I recently watched my sister perform an act of magic.
We were sitting in a restaurant, trying to have a conversation, but
her children, 4-year-old Willow and 7-year-old Luca, would not stop
fighting. The arguments — over a fork, or who had more water in a glass —
were unrelenting.
Like a magician quieting a group of children by pulling a rabbit out
of a hat, my sister reached into her purse and produced two shiny
Apple
iPads, handing one to each child. Suddenly, the two were quiet. Eerily
so. They sat playing games and watching videos, and we continued with
our conversation.
After our meal, as we stuffed the iPads back into their magic storage bag, my sister felt slightly guilty.
“I don’t want to give them the iPads at the dinner table, but if it
keeps them occupied for an hour so we can eat in peace, and more
importantly not disturb other people in the restaurant, I often just
hand it over,” she told me. Then she asked: “Do you think it’s bad for
them? I do worry that it is setting them up to think it’s O.K. to use
electronics at the dinner table in the future.”
I did not have an answer, and although some people might have
opinions, no one has a true scientific understanding of what the future
might hold for a generation raised on portable screens.
“We really don’t know the full neurological effects of these technologies yet,” said
Dr. Gary Small, director of the Longevity Center at the
University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “
iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.” “Children, like adults, vary quite a lot, and some are more sensitive than others to an abundance of screen time.”
But Dr. Small says we do know that the brain is highly sensitive to stimuli, like iPads and smartphone screens, and if people
spend too much time
with one technology, and less time interacting with people like parents
at the dinner table, that could hinder the development of certain
communications skills.
So will a child who plays with crayons at dinner rather than a coloring application on an iPad be a more socialized person?
Ozlem Ayduk, an associate professor in the Relationships and Social Cognition Lab at the
University of California, Berkeley,
said children sitting at the dinner table with a print book or crayons
were not as engaged with the people around them, either. “There are
value-based lessons for children to talk to the people during a meal,”
she said. “It’s not so much about the iPad versus nonelectronics.”
Parents who have little choice but to hand over their iPad can at least control what a child does on those devices.
A report published last week by the
Millennium Cohort Study,
a long-term study group in Britain that has been following 19,000
children born in 2000 and 2001, found that those who watched more than
three hours of television, videos or DVDs a day had a higher chance of
conduct problems, emotional symptoms and relationship problems by the
time they were 7 than children who did not.
The study,
of a sample of 11,000 children, found that children who played video
games — often age-appropriate games — for the same amount of time did
not show any signs of negative behavioral changes by the same age.
Which brings us back to the dinner table with my niece and nephew.
While they sat happily staring into those shiny screens, they were not
engaged in any type of conversation, or staring off into space thinking,
as my sister and I did as children when our parents were talking. And
that is where the risks are apparent.
“Conversations with each other are the way children learn to have
conversations with themselves, and learn how to be alone,” said Sherry
Turkle, a professor of science, technology and society at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of the book “
Alone Together:
Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.” “Learning
about solitude and being alone is the bedrock of early development, and
you don’t want your kids to miss out on that because you’re pacifying
them with a device.”
Ms. Turkle has interviewed parents, teenagers and children about the
use of gadgets during early development, and says she fears that
children who do not learn real interactions, which often have flaws and
imperfections, will come to know a world where perfect, shiny screens
give them a false sense of intimacy without risk.
And they need to be able to think independently of a device. “They
need to be able to explore their imagination. To be able to gather
themselves and know who they are. So someday they can form a
relationship with another person without a panic of being alone,” she
said. “If you don’t teach your children to be alone, they’ll only know
how to be lonely.”
Rita Brito
Retirado
daqui.
