Shocking Impact of Screen Time on Kids: Expert Parenting Strategies

Foreign I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on parenting in a digital age, managing the dangers of screen time. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Today we're going to explore the peace impact of digital technology on children at each developmental stage and as it relates to child screen time as a aspect as well as as it relates to parents screen time. And for those of you who haven't been to my class before, peace stands for physical, interpersonal, emotional, cognitive and environmental. So we're going to look at the holistic impacts and then we're going to identify related parenting challenges and strategies. Mobile phones, tablets, laptops, computer based learning, video games and even television contribute to screen time. And all of that screen time is additive. If you have a kid doing 30 minutes on their mobile phone, 30 minutes on a tablet, you know, another hour on a laptop and then two hours of computer based learning, video games, then watching television, that's a whole lot of screen time. You know, they keep saying that sitting is the new smoking, which I really don't know what that means but, but sitting is for long periods of time. Being inactive is, is problematic for a lot of reasons. But in children and, and I'm jumping ahead of myself a little bit, but you know me, in children, they are developing their fine motor and their gross motor skills. So if they are sedentary, they are not developing those skills as effectively as children who are active. The recommendation is less than two hours per day. They find that more than two hours of screen time per day is associated with significant impacts in each piece of life. And you're like, at least for me, when I was doing this presentation, I was thinking about my own kids and heck, thinking about my own self and thinking, yeah, I'm way over two hours of screen time a day. And in the schools, even a lot of schools have gone to basically technology based learning or whatever you want to call it. So the children are doing things like time for learning and oh gosh, what's the other one? Khan Academy and some of those other things online at school. So they're not interacting with one another, they're not interacting with humans. So let's take a look at what that might do. We're going to go through each piece issue in order to identify some of the problems. For a lot of children we see circadian rhythm disruption due to evening blue light exposure and delayed bedtimes. Now this is typically more problematic in your preschoolers and older, but there are some toddlers who spend a lot of time on a Tablet. I know when my kids were in martial arts, the owner of the martial arts studio had a toddler who eventually preschooler, and that child would spend the entire time, the entire two hours on the tablet. And you know, maybe that was the only time she was on the tablet. So it's still under that two hours. But my guess is she had other screen time. And not that I'm, I'm, not that I'm dissing, not that I'm criticizing, but it is very nefarious how screen time just kind of seeps into our daily life. And as parents, as caregivers, we need to be cognizant of that. We also need to be cognizant of it for ourselves. The delayed bedtimes. If people have late blue light exposure at night, it delays melatonin release. So it delays people getting sleepy. So even if the child goes to bed at 8 o', clock, they may not actually start winding down and getting sleepy until 9 or 9:30. We also see with a lot of video games and things like that, and even television, where the child wants to, as my son's favorite phrase was, finish the mission. So his bedtime might get pushed up just a little bit. Well, especially if they're playing video games, and this is when he was a teenager, but still, if they're playing video games, that is adrenaline, that is dopamine, that is excitatory. So instead of winding down right before bed, they're energized up until it's time for lights out. So again, it's going to delay that circadian, circadian cycle. Being cognizant of this, just like we are for good sleep hygiene, are supposed to limit or eliminate if possible, blue light exposure two hours before bed. It is recommended that our children do the same thing in order to help their brain recognize, hey, it's time to start winding down and getting ready for sleep. So they can have improved sleep structure so they can not only go to bed on time, but they can actually fall asleep in a reasonable amount of time. Lack of sufficient quality sleep because of sleep fragmentation because of these, the delayed circadian rhythms contributes to stress the body and contributes to a fair amount of activation of the central nervous system. You know, and inflammation, which lead to irritability, leads to brain fog, leads to difficulty in the morning because they're tired, difficulty in the morning focusing, and then they drag their happy little butts to school, feeling kind of hungover, if you will, from the lack of quality sleep. How good do you think their learning is? How effective do you Think they are. And most of us, when we're sleep deprived can be because we're. We've activated our stress response, we can be a little irritable. So how does that impact their interpersonal interactions at school? If they're struggling to learn, they're struggling to stay focused, they're struggling to stay awake, they may tend to be more irritable. And so how does that impact their ability to deal with other youth of the same age who similarly are struggling with a lot of the same issues? And none of these youth, because of their stage of development, have fully developed, fully solidified their downregulation skills, have fully solidified their stop and think behaviors. So they tend to be more impulsive. There's less physical activity in people who are on the screens. Now, one of the things you can do is pair them. If