Do phones and laptops affect brain development in children?
I remember this meme that was getting around in 2013 at the time of the NRL State of Origin when QLD had their 8 year win streak. It said something on the lines of “When was the last time that a NSW fan tweeted from their iPhone that NSW won the State of Origin? Trick question, Twitter had not been invented the last time NSW had won.”
The point I am trying to make here is that technology that we use now has popped up almost out of nowhere. We have students attending college who are younger than the iPhone and our seniors who are graduating are only a few years older than it. This generation of children coming through schools will be the first to have grown up with smartphones, to be able to take laptops to school powerful enough to play graphically demanding video games, and be able to load up any movie or tv series in a matter of seconds, whereas for most of us we had to travel to a video store to rent it. This is a pretty scary concept because as this sudden explosion of ease of access of technology happened, no one handed us a manual to say this is how to raise children with this new technology and software.
The reason why I am writing this article about this topic is because during lockdown, I was having a conversation with a parent who raised a significant concern about her son’s addictive like behaviour with his technology, most of the time choosing not to do the lessons but instead going on Snapchat, House Party, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Another parent I spoke with was telling me how their son was complaining about how they found it really hard to stay focussed, and then they would go on their phone and use similar apps.
My takeaway from my time studying developmental psychology at university is that children’s brains take a very very long time to develop, go through crazy periods of growing and changing, and are constantly bathed in a soup of hormones and neurotransmitters. So it almost makes sense why children have found it so hard during lockdown to stay focussed. However, I attended a conference which included Dr Andrew Fuller, a psychologist and therapist specialising in children and education, who answered a question from a parent on something similar in relation to their child’s short focus. He answered their question with another question: How long does your son spend playing video games, watching youtube, tv or movies? Children can focus for long periods of time.
At that same talk Dr Kristy Goodwin, a digital wellness expert spoke about managing the attention span of children distracted by phones, laptops etc. She began her talk discussing a science experiment conducted on rats. These scientists setup an experiment where these rats were able to push a button and their brains were stimulated to release serotonin, a neurotransmitter which signals to our brains that action or activity you really enjoyed, kind of like a reward. It is usually released when you eat a really delicious meal or are having fun hanging out with your friends.What the scientists discovered was that the rats became addicted to pressing that button and would not eat or drink when they were hungry or thirsty and instead press that button 7000 times per hour.
Dr Goodwin brought this up because it was very similar to the behaviour of people addicted to gambling, they would receive a sudden rush of serotonin in the excitement that they could win, then press the button to play another game, over and over again. She said that tech companies have designed phones and software to mimic this. The scrolling and swiping actions on phones as well as the short timed videos of TikTok and Instagram mimicking the short games of pokies and that pulling the lever action, all to give those big releases of serotonin. Dr Goodwin was very purposeful making this connection because we have given children mini pokie machines that fit in their pocket at a time when their brains have a long way to go developing.
Going back to the parent I had the conversation with, I was very impressed with the lengths that she went to to help support her son and try to remove those distractions. She went and found resources that showed her how to setup permissions on her son’s laptop which prevented him from accessing particular sites, installing programs without her permission, and removing VPNs which get around blocks to websites (like being able to watch Netflix at school). She even set up similar permissions on his phone preventing access to apps, not being able to install apps without permission, and limiting screen time (yes phones can do that!).
Dr Goodwin said at the talk that we need to teach our children/students to be bored again and not to get that quick fix from technology. She highlighted research which indicated that children that experienced frequent short moments of boredom had greater levels of creativity because they were given these moments to daydream. I’m confident that the big movie blockbusters coming out this summer were written in moments of daydreaming and not swiping through Instagram or Snapchat.
If you wanted to learn more, Dr Andrew Fuller and Dr Kristy Goodwin are great names to google. Dr Fuller has written a number of books on helping children reach their potential, and Dr Kristy Goodwin writes a number of blog articles on children and the digital world.
Zach Holmes
Head of Mathematics