Screen Time 5
The wisest man who ever lived,
Solomon, tells us, The rod and reproof give wisdom: But a child left to
himself bringeth his mother to shame (Proverbs 29.15). Wisdom is how
something ought to be done. Children are wisdomless, to coin a word. They are,
in Solomon’s parlance, simple. Parents are commissioned by the Lord to teach
their children the three great concepts of knowledge, wisdom, and
understanding. Parents need to do this so that their child will have the right
underlying foundation to make proper decisions on their own as they mature. Train
up a child in the way he should go (Proverbs 22.6). Until a child matures
into an adult, it is the parent’s responsibility to make decisions for the
child in order to protect the child from the negative impact of wisdomless
decisions.
There are, sadly, many parents who
ignore this biblical responsibility, accidentally or practically. In so doing,
they bring destruction upon their children and shame upon themselves. They do
this in several ways. First, as we saw above, they leave their child alone too
much. Second, they follow the wrong parenting advice, unbiblical advice. Third,
they allow the child to marinate in a spiritually unhealthy atmosphere. It is
my contention that the parents of this generation all too often combine all of
these mistakes into one by allowing children entirely too much screen time.
Further, this disastrous parenting philosophy is working its way more and more
into the church. Take your child to any independent Baptist youth conference
and marvel at how many teenagers have unfiltered internet access on their
phones, for example.
Screens are an attractive resource for
parents. They help to keep a child quiet when they are left to themselves. They
are educational, and help to prepare the child for a technologically advanced
world. Screens are entertaining and fun; children love them. Screens make
parenting easier. So we place the screen into their hands, on their desks, and
in their lives. Then we go about our business thinking we have fulfilled our
parenting responsibilities without ever thinking through how much that decision
is going to cost them.
Well, let me tell you what it will
cost them.
First, it will cost them a growing
dopamine addiction. Dopamine is a chemical used throughout our body, but
primarily in our brain as a neurotransmitter. I am not a brain scientist
(though I did interview one in preparation for this series) but my understanding
is that dopamine signals the desirability of something, for lack of a better
phrase. It is a physical substance that can be increased or affected by the
choices we make and the things we do. It can also be chemically manipulated to
make someone feel something very desirable, a high, so to speak.
This is exactly what cocaine, meth,
Ritalin, Adderall, ecstasy, and numerous other drugs do. They do not produce
physical addiction like opioids do, necessarily, but they do produce a strong
craving or desire to repeat the high.
Most unfortunately, the same dopamine
rush or high that is transmitted through our brains by controlled substances is
also transmitted via various screen activities. Gaming produces dopamine.
Social media likes produce dopamine. Viewing pornography produces dopamine. In
fact, studies have shown that excessive screen use by young people damages
their brain in the exact same way that frequent cocaine use does.
In 2012, Dr. Lei of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences compared the brains of people diagnosed with Internet Addiction
Disorder with those of healthy people. His study, published in the “Public
Library of Science” found that IAD subjects had brains that had morphed from
normal brains into brains similar to people who had substance abuse issues. In
other words, screen addiction looks exactly like drug addiction in the brain.
Screens are digital crack. Other studies done in 2013 and 2014 found similar
correlations.
In 2012, psychologists Patterson and
Hoffman began experimenting at the University of Washington on ways to reduce
pain in burn victims without using opioids. They discovered that when patients
play video games their pain sensations greatly decreased because so much
dopamine was flowing through their brain.
Regarding gaming, Dr. Peter Whybrow,
UCLA’s director of the Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour calls
computer games electronic cocaine. Commander Dr. Doan, US Navy, says that
gaming activates the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis. This is the
adrenaline rush that comes with gaming. Blood pressure rises, palms get sweaty,
pupils constrict. That combination of adrenaline and dopamine is potent and
highly addictive.
Gaming companies, of course, are aware of
this. They purposely design their games to induce as much of it as possible. In
other words, computer and video games are engineered to be addictive. Dr. Doan
says, “Gaming companies will hire the best neurobiologists and neuroscientists
to hook up electrodes to the test-gamer. If they don’t elicit the blood pressure
that they shoot for – typically 180 over 120 or 140 within a few minutes of
playing, and if they don’t show sweating and an increase in galvanic skin
responses, they go back and tweak the game to get the maximum addicting and
arousing response that they’re looking for.”
In my conversation with the brain
scientist I mentioned earlier, Dr. Grace Fox, she used this illustration to
explain it. Sugar, like controlled substances, also produces a dopamine rush
and is addictive. That sugar-induced dopamine rush trains us to go back to the
peanut butter cookie when we want to feel that way. Additionally, this is not
isolated to just that decision. Dopamine use affects the portion of our brain
that helps us to make all decisions, reducing its neutrality, so to speak. The
brain is plastic; it is moldable or trainable. The younger you are the more
plastic it is. In other words, the younger you train your brain to chase
dopamine highs the more deeply that chase is embedded in you for the rest of
your life.
