Influence of the tablet on the child's brain

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The overwhelming majority of parents, who, according to my recommendations, have restricted their children access to tablets and computers, note that the children have become noticeably calmer, more diligent, that they have developed an interest in books, drawing, educational blocks, and so on.

“Anna Viktorovna, he is so smart! Look - in the tablet, in the phone he finds the cartoons he needs. We pumped developing games into his tablet, he copes with any logical task. Puzzles? No, he doesn’t like them, but he collects them wonderfully in the tablet! Books? Well, of course we tried to read him, but he doesn't listen, he runs away … he doesn't like books. He's a smart boy, but he doesn't want to play with children. And we are worried about his speech development …"

Modern young parents who are concerned about the speech and emotional development of their 3-year-old Mishutka came to my consultation. There was a difficult birth, the doctors performed hypoxia, but at the same time the first year of the child's life was relatively safe. Only now I slept badly. The tone problems were minor. But in general, everything is in order, he did not differ from his peers. And now they noticed that the boy does not speak well - the sentences are short, the number of words is limited, and more often he tries to show with gestures what he needs. Doctors put both autism and speech retardation, others said that everything is in order, you need to wait until 3, 5 - 4 years.

And there are a lot of such cases in my practical work. Children do not like to play with blocks, do not assemble mosaics, do not take an interest in books. But to the delight of parents, they are amazingly fast at solving puzzles on the tablet. And parents in every possible way support them in this, often without thinking how much they harm their baby. What is this harm? First of all, a tablet, as well as a computer and a TV set, negates the child's own cognitive activity. He does not need to invent anything, he does not need to try to change something, somehow influence the course of the game. Everything is given. He only has to follow a certain algorithm, or even just look at the screen, where he does not even need to try to keep his attention, because bright, rich, rapidly changing frames themselves captured his attention. Just think about what it might threaten in the future. A person is growing up who does not need to be active, for whom something or someone will always decide.

Secondly, the child becomes uninterested in the real world. Will a child who assembles a pyramid with a finger on the screen be interested in an ordinary pyramid, cubes? Unlikely. In the real world, there are no such bright colors, no funny and cheerful fairy-tale characters, no applause and no music sound while the next ring is correctly lowered onto the pyramid. The child begins to see the real world as insipid, boring. Have you watched what the schoolchildren are doing now during recess between lessons? Are they talking, playing tic-tac-toe, or maybe running around the classroom? Well, perhaps, fortunately, sometimes they still run. But for the most part, everyone is sitting with their own gadget. Why? Because the child is more interested in the virtual world than in the real one.

Thirdly, emotional-volitional and speech development suffers. This is especially pronounced when the tablet falls into the hands of a child 2-4 years old. As a consequence of the fact that the real world becomes uninteresting, he increasingly prefers communication, interaction with people, developing electronic games. And then the teachers in the kindergarten note that the child does not seek to play with the children, and the parents themselves see that their child plays mostly alone on the playground. And how else to develop speech, if not in the form of communication with others? So it turns out that a modern child of 3 years old is able to find the game he needs in his mother's phone, but he cannot go up to another child to ask him for a toy. I am not currently considering children with autism spectrum disorder or children with developmental delays. I'm talking about normatively developing children, and children with minor developmental disabilities.

Let's go back to the boy Misha. It would be a mistake to think that the tablet is to blame. Hypoxia during childbirth, disturbed tone and sleep disturbances in the first year of life indicate to us that he has deficits in certain brain structures, namely, subcortical structures, which are the basis for the development of both emotions and cognitive functions. That is, he has the prerequisites for a developmental disorder, and everything else depends on how much parents can organize a developing environment for him. In order to saturate the subcortical structures, a child needs two basic things: movement and sensation. It is necessary to nourish his sensorimotor sphere as best as possible. The child must run, jump, climb, and not only climb the same slide, but preferably rocks, mountains, trees (with dad's and mom's support, of course). Puddles, mud - oddly enough, the child also needs. He must play not only with dry sand, but also with wet sand. The more varied the sensations, the more movements, the better the subcortex will develop, the more developed the child will be. What does a tablet do? He steals from the subcortex. And in general, all early developmental activities that are associated with reading, writing, learning foreign languages - they all steal from the subcortex. Because reading, writing, languages are very energy consuming activities. They are carried out through the overlying structures, namely, the cerebral cortex. And in that period when the child should develop a subcortex (movements + sensations), we use tablets to develop the cortex (reading, writing, foreign languages). And the energy resources of the brain are limited. Teaching a child at 3 years old English on a tablet (and not only on a tablet), we thereby take resources from the subcortex, giving them to the bark. And it will come back to haunt, if not now, then later.

The overwhelming majority of parents, who, according to my recommendations, have restricted their children access to tablets and computers, note that the children have become noticeably calmer, more diligent, that they have developed an interest in books, drawing, educational blocks, and so on. You just need to wait out the moment when the child requires him to turn on the cartoon, not to succumb to his manipulations, not to be afraid of his tantrums. And if you endure it, you will be surprised to find that it is changing before our eyes, and changing for the better.