you want to watch something on television or you want to play that game on your tablet or on your mobile device. Okay, well, if you're going to do that, then, then you either need to do an hour of physical activity to earn the credits to be on there, or you can do it concurrently. Some of the things you can do concurrently, like put it on the monitor of the treadmill and you can walk slowly while you're playing your little video game or watching your show. I've got my husband doing that now for he watches his favorite television show while he's on the stair climber. And that helps him do an entire 40 minutes on the stair climber, as opposed to, you know, hating life and want to get off after 10 minutes. And it also limits or reduces some of the amount of time that he is ex doing screen time as caregivers. And, and we've said this before in the previous videos, children learn what they live. And if we are telling them you can't have screen time, but then we're spending seven hours in front of the television screen, or we're constantly walking around fubbing everybody, then they're going to tend to do that. You know, they want to do what or they're going to model what we're doing. So we need, as parents, as caregivers, we need to be cognizant about what we're modeling. Delayed gross and fine motor skill development. As I mentioned earlier, when children are not going outside and playing, they're not swinging on the swings, they're not making snowballs if you're up north, making sand castles if you're down south, all of those fine motor things that children do. If they're playing with Lincoln Logs or Tink Tinker toys or Legos. Those are, that's fine motor skills, developing those skills. If they are simply sitting there moving a mouse around, they're not developing those skills. They're not developing their gross motor skills, their ability to run, their proprioceptive abilities. They're, they're not developing the muscles that they need to develop in order to, you know, live a healthy lifestyle. We have to have muscle strength, to have stability, to be able to stand and walk and do all those things. So delayed gross and fine motor skill development is problematic. And when it starts happening early, then the children often experience also self esteem issues in later school if there are other people who have better gross and fine motor skills. One of the articles I was reading was looking at children, and this is one of my pet peeves, looking at children who were put in a baby swing and basically just left in front of the TV all day long or they were put in a playpen and left there most of the day. Now playpen's better than the swing because they can move around a little bit. But those children tended to show significant delays in crawling, walking, just general movement because they weren't encouraged to do so because they didn't develop those, those muscles. And for any of you who have been on bed rest or had to take a break from activity for a while, then you get back into it. You know, if you haven't worked those muscles in a while, it hurts and you get tired quickly. So a child, an infant, when they're learning how to scoot, and if you've ever tried to scoot on the floor, it takes a lot of energy, I'll tell you what. And, or to crawl, that actually also takes a fair amount of energy. But doing that, they're developing their shoulders and their back and their core muscles and everything else that prepares them to be able to stand upright. We also see overuse and lack of use injuries overuse. We see we'll get down to text neck in a minute, which is a posture issue. But we do see children starting to develop things that look like tennis elbow from moving the mouse around and thumb problems from clicking. They develop tendinitis in their thumbs as a result of clicking. I remember back in the day when before we had electronic health records and I had to handwrite everything, I would start to get pain up here. I would start to get some tendonitis. But it is important to pay attention to is this child putting themselves in a position where they are likely to be overusing a particular muscle group and cause Themselves a repetitive stress injury. Now, what I call lack of use injuries are injuries that you get because you lack that stability. Knee injuries you get because your leg muscles are not strong enough to keep you stable, or your ankle injuries. When you have a, or when you have an area that doesn't have a lot of, that doesn't get used a lot, and then you suddenly use it, you can actually cause, cause a strain really easily again. As caregivers, we want to encourage our youth to move. Now, most of them aren't going to want to go to the gym. Not everybody likes to play ball. So we need to find out what they do like and make it fun, make it a game and, or tokenize it if your child just hates going outside. All right, what can we do inside that helps you move around? My daughter eventually developed pots, but she's never been able to regulate her body temperature. So going outside in Florida wasn't going to happen. So we need to, we needed to figure out things that she could do inside as a young child to get her energy out. And there were play gyms around where we were that we went to all the time she was in gymnastics. She tried a, a variety of different things so she could move around and get her, get her activity on, if you will. But it is important to figure out if my child doesn't want to exercise, which often feels like a bad word. If my child doesn't want to move around, why not? What do they like to move around to do? One of the things that we did once we moved up to Tennessee and we had our first time when we were all snowed in for like 10 days. I blew up balloons because you don't want to be throwing balls around the house because you're going to break something. But I blew up balloons and we played hot potato and tried to keep the balloon from hitting the ground. And the dogs thought that was