Clinical Disorders and the Glow Kids Effect
Several years ago, I had been working with a young man named “Robert” who had Asperger’s syndrome—a developmental disorder considered to be on the higher-functioning end of the autism spectrum. Robert was originally from down South but had moved up North to live with his lovely grandmother after his mother died suddenly, when he was 13.
When I met him, he was a very soft-spoken 16-year-old with very poor interpersonal skills—he made no eye contact, for example, and had no sense of how to engage in a back-and-forth conversation. He would also engage in some bizarre behavior that didn’t help him fit in at school: he carried around a stuffed monkey and, on occasion, would crawl under his desk and refuse to move. And there was one more thing: Robert was an out-of-control video game addict, totally consumed by the Final Fantasy RPG series.
He had a Game Boy that he constantly played with at school and a computer at home that he would game on from the moment he got home to the time he fell asleep—which he often did at the computer table. His poor elderly grandmother, who had her hands full trying to rein in his behavior, would cry, “I can’t stay up all night chasing him off the computer!” In school he was borderline mute, and in group counseling he would barely participate—until the subject of video games came up; then he would sit up straight in his chair and talk in a rapid monotone about the various minutiae of the game.
When Robert failed all of his classes due to lack of interest, his grandmother finally shut down the electronics—cold turkey. She felt his explosive wrath for a couple of days, but eventually he calmed down. In school, the poor kid would try to borrow other students’ devices, but because of his poor social skills, it was a challenge since he didn’t have any friends and couldn’t express himself clearly, often mumbling and looking off in another direction. Robert had about three or four meltdowns in school, standing on top of his desk and screaming or banging his head against the wall. In hindsight, I realized that he was going through screen withdrawal.
In trying to figure out a way to connect with Robert, I noticed that he was an excellent writer. Sure, his fictional stories dealt with aliens and fantasy worlds, but the kid could write. So I asked him to write a science fiction story for me, complete with narrative arc and characters. Sure enough, he came in with a detailed manuscript in microscopic handwritten print, along with illustrations.
He began to tell me, in animated fashion, about his story. As he talked, I noticed something: he was looking at me in the eyes. He had been unplugged for about a week and a half at that point, and he was making eye contact! In group, I asked him to tell the other kids about his rather fascinating intergalactic tale. While still a bit awkward in the group setting, he was now talking more fluidly and pausing to hear feedback—all great signs of improvement.
At one point I noticed that Robert was looking at a copy of The Lord of the Rings that I had on my bookcase. I grabbed it off the shelf and handed it to him. He looked at me a bit perplexed.
“Read this. I think you’ll really like it. It’s a fantasy—almost like your Final Fantasy video game—but you have to read it.”
I saw a little crooked smile creep along his face as he thanked me—another first.
Robert wound up doing fairly well. Over the few months that he was screen-free, his social skills progressed dramatically as he continued to read Tolkien and write his fantasy stories. At some point his grandmother gave him back the games because he had been improving so much in school. He did have a couple of setbacks, but he had moved the needle considerably on his social skills and was able to graduate.
His stuffed monkey now sits ornamentally on my bookcase. I smile whenever I look at it—as I also do when I invariably have to answer the “Hey, Dr. K . . . what’s a stuffed monkey doing in your bookcase?” question.
Electronic Screen Syndrome
Dr. Victoria Dunckley has boldly gone where no child psychiatrist has gone before.
Having worked with hundreds of kids with a variety of psychiatric, developmental and behavioral disorders, she realized something very profound: perhaps these disparate disorders had the same underlying cause. Maybe kids with ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, sleep disorders, mood disorders like depression and bipolar disorder, or behavioral issues like aggression—even kids with autism—maybe they were all part of an underlying syndrome that presented itself in a variety of different clinical expressions.
