Avoiding screens until the age of three, delaying cell phone use as much as possible, and warning about the risks of its use are some of the recommendations parents usually heed when addressing basic doubts and questions about the child. children’s access to the Internet and mobile phones.
“First contact should never be made before age three,” she says. Keren KuzgunProfessor of Evolutionary Psychology and Social Education and Methodology at the Jaume I University of Castellón. “Children at that age are learning how to relate to the world, and they need all the capacity in their brains for that learning,” she says. “Giving his cell phone a digital pain reliever to distract him deprives him of visual learning, of language.etc.” he adds.
Cuervo says that mobile phones are generally in this sense, “digital heroin”. “Calming a child is very helpful and very helpful, but we are unaware of the damage and discomfort it causes,” she says. One of them is language delay at this early age, “losing the social interaction that is most important in learning.”
According to the UJI expert, this uncontrolled use of the phone in children also causes other secondary damage: “There is frustration, a lack of tolerance for attention span and concentration.” “He gets used to fast stimuli and then switches to slow stimuli like seeing a teacher in the classroom, which can be very boring for him,” she explains.
violent reactions
Other mid-term dangers of using cell phones to calm young children are isolation, obesity, lack of attention or difficulty regulating emotions. Even in the long run, violent reactions. “I work with juvenile court and we observed a correlation between the lax and permissive attitude of the parents on this issue and the later aggression of the children towards the parents,” she says.
In childhood “playing, going out, running, painting, reading… will help to gain concentration capacity and other skills lost by screen abuse”. Boredom is allowed, as summer has its time for everything. Even good. “The important thing is that the little one can get bored. When he is bored, he discovers who he is, what he likes, how he feels, what he is good at…”.
These alternatives should be combined with a use over the years”controlAllow “devices” and only “certain utilities” at certain times, at certain times, or with certain utilities such as video calling friends or family or doing homework.
As for the benefits, “there is”. “It depends on the use. On the cognitive level, there may be some advantages, such as increased processing speed, but it’s counterproductive, especially in younger children.” Cuervo points out that teaching children how to use mobile phones and applications should not be rushed. the same way they will learn“.