great fun too, but we were moving around. Were we keeping our heart rate steady state? No, we weren't. But we were moving, we were breathing, we were oxygenating, and we weren't watching television or on the computer or, or whatever. We weren't engaging in screen time. We see increased falls in youth partly because they have an underdeveloped sense of proprioception. Their gross motor skills aren't so good. And proprioception is when you know where your foot is in space so you know how far it is to that step instead of going. Well, I know that steps around here somewhere. But children with poor gross motor skills tend to have more Falls. And as I can attest from my own children, when you walk around on the sidewalk or in the store, texting on your phone, and you're not paying attention to where you're walking, guess what? Sooner or later you're going to freaking walk into something and, or slip and fall. So you can easily get hurt. That's a simple one. If you're walking, you are not texting. And. And again, the rest of it gets solved if people are moving around more. Increased headaches and eye strain. This is particular if there's a lot of glare on the screen. It can be a television screen or computer screen, tablet, whatever, that can cause headaches. Poor vision. If the child doesn't see well, that can. And there's a lack of contrast that can cause headaches. And for those youth or people who engage in screen time in a dark room, that's really, that's a lot of glare, that's a lot of brightness shining in your eyes in a dark room. And it has been shown to increase headaches and eye strain, which if you're doing it at night, can disrupt sleep. If you're doing it during the day, you get a headache, you're certainly not going to feel like going outside and moving around or doing homework. So there are downstream consequences of what happens when we get these headaches. And then there's something. They've actually given it a name now. It's called text Neck. Your neck is supposed to have a nice little curve to it, so your head kind of tilts back a little bit, you know, not a lot, but a little bit. And we're finding that a lot of people who spend a lot of time on mobile devices tend to develop this hunched over, almost like you would expect with osteoporosis, but their head is bent down because they're always, they're always doing this. And we start to see a lot of muscular imbalances. We start to see a lot of neck pain that contributes to headaches. And it also contributes in the growing person to imbalances in the way everything grows and lines up because you're throwing your spine out of whack, let's just say what it is encouraging youth or. And ourselves. If you're spending a lot of time on a screen, especially one where you're looking down, or even if you're reading and you're looking down, picking your head up periodically, maybe even doing some neck strengthening exercises where you put your hands behind your head and just press back against them a little bit, nothing too hard, but strengthen the back of your neck in because it's having to work to hold your head up and, and it can get sore. So those are some physical issues that we want to prevent. And as again as caregivers, by limiting the amount of screen time and encouraging proper ergonomics when they are on screens, then we can start addressing some of these issues. Autonomic system imbalances, your nervous system, we've talked about this so much. When you have a system, sympathetic nervous system that is too strong, your stress response is too strong and your relaxation response, not so good. They're constant. They're supposed to balance each other. But it's like being on a seesaw or teeter totter, whatever you call it, where you're at, and you weigh 80 pounds and the person on the other end weighs 200 pounds. Kind of like when you used to try to teeter totter with your, with your little kid. You have a four year old on one side and they weigh 60 pounds and you know you weigh a lot more than that. They're not going to naturally be able to balance you out. So we start to see the sympathetic nervous system becomes overly prominent because sleep disruption, pain and other inflammation and other issues that result from all of this stuff. Keep the sympathetic nervous system, keep the stress response activated so it becomes dominant, which contributes to irritability. It contributes to dysregulated cortisol, your stress hormone, and contributes to inflammation. Remember, cortisol is not all bad. It is a stress hormone. But we need a little bit of stress in life. It's supposed to peak in the morning to give us energy to get out of bed and then decline and be at its lowest when it's time to go to bed. That's part of your circadian rhythm. If your circadian rhythms are out of whack, guess what? Your cortisol is going to be out of whack. And what do a lot of people do when their cortisol levels are out of whack and they're not getting good sleep? They drink a lot of caffeine. Caffeine kicks your cortisol levels up and your blood sugar levels, but it also disrupts that balance that we're supposed to have of high in the morning and gradually declining by evening. Especially if the person, the child is consuming caffeine in the afternoon. The body's like, what, what, what what? We're supposed to be that, that awake right now. We see dysregulated metabolic pathways and insulin resistance. Every time we get stressed, our body dumps Blood sugar to give us energy to fight or flee. Well, just like somebody who is, you know, every constantly eating a bag of M M's, you know, their blood sugar is way up here, so they have a lot of insulin in their body and their, their cells start to become insulin resistant. And so we start to see dysregulated metabolic pathways as a result of the chronic stress. Independent of weight, independent of what they eat, the body is dumping blood sugar so often that we start basically simulating eating a bunch of junk food constantly. We