Three Issues With Screen Time for Children

 

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 8^th to 11^th 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?