time with other children, and time to learn from the elders all the interesting things we can explain and teach them
Now, if they spend little time playing outdoors, if they don't get bored, if they communicate little with other children and much of their free time is summed up to turn on the tablet and start watching video after video, which are also chosen by Children (in the past you could get in front of the TV, but the variety depended on what was broadcast on each channel), there comes a time when the stimuli that they do not choose, those that we can offer others, begin to lose charm.
Is the immediacy of leisure in the form of a tablet. I want it, I have it. I want to see this, I see it. What interest will he have, if he has that at his fingertips, for what a teacher can explain to him at school?
The subject may already be very interesting, or be a teacher (or teacher) very capable of capturing your attention, because if not, there will be few children who follow it for the interest of learning.
Overstimulated and large consumers of content with enough narrative rhythm and full of strategies to capture their attention, when you have before you the perspective of an hour of class on a subject that may not be of interest or pleasure, the easiest will be start to "disconnect" and think about your things, or to find a way to have fun, perhaps annoying the rest of the group.
But ... if they also put videos in school!
Umm, yes. Now in many schools they have audiovisual media in each classroom and sometimes they even put YouTube videos with drawings. I do not know if much, little, better or worse is done, but of course ... its use should be very limited, because of "not digging your own grave".
Taking into account that the best learning, the one that best consolidates and the one that gives rise to children wanting to know more and more, is he who comes from curiosity and motivation, adults are making it more and more difficult (for children) by allowing them to spend much of their free time in front of the screens, with a very striking leisure, with little content, which requires little interaction and little movement.
Then do not be surprised if problems begin to be detected of behavior, learning, overweight, relational, etc. They will be, alone, the consequence of their childhoods.
Photos | iStock
In Babies and more | Half of eleven-year-old Spanish children have a smartphone, The shocking photos of families without mobiles or tablets that show how hooked we are, How to manage the use of mobile so that our children are not abducted by the screen
In Xataka | The generation of parents who feel guilty because their children spend a lot of time watching screens