see impaired immunity when inflammation is up and it leads to increased neuroinflammation as well. But we, it also leads to impaired immunity because the immune system is involved in all that inflammation and it's trying to figure out how to fix whatever's causing the inflammation. So then these other opportunistic bugaboos come in and people get sick. Think about during finals when you know, you would be doing, you know, probably not sleeping well, probably not eating well, putting your body under a lot of stress. A lot of us pretty much inevitably got sick. We see that in, in youth when for them, same thing, they have finals, which puts them under a lot of stress. They're studying for it. But we also see in youth that are chronically stressed, they tend to be susceptible to illnesses. And we have delayed physical growth and healing because of this inflammation, because of the poor sleep. Sleep is one of the times that our body repairs and rebuilds and builds. And when they're not getting enough quality sleep, then we start to see delayed, impaired physical growth and healing interpersonally. Too much screen time leads to delayed language development. And you may be thinking to yourself, well, they're sitting there watching Elmo and talking back to Elmo. When my kids were little, you know, we still had the old Sesame Street DVDs, you know, Sesame street sing alongs and stuff. And we would sing together, what have you. And I would generally watch it with my children, partly because I enjoyed it, but we would sing together. So there was some, some language utilization. But especially for children who don't have a caregiver that is interacting with them while they're engaging in screen time. It's a one way thing. They're hearing something, talk to them, but they're not responding. They are not figuring out what to say back. There is no turn taking, there is no use of all of these small muscles that are needed in order to speak it actually. I mean, if you don't have muscles, you can't talk. If you're not talking you're not developing those muscles as effectively. And it's harder to put words together if you're not used to used to doing it. That's a cognitive skill that's developed as children learn to go from single word responses to two or three word sentences to full sentences. That is a cognitive developmental stage. So children who spend too much time in front of a screen, especially independently, where they're not talking back to it, interacting verbally with it, show delayed language development. If your child likes playing particular shows, all right, let's watch it with them. Let's talk about what's going on. Let's pause it periodically. If it's not live tv, let's sing some of those songs to encourage the. Even if they're not interacting in a two way conversation, if we're encouraging them to sing or to talk back to the tv, we're encouraging them to put words together and to use those muscles. The impaired communication reciprocity is also a problem because children who watch a lot of television or interact with video games. We had where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Was one of my son's favorites. But he didn't have to talk back to it. She would talk to him, she would ask questions, he would solve puzzles and problems and stuff. But he didn't have to speak, speak. He didn't have to talk back to it. So he didn't get used to responding and then waiting for the other person to say something back. This back and forth thing, he didn't get the hang of too well when he was little and we had to work on that as, as he got older, making sure that he was able to engage in that reciprocity. Now for him, he also has adhd, so that contributes to problems with communication reciprocity. But definitely it's important to make sure that we are asking our children questions and engaging them in a back and forth dialogue a couple of times a day at least. Interpersonal disinhibition on and offline. This is more for your older youth that are texting, that are getting on Instagram or Tick Tock or wherever they're going. Being online. There is a phenomenon called disinhibition where we tend to say things to people online we would never say to them in real life, you know, nasty things generally. So this interpersonal disinhibition, they don't develop the filter that says, yeah, you probably ought not say that. If almost all of their activities are online and they are regularly disinhibited, then when they get out into, you know, real life. They're not going to have that filter, so they're still going to be disinhibited and it can get ugly real fast. I saw that there are actually people that have become what they call social interaction coaches. Because this has become so much of a problem. People have lost the ability to be patient, to take perspectives, to inhibit themselves. And I mean that in the positive way, not in the, you know, doormat way. But they have difficulty engaging in imaginative play and impaired creativity. Oh my gosh. This used to be one of my mother's like, things that she would get very adamant about because she thought that there were too many, too much technology. You know, you didn't have to use your imagination anymore for the toy fire truck because it had its own sirens and it, it was remote controlled. You didn't even have to make it work. She was all about old school toys. And I can get that. Children that spend a lot of time on screens often expect a lot more than what a old fashioned toy will provide. So those old fashioned toys aren't appealing to them. They don't even know what to do with them. They, you give them just a little stuffed animal and you say, here, play with this. They look at it, they're like, it doesn't do anything. I don't know what to do with it. And it doesn't do anything. They have impaired cre creativity because they don't have to be creative. Creativity is something we learn and when they don't have to be creative, it doesn't develop. So again, encouraging