11/02/2025
This is brilliant!
Screen time the biggest environmental change in the last 10 years without doubt 👏🏻
Childhood diagnosis is on the increase in relation to emotional regulation, attention issues, academic motivation and behavioural issues. Referrals for speech & language have skyrocketed and the amount of children starting school with toileting issues, a lack of capacity to play or use their imagination, and whose interpersonal skills are seriously lacking, is deeply concerning.
Screens render children passive: they disconnect from their bodies, their impulses, their imagination, their capacity to think for themselves, their curiosity, their impetus to speak, their interest in others, their capacity to make friends, to play, to listen, and to pay attention to anything that doesn’t hold their interest as vividly as a screen. Schools see this impact in increasingly concerning ways. More than a quarter of three and four year olds own their own tablets/smartphones. Many of these kids show up to school emotionally and physically dysregulated, cognitively distracted, grossly under-stimulated, socially stunted and very uncomfortable. Recommendations are that children under 2 years of age should have zero screen time in order for them to engage fully with all of their senses in the world so that their brain comes fully online and so that they have optimal developmental conditions socially, emotionally, cognitively and physically. For 2-5 year olds 30 minutes of screen time per day is recommended.
If you want your child to flourish, this is an important pathway. However, tech companies and algorithms shape our relationship to time, attention, thinking and even parenting. Parents themselves are addicted to their screens and consequently find these recommendations a struggle and even unrealistic. So the typical parental approach is ‘collapse’ - "sure everyone else is doing it and sure there’s nothing much I can do about it". The evidence is clear - overuse of screens equals developmental compromise…and I’m not even talking about adolescents here - the impacts for them are even more concerning. Wake up and put the screens away. Until that happens, we will continue to diagnose kids with the predictable side effects of childhood screen addiction and we will continue to see them struggle.
