Toula Lionakis is a mother of two boys, Johnathan and Matthew, aged 13 and 9. She considers herself one of the ‘lucky mothers’ whose children love sport and any outdoor activities that get them outside, off computers and Play Station.
Between 1987 and 2007, the amount of time we spent in virtual interactions has doubled – from 4 to 8 hours a day, while the amount of time people spent in actual social interaction has dropped to around a third – from 6 to 2 hours.
With 90 per cent of communication being non-verbal – not in words, but in the body language, in eye contact, in the pitch of the voice – research has found that we need real human interaction – to seek physical touch, to hug people, to talk to them. When it happens, an oxytocin hormone – known as the cuddle hormone – is released. And in people with less social interaction, less oxytocin is secreted.
It wouldn’t be so important, if scientists didn’t conclude that oxytocin kills cells we have in our immune system, like cancer cells, meaning that people who have less face-to-face time are more prone to diseases and shorter life.
Online is great. But how much real time with real people do we spend nowadays?
As adults, we are able to draw a line between real and virtual. But what about our children, who often tend to turn to playing video games and their parents’ iPhones, rather than embracing their peers in the playground?
Even though in Lionakis’ household specific rules have been set when it comes to screen usage, Toula is concerned about the time her children spend with technology, both in school and at home.
“All their workbooks at school they work off iPads. When they come home, if they’re studying – they are using the computer and the internet; if they are having a break from studies – again they are using the computer, and playing online games.”
“Both of my boys do a lot of bike riding as me and my husband are both into fitness, but they still spend a lot of time in front of the screen. We try and have a rule, where if they are one hour on – they have to be one hour off the screen,” Toula Lionakis tells Neos Kosmos.
During the week, gaming is not allowed, so the young Lionakis boys play games on Friday night, usually after Greek school and on the weekend.
“Generally they are not allowed to be on more than three hours during the weekend, unless we have family or friends coming over, and they play with them,” Toula says.
Dr Wayne Warburton, the deputy director of the Children and Families Research Centre at Macquarie University, says that parents want their children to have a healthy lifestyle, but often forget that healthy neural development must take into account screen time and its impacts on the wiring of developing brains.
“We have this thing called brain plasticity, which means that literally the brain is wiring up every second, in response to the things we experience. And in the modern world, kids, adolescents, adults have a lot of exposure to the media, so a certain amount of the way our brain wires up is in response to the media that we experience. That means there will be changes to the way we think and feel due to media specific effects,” Dr Warburton tells Neos Kosmos.
Psychologists around the world are concerned with problematic media use, sometimes called screen addiction, with kids spending too much time in screen play, to the detriment of other parts of their life.
“Typically their grades start to go backwards, partially because of time spent in screen play but also, as emerging evidence shows, attention deficit appears, problems with friendships and interaction, and other things.”
Around eight per cent of kids have a problem with the amount of access they have to the internet and fall into the category of overusing video games. A small number of those children develop addictions, Dr Warburton explains, but the overuse needs to be taken more seriously by the broader health profession.
With his research focusing on human cognitive and personality development, aggressive behaviour and media psychology, Dr Warburton says those consuming violent media content become more aggressive, fearful, emotionally desensitised and less empathic. Studies have shown it, as well as MRI scans.
“If you put a person who is consuming violent media to an MRI scan, you can see that the part of the brain where we think through the consequences of what we do, and have rational thoughts – gets turn down. You see activation in the part of the brain we call the limbic system, where we have emotional and much more unthought-of responses. In evolutionary terms, that’s an older part of the brain, where we respond more automatically to things happening in our environment, the part that can’t distinguish the virtual from the real. At the time that part of brain evolved, everything was real, there were no virtual threats. It responds to the virtual as it would in real life,” he says.
The memories of violent media get stored in the part of our brain where trauma memories are stored – the posterior cingulate. Memories from the posterior cingulate are easily accessed, resulting in trauma flashbacks, bad dreams and thoughts.
The same implications and responses appear both in children and adults. The difference, according to Dr Warburton, is that adults have a much bigger framework to put their experience in, and are more understanding of the world.
“There are two crucial stages in children’s neural development. During the first few years, children take in everything, their brain wires in response to everything in their environment; while as adults we only commit our memory to those things we are focusing on.
“That means that what happens in the first few years of life is crucial; that’s when the child’s brain is doing all the work of initial connections.”
The second crucial period comes with teenage years, when the brain starts to shed neural connections, to thin out.
