Let's Chat with Will & Tony
Let's Chat with Will & Tony
SEG 1 of 3- Digital Health - Balancing Screen Time and Child Development with Mindful Connections
Discover how the digital world's allure may be reshaping our very essence, and learn what it takes to navigate this terrain without losing sight of what truly matters. Together with our guest expert on child development, we dissect the intricate dance between technology's undeniable advantages and the subtle ways it could be fraying the fabric of our personal connections. Our conversation is a wakeup call to evaluate our screen time habits, as we draw parallels to the once addictive ingredients of sodas like Coca-Cola, and consider whether tech giants hold any responsibility for their habit-forming creations.
As we transition to the topic of early childhood development, we're reminded of the profound effects that nurturing relationships have on a child's growth. Our guest helps illuminate the ideal levels of engagement between parents and their children at various stages, and shares insights from studies on Romanian orphanages that underline the lasting impact of care—or the lack thereof—in the early years. Packed with invaluable advice for parents, our discussion underscores the importance of seizing the irreplaceable opportunities to foster these bonds, while acknowledging that while it's tough to make up for lost time, it's not impossible.
Get out of your rut and into your groove. Let's chat with Will and Tony on News Talk 1079. Now here's Will Kesley and Tony Pack. Welcome to the show. I was just taking a drink as the audio went up.
Speaker 2:You sound in a little gruffly today.
Speaker 1:You can hear me. I've got the. What do they call that? The winter or something? The winter, the winter gum, the winter gum boo.
Speaker 2:The gum boo. Yeah gum boo, I hope you were going to get a fill in. Yeah, thanks, tony.
Speaker 1:You know, the worst part about doing radio when you sound like this is that everybody else that hears you goes. They still want to be around people that are sick.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there's actually people who turn their radio off because it's like I don't want to catch that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you like. That's a rough one getting infected over the airways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're not. You're not going to get infected anybody, I promise you. I've, I've, I've sanitized it between here and the transmitter, All right.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 1:Hey, we got a great show though. Yeah, this is good show. Um, one of the things we want to jump into, uh, quite quickly, this is a new state came out today, and you know, tony and I for those that listen to the show you know we are hmm, I don't want to use the word anti.
Speaker 2:No, not at all anti. We're not anti, but we are realists realists and extremely sensitive to the risks of electronics and social media technology technology.
Speaker 1:And look, we are going to continue. Tony and I are going to continue. In fact, we've been asked and I think we might take them up on this to start going on to schools and having this discussion about the facts regarding technology. We are, uh, as a general population, we are missing the boat, correct About technology. Now, we always like to frame, we'd like technology, we think technology is a gift to.
Speaker 2:Oh it's, it's amazing tool, the things we can do today. I was just thinking the other day I'm, you know, I'm out in the mountains and I'm pulling up my phone calling my wife to have her meet me somewhere and I'm like off grid and it's amazing. The stuff we can do is amazing.
Speaker 1:I mean, go in on and on and on, like, as a pilot, the fact that I have GPS that follows me around. Now there were days I used to talk to my wife about if I go down and I'm outside of radio contact. Here's what I'm going to do with the plan Now. I'm just like I can take Zach around, man I just follow the phone.
Speaker 2:I mean the other day my kid's coming home from Boise and I. I got on and I tracked his phone. I could see right where he was and soon he was going to be home. It's beautiful. So we're not anti technology.
Speaker 1:However, we are going to be candid about technology. That's right, the gift of technology. But with that gift always comes a downside. There's never an opposition that doesn't come with those types of blessings in our life. The opposition is this we are destroying relationships with technology. Not only that, but you're destroying yourself and, more importantly, you're stealing from yourself. You're allowing the people that program technology to steal from you your joy, your happiness and your satisfaction in life.
Speaker 1:You just start agency and we can go through all those details about how they've programmed these things to play with chemicals in your brain, just like. Look, here's an example. And they first came out with a soda called Coca-Cola, right, okay?
Speaker 2:They put cocaine in it. There you go, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it was a stimulant. And people, hey, this is, you know, chemical to get you kind of hooked on it, right? Well, once that became illegal, they had to find the next stimulant. So they went to caffeine, and caffeine is still a legal thing, but now you can actually buy on the internet. You can get your little tubs of powdered caffeine for people that need extra scoops, little extra scoop in the coke, right, yeah, get their coke to give them their little zing-zing. That's what people do. It's very clear that people they produce things that make you want them more.
