Screen Addiction and Children: Do the Benefits of the Internet Outweigh Its Deficits?

I remember queuing in the mid -80s at the post office while waiting to take a package or buy a book of stamps. I also have memories of a decade earlier when I was a child and I went with one of my parents to deposit my monthly allowance in my savings account, proud to show my growing pass book savings. At the end of the 80s and early 90s, the first internet innovations allowed me to jump these lines, and I was able to write an email, a press on Send and that's it. I felt like I saved at least 90 minutes of writing a letter, printing, addressing an envelope, then running to the post office. What was once a task that took time was suddenly taken care of in minutes. It seemed almost magical, as if we saved time, and we were regularly informed that the Internet would not only save us a lot of time in small tasks and races, but that the physical queue would ultimately be replaced by various interfaces and online websites that allowed us to pay our online bills. Now, looking back over the past thirty years, the time saved by internet is greatly litter.

Since the beginning of the century, paying online bills and having most automated items is certainly a wonderful asset. But at what price?

Nowadays, I find myself on an almost bihebdomedary basis that has to download new applications to do something that a credit card would work even more efficiently. This, in addition to all updates and conflicts that applications create for my computer and mobile phone. But the biggest deficit in the way computers interfere with our lives is that recently, I had to negotiate with the insistence of my eldest child to have a smartphone because his peers as young as nine years have mobile phones. Yes, you read correctly. I saw a 21st century following the Jones.

Unfortunately, things become more bizarre with schools insisting that in recent years, children have used the Internet and a computer at home to do most of their homework, entirely jumping our consent as parents, apparently do not care about our desire that our children Do not spend hours a day on a screen. This, in addition, there is an intrinsic importance in teaching children to appreciate the touch, to learn books that have been edited, actually verified and often have an incredible prose. Children no longer learn to write (or read) in cursive, and they can barely distinguish between grammar and correct vocabulary and the slang in which the Internet is bathed.

Then there is the question of security. It is quite surreal to think that only a decade ago, children learned the “foreign danger” and to fear almost everyone in society, and now they are told quite the opposite, schools expecting parents to give our children the proverbial keys of the Starship company. Of course, we want our KDIs to have information and to be able to use the Internet for learning purposes, but like the literal highway, the “information route”, as the Internet was called in the 1990s, has toxic and fairly dangerous sites that fall far beyond the control of most of the security and parents.

Although my daughter knows that I do not receive her cell phone so early, I made sure that she has an eight -year -old tablet in the age of hope that she would learn the positive use of these devices. But things did not go as I expected since using his tablet with only installed learning applications, I noticed that her behavior had radically changed when she spent time online. I want this not the case, but every time I allowed her to use her tablet, she became in a bad mood, impatient and even unpleasant when it was time to put the device. As a result, we put the tablet tidy up and tried again a year later with the same results. Finally, when my daughter was 11 years old, she was able to use her tablet for a limited amount of time. However, I noticed that his mood would become quite unpleasant if his use of the tablet exceeded 30 minutes. It was as if she was dependent on her device. By thinking that I had to imagine the changes in the behavior of my child, I started to read various scientific studies on this question, and I learned that my daughter's behavioral transformation around the time of the screen was far from abnormal.

The screen time has been widely studied and it is proven A host of problems For children from my daughter's age. A systematic journal on the association between screen time activities and aggressive behavior, which analyzed the data of 4,381 studies, revealed that “children and adolescents who spend most of their time watching television are more at risk of violent behavior, in particular physical fights, victims and intimidation”. In many other studies, excessive screen time has been linked to school problems, anger, assault, impulsivenessfrustration, depression, and other emotional problems. It is widely understood that the overvaluation can lead children to concentrate badly and to exhaust their mental energy, which often leads to explosive behavior.

One of Signs revealing on screen dependence is something that I noticed for the first time in my daughter – with creation symptoms such as anger and anger attacks when I ask her to turn off his tablet. I also asked my daughter to use her tablet when she seated next to me and share with me what she does. And even if my daughter's tablet is largely limited to Google Classroom, it did not make the screen dependence less, because it would use a class window to pierce the restrictions of the tablet. I consider myself lucky after reading studies on how other parents report a worse behavior when they impose restrictions on screen time on their children.

The problem of dependence on screen is linked to the dissemination of social media, where it is literally impossible to protect yourself against dependence on social media without simply removing your child's tablet. Researchers in Canada have discovered that social media hang adolescents while nourishing their assault and impulsiveness, while letting them unable to concentrate. And researchers think they know why children react this way.

Canadian scientists have studied changes in the brain reward system while adolescents are watching video clips. These researchers argue that, similar to the way serotonin dives when we are hungry, screen time can also strongly influence the brain reward system, which is the key to decision -making. Some researchers hypothesize that there could be a depletion in serotonin, where the imbalance mediatal assault in children.

In parallel with social media, research studying the effects of online games Demonstrates an increase in anti-social behavior (that is to say coarse language and aggression) with an increase in positive effects (that is to say, more transparent communication and honesty). Certainly, not in the forms of aggression that work against society, as indicated in several studies linked to the way in which the negotiation of aggressiveness on a action trading platform positively affects the efficiency of the market and the general social well-being. There is a Darwinian aspect of the aggression which “can be considered as an expression of competition”, hence survival.

Despite the survivalist aspects of the aggression, during the examination of these valences among children, the assault and mood changes are now considered as standard by-products of the use of social media among this cohort, where behaviors such as fighting, arguments and rupture of rules have become more common. Research also indicates how artificial intelligence algorithms (AI) on social media platforms are designed to attract and keep people online to expose them to more advertising. It is also an overwhelming factor with regard to the use and abuse of social media adults, which also indicates alarming levels of smartphone dependence around the world. We have all seen the couple in the restaurant, each pretending to pay attention to the other while their real attention is aimed at their smartphones. Likewise, for children, there are a considerable number of studies that demonstrate how prolonged exposure to violent video games can desensitize children to suffering, by reducing empathetic responses.

We must ask ourselves if this is the kind of company we want to create. A clear path out of this mess is to reduce, if not entirely entirely, our use of social media and games, not to mention the overculying of online education. I have already talked to my daughter's school, asking them to limit all the homework that requires screen time, noting their behavior changes. Surprisingly, the teachers agreed with my conclusions on the negative impacts on my child when using his tablet for hours a day. I also plan to abandon my smartphone and limit my online use to my computer, and strictly for a limited number of hours per day. I also have offline hours when I don't use or even look at my mobile. And during my working day, in order to maximize my efficiency, I have a white list which only allows telephone calls only from a few selected people, which allows me to focus on work so that when I stop working, my children have my attention and my time, and I have a necessary break from these devices.

While neo-tune Could not please you, it is worth checking real conversations, social gatherings, while using social media for very occasional use, if all. Although we can say “this is already there, why not make the most of it” when fighting rapid integration of social media in the peers of our children, we must not abandon our rational positions to create and nourish real and live social connections.