Let's Chat with Will & Tony
Let's Chat with Will & Tony
SEG 2 of 3 - Digital Health - Screen Time and Child Development: Strategies for Parents to Protect Growing Minds
Are your children's brains at stake with every swipe and tap on a screen? Our latest episode zeros in on the critical findings from a Pediatrics study and the American Academy of Pediatrics' guidelines that set off alarms about the effects of screen time on our little ones' development. We peel back the veneer on digital exposure, contrasting passive screen usage with interactive scenarios like family video chats that may not carry the same risks. With toddlers clocking in over three times the recommended screen time, we confront the need for sensory-rich environments and probe the ramifications of disregarding these expert recommendations.
Join me, alongside my co-hosts Will and Tony, as we navigate the immediate steps parents and caregivers can take to combat the screen time surge. We're dishing out practical strategies and delving into our own journeys of managing digital distractions while fostering growth-promoting experiences for children. Tune in to this episode on Apple and Spotify to pick up our toolkit of tips and to share your own triumphs in this modern parenting challenge. Your feedback is the heartbeat of our community, so drop us a comment, and let's champion our children's development together.
Common Sense Advice for Life. Let's chat Now. Here's Will Kesley and Tony Pack. All right, welcome back to the show, Will Kesley. This is Tony Pack. Here we are chatting it up. This is what we do we chat. It's called the Common Sense for a Broken World. That's right.
Speaker 2:A little bit of advice to bring a little joy in your life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Common Sense Advice for Things in Life, and so the Common Sense Advice. Today. We kind of got the show started off on technology a little bit. We talk about this often, but there's a new study out and it's a credible source. You know it's out of pediatrics. It kind of scares me.
Speaker 2:You know I was thinking about on the break. I know this lady who's recently become pregnant and she, you know she's talking about what she should eat. What she should eat. She's buying the book what to expect when you're expecting. She's doing all this stuff right to protect her child and I wonder.
Speaker 1:Let me guess the other kid she puts in front of a tablet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wonder Exactly right, so you do all these things when the baby's forming to make sure that the baby's healthy and almost universally, mothers do this right. They take care of themselves better while they're pregnant because they're worried about the development of the kid. Well, now, when the kid gets here, boom, they slap him in front of a tablet, slap him in front of a TV screen and they just I don't think they're aware of how dangerous it is and how poor it can be for the child to be just connected that way.
Speaker 1:It doesn't seem as if it's just a TV, it's just a show. It's just. It's a kid's. They're learning. They're learning how to count by watching this show. That's not what we're trying to get to. What we're trying to get to is the brain's development. The brain develops by experience. It needs all kinds of experience. It's going to need kinetic. It's going to need touch. It's going to need smell. It's going to need emotions. It's going to need laughing. It's going to need giggles. It's going to need tickles.
Speaker 2:It's going to need connection and interaction from real people Right.
Speaker 1:What happens when we get to screens is the brain will have a tendency to disconnect, and that's why it's so calming. People are like I put my kid in front of it and he's quiet. Well, yeah, because the brain gets put in this little trance, it's like I'm happy now I got my happy.
Speaker 2:Just, it's like in this auto-created little world, you're in a fantasy world, respectively, and you don't have to think anymore because it's being fed. Yeah, you don't actually have to do something.
Speaker 1:Not good when we're developing. Yeah Right, that's the key. So when you talk about babies in the womb critically important, by the way, how your emotions are when you're in the womb Look, you can pass stress onto your children in the womb. You can pass all kinds of things, including what you're eating, and so it's important that you have a healthy diet and you do healthy things. That's why smoking is very frowned upon. Alcohol, incredibly frowned upon.
Speaker 2:Any kind of drugs or anything. Any kind of drugs Right, right, frowned upon. I think what we're talking about, though, is be aware, just be aware. Be aware of what the potential problems in educate yourself. You know, you can go out and find this study that we're talking about today, and there's a lot of other information out there that talks about the dangers of screen time for kids.