As she looked at the data, she saw that visits for kids diagnosed with pediatric bipolar disorder had increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003; that between 1980 and 2007 the diagnosis of ADHD had increased by nearly 800 percent, while prescriptions for psychotropic medications given to kids had sharply increased over the past two decades.1
What was happening? Was this just a case of more awareness and, thus, more diagnosis, or were there really more psychiatrically distressed kids? And, if so, what might be causing these spikes in clinical cases? Dr. Dunckley wondered if there could be some common environmental stressor causing these epidemic increases. Perhaps, she reasoned, even if all of these disorders weren’t being entirely caused by the environmental stressor, could they be getting amplified by a mitigating environmental factor?
As she looked over the child landscape trying to figure out what could have been the common denominator that kids had been getting exposed to, one thing glowingly stood out: screens.
The more that she looked at the problem, the more she began to understand what she began to call electronic screen syndrome (ESS). Dr. Dunckley came to believe that the unnaturally stimulating nature of an electronic screen, regardless of its content, wreaks havoc on the still-developing nervous system and mental health of a child on a variety of levels—cognitive, behavioral and emotional.
She began to conceptualize ESS as a disorder of dysregulation; that is, an inability in children to modulate their moods, attention or level of arousal in an appropriate or healthy manner.
Dunckley hypothesized that interacting with screens overstimulates the child and shifts the nervous system into fight-or-flight mode, which then leads to dysregulation and disorganization of the various biological and hormonal systems. These disrupted systems can then create—or exacerbate—disorders such as ADHD, depression, oppositional defiant disorder and anxiety.
But electronic screen syndrome isn’t just limited to kids with pronounced psychiatric or behavioral disorders. Dr. Dunckley observed that all kids were getting impacted on some level—even those with so-called “moderate” screen exposure were showing signs of “subtle damage,” such as chronic irritability, inability to focus, a general malaise, apathy or, oftentimes, a state of being “wired and tired.” (That is, they’re agitated but exhausted.)
Many of these kids fell below the threshold of a clinical diagnosis but still had troubling symptoms: “Many of the children I see suffer from sensory overload, lack of restorative sleep, and a hyperaroused nervous system, regardless of diagnosis . . . these children are impulsive, moody, and can’t pay attention.”
There’s an old axiom in the medical community (placebo effects aside): if the cure works, you probably have the disease. That is, if a particular treatment works on an ailment, we might reasonably infer that the patient had the ailment that the treatment was designed for; if an antiviral drug reduces symptoms, we can infer that a virus was at play. If an antibiotic does the trick, then we would suspect a bacterial infection.
In similar fashion, Dr. Dunckley set about to confirm her electronic screen syndrome hypothesis. If screens were indeed the underlying culprits in these various disorders, then, certainly, the removal of this theorized environmental “toxin” should alleviate some of the symptoms in the hundreds of children she was treating.
Toward that end during the past decade she has prescribed four- to-six-week “tech fasts”—the removal of all electronic screens—to more than 500 children, teens and young adults. Here’s what she has found: for those who strictly adhered to the fast, the results have been dramatic—if electronic screen syndrome was observed along with a true underlying psychiatric disorder, the tech fast was effective 80 percent of the time and typically reduced symptoms by at least half; in cases where there did not appear to be an underlying psychiatric condition, she often found “complete resolution of symptoms.”2
To illustrate how amazingly successful the removal of screens can be in transforming troubled kids, Dr. Dunckley wrote in detail about one particular student whom she treated:
“Mikey” had been a real problem. In the year before he was treated, the fifth-grader had become increasingly resistant to doing homework and had become more and more oppositional and defiant. If he was told “no” about anything—especially regarding his electronics—he would fly into a rage and would typically destroy school property. These explosive rages were wreaking havoc in his classroom, as he often would throw chairs and knock desks over.3
The ten-year-old had been diagnosed with mild autism and ADHD; there were also whispers of bipolar disorder. Not sure what to do, the school district insisted that Mikey undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Luckily, he was referred to Dr. Dunckley.
She discovered that Mikey had been playing video games since age seven and would play his nonviolent games for several hours a day, usually starting as soon as he got home from school. When he was out with his family, he would play with his sister’s or father’s iPhone; at school, he had daily computer time and often watched cartoons.
