CBC Radio: Kids’ Online Use During the Pandemic
Photo by Blake Meyer on Unsplash
A recent CBC Radio web article by Willow Smith offers advice for parents on supporting their kids around online/screen use during the current unusual circumstances caused by the pandemic.
Many parents worry about how much time their kids are spending on screens during the pandemic. According to researchers at Western University in Ontario, since the pandemic, screen time for elementary-school-aged kids, additional to time spent online for school purposes, has more than doubled, from an average of 2.6 to 5.8 hours daily.
Emma Duerden, the lead author of the Western University study, and a Canada Research Chair in neuroscience and learning disorders noted that this has been an unprecedented time with children spending so much time indoors and relying on screens.
Dr. Shimi Kang, a psychiatrist and associate professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia, says that parents need to take the risks seriously. During the pandemic, screens are essential social links, which makes it hard to regulate, but she says, “There are serious physical and emotional consequences to too much time spent online.” She expressed concerns about sleep disruption, vision issues, increases in video gaming, shopping online, and gambling online – negative, dopamine driven, addictive aspects – along with mental health effects such as loneliness, body image issues, reduced rates of empathy and social skills, and, very worryingly, online expressions of gender and race-related hate. She noted, too, that “sitting is the new smoking’, with issues related to sedentary lifestyle and crouched-over posture. She referenced a study that indicates too much screen time in preschoolers may be linked to negative impacts in the brain area crucial to the development of cognitive skills.
Debbie Jones, a clinical professor of optometry and vision science at the University of Waterloo, who studies myopia (near-sightedness) in children, advises that parents make sure kids rest their eyes by taking breaks from screens, and changing their focal point by looking out a window or around the room. Encouragingly, she says they have been able demonstrate categorically that spending more time outdoors makes it less likely to become myopic.
Dr. Kang recommends focusing on quality rather than quantity. She said, “An easy guideline is to compare tech to nutrition: consume healthy tech, limit junk tech, and completely eliminate toxic tech.”
Dr. Kang notes that if parents notice their child showing signs of obsessive screen use that is negatively impacting the rest of their life, then they should seek help from a medical professional. She also recommends that parents assess their own tech diet to make sure they are modelling healthy behaviour for their children in this respect. But, she states encouragingly, screen habits can be changed with some persistence, “The brain continues to develop and wire and rewire until the moment we die.”