Doc Mac Pediatric Clinic

12/09/2025

09/09/2025

Marco & mom🥰

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30/08/2025

If you’re a parent, you’ve most likely experienced juggling responsibilities at home. From preparing meals to changing diapers or even attempting to quiet the infant so you may complete daily tasks. Baby apps, touch tablets, and cellphones can feel like lifesavers in keeping an active infant calm and quiet while you finish up on things.
Recent studies showed how it negatively impacts our children:

1. Shorter Attention Span
Screen time produces a significant amount of dopamine, the “pleasure” chemical, so that on a brain scan it appears similar to illegal drug usage. Technology use activates addictive pathways through the release of dopamine. Prolonged exposure to screen time affects their concentration and focus due to abundance of stimulation(ex “switching from 1 episode to another show, moving from 1 app to another app, etc). This heightened stimulation leads to inability to focus which affects their early brain development. Consequently, the average young child becomes highly susceptible to distractions, compromising their ability to engage in long-term tasks.(Off Topic: This could be one of the reasons why children nowadays are having a hard time or getting frustrated in finishing modules or multiple school projects)

2. Inability to Control Their Emotions
Screen time tantrums is a new concept that describes children’s negative affect screen time limits. I do understand that limiting screen time to toddlers is a very challenging obstacle to overcome. According to the recent study, kids miss the opportunity to develop useful skills and abilities in such activities as play, reading, art or communication due to excessive screen time(Bergmann et al., 2022; Nikolaeva et al., 2023). Because of lack of sufficient practice of these activities, children may not reach the level of mastery and concentration when they become enjoyable. This may result into anger or frustration because other activities may even seem boring and not attractive to children. Going back to the recent paragraph, Dopamine can also play a significant role in controlling their emotions due to the addictive pathway.

3. Reduces Empathy
Early childhood is the time when they interact with the people or the world around them. They recognize mom’s face when she gets upset or when dad tries to be silly. Too much screen time inhibits children’s social development. There are influencers or content creators that seems to interact with children but they really don’t. This could be one of the hindrance in developing social interaction or interpreting emotions. “Until babies develop language,” says Charles Nelson, a Harvard neuroscientist who studies the impact of neglect on children’s brains, “all communication is non-verbal, so they depend heavily on looking at a face and deriving meaning from that face. That two-way exchange between infant and parents is critically important for brain development.

https://www.unicef.org/parenting/child-development/babies-screen-time
https://answers.childrenshospital.org/screen-time-infants/
https://www.oxjournal.org/how-does-technology-affect-the-attention-spans-of-different-age-groups/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11290121/
https://momentumlearning.ac.nz/blog/2024/5/15/how-screen-time-is-eroding-your-childs-emotional-intelligence

11/08/2025

A little breather from all the shaming, professional fee and hateful columnist…

Back when I was a pediatric resident, I had a very fond experience during my ER rotation. At the Emergency Room, you assess all patients who comes in through the swing door for 24 to 36 hour tour of duty. As a trainee in a government hospital, it is a very gruesome task, seeing 10-15 patients every hour and being accompanied by a nurse or no nurse at all during your shift to assist you. Fever, vomiting, diarrhea, seizures and some parents who are just worried about their newborns, is what you mostly encounter at the ER.

One afternoon, an anxious mom and dad came in with their little girl who had a few days of fever. The nurse checked her vital signs then I assessed the patient. I explained to them that my physical examination was normal but we had to run some test just to be sure. It was a very busy afternoon, so I told them that the lab results may take a little more time than expected.

A little pause from the chaos, while I was having a little chitchat with my on duty nurse, the father came up to me and hand me a cold can of soda. Then I said “ O Tatay, nagabala pa po kayo, pambili nalang po sana ito ng gamot ng anak niyo”. He responded “ Hindi Dok, konting pasasalamat lang po yan”.

Till this day, I always go back to that moment every time I get stressed out with viral post about complains against health care professionals or relatives who expects nothing but the worse when it comes to government hospitals. I still believe that most FIlipinos appreciate the work that we do as health care providers.

Proverbs 17:22
A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.