Canadian kids, on average, spend nearly eight hours a day in front of screens, while the recommended limit is two hours,
But how does all this screen time affect children’s development? That’s where Eric Meyers comes in.
Meyers is an assistant professor in UBC’s school of library, archival and information studies, and his research focuses on the social aspects of how young people engage with technology. But he’s not just a researcher; he’s a former elementary school teacher and librarian, and the parent of a four-year-old girl. Meyers is the guest speaker at an upcoming Burnaby event for Screen Free Week, an international campaign encouraging people of all ages to take a break from screen-based technology. Meyers’ talk will focus on how screen time affects babies and children up to 12 years old. He’ll also offer tips on how families can use screen-based media to support learning and development.
The talk is on Tuesday, May 5 at the Burnaby Neighbourhood House at #100-4460 Beresford St. Admission is free, but spaces are filling fast, so register by emailing [email protected]. Pizza and light refreshments will be served.
Q&A:
How can parents help children negotiate a healthy relationship with these devices?
There’s no magic solution to the challenge of screens. But I think there are three areas I’d like to emphasize, the three Cs. One is content, the second is context and the third one is the child. ... By content, we have to be able to find ways to identify high-quality screen media, so looking for good examples of exemplary screen-based media young people can use.
(Context) is the notion that to raise a screen-smart kid in your home, you really need a supportive environment for that, and you also need some adult mentorship for young people. … A big part of it is setting appropriate limits and giving guidance for young people but also this idea we want to model what turning off our screens looks like, and that has to come from adults. So really having screen-free dinners, where nobody brings an IPhone or laptop or tablet to the dinner table, or have reading evenings instead of screen-based evenings, where entertainment comes from some other source, where we stop and play games, like board games, instead of always playing computer-based games.
This generation (of young kids) seems to be the first that has grown up in this age where we are immersed in the Internet, and IPhones and IPads. Is there anything shown in the research so far about how this is going to affect their development?
We know some basic principles about how the brain develops, and we know that stimuli result in different developmental patterns. …There’s this ideas that brains are very plastic and they develop in ways that muscles do with different stimuli. So if you work out a lot, you get big muscles. You stop working out, your muscles go back down to a normal size. Young children are really plastic. They have greater plasticity than adults do. So the concern, of course, is that as we expose them more to rapid touch, fast twitch kind of media, that they’re developing in some cases faster response rates or greater ability to engage with faster media. At the same time, we don’t know what’s missing. We don’t know how that development is then not being funneled to other things.
With the degree of plasticity in the brain, is all of this something that is impacting the way that we think, or is it also something that can be undone fairly easily?
We don’t know the extent to which children who have developed in this contemporary media landscape will be able to go back to something, because there is nothing to go back to. There was no prior state where they only experienced slow media. But the challenge is we’re introducing devices and media into people’s lives faster than we can study it.
What’s your best piece of advice for parents who are raising kids in the digital age of fast media?
Don’t be afraid of limiting things. Be prepared to provide some structure for young people even if you’re not familiar with all the bits of media out there. But we also need to do a better job of crowd sourcing, as parents, of getting parent knowledge out and sharing it with each other. I also think it’s a great opportunity for us if we get together as parents, as educators, as librarians and facilitators to actually push back on some of this. We can talk to media creators, to service providers, to people who regulate media, including politicians and the government, and say maybe we need to step back, and maybe we need to fund more research in this area so we have a better understanding of how this is supposed to work.
With the pace of technology, change and adoption is so rapid, I really wish we could take a step back and reflect on what we are doing and how we are doing it.