youth to engage in imaginative thinking and creative problem solving activities, remembering that behavior is communication. So it's going to be important to find activities that the child likes to do. And I'm not exactly sure where it started, but my son developed a fascination at a very young age with dinosaurs and Star wars, but with dinosaurs. And that's persisted. He's 25 now and he writes fan fiction that is based in a dinosaur world. Okay, that's fine. He did a lot of reading. One of his favorite places to go, I know, imagine this. He called it his baby. It was the downtown library in Gainesville. Okay. So we would go once a week to the library and we would walk out with bags of books and he would have them all up in his bed. He spent a lot of time reading and looking at picture books and being imaginative, which was really cool for me. It was really cool to see because he was so enthralled with some of these things. But we do need to encourage them if there's something that they like on online. Let's see if there's a book about it. Let's see if there are action figures that they can play with. One of my friends, Adriana's son is really into Smurfs right now, which I think is so awesome because I was into Smurfs back when I was a kid, about his age too. But you can get these little Smurf things and you can play with them, you can have creativity with them and that can be liberating. The Smurfs can engage in communication reciprocity. The Smurfs, you know, as they're talking to one another, that assists with language development. So finding something that the child likes to do and encourages their imagination. For some it may be building with Legos as opposed to being in Minecraft and clicking to build in those different worlds, actually using those fine motor skills and building things with Legos or something else. Social anxiety offline and fear of missing out. These are kind of related. But because of their level of interpersonal disinhibition and the challenges that a lot of their peers have with interpersonal disinhibition, a ton of youth and I don't know what the numbers are. Last time I, I found a study, it was pre, pre 2020, but it showed that 60% of adolescent youth have social anxiety. 60%. 6 out of 10. Oh my gosh, that's heartbreaking. And it's just getting worse because of the disinhibition. So now when they interact with their peers in real life, it feels traumatizing. When they interact with their peers online, it feels traumatizing. So they start feeling like other people are unsafe. As caregivers, it is so important when we can to encourage our youth to engage with their peers. Play dates for the little ones, team sports or activities, chess clubs, whatever it is for the bigger ones. So they are engaging with other youth in a non threatening environment and not developing this emotion based belief that all people are aggressive and dangerous. There's also the fear of missing out. Online is 247 and a lot of youth are constantly checking their phones, especially the tweens and the older ones, they're constantly checking their phones because they're afraid, afraid of missing out on a party, they're afraid of missing if somebody starts trolling one of their posts. They're afraid of missing out on. So they're afraid of missing out on protecting themselves and they're afraid of missing out on fun. So there's just this fear of missing out Helping people recognize that you can disengage. And most of the time when you go back online, things haven't really changed all that much. And that was one of the things that I had to do as an adult was take, take a break from social media, especially news. And I learned that if I take a break from that and I only check into the news once a week, there ain't that much that's really changed. And if there is something in the meantime, my husband tells me about it so. Because I can't get him to take one of those breaks. But that's a lot of stress on youth. And when we are constantly anxious, that means that sympathetic nervous system is constantly engaged. That means our blood sugar is constantly getting pumped out. That means we're setting ourselves up for a lot of dysregulation that has downstream effects in each piece of our life. People who spend a lot of time online often lack mindfulness because they're focused on what they're doing. They're focused on this game, they're focused on this television show, they're focused on scrolling on TikTok. If I'm scrolling on TikTok and watching videos, I have no idea what's going on inside me or what I need. I am focused on usually looking for some funny dog or cat video. And because there is never ending novelty, especially now with YouTube shorts and tick tock, people get addicted to being online. They just, just like somebody who's watching porn. They keep scrolling until they find something that checks their interest. They watch it, they get a dopamine hit and they say, hey, I want to do that again. So we start to see youth at a very early age disregulating their very sensitive and fragile dopaminergic system. There's reduced caregiver interaction with screens, which weakens attachment and social referencing. We learn how to act and react by watching those around us. And if the youth are not interacting with their caregivers, they don't know what, what is the appropriate response. I don't have a reference point for how I'm supposed to act. It also means that the caregivers are less connected. There's a weaker attachment at best because the caregivers are not consistent, attentive, responsive, encouraging and possibly safe. A lot of times in today's digital world, it's not just the kids being online that's a problem. If the caregivers are sucked into TikTok or Instagram or some show that they're binge watching on Netflix, they are not available emotionally and or physically for their child in a meaningful way. Yes, they may be there if the house starts to burn down, but there's more to being attentive and