Speaker 2:Yeah that's a good business model, right, it's a good business model.
Speaker 1:They get you hooked up on something and you're going to want more of it and you're going to keep buying that stuff. Hopefully they get hooked on. Let's Chat Right, we'll teach them. So the cell phone is the same thing. In fact, some of the proof to that is that, you know, recently iPhone and androids both put in screen time management systems in their software and people wondered why. In fact, most people don't even know it's in their phone. By the way, if you go to your general settings, you can find a thing called screen time, especially if you're an Apple phone, and in that it gives you ways to manage what you do where you're at lockdown things.
Speaker 2:But time or something. Yeah, track how much time you've been on it, track which sites you're on, what controls on things.
Speaker 1:I had this conversation with the youth group just the other day and I invited the parents to look at that and the kids to show it, and that parents could monitor what was going on. More importantly, the kid could look at and go. How much time am I on my phone?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they could go in and take a look on. How many times does my phone notify me Right? How many times have I picked it up? How many times have I picked it up? I look at it. Yeah, all that stuff.
Speaker 1:What programs I look more at Actually a pretty good tool. It's a great tool. But the reason they put that in there and I understood this from an insider said to me the reason they did that is concerned about liability. They were worried about people suing them because they knew what it was doing to the human mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they knew that it was compulsive and it was. It caused all these chemicals and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:And so what they're apparently what they're saying is that, well, we gave you the tools to manage it, you're just not doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah so it's back on the person yet, yeah you're not our problem.
Speaker 1:You gave the tools to manage it, but you're not managing it. So here's what we want to talk about today. This is coming out of the American Medical Academy of Pediatrics, so it's a pretty prestigious little group. They did a study on screen time. We're talking about screen time in infants.
Speaker 2:They're talking all types of screen.
Speaker 1:TV, mostly, mostly TV, okay, but when I say TV, keep in mind nowadays Kids are baby sad by their tablets in their smart and everybody's got, everybody's got a little device. My wife and I are out at dinner the other day and we noticed there was a mom and dad having dinner. They were on their screens and their two kids that were probably ages three and two Both had while they're eating their waffles at IHOP. They had their screen up in front of them, tilted, and they're watching it while they're eating. Crazy, and I sat and just rolled my head going what, what are we doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, where where are we at Right and? And so I just kind of said the parent, I said so, is this helpful? And she goes. Oh, we don't go in public.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we don't go anywhere without our tablets or otherwise.
Speaker 1:there are nightmares, they're a nightmare because they are just out of control. Children, and I put this in front of them Interesting. They're out of control. So you put the binky in front of them and they get back in control. What's controlling them? So they use it as a babysitter. Well, let me tell you what the academy, this pediatrics, medical Okay, let me hear it what they're saying is. They have found a troubling association between early exposure to screens and Sensory processing. That's challenging children. Now this study and break that down a little. Before it, they did it from ages 12 months and younger. So infant, infant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is baby little little babies, no babies, and then 18 months to 24 months and 24 months to five years, gotcha. And To make this simple, there's 1400 kids in the study. They found in the study of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is how the brain develops.
Speaker 2:It's how it adapts to the environment how it learns and adjusts and and creates its Different pathways to deal with life, right, okay.
Speaker 1:When children were put in front of Screen time, they found that it it changed the sensory experience To the brain and its ability to make connectivity to certain parts of the brain. It says that influences things like behavior. It leads to maladaptive behaviors, but, more importantly, what they found was that it increased the probability of sensory seeking Sensory seeking. So these are kids looking for attention. Yeah, looking for more input, more more stimuli. Right, yeah, sensory sensitivity.
Speaker 2:So that would be more input freaks them out right, overloads the brain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right. So the meltdown and then sensation avoiding.
Speaker 2:Oh, like, like depression, like one in a curl up, turtle up and get away from the world.
Speaker 1:You've got, you got it. Okay, these things, these are atypical sensory processing issues that are connected to things like attention deficit disorder, which is off the chart in America. Oh, it's crazy, right, and even worse, we're now medicating for it, which makes even more after. And, what's interesting, people understand that when you have attention deficit, what they do is they may medicate you, typically the stimulant. So here comes Ritalin. It's like 10 cups of coffee and you know, but they're hyperactive. Why does that calm them down? Well, when you look at the brain wave and I've got an EGM, my office, yeah, look at brain-move activity in children we find that there are certain brain waves. Well, we see four different ones that we seeing kids that are quote attention deficit All right, yeah one.
