Excessive Screen time shrinks our brains – literally

The study was scary: when toddlers were in the same room with their parents, even if the parents were washing dishes or doing something else, their children would follow them with their eyes. If a tablet was close to them, they were totally absorbed by the screen, paying no attention to other people.
 
Have you ever considered what screen use does to our brains and personality development? Crystal Collier, therapist, educator and book author, has something to share, and it’s not what you might want to hear: extensive screen use doesn’t make your children smarter; instead, if not balanced with other activities, it can lead to depression, anxiety and even let parts of the brain shrink. Parents, so her message, should do everything they can to delay screen use – and allow smartphones and social media only at high school age. That’s one of the most important messages she shared at the first meeting of Smart Families, a program implemented at St. Pius X School in Corpus Christi.
 
Crystal Collier has experience with addiction – as a teenager, after moving to a new town, she drank a beer just two weeks shy of her 13^th birthday. Later, drugs became her coping mechanism until she almost overdosed in college. When she studied brain development and became a therapist, she discovered that technology and social media affect the same regions in the brain as drugs and alcohol.
 Dr. Crystal Collierand Principal Beth HinojosaWhile former generations encountered smartphones only at a certain age, Gen Zs are the first to grow up with them – and changes in their brains are visible. The brain needs 3-4 hours of consecutive activity to create brain cells. “You need to train to become good at sports, debating, music,” Collier explains. If a child plays 3-4 hours of video games, it develops a good coordination of visual stimuli and hand reactions – but only that. Other connections that a brain would develop are non-existent. As a consequence, adolescents with internet addiction display altered brain connectivity.
 
The general lifestyle change—less playtime outside, more supervised indoor activities—has already had consequences for children: obesity, sleep disturbances, and nearsightedness have increased. The average attention span decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2018. A goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds.
 
And there are mental effects, too: “The iGeneration suffers more from depression, hopelessness, meaninglessness, suicide risk than any other generation before,” says Collier. One reason is that children today have experience deficits: “Everyone feels anxiety when confronted with something new – a new school, a competition, being away from home. But today, we’re often avoiding anxiety instead of learning coping strategies.”
 
What can be a solution because the technology is here to stay? Crystal Collier recommends delaying using smartphones until high school and social media to 16 years. “Children have to earn a phone or social media use by doing other activities like sports or reading.” She shared the alarming data that the average age of exposure to pornography is nine years. “70-80% of pornography contains violence against women. Most teens, even the girls, believe that sexuality has to be like this.” 
Collier shared a chart for the screen time use per age: 18-24 months only video chats with loved ones, 3-5 years one hour a day together with a parent, and from 6 years on, maintaining a “brain balance”: after one hour screen time, one hour of another activity. In her program “Smart Families – Shaping Souls,” she describes how families can draft a family contract – everyone would try to be “respectful, responsible and fun to be with.”
 
St. Pius X Principal Beth Hinojosa learned about the Smart Families program at a conference and immediately liked its approach. She started implementing it at St. Pius and plans to expand it to all the Catholic schools in our diocese.