The question we were asking is - are we all just having a moral panic over screens, or are they as bad as the experts say they are?
And I think we’ve just got more evidence that the latter is true - that screens are a particularly pernicious problem of our age for the little ones.
Teachers are saying there are kids turning up at 5, sometimes 6, at school - and they just can't put sentences together. One teacher said a 6-year-old might say, for example, 'Me go pee' instead of 'I need the toilet'.
And frankly, that's pretty alarming for a 6-year-old. That is what my 2-year-old talks like, a 6-year-old should be way past that situation.
The teacher said that they had been teaching for 24 years, and they've never seen this low level of language. And what they’re putting it down to is too much screen time. Just too much TV, too much iPad.
And apparently, it's gotten worse since Covid, where screens became baby-sitters during lockdown and parents haven’t snapped out of it.
I recently spoke to a grandmother who doesn’t think 3 hours of TV a day - on multiple days - is a bad thing for a toddler. And obviously, that's a bad thing.
The problem with that is no one’s talking to the kid for three hours, or reading them a book, or showing them how to properly structure a sentence about wanting to go to the bathroom.
I have no idea what’s going on here with parents if they don't understand that this is a problem, I don't know how you fix it if it isn't obvious to parents that their child, at 6, isn't talking properly.
But teachers are right to feel frustrated at this, this is not their job.
I argue a lot of stuff about what they need to do in the classroom - but this is not their job. They're right to expect a 5-year-old to turn up at school knowing how to string sentences together. This is squarely on parents.
The evidence is now overwhelming that too much screen time is bad for kids - and if we're being honest about it, parents have known this since the 1980s.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show HERE - where this article was sourced.
6 comments:
What is equally alarming is the lack of research by people who call themselves journalists; this article is hardly a revelation. The obvious issues around kids versus tech (and everyone for that matter!) have been discussed for years both overseas and in NZ. I suggest the author looks up the work done by Jonathan Haidt (USA) & NZ’s Brainwave trust.
Another aspect that puzzled me a while ago was a comment about schools teaching kids to read. There are apparently different ways of doing this.
I could not understand this. To me reading comes naturally - like breathing!
No-one "taught" me how to read. I was reading at age 4, a year before I started school.
My youngest daughter also was reading before even starting school.
We all loved books and books were very much a part of our home and life.
But, of course back in those days there were no screens.
No TV.
So us inquisitive youngsters had to learn to read to understand what the pictures in our books were all about.
So teachers could concentrate on teaching us other things - for example how to hold a pen properly!
I think my mother taught herself to read too. She was always telling us. Apparently in the books she was reading there was a boy called Hugh. That confused her.
Not bad for someone that didn't speak English until she came here at the he age of three.
We learnt consonant blends and colour reading at school 'curly letter green snake' š that was S. I never had alphabets on the wall at home, I think my mother forgot to do all that stuff. My father read bedtime stories he was quite imaginative. My mother wasn't so keen, it was always like a school lesson with her. So learning to read at school was newish but not too difficult. My mother had hundreds of flash cards, weirdly enough she was a teacher. She was quite a good teacher tho', my friends would tell me, she was strict but treated them as friends. I just remember her as strict. I was the last child so by that time your enthusiasm wears thin. And in any case mothering didn't come naturally, she lost hers before she was young.
We watched TV down at my Nana's house, then we got a tv. It took about a minute or two to warm up when you turned it on. I remember watching the landing on the moon in the middle of the night. Via satellite it was. I had just started school. The tv was still new. I watched a lot of TV after school, probably too much.
We knew about computors they used to be the size of classrooms but were told they were forever getting smaller. I typed a letter in the computor lab at polytech on the main frame and in the 90's we all got lap tops. Been entertained by the them ever since. My nephew would scream blue murder if you tried to deprive him of time on the computor. He's a computor engineer or something like that now. Probably spent too much time on the computor.
We used to drill him to learn his times tables, he didn't like it but we all pressured him to do it. We bought him a big book of the Grims fairy tales which he read, his father didn't like him having that book, his parents had fled from Nazi Germany, they changed their name, but we said it was ok it teaches some good values and he really liked the stories. I would say reading taught him good language skills.
There are many ways of teaching children to read and about 30%-40% of children learn regardless of the method used. However phonics works for all children and about 60% of students need phonics taught explicitly and systematically or else they become poor readers. About 10% of children have quite severe difficulty in learning to read and could be labelled dyslexic. These children, who may be very bright are often non readers unless given a very intensive course of phonics. Neuro -science confirms this .
Children , of five years old are arriving at school still in nappies in some lower decile schools. I do wonder what pre-schools are doing since the parents are often both working paying off the mortgage. Small children who were exposed to infernal face mask wearing by those around them are now backward in speech, apparently.
There ought to be public health notices about the adverse effects of screens on children's developing brains. There is the dopamine effect as well But our Min.of Ed. , who notoriously always do the wrong thing have advocated learning by screens , despite the research against this. Sweden have excluded screens from schools.
Thanks, Gaynor, for your informative comment.
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