But things had gotten worse in the past year: he’d become more resistant to doing homework and was now playing his video games to the exclusion of all other interests. In addition, his oppositional behavior had started to escalate, and his violent rages increased and had become more violent. Although bipolar disorder was discussed as a possible diagnosis, there was no history of it in his family.
Before prescribing any medications, Dr. Dunckley suggested a four-week electronic screen fast, to both assess the role that screens may have been playing in his behavior as well as to help him reset and downshift his obviously overaroused nervous system. His family supported the decision to remove all screens—including television—for four weeks. They also bought him Legos and puzzles and set up tennis and park outings in order to restructure his life with screen-free activities.
After one month, he’d only had one episode of aggression at home and none at school. In addition, Dr. Dunckley reevaluated his medication needs and concluded that no meds were necessary at that time. One year later, this boy who had had almost daily rages amazingly had not had any incidents of aggression.
He has also been able to slowly integrate some electronics back into his life; he doesn’t play video games, but he does watch some TV on the weekends (though no cartoons). He has some computer time at school, but his parents have requested that it not be daily.
In light of the severity of his aggression and the concerns for his own safety as well as that of others, in 99 cases out of 100, a boy behaving this way would have invariably been put on strong psychotropic medication and perhaps even sedating antipsychotic meds. And as any mental health provider can tell you, once the medication merry-go-round begins, good luck getting off.
Luckily Mikey had been referred to Dr. Dunckley and averted a collision with a prescription pad; all that was required was a removal of the hyperstimulating screens that were raising his arousal thermostat to the point where he couldn’t shut it off.
The navy’s Dr. Doan also talks about the hyper-arousing nature of screens and video games, which activate the HPA axis and where adrenaline and blood pressure are consistently raised as kids go into chronic fight-or-flight mode and are unable to reset their adrenal thermostats.
In the past 14 years that I have worked with teenagers with emotional, cognitive, behavioral or developmental issues, I have had the opportunity to participate as a committee member in over one thousand Committee on Special Education (CSE) meetings for those various teenagers. And, like Dr. Dunckley, over the past seven or eight years, I also began to see a pattern—a connection—between many of those teens that had been classified with a disability and their addiction to screens—either video games, phones or social media.
I began to start tracking those numbers, and fully ninety percent of the students that had been classified with either an attentional, behavioral, emotional or developmental problem also had a problematic relationships with screens. At a recent CSE meeting, an intelligent, high-functioning boy with ADHD and a mild autism diagnosis was not doing well in school and falling asleep in all of his classes. These somnolescent tendencies were so severe, that the boy would often snore loudly and would be difficult to awaken by his flummoxed teachers.
The parent mentioned making an appointment for a sleep study for apnea and was also making an appointment to see a neurologist. I asked the obvious question to the boy: “Are you doing anything that’s keeping you up late at night?” The mother began nodding her head as the boy’s eyes lit up as he mentioned a particular video game that he played for hours and hours: “I just love it! I love it!! I can’t help it, but I love that game so much that I play until 3 or 4 in the morning. I can’t help myself!”
Shockingly, the mother looked at me and asked: “Do you think the game has got something to do with this? Do you think that’s part of the problem?” I said that it very well could and suggested that she try an experiment: “Unplug the boy for 4 weeks and let’s see what happens.” As the boy loudly protested and shot me a dirty look, his mother agreed: “As of tonight—no more games!” Within a week, the boy stopped sleeping and loudly snoring in class and, not so surprisingly, his grades dramatically improved.
Unfortunately, oftentimes, the screen effect on the child can be much more severe than just sleep deprivation. I had interviewed Dr. Chantelle Bernier, a Pediatric Occupational Therapist on the West Coast who describes seeing an epidemic rise in children with serious psychiatric issues and had also noticed the adverse effect that screens were having on these kids. She described one of her patients, a 9-year-old boy who had been hospitalized for attempted suicide.
