The influence of modern gadgets on children (pros and cons)

Modern people find it difficult to imagine their life without gadgets. Smartphones and tablets have firmly entered our lives and have become real assistants. Even children start using them from a very young age. Responsible parents are concerned that children are becoming more and more attracted to screens and the world around them is becoming less interesting to them. However, today we cannot do without gadgets. In this material we will look at the harm and benefit of them, what is and is not advisable for children to watch, and how to avoid addiction.

According to the Institute of Contemporary Media, by the age of 10, every child has a personal gadget, 25% have one already at 3-4 years old; The most popular tablet among children. The University of Washington School of Medicine conducted a survey of 52,000 people, which included children, adolescents and adults. It turned out that 65% of adults, 59% of teenagers and 62% of children spend more than 2 hours a day with gadgets in their hands. And according to the US National Library of Medicine, children spend 7-8 hours a day watching screens.

Harm of gadgets for children

Health effects

1. Electromagnetic radiation from modern gadgets negatively affects the immature nervous system of children.
2. If children are overly involved in them, they have problems with coordinating actions with their hands, which manifests itself, for example, in playing with a ball.
3. Fine motor skills also do not develop. It is useful for a child to play with construction sets and mosaics, rather than using a computer mouse. Children do not receive the sensory sensations they need.
4. Staring closely at small objects on phone and tablet screens develops myopia.
5. A passion for gadgets is also harmful for a child’s spine. A child sits in one position for a long time at the computer, and his head is tilted unnaturally.

Child-parent relationships

Parents give their children gadgets for different purposes: for development, for switching attention during whims, when you need to wait for a long time, or simply to find free time. But you can’t do this with very young children under 2 years old. At such an early age, a child develops special emotional relationships with loved ones. Replacing parents with such an attractive device leads to disruptions in these connections.

At the age of 2-7 years, children master role-playing games in which they copy the actions of adults. This is a very important stage in the development of children, when they thus adopt the system of human relationships and learn to analyze their actions.

Role-playing games require a child to have a high creative and intellectual level, the ability to cooperate and negotiate, while electronic entertainment and games are primitive and only involve repeating actions until a result is achieved. And since such games take place without the participation and involvement of an adult, they do not contribute to the formation of proper child-parent relationships.

Speech developmental disorders

From birth, a person's articulation organs are ready to pronounce sounds. But the development of speech (oral and then written) requires time and certain conditions. The first three years of a child's life are very important for the development of coherent speech. Only the child’s desire to know the world of adults, to be heard and understood, prompts him to speak. And adults must react emotionally to the child’s attempts to communicate, tell him everything that is happening around him, sing songs with him, and memorize rhymes. Early exposure to gadgets slows down speech development and aggravates communication problems.

Difficulties in learning to read and perceive information

Many modern children who use gadgets from an early age have difficulty retaining the previous phrase in memory when listening to a text, linking words into sentences, or understanding the meaning of a story. Hence further problems with reading. They understand individual words and short sentences, but the essence of the text eludes them, so reading becomes boring and uninteresting.

Frequent screen play causes the eye muscles to malfunction. The eyes get used to following bright moving objects, and it is very difficult to focus on something that is not moving. Hence the problems with tracing a line from left to right and returning to a new line.

Impact on the child's psyche

In childhood, the foundations are laid and the most rapid development of the human psyche occurs. Gadgets promote intellectual development, but negatively affect the development of thinking and perception. Bright pictures evoke strong emotions in the child, his vision and hearing are oversaturated, and his tactile and tactile sensations are deficient. The child’s imagination and fantasy also do not develop, since he is provided with ready-made forms.

Modern cartoons and games are created in such a way that the child immediately and effortlessly receives pleasure and positive emotions. In the real world, this requires a lot of work. Understanding what toy you like, figuring out how to play with it, inviting someone to play with you - all this is quite difficult. And by pressing a button, you can get pleasure immediately. The child's incentives to interact with the real world become weaker.

Children who prefer to play “shooting games” have a distorted perception of the world. The child is unable to separate play from reality. Therefore, he considers all the tricks of computer heroes and their ability to recover to be true. He also adopts a model of behavior in which he is not held responsible for bad deeds committed.

In addition, games do not teach you to make efforts and work purposefully to achieve results. When faced with problems in real life, children who are overly interested in gadgets are prone to stress, hysterics, and depression.

Impact on socialization

As already mentioned, in order to develop communication skills, a child needs to interact with adults and peers and play role-playing games. Spending a lot of time on gadgets, children do not have the opportunity or desire to improve these skills. Therefore, their socialization suffers.

