Education Focus
Now switch off and detoxify
Author of Toxic Childhood, Sue Palmer says technology is bad for young brains and that old-fashioned play is best
VIEW CHILD EXPERT
Have you heard of Moore’s Law? It’s held true since the early 1970s, and states that the power and potential of digital
technology doubles roughly every 18 months. It’s a testament to the remarkable plasticity of the human brain that we manage so well. As each new development comes along, we integrate it neatly into our lifestyles – emailing, social-networking or Googling. And we happily abandon hard-won skills as they become redundant (the day I bought my first satnav, all road maps went into the boot – and stayed there). But as life moves ever faster, perhaps we should consider what might be lost in our relentless pursuit of short-term, immediately gratifying gains? As the American IT writer Daniel Tenner recently mused: “It would be a shame if brilliant technology were to threaten the brain that created it.” And the most likely time for the human brain to be threatened is during childhood, when it’s laying down the neural networks upon which habits of behaviour depend. For the last ten years, I’ve been struggling with a rather scary question: might technological wizardry that’s fine for mature adult brains be potentially damaging for brains that are young and still developing? And I’ve concluded that the answer is: Yes. Over recent decades, primary teachers in schools across the social classes have noticed deterioration in three important aspects of children’s behaviour: first, their ability to focus attention; second, their capacity for self-control, and third, their powers of empathy. It was the concern of teachers I met in my work as a travelling literacy specialist that led me, 12 years ago, to begin researching child development in the modern world. I found that a toxic cocktail of lifestyle factors have changed childhood in ways that can inhibit aspects of brain development. Tese include changes in eating and sleeping habits, the impact of a screen-based, market-driven culture and the changing nature of play. Play is the natural human learning drive (according to psychologists, it’s as vital to human development as food and sleep). But from an ever-earlier age children have now exchanged three-dimensional, creative play (involving first-hand experiences, in real time and space, with real people) for various types of screen-based activity. Tis screen-saturated lifestyle distracts them from more developmentally-useful activities (such as playing outdoors with their friends), makes screen-gazing their natural default activity, and ensures they’re constantly exposed to marketing messages for more technological gear. Te net result is to hinder the development of the three key brain functions listed earlier: attention, self-control and empathy.
Screen-based entertainment attracts and controls the focus of children’s attention – so they don’t learn how
46 FirstEleven Autumn 2011 “ ”
It would be a shame if brilliant technology were to threaten the brain that created it
to sustain concentration for themselves. With constant access to quick-fix fun and games, they don’t develop their powers of self-control either, including physical coordination and the all-important ability to defer gratification. And children who grow up interacting with screens rather than people don’t learn the complex skills underpinning empathetic engagement – the reciprocal appreciation of body language, facial expression, tone of voice and other subtle human signals that underpin mutual understanding. As a specialist in literacy, I’m particularly worried about the impact of screen-saturation on children’s capacity to read and write. Unless we take urgent action, I fear these skills – along with many others that have brought our species to its current levels of civilisation and intellectual sophistication – are seriously threatened. Reading and writing don’t come naturally to children – they have to be taught. It can be a long and hard process and if their attention and/or self-regulatory powers are under-developed, it may be so hard that they give up the ghost. Even those who pick up basic literacy skills with ease may have little motivation to develop the fluency that underpins true literacy. Tat depends on endless practice – and why bother with books when you can get all your entertainment in visual form at the flick of a switch, and any necessary written information in short, pre-digested gobbets on the internet? In her book, Proust and the Squid, American literacy guru Mary-Ann Wolf explains how increasing access to “automaticity*” in reading is a key factor in humankind’s rapid intellectual advance over the last 2,500 years. Becoming a fluent reader and writer “changes the functional architecture of the brain”, making us more reflective, understanding and civilised – and greatly enhancing our ability to focus concentration, control behaviour and empathise with others.
Tragically, education in the UK has conspired with
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