The child had been obsessed with playing Grand Theft Auto and had been so sleep deprived after playing the game for hours that he started hearing command voices to kill his entire family. The voices persisted until the boy grabbed a knife and tried to kill himself. The boy was hospitalized and put on antipsychotic medications which, apparently, only made things worse.
Another patient, an intelligent 17-year-old gamer whom Dr. Bernier described as quite thoughtful and sensitive, had been referred to her unit because he started having homicidal ideations—thoughts of killing others. To desensitize those thoughts, he had begun watching very violent porn. He finally went ballistic when his foster-father tried to get him off the computer; he grabbed a large hunting knife and started stabbing a large dummy that was in his room and then chased after the foster-father with the knife as the older man ran out of the house.
Adding to the problem, Dr. Bernier was flabbergasted that her hospital was giving iPads to these hospitalized kids; in addition to exacerbating their psychiatric symptoms, on a physical level, these children were developing bed cramps from just sitting in their hospital beds all day and playing video games.
She educated the staff and parents about the adverse effects of the iPads and the video games and, eventually, became successful in having the technology removed. She substituted activities like yoga, mindfulness, crafts, journaling and labyrinth walking. The children began to feel a sense of routine and self-efficacy and saw a huge improvement.
According to Dr. Dunckley, seeing ESS children who are “revved up” and prone to rages or, alternatively, depressed and apathetic has become disturbingly commonplace. Homicidal and suicidal cases are certainly the extreme cases; but most chronically irritable children are often in a state of abnormally high arousal and may seem “wired and tired.” Because chronically high arousal levels impact memory and the ability to relate, these kids are also likely to struggle academically and socially.
These kids would normally be diagnosed with heavy-duty disorders such as major depression, bipolar disorder, or ADHD and be prime candidates for the prescription pad. But before the decision is made to go the medication route is where the tech fast comes in.
Dr. Dunckley is adamant in advocating for a full fast/detox rather than a tech reduction in order for the nervous system to fully reboot; in her experience, tech reductions simply don’t work—the problematic dysregulation that leads to clinical symptoms does not get stabilized by that less-intense approach.
The one difference that I have with the way that “digital detoxes” or tech fasts are currently done—both by Dr. Dunckley and at tech addiction rehab facilities like reSTART—is the cold turkey approach. As an addictions expert who runs one of the most respected rehabs in the country, I think we need to borrow what we’ve learned from the drug addiction treatment community. That is, when we do a drug detox, we no longer make the addict go cold turkey; that’s when we get explosive and aggressive episodes—as we’ve seen with some of the kids I’ve described who have been unplugged abruptly.
In the barbaric old days of drug and alcohol treatment, the alcoholic would be thrown into a dry-out tank or, worse, a psychiatric “snake pit” in an asylum. Today, when we detox addicts, we do so gradually because (a) it’s more humane and (b) it eliminates any of the above-mentioned adverse behavioral effects. There is no punching, kicking or screaming when someone is gradually tapered down toward abstinence.
Similarly, when doing a “digital detox,” we should slowly taper the young person down: for example, five hours of screen time should be tapered down by one hour per day. Thus, gradually over a roughly weeklong period, the child is weaned off screens. However, during this time it’s critically important that alternate healthy activities be substituted. You don’t just cut back the screens and have the kids sitting in their rooms twiddling their thumbs. You take them to the park, or give them creative projects to work on. Things like that.
Once the young person is down to zero screen time, then the minimum recommended period of abstinence to reset his or her adrenal clock is four weeks, although some kids need several months. Obviously, long-term tech abstinence is difficult if not close to impossible in our screen culture. Short of living a hermetic and ascetic life off the grid, most people have to inevitably intersect with screens and technology at some point.
After the fast, once the child’s brain is reset, parents can monitor him or her to determine just how much electronics use can be tolerated without the symptoms returning. But the treatment goal after the fast-as-detox is to encourage a healthy relationship with technology and to learn to identify the difference between “digital vegetables” and “digital candy” so as to avoid the latter. Digital vegetables can be a healthy use of screens (researching a term paper), while digital candy (Minecraft, Candy Crush) are hyperarousing and dopamine-activating digital stimulants without any ostensible “health benefit.”