parenting than only responding when there's a crisis. We see reduced self esteem due to social comparison. Back in my day in the dark ages, we had magazines and airbrushing, which we thought was the worst thing ever because all of these models would be airbrushed to look a lot thinner and more perfect than they really were. So when you're in the department store under these glaring bright lights, looking at the mirror, you look at yourself in these clothes and you're like, oh, no, I can't pull that off. Youth today have that times 10. Not only is there airbrushing, but they also have for for pictures, for images, but they also have filters on Instagram and all these other sites and things that make you look younger, better, prettier, more attractive than you may actually be in real life because it smooths out the wrinkles and takes away some of the shadows and everything. Now, for kids, they're not looking at wrinkles, but they're looking at zits or moles or scars they may have or something that they don't like. And they're comparing what they see in the mirror of themselves to what they see online of their peers. And they're like, everybody else is so much more attractive than I am. Yeah, not so much. If you take away the filters, I bet you'd be surprised. They also have reduced self esteem due to social comparison because they're living their entire life. They're living the good and the bad. But what do we post online? The good stuff? We don't post when we get up in the morning and we're just having a horrid hair day. We don't post when we break up with. Well, some people do post when they break up with somebody, but generally people share the best parts of their day and their life and they're not bombarding their feed with complaints and hiccups and problems and what have you. And trolls or lack of likes. Unfortunately, a lot of youth self esteem has started to revolve around likes. And what a lot of them don't realize is the algos may not be showing their posts. So their friend Sally's post, the algo, may be showing it to a thousand people. And so Sally's post gets a lot of likes, but for whatever reason, the algo doesn't show their post to more than 20 people. So they don't get that many likes. And then they start feeling like nobody likes their stuff. Well no, that's not necessarily true. And some people just don't hit that like button. I don't know. But it is important to be aware of how much our youths self esteem is wrapped up in that external validation of people saying you're okay. You know, what would happen if you didn't get any likes? You know, and I struggled with this for a while on X, used to be Twitter because for whatever reason I never got my ex account to take off. And I would post what I thought to be helpful quality content and I'd get like four impressions and no likes and no reposts for everything. I think the most I ever got was like 7 likes on a post that I did. And I really tried, I really tried to put out good non, non commercial but educational content and stuff and it just didn't work. And it's important to realize that some of it has to do with the algos. Same thing on YouTube, that certain topics, certain things are promoted more strongly by YouTube algos than others. And it doesn't have to do with you as a person. And that's true for Instagram and Facebook and Tick Tock and all those others. It doesn't have to do with the quality of your content or you as a person. It has to do with their algos. But that's hard for younger children to wrap their heads around. Children who spend a lot of time on screen time, watching television, on the computer, texting with friends, may not know what their personal interests are. If you took, if the power went out and you said, okay, there's no tv, there's no screen time for a week, what would they do? What do they like to do besides play Candy Crush or you know, whatever one of those games is. And a lot of youth don't even know anymore. They're like, I have no idea what I like doing. You ask them, let's go out and do something this weekend. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do? I don't know, I just want to play my video game or I just want to watch XYZ on tv. No? Okay, so let's try some things. Encouraging youth to try. Make a list of things together that they may like, they may be willing to try to do. Going hiking, going fishing, going to. Walking through the shopping mall, going to. It's still screen time, but going to a movie, at least you're getting out. What things do you like to do at? If they don't know, let's start trying things kind of like a sampler at, at the ice cream store. Cyberbullying and cyber stalking. Because of all this disinhibition, it is really easy to be cyber bullied and it's really easy to be a bully. And if you go through any of the social media, you'll find people calling each other names and telling each other they're stupid and just horrible, horrible, horrible things. And, and that's, that's bullying. That is. You don't agree with me, so I am going to be aggressive towards you. Helping youth take a step back and say, okay, help them understand disinhibition. You know, what they're saying to you online isn't right. They may not say it to your face, but they may. How do you handle it when somebody is inappropriately aggressive toward you? Cyber stalking. Going online, you have this friend from school that you want to know if they're hanging out with somebody else from school. So you go start lurking on all of their social media, maybe even creating a fake profile. It can get somewhat obsessive really quickly and take a lot of time and it can make people feel unsafe. Grooming, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on, but we do need to be aware of it. As caregivers, we need to be aware that there are older adults and older youth that are creating fake profiles and going on to little kid games and starting up conversations with them and trying to groom them for, for their nefarious