Speaker 1:They have too much theta wave. Theta wave is kind of generally you say this in a broad spectrum but it's typically kind of connected with calming, getting ready to go to sleep.
Speaker 2:If you have too much chill wave.
Speaker 1:The chill wave, if you will. It does a lot of other things, but that's kind of a play it rolls it has. If you have a bunch of that during the daytime, that's maladaptive to the brain because it's telling the brain chill out, okay. So what happens is the brain tries to get all of its frequencies up to the same level. So once really high, others are low. That tries to jack the other ones up, all the other theta, alpha, delta, high beta, gamma, all these frequencies in the brain, and to do that it jacks the person up, it makes them get jacked. So they start having, you know, to get an argument, so they bounce off the walls. They do this, they do that because it's trying to get everything jacked up. So what they do with the medication is they go Just jack the kid up. Here's 10 cups of coffee. It jacks the brain up and the brain goes oh wait.
Speaker 2:Okay, now at the same level.
Speaker 1:I can chill, we're in balance, but now we're way too hot so we got to chill. So the brain's going on this stuff and the kids like, looking like he's in a coma. Yeah, how does that work? It should give them the jitters, yeah. Well, then we get some kids who don't have the theta problem. They don't have this sleepy brain problem, if you will. During the day they actually do have high beta, which is the fight or flight type of frequencies in the brain.
Speaker 1:Okay, and now you jack them up on a medication and they really are jacked up. Yeah, they get crazy, they're the ones that get angry, they get suicidal, they lose weight, all this kind of stuff goes on. And so you look at this, the statistics of all this kind of stuff, and you go this is nuts. And we treat anybody that has a behavioral issue, we turn them into a zombie by jacking their brain up. Well, what's happening with technology is it's doing the same thing, but in the early stages, it's pre-jacking them up, before the brain is developed correctly. Hmm, this sounds just very dangerous to me, very dangerous. So, for example, we know they're going to make us take a break here. In a second We'll come back to some of this.
Speaker 1:We know, for example, the studies that came out of Romania. Okay, so they had this thing where they paid families tax incentives to have more kids. They're trying to build a population of Romania and all these kids ended up being orphaned or abandoned. All right, and a lot of people went and adopted these children, but there's interesting studies that came out of it, because the kids that were adopted before age two about a good portion of them still have issues in life, but not like the ones that weren't adopted until age four.
Speaker 2:Because the ones later had their brains had developed in the time and they were orphans with little care and little love.
Speaker 1:Yes, so they got locked in, so to speak. Right, so what happened is they didn't have all that interaction with caregivers. They didn't have tickling, they didn't have goo goo, they didn't have little smiles, they didn't have little pokey poaks, they didn't have little giggles, they didn't have any of that kind of fun stuff they would do. They left them in pins and they would change their diaper and give them a bottle. Yeah, keep them alive. They didn't get any of that social development. Hmm, so what they're saying in a sense in this study is that the children are getting screen time and in the meantime, they're not getting social development. This means the brain's not forming its connectivities in the sensory systems of the brain like it should.
Speaker 2:Well, and I gotta imagine it's forming. It is forming connectivities, but connectivities based on the screen time input constant.
Speaker 1:Right, right, that show maladaptive behavior going forward.
Speaker 2:So we're gonna get into more detail. Yeah, let's get into more of this.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna get into specific what they say about how much time you should have in front of kids and what ages. I think that one's gonna be interesting. We'll talk a little bit about the Romanian thing as well, just because it's very, very, very important. We understand how critical in the early stages of child development that they get healthy relationship connections.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you gotta listen to the next segment because we're gonna get into stuff that will help you and help you, as parents, avoid some of these pitfalls, because you cannot go back and change it once it's passed. Yeah, once you get that locked in, then it's extremely difficult to ever turn back.
Speaker 1:You cannot give up the early stages of children and their development and the interaction you need to get their brains to formally form conductivities. So we'll get back to that and more. I gotta take a quick break. Like to join the show? 607-414 Chat or you can text us. We also got your emails at let's Chat with Will and Tony At gmailcom. Back in two. We'll see you next time.