Interestingly, the new DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) has included a new childhood diagnosis called disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (DMDD).4 DMDD is a condition wherein a child is chronically irritable and experiences frequent, severe temper outbursts that seem grossly out of proportion to the situation at hand. These symptoms sound familiar to those of us who have worked with hyperaroused kids suffering from either screen addiction or ESS.
In addition to DMDD, many researchers and clinicians have also pointed the finger of blame at screens for the explosive increase in the ADHD epidemic. Let’s take a look at some of those claims.
Screens and the ADHD Effect
Six million kids have been diagnosed with ADHD. That’s one in ten kids.
What the hell is going on?
Some have attempted to explain away what has been called the ADHD epidemic by saying that the higher rates of diagnosis are just a function of more screening and more awareness about the disorder. Others disagree.
Earlier, in chapter one, we discussed the notion that exposing kids to hyperstimulating screen experiences conditions them to continually require stimulating screens in order to stay engaged. Sure, glowing screens may quiet little Johnny and Suzie down for a bit and make life for mom and dad a bit easier—in the short term.
As Dr. Susan Linn, author of Consuming Kids and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, puts it: “It’s true that if you provide children with a screen device when you go on car trips, take public transportation, or go for their annual physical, the periods you spend waiting may be more restful or easier to manage. But such convenience comes at a cost. It fosters dependence on screens to get through a day, and prevents children from getting in the habit of noticing, and engaging with, the world around them.”
Said another way, once kids have developed a taste for Grand Theft Auto, sitting down to do their algebra homework just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Sure enough, ample research has shown that exposure to video games and television in childhood and adolescence is a significant risk factor for subsequent attention problems. In addition to the theory that experiencing something exciting makes it difficult for a kid to downshift to something less exciting, others have hypothesized that because most TV shows or video games involve rapid changes in focus, frequent exposure to screens may compromise children’s abilities to sustain focus on tasks that are not inherently as attention-grabbing—like schoolwork.
In a 2010 Iowa State University study called “Television and Video Game Exposure and the Development of Attention Problems,” published in the journal Pediatrics, 1,323 middle-childhood participants were assessed during a 13-month period.5 The conclusions? Viewing television and playing video games each are associated with increased subsequent attention problems in childhood; 6- to 12-year-olds who spent more than two hours a day playing video games or watching TV had trouble paying attention in school and were 1.6 to 2.1 times more likely to have attention problems. Surprise, surprise.
“The reality is that we’re seeing ten times more ADHD then we were seeing twenty years ago,” says Dr. Dimitri Christakis, co-author of the study and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and a longtime researcher into screen effects. “I think that the concern is that the pacing of the program, whether it’s video games or TV, is overstimulating and contributes to attention problems.”
The researchers consider the increased risk significant. According to study co-author Dr. Craig Anderson, “The risk is just big enough that it does warrant parents taking action.” He suggests that they allow only one to two hours of screen time per day, consistent with what the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends. Dr. Christakis disagrees: “My feeling is that two hours is too much.”6
In an earlier study, from 2004, Dr. Christakis found that the more TV a child watches between the ages of one and three, the greater the likelihood that they will develop an attention problem by age seven. In fact, the study showed that for each hour of television viewing, the risk of attention problems increased by 10 percent over that of a child who didn’t stare at a screen. Thus three hours of TV time translated to a 30 percent increase in the likelihood of developing an attention problem.
Things to consider that have become known since that study was published: more recent research indicates that the attention-dampening effect is amplified by tablets and interactive media. Additionally, screen time for kids has increased exponentially since 2004. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (2010), kids between age 8 and 18 spend a whopping 7.5 hours a day in front of a screen—computer, television or other electronic device. That time estimate does not count the additional 1.5 hours kids spend texting or the half-hour that they talk on their cell phones. That’s the majority of a kid’s waking life—in fact, that’s more time than they spend sleeping.