means. I was shocked when I first learned about it, you know, many, many years ago, because I thought, okay, if they're being groomed, it's on some, something like Facebook or somewhere like that. No, no, they're going into chat rooms on Minecraft or, you know, one of the other games that a lot of kids play and they're creating relationship with these kids and starting to groom them. You see it with teenagers who are going through that stage of trying to become more independent when they may be more likely to be swayed or tempted when they meet somebody who shares a, a different point of view than their parents. So we do see a lot of adults going on again, posing as younger people and trying to find those youth who are what I call lost online. They just spend all day online because they don't have guidance back here and, or because the guidance they're getting back here doesn't feel like they're understood or accepted. So they're looking for acceptance. And the bad actors will seize on those people who desperately want acceptance and they will Just groom them. Sexting and sextortion. A youth, a minor, sending sexually explicit images or even text, but generally images to someone else is technically child porn. Youth will engage in sexting. They do send topless pictures of each other, of themselves or whatever to each other. We want to make sure they understand that once it's out there, you have no control over it. And what's going to happen if you decide that you want to go to law school or you decide you want to do this? Is this something that you want out there? Maybe you want to run for Senate? Is this something you want out there that can be used against you? Parental posting, violating child's boundaries, which evidently is called sharing. When you show that adore share that adorable little picture of Jim Bob when he was two butt naked in the bathroom in, in the, in the bathtub. Well, you know, Jim Bob is now 16 and really doesn't want all of his friends seeing him butt naked in the bathtub. So they get embarrassed and they feel ashamed. As parents, we need to be very sensitive to what's going on with all of these. We need to be aware of what we're sharing and what our, what our children are sharing online. We need to educate them because they can get to it. If they want to get to an open wi fi, they're going to find it. You can have the best firewalls in the world at your own house, but as soon as they go to school, as soon as they, you know, go to work, if they're a teenager, they've got open WI fi. If you have their phone locked down, that's fine. They'll use their friend's phone, you know, so they're going to get it. We need to educate them and empower them in addition to setting up safeguards but so they understand why we've got those safeguards there and they're not as tempted to try to sneak around and parental lurking. When we go on to our kids social media to see what others are saying to them or to see what they're posting, we really want to ask permission ideally so they don't feel like we're basically eavesdropping on their conversations. Emotional issues. Children fail to develop down regulation skills due to less co regulation. They get upset, they get angry and there's no caregiver around in sight to help them contain that down regulate and then choose an effective response strategy. The child may not seek support. They get upset and you know, it's like, okay, I'm upset, whatever. They don't know that they're supposed to ask for help or they can ask for help. The parent immersed in their own screen time, the child gets upset, the caregiver doesn't realize it because they're scrolling on tick tock. And again, no co regulation or the parent uses the screen as a digital babysitter or pacifier. So when the child gets upset in the grocery store and starts getting irritable because you know, I want to go home, I want to eat, I want to whatever. Here, here's a screen. Just play with it, be quiet. The child hasn't learned to downregulate, they've just learned to distract themselves occasionally. That may be a useful tool. But we also do need to help children learn how to downregulate because what happens if you don't have a screen you to give them? What are you going to do then? Mood issues. Research shows that there is a lot more generalized anxiety, social anxiety, anger, irritability, depression and loneliness in youth in proportion to the amount of time that they spend on screen time. Especially in proportion to the amount of time that they spend on on the Internet, on mobile devices, tablets, etc. We see attention deficits and a difficulty filtering extraneous stimuli because online they're being bombarded constantly. I mean right now I've got three screens going at the same time. If I'm trying to work on just one screen, I feel completely hamstrung, which, you know, 20 years ago I wouldn't have said that, but now I expect to have three screens and, or more and 20 tabs open on each one. So there's a difficulty filtering what's important, what's not important because we just have so much input coming at us from if you're playing a video game or watching TV or whatever. Helping youth step back and figure out what's important and what do I need to do in order to concentrate. Some people develop a need for additional stimulation. If they don't have multiple things going on, they actually become more stressed. I know I've worked with people with ADHD who actually have to have background noise on in order to be able to concentrate. Otherwise they're under stimulated and they just can't focus. Difficulty focusing on one thing for an extended period because video games move so quickly. And even today I will watch a movie from the 80s and I'll be like, okay, come on, pick up the pace a little bit. Because I'm so used to the fast paced stuff of the 2000 and tens and and later. Frequent multitasking impairs retention and comprehension. We all know this from work, but this is think about kids. They're