Speaker 1:Here's what the Academy of Pediatrics recommends All right, okay, according to the American Academy, the AAP, they advise. By the way, they advise against any screen time. You saying zero, zero, screen Wow. They advise against any screen time for babies under 18 to 24 months.
Speaker 2:So zero screen time for the first two years, yep.
Speaker 1:Okay, they do say exception can be things like live chats with family members and others, where they can have some benefits of interaction and facial expressions and other things. So with real people, yeah, the real dynamic of grandma, grandpa on the phone and you're gonna put it from the tablet. They're gonna chat with grandma and grandpa and they're gonna talk to them. Like, okay, because it's interactive, interactive, right they're not zoning out that zero time, zero to age 24 man that that surprised me, yeah, when you said that.
Speaker 2:I was thinking they're gonna throw out, you know, one or two hours or something like that, but zero, zero. That's impressive. It says.
Speaker 1:For children ages two to five, the recommended limit of time is no more than an hour per day, from two to five. Two to five Now I would challenge that a little bit. I don't know there's any reason for them to have more than I mean. An hour a day is seven hours a week. That's.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of that's still quite a bit of time.
Speaker 1:Keep in mind, the brain does not do well learning off 2d. 2d is a flat screen. Yeah, it needs 3d. That's why you have blocks, that's why you play with balls, that's why you go outside.
Speaker 2:It needs these environmental and I would almost say the 4d when you add in the other senses. You know smell, taste, exactly, you know hearing the more type of stuff. The more dimensional, yes, connections, the more the brain will develop. Yeah, absolutely, in a healthy way.
Speaker 1:Then it goes on to say that no more than an hour a day according to guidelines. This was back in 2019. This account in the pediatric group said they stated that the trend in the report that came out in 2014 that were kids to and under To and under we're average to an under averaging three hours and three minutes a day as well, and that's the time when the recommendation is zero, zero, and they're averaging. That's the average three hours. Wow, three hours a day.
Speaker 2:And you wonder why there's so much that skyrocketing of mental health issues.
Speaker 1:Depression.
Speaker 2:We had a show earlier this year where we talked about Depression in young ladies, Yep and how their suicide rates going up their suicide rates going up.
Speaker 1:I mean there's lots of identity, who they are and their values in person, because they're seeing everybody else is so great on Facebook.
Speaker 1:It's. It's a fantasy land. That is not the way to raise the child. So, parents, it all means I get how easy it is when you just you're just fed up and you have too much, just put them in a screen, they just go away, you can cook dinner and everything's just fine. I Understand you have to be willing to accept the fact that during that time they're not mentally developing. Even if it's a counting game, it's a spelling game, it's like oh, but they learned to count. Yeah, but they're also now learning other things that are not the maladaptive in the way that they hand their Sensories. According to this is about how the brain now will handle saying I think it's back to.
Speaker 2:You know, everybody wants to make the excuse with the good thing, right? Oh hey, you know it was a you know lesson to teach them to count.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I guarantee they're not on the teach to count lesson for three hours a day. You don't have that on a spinning rail, right? I mean I, it's all the other Programming in and around that. But we all want to like justify our do the test.
Speaker 1:Do the test. Here's what you do. Put your kid in front of that thing that counts one to five, one to ten. And now I want you to take your child and go sit with them with some blocks and Miscount out one block, two blocks, and see which one they learn faster from and see which one they're more engaged in, right, the zone thing.
Speaker 2:So, speaking of the zone thing, so you know one of the thing I see in my family, you know my kids will get on their phones, boom off, they are onto their reel of you know flipping through videos. Yeah, when you see them in that posture, mm-hmm, look at the you know the way they are aspect of the person. Yeah, how they are. They'll they'll have lazy eyes, mouth open and it's just like the thumb moving and that's about it. Take them and take them outside and play cards with them do something, do anything.
Speaker 2:You know, play baseball, play cards me and then see how they're their overall persona is and you just. It's completely different.