Knowing what we do about the attention-dampening effects of hyper-stimulating and hyper-arousing screens on young brains, is it any wonder that we have an ADHD epidemic?
Dr. Christakis puts it this way: “When you condition the mind to become accustomed to high levels of input, there’s a chance that reality can just become boring.”
And that, in a nutshell, is what I’ve seen in my clinical work with the hundreds of teens I’ve worked with. Reality is, you know, boring. How can it compare to the surreal and larger-than-life, vivid and hyperstimulating imagery of World of Warcraft or the rapid-fire stimulation of hypertexting? Look at any kids’ show from an earlier generation—say, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, with its star’s thoughtful and slow manner as he spoke, God bless him, to his young audience. Compare that to a Nickelodeon whiz-bang show of today—say, Team Umizoomi or even SpongeBob SquarePants; the scene cuts are much faster, the music is louder, the pace more frenetic. How does constantly watching something frenetic vs. something that requires patience to watch shape a young child?
Of course, there are those who disagree with the theory that hyperstimulating technology causes ADHD. While acknowledging that the research clearly links screen viewing with poorer attention spans later in life, the screen deniers will use the age-old chicken-or-the-egg argument, suggesting that perhaps parents of already restless ADHD-like kids are more likely to put them in front of the TV to calm them down. As Dr. Jacquelyn Gamino, head of ADHD research at the University of Texas, succinctly puts it: “Which causes which?”
These are valid questions from people trained in the sciences; we are taught the distinction between correlation and causation early on. To be sure, we know that attention is interest-based; children with ADHD may indeed be drawn to video games because they are stimulating enough to focus on. And the game stimulation can be self-medicating and dopamine-boosting for kids who may have a dopamine deficit.
But did the screens perhaps cause the ADHD thirst for stimulating fare?
I would offer several arguments to push the dial toward causation rather than correlation—meaning that screens are indeed causing disorders of attention.
First, we have brain-imaging research that shows that the frontal cortex (which controls impulsivity—a big ADHD component) gets compromised by screen exposure stimulation. The research by Dr. Wang at Indiana University School of Medicine showed that people who had been nongamers who then played ten hours of video games for one week showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex than in their baseline results and less than the control group. Those are brain regions instrumental in impulsivity and emotional regulation.7
“For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home,” Dr. Wang says. “The affected brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior.”
Beyond brain imaging, we have Dr. Dunckley’s previously mentioned clinical work and my own clinical observations. By using “tech fasts,” we see a significant decline in clinical symptoms, including symptoms associated with ADHD, when screens are removed from kids’ lives, thus proving the old axiom that “if the cure works, you probably have the disease.”
Finally, we have our own common sense and powers of observation. Based on everything that we know about how children grow and develop, does it make sense that if we hyperstimulate their fragile nervous systems and not-yet-fully-developed brains that this somehow won’t lead to some problems? Do any of us who have kids—or have worked with kids—not see how easily they can get overstimulated? And then how they need to keep getting stimulated in order to sit still and stay engaged?
The trap that many parents fall into is in believing that when their kids are hypnotically looking at a screen, they are demonstrating a profound ability to stay focused. After all, they maintain a laserlike attention on the screen, so how can there possibly be an attention problem?
But that rapt attention to the screen actually typifies an attention problem. As NYU pediatrics professor Dr. Perri Klass wrote for the New York Times (May 9, 2011): “In fact, a child’s ability to stay focused on a screen, though not anywhere else, is actually characteristic of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.”
She adds that the kind of concentration kids bring to video games and TV is not the kind that will help them thrive in school or elsewhere in their life. According to Dr. Christopher Lucas, associate professor of child psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, that kind of concentration is problematic: “It’s not sustained attention in the absence of rewards; it’s sustained attention with frequent intermittent rewards.”8
It’s those frequent intermittent rewards that, as mentioned in the addiction chapter, create the addictive hook that then, in a classic vicious cycle, further perpetuates the attention problem, which in turn further compromises the child’s impulse control and ability to avoid being glued to the screen. Indeed, what we have seen in the age of Glow Kids is that children raised on a high-screen diet have laser focus for screens but little patience for anything else.
