NY Times Jane Brody
Excessive use of
computer games among young people in China appears to be taking an
alarming turn and may have particular relevance for American parents
whose children spend many hours a day focused on electronic screens. The
documentary “Web Junkie,”
to be shown next Monday on PBS, highlights the tragic effects on
teenagers who become hooked on video games, playing for dozens of hours
at a time often without breaks to eat, sleep or even use the bathroom.
Many come to view the real world as fake.
Chinese doctors
consider this phenomenon a clinical disorder and have established
rehabilitation centers where afflicted youngsters are confined for
months of sometimes draconian therapy, completely isolated from all
media, the effectiveness of which remains to be demonstrated.
n its 2013 policy statement on “Children, Adolescents, and the Media,” the American Academy of Pediatrics cited these shocking statistics from a Kaiser Family Foundation study
in 2010: “The average 8- to 10-year-old spends nearly eight hours a day
with a variety of different media, and older children and teenagers
spend more than 11 hours per day.” Television, long a popular
“babysitter,” remains the dominant medium, but computers, tablets and
cellphones are gradually taking over.
“Many parents seem to
have few rules about use of media by their children and adolescents,”
the academy stated, and two-thirds of those questioned in the Kaiser
study said their parents had no rules about how much time the youngsters
spent with media.
Parents, grateful for
ways to calm disruptive children and keep them from interrupting their
own screen activities, seem to be unaware of the potential harm from so
much time spent in the virtual world.
“We’re throwing
screens at children all day long, giving them distractions rather than
teaching them how to self-soothe, to calm themselves down,” said
Catherine Steiner-Adair, a Harvard-affiliated clinical psychologist and
author of the best-selling book “The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age.” [...]
Texting looms as the next national epidemic, with half of teenagers
sending 50 or more text messages a day and those aged 13 through 17
averaging 3,364 texts a month, Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Research Center
found in a 2012 study. An earlier Pew study
found that teenagers send an average of 34 texts a night after they get
into bed, adding to the sleep deprivation so common and harmful to
them. And as Ms. Hatch pointed out, “as children have more of their
communication through electronic media, and less of it face to face,
they begin to feel more lonely and depressed.”[...]
"Many come to view the real world as fake."
ReplyDeleteOne of my students used a version of this on me a couple of days ago. I told him there was a time when a person called to the Torah for an Aliyah lained the Torah. Many boys could lain the entire Torah by the time they were ten. The student told me that was because the children then didn't have video games to play. His logic was that only a person starved from video games would have the focus to concentrate on learning Torah intensively.
This lead to a discussion where I brought out that video games are artificial, while the Torah is the knowledge of how our world and all that's in it came to be. I think my student liked that. He didn't accept it right away, but challenged me. As I wrote in a comment on another post, that's a sign a student is thinking over what I said, examining it, trying to determine its value.