Screen Damage

All forms of recreational digital consumption whether on smartphones, tablets, game consoles or TVs have skyrocketed in the younger generations. From the age of 2, children in the West clock up more than 2.5 hours of screen time a day; by the time they reach 13, it s more than 7 hours a day. Added up over the first 18 years of life, this is the equivalent of almost 30 school years, or 15 years of full-time employment. Most media experts do not seem overly concerned about this situation: children are adaptable, they say, they are digital natives , their brains have changed and screens make them smarter. But other specialists including some paediatricians, psychiatrists, teachers and speech therapists dispute these claims, and many parents worry about the long-term consequences of their children s intensive exposure to screens. Michel Desmurget, a leading neuroscientist, has carefully weighed up the scientific evidence concerning the impact of the digital activities of our children and adolescents, and his assessment does not make for happy reading: he shows that these activities have significant detrimental consequences in terms of the health, behaviour and intellectual abilities of young people, and strongly affect their academic outcomes. A wake-up call for anyone concerned about the long-term impacts of our children s over-exposure to screens.