We Need to Stop Putting Our Children in Front of Screens

As my husband and I made our way back to New York from his family reunion held in New Bern, North Carolina (coincidentally where my own paternal grandfather was born), we rode on a bus from New Bern to Wilson, where we would pick up the Amtrak that would take us back to the city.

We sat toward the front of the bus, but had skipped two empty seats because we wanted the two seats on the other side of the aisle for our son, David, and my husband’s cousin Marie. So the two empty seats just ahead of us beckoned when an older woman and a young girl of 6 or 7 entered the bus. They soon settled into their seats.

[Related: Getting Kids Math Help Before They Fall Behind]

My husband chatted with Marie across the aisle, catching her up on everything in our lives and talking about the reunion, as I sat looking

out the window at the North Carolina scenery, some of it quite beautiful (the lone Confederate flag I saw, not so much). But then I heard voices, like the voices you hear from a TV set. The voices came from a large smart phone the little girl was holding. Her older traveling companion, perhaps her grandmother or an older aunt, adjusted the phone and volume for the little girl to optimize her viewing. She had a pleased look on her face, as if she’d just given the child a copy of Anne of Green Gables, or Little House on the Prairie, or Sounder, all free and available at most public libraries. She had not.

So not only did this child miss out on learning how to entertain herself by looking out of the window of a moving bus, she took steps toward developing a need to be externally entertained. How I wish I could have given the older

tom-banner ampforwp-incontent-ad2"> woman ahead of us a copy of the New York Times article, “Screen Addiction Is Taking a Toll on Children,” written by Personal Health columnist Jane Brody, an excerpt of which is below.

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Unfortunately, it is known that poor children and black children in this country watch much more TV than their more affluent peers. I have even seen children in strollers with little kiddie computer tablets. It isn’t cute–it’s sad. Here’s the excerpt from the New York Times piece:

Excessive use of computer games among young people in China appears to be taking an alarming turn and may have particular relevance for American parents whose children spend many hours a day focused on electronic screens. The PBS documentary “Web Junkie” highlights the tragic effects on teenagers who become hooked on video games, playing for dozens of hours at a time often without breaks to eat, sleep, or even use the bathroom. Many come to view the real world as fake.

Chinese doc

tors consider this phenomenon a clinical disorder and have established rehabilitation centers where afflicted youngsters are confined for months of sometimes draconian therapy, completely isolated from all media, the effectiveness of which remains to be demonstrated.

While Internet addiction is not yet considered a clinical diagnosis in the U.S., there’s no question that American youths are plugged in and tuned out of “live” action for many more hours of the day than experts consider healthy for normal development. And it starts early, often with preverbal toddlers handed their parents’ cellphones and tablets to entertain themselves when they should be observing the world around them and interacting with their caregivers.

In its 2013 policy statement on “Children, Adolescents, and the Media,” the American Academy of Pediatrics cited these shocking statistics from a Kaiser Family Foundation study in 2010: “The average 8- to 10-year-old spends nearly eight hours a day with a variety of different media, and older children and teenagers spend more than 11 hours per day.” Television, long a popular “babysitter,” remains the dominant medium, but computers, tablets, and cellphones are gradually taking over.

“Many parents seem to have few rules about use of media by their children and adolescents,” the academy stated, and two-thirds of those questioned in the Kaiser study said their parents had no rules about how much time the youngsters spent with media.

Schoolwork can suffer when media time infringes on reading and studying. And the sedentary nature of most electronic involvement – along with televised ads for high-calorie fare – can foster the unhealthy weights already epidemic among the nation’s youth.

Read more at the New York Times…