trying to learn the foundational knowledge they need to succeed in life. They're reading, writing, arithmetic, all that stuff. And if they are frequently multitasking and they're not actually gaining accurate information, then they're going to have more difficulty later in life because they don't have the knowledge they need and they don't have the problem solving abilities. For a lot of people, exposure to curated information that is often biased because of those dagum algos, they will show you what they think you want to see. So you never get a fair and balanced picture of anything. And a lot of you think that because what they're seeing, because of what they're seeing, they think that's all there is. Instead of going, what am I not being shown? As caregivers, we need to encourage them to look at the other side, to ask themselves, what am I not being told? What am I not being shown? What are the other perspectives that might be going into what's going on here? Exposure to inaccurate information. And this is one of my soapboxes right now. Your large language models like Chat, GPT, Perplexity, Grok, whatever their use at Claude, they tend to be only about 60% accurate. 60% accurate. The rest of it is only partially accurate or a flagrant, what they call a hallucination, where the AI just makes stuff up. So if you're using a large language learning model, especially for something specific, you need to be aware that what you're getting may not be accurate at all. Don't turn in that term paper that you had the AI right, without checking it first. And technically you're not supposed to have the AI write it anyway. I had somebody send me a resume, a young person send me a resume when I was working at my last job that they clearly had an AI, Right? Because one of the jobs was completely fabricated. The business didn't even exist, let alone it wasn't a real business and they didn't even bother to check it. So a lot of youth are taking what they see on the Internet and what AI spits out at them as 100% accurate when it's only about 60%. There's a loss of critical thinking and problem solving abilities. If you're having GROK do all your thinking for you, you don't have to think for yourself. My daddy always used to say, well, what happens if one of these days we don't have calculators anymore? You know, this was back in, back in the 1970s. What happens if we don't have calculators anymore and you don't know how to do math by hand? And I'm like, well, then I guess I'm not going to do very well. But it's even worse today with AI, there are increased errors in work because youth have largely because they expect what they're getting spit out to be right. They don't fact check, they don't proofread anything. And for both parents and youth, we're just in a state of information overload. Constantly and even beginning to think of how do I filter out the real from the unreal and the, the good from the bad? Oh my gosh, it's overwhelming. Continuous stimulation reduces reflective thinking and goal persistence. So if it's constantly coming at me, why do I have to think? Why do I have to ponder it? It's like, okay, that's fine, moving on. That can make it harder to persist in actual goals. In real life. The over reliance on high interest content creates a dependence on dopamine stimulation that never ending novelty, which leads to craving behavior. If they're not getting that hit from tick tock or video games or something, they start getting irritable because they start becoming dopamine deficient. Their neurotransmitters start getting out of whack. This o, this high interest content also reduces intrinsic motivation because what's going on inside of me is not nearly as exciting as all the rewards I can get on my video game or on social media by all those likes. And it reduces the ability to delay gratification. The if the person doesn't like what they've got or they're finding it difficult, okay, I'll just go do something else. Because that never ending novelty, they don't have to persist to get it done. Environmentally, there's less room for movement in a lot of homes because there's digital stuff everywhere. Difficulty regulating access as caregivers, as I mentioned earlier, we can have great firewalls at home, but children are going to be able to get where they want to. Um, as soon as they leave the house, they're going to get on some open WI fi network, they're going to use their friend's phone, whatever. So it is difficult for us to regulate and know what our kids are seeing. And children who engage in a lot of screen time often have less situational awareness. They're focused on the screen, they're not focused on the people around them, the dog that needs to go out or anything else that's going on around them. So they're kind of checked out from life. Technology is a part of our world. However, it's permeation into our daily lives is much different. Much different. Back when there was only television, even with 2,000 channels, because most of most of the time there were 2000 channels but nothing you wanted to watch. You'd get up and you'd go outside, you do something. But now there is almost. You can almost always find something to distract yourself. Children are easily captured by the never ending novelty, which can make it tempting to be overly permissive. They're happy, they're quiet. Just let them, let them stay on the screen. Technology may have a place in our lives, but we must find the balance and recognize the dangers as well as the benefits. Are there any questions? And it is also difficult for. And I didn't bring it up in today's presentation, but I'm going to bring it up now. With the lack of human interpersonal reciprocity, it's hard to interpret nonverbals because nonverbals are something we learn to interpret. It's not something we're born interpreting, which contributes to more communication issues. Okay, everybody, thank you for being here. It was great seeing you. And I will see you next Wednesday.