This is also dangerous for teenagers, who use social networks to replace face-to-face communication and fall out of real life. The anonymity factor also plays a negative role. It's easy to live a double or even triple life on the Internet. This creates obstacles to the formation of personality, identity, and self-understanding.

How long can a child use gadgets?

Recommendations from pediatricians, neurologists, and psychologists regarding the time that children of different ages can spend on gadgets are as follows:

• Children under 2 years old should not be given gadgets;
• children 3-4 years old - 30-40 minutes a day;
• children 5-6 years old - 1 hour a day;
• children 7-9 years old - 1.5 hours a day;
• children 10-13 years old - 2 hours a day;
• Children 14-16 years old are allowed to use gadgets for up to 3 hours a day.

How do smartphones and tablets affect a child's development?

There is no clear answer to this question yet. Scientists began studying the influence of gadgets on the younger generation relatively recently . In 2021, the US government initiated a large-scale study of the intellectual abilities of modern teenagers. 11 thousand children aged 9-10 years throughout the country participate in it. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) want to find out how long-term smartphone use affects the physical structure of children's brains, their emotional development and mental health.

The $300 million study will last 10 years. Recently, its authors published the first results. After studying MRI images of 4,500 thousand children, scientists discovered premature thinning of the cerebral cortex in schoolchildren who spent more than seven hours a day on gadgets. The changes affected the outer part of the brain, which is responsible for processing information from the five senses. This usually happens to a person in adulthood. The causes and consequences of the changes are yet to be determined.

Also, according to the report, children who spend more than two hours on gadgets perform worse on tests of reasoning and language proficiency than peers who use smartphones less often. The authors of another study on children from two to five years old came to similar conclusions. Psychologists from the University of Calgary (Canada) explain the developmental delay by the fact that children addicted to smartphones are passive and weakly interact with others.

What can and cannot be watched by children?

Restrictions directly depend on the age of the child.

Preschoolers

For such children there are interesting educational cartoons and programs.

You can also play simple games for attention, logic, and memory. It’s good if parents do this with their children and then discuss what they saw. But the main activities of a child of this age are playing with peers, walking outside, and creative activities.

Junior schoolchildren

Children can still watch educational programs and cartoons, play games appropriate for their age, devoting no more than the allotted time to this. Watching it together with your parents is also valuable. The leading activity of a child of this age is study, but he also spends a lot of time playing and walking.

Middle school students

Children over 10 years old already want to have their own smartphone and spend more time with the gadget. Parents need to make rules. A gadget is a parent’s thing, which they allow to use on their own terms.

It is imperative to control what sites your child visits and how much time he spends online. For this purpose, there are special parental control programs that help organize the child’s safety on the Internet. When allowing games to be played, it is worth limiting games with elements of violence - “shooting games”. This is especially true for children with problems regulating negative emotions. Parents and children watching together remains valuable.

How to reduce harm from using devices

Setting the mode for gadgets

To make it easier for your child to accept restrictions, you need to explain them to him in advance, talk about the reasons for their appearance and adhere to the rules you created, without making exceptions.

Try to limit the time you watch cartoons, based on the child’s age. Let cartoons and games be given out in doses and never as encouragement.

• It is advisable to start with one 10-15 minute episode of a cartoon or game - for a child 2-3 years old this is usually enough.
• When determining the amount of time a child will spend playing with gadgets, also focus on his age and, most importantly, on the advice of an ophthalmologist and neurologist.
• Having decided on the time for playing games and watching cartoons, set a timer or buy an alarm clock, for example, in the shape of an animal that your baby likes.
• Choose educational puzzles and quests instead of plotless, aimless games.
• Avoid games where you need to level up your characters and move from level to level, where one session of the game can stretch on indefinitely.
• Avoid games where you have to buy something with real money in the game space.
• Designate one day of the week that goes device-free.

Add real social interaction to the gameplay - choose games designed for two for your little one, and take part in them yourself.

Signs of gadget addiction in children

Psychologists distinguish three types of computer addiction: gaming, network and surfing.

1. Gaming is a painful craving for computer games.
2. Network is an addiction to social networks, a desire to spend a lot of time on them. Social networks often attract children with low self-esteem who are afraid to express themselves in society.
3. Surfing is the most complex addiction: children watch educational and entertaining videos for hours, read information, but do not apply it in life. It seems that they are doing useful things and developing, but in reality this is not the case. Nothing can replace personal experience.

