Technology and Kids

We beg all parents, particularly those with children under the age of 10, to please not fall into the trap of believing children of this age need personal smart technology. Personal smart technology (smartphones, tablets) is not beneficial to growing brains and is more harmful than anything else.

Let me repeat: Personal smart technology for children under the age of 10 is more harmful than helpful.

Why?

First, children’s brains grow when cells make new connections. When babies are first born, the only connections their brains have are those that sustain life. But as they grow, they experience new things. Each new experience creates a new connection in the brain, laying neural wiring on which new connections are made. This is how a child’s brain grows.

What is important to remember is that for young children, the vast majority of their experiences are physical, and most of those physical experiences are motor-based.

In other words, when children aren’t moving, their brains aren’t growing. They have to move to learn.

And when kids don’t move, they become weak.

Weak children struggle in school because they do not have the strength in their arms and hands needed to hold a pencil and successfully move it across a page. They gain this strength through physical play: climbing, digging, crawling, building forts, and pulling sleds. They do not gain strength in their hands by holding personal smart technology and swiping or tapping.

Weak children struggle in school because they do not have the strength to sit comfortably in a chair, at a desk, or in circle time. Children cannot multitask, so their brains are consumed with the discomfort of sitting. Their brains are not listening to their teacher for directions. Children gain the strength to sit with comfort when they run, jump, and climb. They can’t gain this strength sitting still with technology.

Weak children struggle in school because they do not have the endurance or strength to run. When children run, they get aerobic, releasing a chemical in their brains that scientists refer to as fertilizer for the brain because it makes their brain cells more receptive to connections with each other. These new connections turn on the brain’s attention, motivation, and memory systems. These connections help children noodle out problems and pay attention. Children can only get aerobic when they are running and moving in big physical play. Children cannot get aerobic when they are sitting still with technology. Technology makes children sit upright and still. When children are upright and still, they cannot hone a focal with their eyes. Without a strong focal point, letters and numbers jump around on the page, making reading and writing extremely difficult to master. Children build a focal point by spinning, swinging, sliding, and hanging upside down. Children cannot build a focal point by looking at a screen.

Technology makes children sit upright and still. When children are still, their brains don’t have a chance to build a data management center. Movement of the body in multiple planes and directions forces the brain to organize data. When well-developed, children can filter important data (directions from the teacher, safety information) from unimportant data (the cacophony of information bombarding the young brain: the HVAC turning on and off, teachers in the hall talking, the friend using the scratchy pencil). When all that information comes into the brain at the same level, the world is overwhelming, and learning is hard. Children build a data management center when they move their bodies a lot in things like logrolling, somersaulting, swinging, and rocking. Children cannot build this system when they are still with technology.

Technology makes children keep their arms and legs still. When children don’t move their arms and legs in the trial-and-error of big-body play, they cannot build a mental map of their bodies. This mental map helps them move with skill, whether it is to climb a tree, kick a ball, or write their name. Children do not move their arms and legs when they are with technology.

Technology makes children miss feeling the world around them. That means their brains don’t understand force. This sense of force helps them use the weight of their limbs to understand how to move them with control, but it also helps them understand differences in force. When they have internalized an understanding of force on their bodies, then they can transfer that to understanding the difference in force needed to pet a kitten or hold an egg versus the force needed to use a stick to crack open a piñata. This same understanding helps them understand the difference in the force needed to squish playdough into a shape versus the force needed to put a pencil to paper without breaking the tip. When children don’t feel force on their bodies, their brains don’t understand what force really means. Children learn force by pushing, pulling, climbing, crawling, and jumping. When they are with technology, their brains don’t feel pressure on their bodies.

What else happens when children don’t get enough movement?

Their brains will make their bodies move anyway. And they will typically move when we don’t want them to, but they can’t help it. They will move at school during circle time, class quiet time, and in organized events. All this moving makes it hard to pay attention, hard to understand the teacher’s directions, and makes school harder than it should be. Worse yet, it could lead to a diagnosis of some kind when really, children just need to move more.

All this extra moving is happening because the brain needs information from a child’s environment to develop appropriately. Lack of movement means the brain doesn’t experience the world, doesn’t grow, and in the end, it means children don’t learn how to use the body for learning and play, because their brains don’t know what the body is doing or how to control it.

Movement, in the form of big-body physical play, is the only way for children to build a foundation on which they can develop the motor movements of writing, the behavioral skills of attending, and the cognitive skills of learning.

What’s worse, these sedentary behaviors also have a direct connection to behavioral challenges. The vast majority of children today struggle with managing self-regulation and self-control. Occupational therapists, once tasked with helping children hone pencil mechanics and self-care tasks, are now working with children on behavior skills. And there are not enough OTs to meet the tidal wave of need. Without the basics of sitting still, managing self-regulation, self-control, and behavior, the higher skills of things like algebra, Chaucer, engineering, and critical and complex thinking are all significantly harder, if not impossible, to achieve. Worse still, lack of physical play means kids miss out on essential and organic connections with peers, which limits their ability to gain crucial adult skills, like:

Boredom. Children NEED TO BE BORED. A bored child is a creative child
Creativity. Smart technology feeds children content far more than having them create
Leadership
Empathy
Body language
Facial expressions
When to be a follower
Kindness
Emotional flexibility

As adults, we want our employees, employers, and coworkers to have these skills. We want to set our kids up for success in their work lives, and these skills are built from playground experiences and self-directed play with peers. These skills cannot be learned from technology. Remember, for all of human history, children have spent the vast majority of their time in big-body physical play. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that children began to spend more time in sedentary behaviors, predominantly with technology. This has had a dramatic impact on their physical and mental health, resulting in a dramatic rise in childhood obesity, type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, and depression.

But much of this can be overcome with simple, readily available, and inexpensive tools like:

At school: More moving incorporated into learning and in the classroom, including more PE.
At home and school: More self-directed, independent, outdoor play, like more recess at school and more outdoor play after school. Remember childhood days of old? Long afternoons spent riding bikes, building forts, playing Kick the Can? Children innately crave this play. Let’s let them have it.
After school: No homework. Children under the age of 8 don’t need homework. They need to play after school. Not sports, but real, physical play. Children in 4th and 5th grade should only have the kind of homework that helps them fulfill a task so they can practice the ritual of homework: meeting expectations, being responsible, and accountable.
At home: Zero technology under age 10. Technology robs a child’s growing brain of the fuel that powers social, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral success.

When considering technology, look to building a world for the next generation that has a solid foundation of moving that lays essential neural wiring for long-term academic and personal success.

Child during physical therapy session. Boy exercising barefoot with textured surface ball in physio therapy. Flat feet.

Fast Facts

If you don’t believe children are weak, consider that core strength in children has been eroding at a rate of almost 4% per year. This greatly inhibits their ability to sit and attend comfortably, hold a pencil or scissors, and hold their heads up to read. In other words, it makes learning harder than it should be.

a group of preschoolers running on the grass in the Park

But it gets worse

Aerobic endurance in children is declining at a rate of 5% per decade. This means that it takes kids more than 90 seconds longer to run a mile than it took kids in the 1980s.