What’s sucking away our kids’ gray matter?
I zing the hobbies electric
Generation of the screen
I remember back in the 70s and early 80s when parents, teachers, and consumer groups were all up in arms about the amount of TV we were all watching – especially our kids. I seem to recall the average being somewhere around 3 hours a day. And I also seem to recall thinking people were right to be concerned even back then about how completely the boob tube had taken over our lives.
But in this day and age, it’s not just TV that’s sucking our kids’ gray matter away – it’s computers, video games, and cells phones too. Everything our kids seem to be doing for fun nowadays is connected to a power outlet or run by a battery. Whatever happened to baseball, fishing, bike-riding and dodge-ball games?
According to a March 10th Reuters Health article, kids ages 8 to 18 are undertaking the equivalent of a full-time job just monitoring monitors of various sorts: TVs, computer screens, cell-phone and PDA displays, video-game terminals, etc. The piece summarized a Kaiser Family Foundation study that concluded the average child spends 6 1/2 hours a day being entertained by electronic media of various sorts. The study also reported that:
- Less than half of kid’s households had any rules at all about TV use
- Nearly 7 out of 10 kids had a television IN THEIR BEDROOM
- More than 30% had an Internet-capable computer in their room
- Better than 25% often used more than one electronic device at the same time
The study also found that the average kid spent only 45 minutes a day reading, only 50 minutes a day on homework (and a lot of people today are claiming schools are TOO TOUGH), around an hour a day in vigorous play or exercise, and just half an hour daily doing household chores.
****************************************************
Child’s play – unplugged
There’s a new “disorder” getting some buzz in the mainstream media – one that may be caused by a lopsided dependency on electronic entertainment
It’s called NDD: Nature Deficiency Disorder.
According to a CBSNews report, the modern separation of kids from nature – caused both by the lure of electronic entertainment and the paranoia of parents about everything from Lyme disease to child-snatchers – contributes to sensory deprivation characterized by the disorder’s discoverer (inventor?) as a kind of “cultural autism.” In his new book on the subject, the self-proclaimed “child advocate” also claims that research and statistics link a nature deficiency with lower grades and even ADD/ADHD (a made-up disorder if there ever were one).
Even though this condition was coined by a fringe journalist with a new book to sell, there may actually be something to Nature Deficit Disorder, in my opinion. But to my way of thinking, it isn’t an illness so much as an obvious consequence of children’s choices in entertainment and parents’ oblivious (or apathetic) acquiescence to those choices. It’s all very simple, and you don’t need some TV “child advocate” to realize the downsides of isolating kids from the outdoors.
If children learn about the world around them from a computer screen instead of first-hand, their perspective becomes skewed. If they don’t have real flesh-and-blood friends instead of just chat-room cyber-buddies, they won’t learn proper social skills. If they don’t expend enough energy outside, they risk a diagnosis of ADHD when they do unplug and go nuts in the house. If they don’t often get outside and run and play real games instead of video versions, they won’t learn athletic skills, coordination or anything about their physical capabilities
They won’t burn enough calories, either. And you know what could follow after that: Obesity, diabetes, and a short life full of drugs, low self-esteem and misery.
Always revealing (or lamenting) human “nature,”
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