But even if a child spends a lot of time with gadgets, this is not always an addiction. There are patterns of behavior that parents become wary of when they discover them. This:

1. The child loses interest in real life. He does not want to walk, play outdoor or board games, draw, or read. These activities seem boring and uninteresting compared to the impressive virtual world.
2. The child is not interested in conversations and discussions of things that are not related to gadgets. He does not ask numerous questions, which is natural for preschool and primary school age. He only becomes animated when talking about the games he plays on his device.
3. The child experiences anxiety, becomes nervous and irritated if he has to spend a day without a gadget, and cannot occupy himself with anything.
4. Aggression, rage, hysterics in a child when trying to take away a gadget or limit the time he spends online. Such uncontrolled expression of emotions over a long period of time is direct evidence of problems in the emotional-volitional sphere.
5. A child loses a sense of time and a sense of proportion when he spends time on a gadget, does not comply with the agreed conditions and strives with all his might to be online as much as possible.
6. The child hides what he is playing. Gets up at night to play and feels tired and sleepy during the day at school.
7. Schoolchildren's performance is falling; they do not want to communicate with friends or spend time with family. All their desires come down to being alone with the gadget.

Every year there are more and more different radio, television and computer devices around us. The mobile phone no longer plays the role of just a telephone. Now this is a camera, a video camera, e-mail, and much more.

To know the weather for tomorrow, you no longer need to notice the peculiarities of sunrise and sunset, look at the month and stars, and note the behavior of animals and birds. You just need to look at the weather forecast on the Internet. You no longer need to read books on one specialty or another. By opening Wikipedia, you can find answers to almost any question.

People of the older generation, recalling their childhood, of course note that children used to spend almost all their free time on the street. The heaviest punishment has always been deprivation of walks. “House arrest” was the most difficult test for a child. The games were mostly active. The children ran almost all day. The appetite after such games was always excellent, they ate everything indiscriminately, but at the same time, there were very few obese children. Every day there were new impressions, new acquaintances. The children knew how to communicate with each other and resolve conflicts. We agreed with words and fists. They could talk in the yard for hours, and the topics for conversation somehow came up on their own.

The human brain develops the more, the more different impressions and stimuli it receives from the outside world. He needs to be constantly fed with information and trained. By the way, besides hearing and vision, there are other sensitive stimuli for the brain. The smell of spring, approaching rain, grass and flowers. Taste of berries. Sensations of touch during outdoor games. All these were methods of exploring the world around us and training the brain, which was developing at a high pace.

What is happening now: children are spending more and more time on computer and phone screens. Their world has shrunk to the size of their gadget screen. There are no more collective and active games - the child’s muscles do not develop as nature requires. Sometimes a child cannot even run away if he is in danger. In virtual communication there are no smells, no taste, and no tactile sensations. A completely new type of thinking is being formed - computer or digital. Children can sit in one position for hours, with all their attention focused on the screen.

You can conduct a simple experiment: a child watches videos from any social network for 30 minutes, after which ask him to tell what he saw and remembered. I assure you that he will not be able to reproduce even 10% of the information from the material viewed. There is simply no incentive for the brain to remember information. The brain gradually degrades and becomes infantile. The habit of memorizing information has disappeared, because it can be found at any time in an Internet search engine. And the Internet itself is monotonous for most users, which does not provide important and useful information that they want to remember.

And if we accept the fact that the Internet in a critical situation can simply turn off. What will happen then? A huge mass of absolutely defenseless people, confused, unable to communicate, not physically trained, unable to negotiate and stand up for themselves. By the way, during the flood in the city of Krymsk, Krasnodar Territory, in 2012, neither cellular communications nor the Internet functioned. During the emergency, only regular wired telephones worked.

Using various gadgets in bed at night is especially harmful. Sleep is disrupted and the sleep-wake phases in the brain are disrupted. As a result, insomnia develops, memory and attention decrease. It is as if a person develops in the opposite direction and becomes stupid. The condition of particularly active Internet users sometimes resembles patients after a traumatic brain injury with outcome in dementia. Intelligence decreases, interests become primitive: I ate, slept, went to work, spent the evening at the computer.

What needs to be done to somehow reduce the negative impact of gadgets on the health of the future generation?

First of all, you should accustom your child to the measured use of gadgets and strictly control the time spent on the Internet. In early childhood, control the time of computer games, stimulate participation in outdoor games with real, not virtual participants. Here your associates will be: sports clubs, dance studios, music and art schools. And adults themselves should also remember the good old board games, when neighbors gathered, talked, told their impressions, played lotto, cards, and dominoes.

Of course, humanity will continue to develop in the direction of digital technologies, our phones and computers will become even smarter and their functions will expand. However, the danger of being overly addicted to various gadgets and the Internet will only increase every year.