Never mind all that, though. Game on.
Second, unmitigated screen time will
create in your child an inability to focus, to think, and to reason. In other
words, your child will look a lot like those who are diagnosed with ADHD.
The more you stimulate a child to get attention the more you must stimulate that child to get attention. We see this societally in the difference between children’s television programming when I was a child – think Mr. Rogers here – and now – think Sponge Bob Squarepants now. It is undeniably factual that the rates of focus inability began to rise off the charts with the advent of television with all of its rapid screen changes and perspectives. That chart defying rise exponentially increased with the advent of the internet, with all its gaming, streaming, and frantic page scrolling and linking.
Dr. Victoria Dunckley, a child
psychiatrist, found pediatric bipolar disorder increased four thousand percent
from 1994 to 2003, and that between 1987 and 2007 diagnosis of ADHD increased
by eight hundred percent. Her working theory is that when a child interacts
with a screen it shifts his nervous system into fight or flight mode. This, in
turn, produces biological and hormonal disorganization, which, in its own turn,
leads to ADHD, depression, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and anxiety.
Would you care to guess how she treats her
patients? With six week tech fasts. Eighty percent of the time the treatment is
effective, reducing the symptoms I have just described by half. Yet most child
psychiatrists treat such conditions with medication, numbing their patient into
functional zombiehood. Further, they do this with very little in the way of
long term studies on the result of prescribing young people such drugs.
Earlier in this series I referenced Dr. Nicholas
Kardaras. He found that ninety percent
of the children he classifies with attentional, behavioral, emotional,
or developmental problems also have a problematic relationship with screens.
In 2010, a study was done at Iowa State
University and later published in the journal “Pediatrics.” It assessed 1,323
middle school kids over a thirteen month period. It concluded that viewing
television and playing video games is directly associated with increased
subsequent attention problems in childhood. That same year, the Kaiser Family
Foundation released a study showing that children between eight and eighteen
spend seven and half hours a day in front of screens and another one and a half
hours texting. Surely the past decade has not seen those numbers decline. And
then we wonder why we have an ADHD epidemic?
When you condition the mind to become
accustomed to high levels of input reality becomes boring. Is that what you are
doing to your child?
The third cost of excessive screen time in
children is loneliness and depression.
Social media is supposed to be the new
form of community. Tech is supposed to increase our ability to communicate.
Both community and communicate have the word “commune” as their root. But the
simple fact is social media use and texting make kids feel lonelier, not more
connected.
Americans send, on average, six billion
texts a day. The younger the American the more they text. A 2011 Pew Research
Poll found that phone users between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four
exchange an average of 109 messages per day. But we are lonelier and more
depressed than ever. In 2014, Dr. Twenge of San Diego State University,
analyzed data on 7,000,000 people. He concluded we are more likely to be
depressed now than in the 1980s. The World Health Organization has predicted
that depression will be second only to heart disease as the leading cause of
disability globally. Further, it found that suicide rates are up sixty percent
over the past fifty years.
What does this have to do with social
media and texting? Well, the truth is these things often isolate us rather than
connect us. They give the illusion of connection, so to speak. The constant
notification pings on my phone promise me people are paying attention to me and
care about me. That promise is often a mirage.
In 2015, the Pew Research Center published
a study by the American Psychological Association of 400 8th to 11th
graders. It found that only thirty-five percent socialize face to face compared
to sixty-three percent who socialize mainly through text message, averaging 167
texts per day. In 2014, the University of Innsbruck published a study in the
journal “Computers in Human Behavior.” In it, researchers Greitmayer and
Sagioglou found that the longer people are on Facebook the more negative their
mood is afterward. They related this to what they call social comparison. We
compare the negative parts of our life to the mostly positive portrayals we see
on social media and get depressed. Well, why do people continue to use social
media in such numbers if it makes them feel so badly afterward? The addictive
power of dopamine. The same reason you eat another piece of chocolate cake even
though you hate how fat you have become.
Case Western Reserve University School of
Medicine published a study on hypernetworking – spending three hours or more
per school day on social networks. It found that such students had higher rates
of depression, more substance abuse, poor sleep, stress, poor academics, and
were more suicidal. In relation to specifics, it found hyper-networked students
were sixty-nine percent more likely to be sexually active, sixty percent more
likely to have four or more partners, eighty-four percent more likely to have
used illegal drugs, and ninety-four percent more likely to have been involved
in a physical fight.
Dr. Kardaras says, “I’ve done probably
about two dozen suicide risk assessments over the last couple of years;
invariably, the depressed and suicidal young person is a plugged in social
media devotee.”
See? A child left to himself bringeth
his mother to shame.
How much time do your children spend doing
what on a screen?
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