By Murray Trenberth
Photo:dreamstime.com An absolute no, no. We must look at baby and talk to baby, not our screen.
‘Embarrassment for our country’ stated the Herald headlines in a Jaime Cunningham article of May 14. It noted that school principals were grappling with growing numbers of new entrants with behaviour and oral communication issues. “Many five-year-olds are coming to school with such limited oral language abilities that teachers can’t communicate with them.”
The covid lockdown was blamed.
Four days later another article informed us that the mental health of our youth was rated the worst in the OECD, and that our teen suicide rate was the highest; as has been the case for decades now. Other articles have made us aware that over the last twenty-five years our reading, writing and maths results have been declining, consistently.
Combined, these statistics tell us that the genesis of the problem was around thirty years ago.
The Herald writer urged concern and supported increased government investment in learning support. And, as a former principal, I agree, this is essential. However, by itself, does not address the entirety of the problem. We need to eliminate the cause, not merely help schools cope in the meantime.
By age five 45.2% of children are experiencing development difficulties in: language and cognitive skills, social competence, communication and general knowledge, emotional maturity, and physical disability. These are Australian figures, but based on all we know, New Zealand data would be similar.
Deep down inside, we all know a pre-existing condition, which might be classified as ‘cellphonacy – compulsive use of cell phones’, was already impacting child development in New Zealand; covid lockdown exacerbated this. Blaming the lockdown alone, allows us to overlook the underlying issues that are much more significant; and will remain so until we address them.
Lockdown forced us to rely totally on our cell phone to socialise; we were no longer allowed to meet with our friends and workmates. Talking to each other, person to person, was banned.
During lockdowns, we human-beings finally completed the transition to screen-beings; an evolutionary step we had been working towards for three decades, but state coercion cemented this into our DNA fully. So, how do we reverse this?
Cell phone-use needs to give way to people, in matters of being human.
We evolved over hundreds of thousands of years by socialising and communicating face to face. Lockdowns stopped this.
Communicating involves much more than talking and listening. To truly communicate, we look each other in the eye, we read facial expression, observe body language, note a person’s agitation…; we sense feelings, empathise, respond in kind; maybe we hug; but it’s only possible, person to person.
Communication and cooperation lifted us up the evolutionary path of our pre-human ancestors. Yet now we are losing it, all to the power of the screen and its algorithms.
Our incessant and indiscriminate use of screen devices for work and play, for socialising online, for gaming and gambling, and for all forms of recreation and communication is leaching the essence of humanity from us. As we lose our sense of belong to a community of people, we are seeing ever increasing levels of mental health distress in young and old alike.
Children who are not able to toilet themselves by the time they attend school, who are not able to understand the simple spoken word, who lack the ability to stay still for a few minutes - is mostly the result of screen parenting; and our current generation of parents need to heed this.
We need to run an ongoing nationwide campaign, promoting aspects of parenting that help families raise healthy children, in terms of both their mental and physical health.
It needs, especially, to target prospective parents and parents of pre-two-year-olds. But the real advantage of such a programme, would be to raise awareness of the harms of screen time for us all, no matter what our age. It is addictive and has become compulsive and excessive for too many.
It is parental screen time that harms child brain development in the first place. A harm that is pushed beyond all possibility of repair, by allowing the child to watch TV and/or play on a cell phone/laptop too.
Healthy development or life-long harm to a child’s brain development occurs in the first two years of childhood.
Researchers involved in The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Longitudinal Study, Nathan Mikaere-Wallis, and the Brain Wave Trust have been telling us this for decades now.
The primary influences determining a child’s future success in life are set in the first 1000 days. If executive functions, such as planning, thinking, memory and emotional regulation don’t develop properly, there are life-long consequences; determining whether they fail at school, have poor mental health, get involved in crime…
Fifteen percent of neural connections are formed in the nine months of pregnancy. The next 70% are formed over the first two years of childhood. This 85% foretells a child’s future.
By the second birthday, the floor plan, foundations and architecture of a child’s brain is in place. You have a two-room hut, or a two storey five-bedroom house with study, …
No amount of home-tutoring or private schooling can fix this later.
We must get back to face to face talking. No screen in sight. Your child is the most important person in your lives now. Not the all-invasive cell phone or its near relative, the laptop.
I repeat, from birth to age two, 70% of a child’s neural connections are created. This is the period when learning, bonding and attachment occurs. Children must interact face to face, and they must play and be active; not immobilized in front of a screen.
A baby’s brain gathers data to shape the architecture of their brain. It does this by interacting face to face with mum, dad, nan…the people it knows well.
The brain is wired to be complex; less language and you have a less complex brain.
Parents need to appreciate that they are a child’s first teachers. No teaching happens when parents are on a cell phone. Their attitude says it all – we are NOT INTERESTED! Our screen is much more important.
Unconditional love and frequent interaction is imperative. Touch is essential for brain development. Rock your baby – relationship develops with repetition.
The more you nurture, cuddle, interact, smile, talk, and sing to your baby, face to face, the better. From 2 – 11 months, chanting nursery rhymes and singing songs with patterns help language acquisition.
Parents and caregivers need to talk, sing nursery rhymes, discuss pictures in books, read to them from a book, so they learn the squiggles are words that tell stories, that are fun.
No screens for parent or baby. No cell phone in sight, or within hearing, while a child is present. You can bottle feed a baby and talk to it without checking your cell phone.
What does the research say about screen time? How much is okay?
NO screen time at all for the first 18 months! Then up to age five, less than one hour a day, so long as the parent co-views, joins in and participates by singing along with Cookie Monster; by discussing what is happening to help the child understand what they are seeing.
What can we do to turn this around? Insist that your children, and theirs, live their lives,
live, not via a screen. Family life must become a no screen life. Meals around a table, together, talking while we eat. The family culture is passed on here.
Children must get back to playing with toys and playing with each other. They are not learning to talk or relate to others by looking at a screen; nor are they exercising.
It’s how we lived for the first 99.999% of our evolution as a species. And we did evolve, now we are devolving.
Murray Trenberth is former secondary principal and CEO of a youth Mental-Health AOD treatment service.
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