How to overcome addiction?

Of course, simply taking away a child’s gadget is not an option. Especially if the child is already in school. This requires a psychologically competent and patient approach. But parents must be strict and not deviate from the chosen strategy.

1. Talk to the child . It’s worth saying honestly that it would be better if he had another life besides a computer or phone. You, as parents, want him to get an education, find a life's work and achieve success. It is imperative to explain to your child what addiction is and that it will take time and effort to overcome it. And his parents will help him with this.
2. Employment . Every day of the child must be strictly scheduled. We need to come up with useful and interesting activities for him - write them down for classes that he will like. He should have time for walks, homework and rest. During the rest period, he will be able to use the gadget, but only for a strictly specified time.
3. Personal example . Children always copy their parents. And if adults spend their free time online, then children do the same. He doesn't see how it could be different. It’s good to introduce rituals and traditions into your family’s life, and plan how you will all relax together. This could be travel, walks, visits to interesting places, board games, joint projects, crafts, handicrafts, culinary creativity. Children will be delighted with this pastime, and gadgets will fade into the background.
4. Benefit . The world of the Internet opens up enormous opportunities for those who want to develop, and not just have fun. Parents should show their child options for useful ways to spend time online.

We devote time to activities with the child

To “tear” your child away from cartoons, exciting games on a tablet or computer, offer him even more interesting activities. Read books with your child, draw and sculpt together, compose and act out stories in the puppet theater. This way you will stimulate the development of his imagination, thinking and memory, which does not happen when a child watches TV. In addition, this way he will gain the experience of an interesting life, exciting impressions in reality, and not in virtual space.

Replace visuals with audio

Audio fairy tales and radio plays, to which a child can assemble construction sets or play with dolls, are a godsend. There are no time restrictions when it comes to audio material. As long as the child is interested, he listens.

Finding something important to do

In a sports, dance, music or art group, a child will not only do something interesting, but also gain experience of achievements and accomplishments. He will understand that this is much more interesting, important and valuable than points in the game.

Prevention of gadget addiction

1. It is important from a very early age to teach the child to follow the rules set by the parents. Then limiting the time spent with gadgets will not be perceived as painful.
2. Some parents practice feeding their babies while watching a cartoon. The child, captivated by the flashing pictures, obediently opens his mouth. But this leads to eating disorders and the development of gadget addiction.
3. You cannot use gadgets as a remedy for hysteria or bad mood. The child must learn to cope with emotions on his own, calm down and safely survive difficulties.
4. Parents set an example for their child. It’s better to spend your free time talking with your family, not with your gadget.
5. Children of all ages need communication with their parents, common interests and goals. Then they will not have the need to escape from loneliness online.
6. It is important to provide the child with interesting and varied leisure time, enough toys, creative materials, and sports equipment.
7. Parents need to be interested in what their children are doing online, what they are playing, what they are watching, who they are communicating with. Respect for the child's interests strengthens parental authority.

What parents can do

“Realizing that every parenting decision affects a child's brain development can be difficult and distressing, but it's not something we should dismiss,” Radesky says. – There are joint activities that have a beneficial effect on children’s development: reading, singing, shared emotional experience, creativity. Or you can take some time out of your busy work routine to just take a walk or fool around.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics has developed a system for calculating the time a child spends in front of monitors, as well as for drawing up a family plan for the use of gadgets.

Here are the main recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics:

Babies

Children under one and a half years old should not be exposed to screens, except for video calls with friends and family members. Babies should be interacting with caring adults and their environment, not sitting in front of a screen that is used as a substitute for a babysitter.

Research has shown that having a television on in the same room as an infant or toddler negatively impacts a child's ability to play and interact.

Children from 1.5 to 3:

By the age of two years, the baby can learn words by communicating via video or using some interactive applications. Research shows that the main factor that influences learning through children's videos and interactive applications is sharing the content and reviewing it with parents.

The positive aspects of gadgets for children

A modern person needs the ability to use a computer and navigate the Internet. After all, in our world everything is computerized. There are high-quality games and applications that allow children to develop logic, memory, and learn foreign languages. Children's passion for games often becomes the entrance door to IT technology. It is only important to orient the child correctly. Today, online education is gaining momentum. You can study with a tutor, study at different schools, courses, attend master classes without leaving home. It is convenient and opens up enormous opportunities.

There is no need to completely protect children from gadgets and prohibit them from using the Internet. It is important to pay attention to the child, to convey to him the meaning of real values ​​- family, friendship, communication, development. And gadgets should only be assistants in life and achieving success. Then there will be no problems with them in the family.

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