Avoiding screens until the age of three, delaying the use of mobile phones as much as possible and warning of the risks of their use are some of the recommendations that experts point out when dealing with the main doubts and questions that parents usually have regarding to the children’s access to the internet and mobile telephony.
“The first contact should never occur before the age of three,” he says. Keren Raven, professor of Evolutionary Psychology and of Social Education and Methodology at the Universitat Jaume I of Castellón. “At that age, children are learning how to relate to the world and they need all that available brain capacity for that learning,” she says. “Giving him the mobile as a digital painkiller, to distract him, is depriving him of those visual learning, of languageetc.”, he adds.
Cuervo points out that mobile phones are usually called, in this sense, “digital heroine”. “To calm a child it is very useful and works very well, but we are not aware of the damage it causes and the disorders it generates,” she points out. One of them, at these early ages, is the delay in language “by losing social interaction, which is the most important thing in learning.”
This uncontrolled use of the telephone in children leads to other collateral damage, according to the UJI expert: “There is a lack of tolerance for frustration, attention span and concentration.” “He gets used to fast stimuli and then moving on to slow stimuli like seeing a teacher in class, it can get very boring,” she explains.
violent responses
Other medium-term dangers generated by the use of mobile phones to calm young children can be, Cuervo points out, isolation, obesity, attention deficit or difficulty regulating emotions. Even in the long term, violent responses. “I work with the juvenile court and we have observed a relationship between a lax and permissive attitude of the parents in this aspect with later aggressions of children to parents”, she asserts.
At childhood ages, “playing, going outside, running, painting, reading… will help to acquire concentration capacity and other skills that are lost with the abuse of the screen”. As in the summer there is time for everything, boredom is also allowed. It’s even good. “It is important that the minor is able to get bored. When he gets bored, he discovers who he is, what he likes, how he feels, what he is good at…”.
These alternatives, over the years, must be combined with a use “controlled” of the devices, and allow them only “at certain times, at certain times or with certain utilities such as video calls with friends or family or to do homework.” “That the use has a purpose,” summarizes Cuervo.
As for the benefits, “there are.” “It depends on the use that is given to it. At the cognitive level there may be some advantage such as the increase in processing speed, but it is counterproductive, especially in young children.” Cuervo points out that there should be no rush to teach children how to use mobile phones and applications, “because after they will learn the same way“.