Speaker 2:You know, I do a lot of work with youth where I take them out in the woods. Yeah, so we'll go out in the woods, and one of our rules whenever we go on the woods, you know, I generally say, hey, you know you can have your phone while we're driving up and back, but as soon as we hit the you know the mountains, we get out of cars. All phones get locked in the cars. Good for the entire Good trip. Right, use them for a tool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is the babysitter.
Speaker 2:So then we get out there and all these kids who have been locked into their phones, they realize they don't have their phones and you would just be amazed at the creativity that starts coming out of these kids on the things they come up with, the things they build out there, the things that they you know, the games they make up, the stories they tell, the connection they have and every single time, by the time we hit that car, nobody's looking at their phones on the way home.
Speaker 2:They're all interacting with each other, they're all connected with each other and they're all just happy, they're just happy and they're making these memories, but every time on the way up, it's four individuals being being being being on their phone.
Speaker 1:So a couple of things to keep in mind when and ask yourself the question when you're looking at a real and I had this conversation just with the youth group I was doing this with the other day if you're looking at a real, you're going through this real and real, and real and real and real and real, when you get done, after five, 10, 15, 20, 30, an hour's worth of time, ask yourself do you feel happy? How do I feel? Yeah, I challenge anybody out there get a bunch of YouTube videos going through screen screen, screen, screen screen. Then ask yourself, when you're done, how do you feel? And I guarantee you you can't tell me I feel fantastic.
Speaker 2:I feel so much better now that I've done that. Yeah, you know you're so right. You won't say it. It's funny that you know, I get sucked in like everybody right and I like to watch those fail-reels. You know people doing dumb things and you know crashing and burning on their motorbikes and all that stuff. So but the funny thing is you think about how much you laugh at the first one compared to the fifth, sixth one.
Speaker 2:They get you into the next one, they get you into the next one, and but by the end you're not even laughing.
Speaker 1:No, you're just dumb into it, you're just dead to it, trying to get some sensation, yeah. You're actually dead to it. This is the clue. Pornography does the same thing, and anybody out there that's watched pornography I counsel. A lot of people have done this, so I know you always say the same thing to me. You see one, you're like, ooh, you see another one, see another one. Then you have to get deeper and hotter and crazier. And next you know you're just thumbing through them quicker, you're not letting them finish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you don't even know they're, you just flash through Flashing through them and then you go like, oh, this is horrible, I might have done this today. I feel so good. You never feel better with yourself because what it's doing is it's playing with chemicals in your mind and they're not real for you to be happy over Correct. That's the clue.
Speaker 2:And you know, and you can all feel this right, but we can feel it, but we keep doing, we get, keep getting sucked in that's how you get the brain wants that initial again and then, once you go back, there's right and it's, it takes you to the same hole where, by the end of it, you just feel depressed.
Speaker 1:So the goal here is to help you feel happy yes, how to feel happy and keep in mind relationships and healthy relationships and a relationship with deity are the keys To lasting happiness and joy and fulfillment in life. You can't have either one of those. When your mind is broken, yeah, it doesn't work. And when you're not learning good behavioral things, interaction things, how to communicate, how to connect, you're losing time on how to become better in a relationship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's why so damaged. Yeah, that's why it's so damaging.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree. And now what they're saying is babies up to age five. They get too much screen time and what do they do? They lose sensory connecting in the brain, so their sensory's get all messed up. They get over-sensorized or under.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's the precursor to all of these mental health issues that we're seeing today you got it.
Speaker 1:Then what you do, you know, you know medicating them down, stimulating them up, and and we're not allowing ourselves to develop into healthy, well-adapted individuals, and that's we're trying to warn you against, all right, well, let's get in this next segment and talk about what do you do now?
Speaker 2:What do you do about it? You're standing here and now. What do you do about it?
Speaker 1:All right, we'd love to hear your ideas. What have you done about it?
Speaker 2:That's the one I want to know about all right.
Speaker 1:Got take a quick break. We're gonna take bottom down news way back plus chat will and Tony check us out on our podcast. They're up now on Apple and Spotify. All those love your comments and appreciate you passing along to those and your family and friends that might need some of the advice. Anyways, thanks for joining us way back, just couple.