“The way it thins out is that if you are doing something and using specific connections and synapses, the brain keeps them. If they are not used the brain prunes them off.
“In teenage years, the brain is under construction and the things you experience in those years are the things your brain keeps. So it’s not the best period to get involved in stuff you don’t want to keep,” he advices.
In essence, Dr Warburton’s view on healthy screen use is the one of a healthy and moderate eating approach. Just like your arteries reflect how much fat you have, your muscles reflect how much exercise you do – your brain is almost a perfect reflection of everything you experienced.
“You should think of media like food, because it is food for the brain. How much? What is the content? How much can give us the right nutrition without ending up with a weight problem? Is the age appropriate? Full cream milk is great for kids – but not if you are an adult with a heart condition!”
According to the American Academy of Paediatrics, two hours a day of recreational – which is not educational – screen use is the moderate amount for kids over two. For under two, no screen time is the best option.
“For me as an active researcher I don’t think the evidence about the influences of screen overuse on children is inconclusive – you can’t fake an MRI scan.”
For Dr Kate Highfield, a lecturer at the Institute of Early Childhood at Macquarie University, whose research focuses on the use of technologies for learning and play, interactive media like mobile devices, tablets, iPads and smartphones can be used as a tool to enhance learning with their educational applications.
The issue here, as Dr Highfield’s recent research found, is that the majority of 85 per cent of the most downloaded educational applications in Australia, UK and the USA were questionable in terms of how much they helped children. The research has found that parents and possibly teachers are often leaning towards applications that are low-level drill and practice, that enhance only one specific skill, thus lowering neural development.
Talking to Neos Kosmos, Dr Highfield says educational applications are often divided in instructive and constructive apps. For things that children need to learn by rote, and need some sort of fluency with, different games on portable technology devices will help practice these specific skills – so-called ‘instructive apps’.
In the case of constructive apps, kids are in control of what they are doing, they are constructing knowledge while using technology as a tool – to make a digital book of a day, a photo album, a video.
“The issue for us is there are very few things that we have to learn with fluency – most of the things we have to learn, we actually have to think about and do a little bit more processing, not just have a fact and respond with an act. When we are looking in this first group of instructive apps where we are drilling and practicing one particular skill, we are concerned that it enforces quite low-level thinking – comprehend and recall. They are good for one and only specific skill, but are not helping in any other way.”
The use of media, when these are not used in educational purposes and when overconsumed, displaces and affects other things, says Dr Highfield, like language development, communication and other skills that children learn when in contact with other people.
“If children are overusing any form of media – whether interactive or traditional media like TV – the risk is that it’s displacing other opportunities – for learning, for communication, physical activities, for gross motor development and fine motor development.
“Parents should ask themselves – is the child’s screen time displacing other things they need to be doing? If your child is only using a screen – are they learning to paint, are they learning to use a brush, a pencil, do they play with resistive toys, are they climbing a tree?”
For kids, she explains, it’s much easier to play a game, than it is to share and take turns and communicate. When a child is playing with a mobile device, it’s much easier to feel successful. When they are with their peers, they have to negotiate – sometimes they will get their own way and sometimes they won’t.
“I guess that’s the concern here – it’s easier to use the device. It’s also about parental choice – children using devices gives us some time as adults. But what service are we doing for our children?”
In Toula Lionakis’ own experience, the jumping castle provided for kids at one of the family gatherings kept their attention for only a few hours – before they got back to ‘interacting’ with their parents’ or even their own iPhones.
“I worry about it, when I look at them sitting on the floor with their necks unnaturally arched while playing a game. When we were kids, we were playing outdoor games – nowadays children spend even school holidays with Play Station or iPads,” she says.
For a mother of two, the main concern about screen use is the open range of internet and her children interacting with people she doesn’t know.
“When they are playing online they are not playing just with their friends, they are actually playing with strangers from around the world. One of the major issues for me is that I don’t know who is on the other side.
“I try and monitor this by having them play it in the family room instead of their bedroom. We argue about it – but I can at least see who they are playing with. Another rule we have is that they have to put their iPhones and iPads on the kitchen bench at bedtime.”
The way for parents to deal with kids in the technology world, Toula Lionakis agrees with Dr Warburton and Dr Highfield, is to educate themselves.
“We are of a different generation – when I was at school we didn’t have iPhones or iPads. We don’t know what the ins and outs are and what our kids are doing. As parents, we have to educate ourselves on it. Being able to know what’s going on is probably the best way of protecting our kids.”
For more information on age appropriate media and games, www.childrenandmedia.org.au