An Urgent Call for Simple Play as Digital Media Destroys Our Children
Updated
Today’s children are growing up in a reality that increasingly revolves around digital machines and little else. For those unaware—this lonely existence is unacceptable to their health and well-being. Without question, the destructive effects of a life wired to phones, social media, and video games are causing talented kids to suffer great emotional pain and tragic consequences. Thankfully, the destructive attachment technology presents to children has been recognized around the globe. But, unfortunately, and as if on purpose, the COVID-19 pandemic did nothing but blast open the door for the powerful tech industry, money-hungry Big Pharma marketing forces, and the Biden administration’s big government to sell schools and parents on the advantages of propping kids before screens. And with “Disease X” on the horizon, it seems a safe bet that, along with the sure-to-follow action to lock down the world’s children again, the fear propagated around the latest deadly disease by those pushing their oppressive agenda will override for most the harms of the digital world our children are thrust into.
A January 16, 2024, article by Epoch Times titled “The Silent Epidemic Eating Away Americans’ Minds” noted that excessive use of screens has “become an epidemic silently eroding lives with little resistance.” In 2012—over a decade prior—a Gallup survey found that roughly 60 percent of young adults admit to spending too much time online. A subsequent study in 2018 estimated that 83 percent of smartphone users admitted they keep their phone near them “almost all the time during their waking hours.” Understanding the figures are much worse now, six years later, why are grown-ups allowing this to happen with our kids? Today, we know that, especially in the first years of life, screen media can play a catastrophic role, increasingly inhibiting development the more it is used. Sharing alarms from educators, pediatricians, and media experts around screen use in children, a 2019 German report titled “Growing Up Healthy In A World Of Digital Media” warns:
“Toddlers [using screens] already display the first signs of addiction-like behavior. In addition, disturbances in brain development can easily occur, with dire consequences.
Even older children, who increasingly spend more time on screen devices, are in danger. More frequent media consumption can lead to speech inhibition, attention deficiency, concentration and sleep disturbances, hyperactivity, aggression, right through to reading and spelling disturbances.”
The report explains that, for at least the first twenty years of life, the maturation and increasing differentiation of the neural networks in the frontal lobe of a child’s brain is a continuous process. Years ago, developmental psychology and neurobiology examined the prerequisites for healthy brain development in children. Without question, the development of children’s senses, especially of the brain, is exponentially enhanced when childhood years are filled with movement and activities, including running, playing, climbing, somersaulting, balancing, and so on. Not surprisingly, research shows that the healthiest brain development is directly related to how intensively a child is exposed to the “real things of the natural environment, with fellow human beings, animals, and plants.”
Of course, this fact—the harmonious way life was created to guide human beings—is not surprising when looking at the intrinsic connection between all living things. In fact, that pure connection is so powerful that it has been vigorously attacked for decades, and now, currently, with a heavy focus on our children. Presently, as technology advances at lightning speed, the pace of the attack on our children is overwhelming, and the path of devastation is unprecedented. Because, as stated by brain researcher Dr. Gertraud Teuchert-Noodt, to master the challenges presented by digital technology, adolescents and later adults need the high cognitive abilities that come from healthy brain development, which leads to increased cognitive abilities. Dr. Teuchert-Noodt stressed the sophisticated and great danger that digital media poses, including addiction, burnout, and depression. Referring to the disaster as a cyberattack on the brain nerves of children, she explained:
“It is what it is: no matter whether a cyberattack is directed indirectly to the computer networks of highly-equipped digital devices that are important for specific infrastructures or directly to specific brain nerves, both have a corresponding penetrating force.
Thus, just as hackers can shut down the power supply of a hospital, media users in their own brain can override the care center for the entire information processing at the psycho-cognitive level and cause an emotional/mental exhaustion. A brain crash is even worse because the neurochemical and brain-rhythmically controlled functions in the corresponding highest brain regions— the limbic prefrontal system—are very difficult with a recovery from a digitally induced attack, especially since this is accompanied by imperceptible creeping symptoms.
If we keep the cart running like this, a whole generation of digitized children will return to the Stone Age.”
According to Dr. Teuchert-Noodt, despite knowing that the human brain has, in theory, been prepared for digitization since the Phoenicians introduced our current alphabet at least three thousand years ago, only the fully mature primary and secondary nerve networks in the brain’s cortex fields allow an adult to become creative in abstract thinking patterns and “deal wisely with media, or perhaps even with writing programs and algorithms.” She explained that the brain is “lifelong programmed for motoric activities,” which, along with other sensory perceptions, are fed into our senses and movements. She advised walking without a phone to generate ideas, reading texts on paper instead of the screen, and no wireless networks in schools.
Indeed, as our children suffer, a step toward their healing would be if society swiftly realized that children under at least eleven should be kept entirely away from digital media. The longer they are away the better. After all, tech execs see the inherent harm of toxic digital media and keep their kids away. Moreover, Dr. Teuchert-Noodt remarked that parents of small children should renounce digital media at home altogether. That effort alone would release children from much anger and worry, improve school performance, and allow time for a new, more responsible media generation to evolve. As we head down the collision course at our children’s expense, parents must reevaluate the role digital media plays in their home lives and keep smartphones away from children. Sounding a dire warning clearly heard by others, and ignored by just as many, Dr. Teuchert-Noodt proclaimed:
“If [children] already use smartphones, tablets, and more, they are automatically and quickly integrated into a dependency that is organized in a limbic circuit, which works under the threshold of consciousness in the brain, which the child’s immature brain does not yet have access to (as a “reward system”).
Moreover, such a kind of dependency leads automatically to the fact that the nerve networks in higher bark fields—for example, for talking, writing, reading, and calculating—can only be supplied insufficiently by the limbic hyperactivity of a digitized child. Corresponding functional performance can be difficult to make up in the later development; then the train has left. The child is affected by an intrinsic stress.
There are two aspects to be considered: First, it is hardly possible to program the child in the medium term to 1/2 media hours per day; The danger of addiction creeps in anyway. Second, the child’s brain—designed to imitate the child—is particularly vulnerable when the parents [allow] the constant use of digital media. Parents can only become a role model again and turn away the addiction risk of their child if they renounce themselves in their private lives as far as possible [away from] smartphones.”