It’s a scene I’m sure all of us are all too familiar with. You’re at a restaurant and you can’t help but notice the couple or the group of friends sitting down to dinner, all staring at their phones, embracing fully the life of a Glowface. Probably more prevalent is the young family enjoying a quiet dinner with the assistance of the iPhone or iPad babysitter. This has been a common occurrence ever since Nintendo gave parents the gift of the Gameboy, which accompanied many family dinners through the nineties and noughties. As a child, I was exposed to this and many other gaming devices. From PlayStation to Xbox to computer games, I consumed it all in copious amounts throughout my early years and well into my late teens. Over this expanse of time I easily accumulated 10,000 hours of screen time. I refer to this milestone of 10,000 hours as there is a theory that says it takes approximately 10,000 hours of time spent on something to be truly excellent at it. To be a Nobel Prize winning scientist, or a Pulitzer prize winning writer or an Olympic sprinter, you are going to need to put in at least 10,000 hours of work to get there.
But hours spent is not the only factor that influences whether those kinds of accolades are accomplished. Only when combined with true talent can one potentially reach those levels. But when there is the potential for our children to spend their 10,000 hours of work looking at screens rather than working on their craft, a clear conflict arises. It’s exceedingly more difficult to spend 10,000 hours working on mastering your talent than it is to spend that time staring at a screen. However, the sense of fulfilment afforded to those who use what God has given them to the best of their abilities is unparalleled. But the willingness of society to embrace screen time for infants and children continues to increase. It’s a socially acceptable norm that children are allowed to watch TV and play on iPhones from their earliest years. It's okay because sometimes parents just need a break and often we think that it’s educational, so it makes us feel better. I won’t deny that parents are more than entitled to a break and I understand this completely. My 1.5-year old has had maybe 14 nights where she hasn’t gotten up since she was born. But we are often ill-informed about the true dangers of screen time for children.
Scientists are only just starting to explore the dangers of excessive screen time for children. The Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study is one of the first large scale studies to examine the effect of screen time on the structural development of the brain. Scientists are finding that children who are exposed to screens for over 7-hours each day are experiencing an accelerated rate of thinning of the cerebral cortex, a key area of the brain that determines behaviour, personality and intelligence. 7-hours might feel like a lot, but between all the different devices a child might be exposed to during a day – TV, parents phones, screens at school, computer games at night – it’s a number that you can get to quickly. In a separate study, scientists found that children whose cerebral cortex thinned at an above average rate had a decrease in their IQ. When their cerebral cortex thin’s faster than it should’ve, they get less intelligent. Seeing that excessive screen time leads to an accelerated rate of cerebral cortex thinning and that an accelerated thinning rate is connected to a decreased IQ is a relationship that is difficult to overlook.
Another difficult reality to overlook is the way key individuals from the technology industry allow their children to engage with screens. Steve Jobs was noted for saying that his children haven’t used iPads, with a reporter observing that dinner conversation at his house often revolved around history and books. Bill Gates didn’t let his children have a phone until they were 14. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of internet site Reddit, was quoted saying that “my wife and I both want [our daughter] to be bored. My wife and I both want her to know what it’s like to have limits on technology… It’s really important that she gets time to just be with her thoughts and be with her blocks and be with her toys, so we’ll be regulating it pretty heavily.” Those aware of the dangers of technology for children are imposing limits on technology and are approaching screens with mindsets that should look to enlighten and guide our own approach.
But often we feel okay as parents to flex boundaries because at least the show our child is watching is educational, or at least that game they are playing is teaching them something. Rachel Barr, a childhood development researcher at the University of Georgetown, has written extensively on notions that challenge this very assumption. She introduces the idea that children’s memory’s are very specific. For example, if they remember the colour red when they see it on a screen, we would expect that they would be able to identify a red pen in the real world. But often this isn’t the case. Your child understands red only in the context they’ve learned about it. For them to transfer that knowledge to a new context, they need to develop memory flexibility. We help children develop flexible memories when we co-use technology with them. Barr argues that repetition, visual and verbal cues are three of the main ways in which children can develop memory flexibility. This inability for infants to transfer knowledge is known as the Transfer Deficit of Learning, which states the infants struggle to transfer knowledge from 2D to 3D environments. Placing our children in front of screens and expecting them to learn is the same as placing them in front of a book and expecting them to learn. Both are 2D forms of media and both would be susceptible to the transfer deficit. But in how we use books with our children we help to overcome the transfer deficit. When we read books we are always co-using them with our children and we use the three ways Barr argues help children develop memory flexibility. We often read the same books and we provide our children with visual and verbal cues whilst we do so.
10,000 hours may seem like a lot, but I can tell you from experience it’s a very easy number to reach. I know that excessive time spent on computer games has altered my path, pushing me away from using my natural gifts in mathematics to more mindless jobs. Screens will continue to stand in the way of our children fulfilling their talents as long as we continue to put them there. We need to realize the danger of screens for our children, how it can actually decrease their intelligence and that educational screen exposure isn’t what we are led to believe it is. We need to adopt the mindset of those most informed about the dangers of excessive screen exposure for our children. We need to avoid at all costs having our children branded as a Glowface from their most formative years. Because if they are branded a Glowface from these early years, technology will steal their talents.