Forty years ago when television was king, women used to joke about setting the table with the remote control placed next to the fork, so addicted were people to TV. Flash forward to today’s screen culture and you find many children spend more time on screens than they do sleeping or with a full- or a part-time job. Increased screen learning in schools and COVID-19 shutdowns have added to the mix of video games, smart phones, laptops, and tablets that have all but captured today’s children.
But is all that screen watching just a harmless waste of time? No. According to scientific studies, it is producing actual negative changes in our children’s brain development. Research published in the International Journal of Sociology of the Family in 2021, for example, states that excessive screen time is linked to “atrophy in the frontal, striatal, and insula cortex regions of the brain,” and specifically reduction in the thickness of the orbitofrontal cortex. “Thinning of the orbitofrontal cortex has also been shown to significantly impact memory and can increase the incidence of obsessive-compulsive disorder,” the paper states….