Beyond just a widespread lack of interest in school, we’ve seen this lack of patience apply to attention-challenged kids when it comes to the sports they play. Many sports commentators have lamented the declining popularity of patience-requiring baseball, both among spectators and as an activity for American kids, as faster-paced sports like football, soccer and basketball have rapidly grown in popularity and many kids complain that baseball is just too slooooow.
New York Mets baseball legend Darryl Strawberry was interviewed several years ago and asked about why young American kids aren’t playing baseball in the same numbers that they used to. He sadly replied that the game just seems to be too boring for today’s kids, who are raised on action and video games. His own son, DJ Strawberry, who chose to play college basketball at the University of Maryland, said in an interview: “I liked baseball, but it was kind of boring to me. I played outfield, and just standing out there was boring. I’m more of an up-and-down [the court] kind of person. I like the action.”9
If you really want a child to thrive and blossom, lose the screens for the first few years of their lives. During those key developmental periods, let them engage in creative play. Legos are always great, as they encourage creativity and the hand-eye coordination nurtures synaptic growth. Let them explore their surroundings and allow them opportunities to experience nature, either at a park or in the real deal. Activities like cooking and playing music also have been shown to help young children thrive developmentally. But most importantly, let them experience boredom; there is nothing healthier for a child than to learn how to use their own interior resources to work through the challenges of being bored. This then acts as the fertile ground for developing their powers of observation, cultivating patience and developing an active imagination—the most developmentally and neurosynaptically important skill that they can learn. Let them live without the glow while they’re kids—they’ll have plenty of time later on to deal with screens.
Screens and Depression
We talked about Facebook depression in the last chapter; yet other recent clinical research is also linking depression to increased Internet use as well:
Screens and Electromagnetic Fields (EMFs)
What is very, very often overlooked when we consider negative screen effects is the radiation emitted by phones and screens. We have all grown up in a world bathed with radio and television waves, and perhaps, like the fish who isn’t aware of the existence of water, we are unaware that invisible waves course through our bodies at all times. But we are discovering that the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) emitted by screens and cell phones are a bit different from others—and more dangerous.
Let’s start with phones.
After years of denying that there were any adverse effects to cell phone use, the World Health Organization (WHO) finally got on board in 2011 and declared that radiation from cell phones can possibly cause cancer. The agency now lists mobile phone use in the same “carcinogenic hazard” category as lead, engine exhaust and chloroform.10
Engine exhaust? Chloroform? Good Lord—ADHD and tech addiction may be the least of our worries regarding screens.
The type of radiation coming out of a cell phone is called non-ionizing radio frequency (RF); it’s less like an X-ray than like a very low-powered microwave oven—you know, the radiation box that we nuke our burritos in—and it’s having a similar effect on our brains. According to Dr. Keith Black, chairman of neurology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles: “What microwave radiation does in the most simplistic terms is similar to what happens to food in microwaves, essentially cooking the brain.”11
It doesn’t take long for our cell phones to make our brain cells go snap, crackle and pop: A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the National Institutes of Health showed that it only took 50 minutes of cell phone radiation to “increase activity” in brain cells; “increase activity” is a nice, academic way to say “cook.”
Yet while our brain cells can show signs of being microwaved after only 50 minutes, it could take years before our microwaved brains begin to show signs of trouble: “When you look at cancer development—particularly brain cancer—[it] takes a long time to develop. I think it is a good idea to give the public some sort of warning that long-term exposure to radiation from your cell phone could possibly cause cancer,” says Dr. Henry Lai, research professor in bioengineering at the University of Washington, who has studied radiation for more than 30 years.
Dr. Black echoes that sentiment: “The biggest problem we have is that we know most environmental factors take several decades of exposure before we really see the consequences.” Yet Dr. Black also indicates that we may be vulnerable to radiation effects other than just cancer: “In addition to leading to a development of cancer and tumors, there could be a whole host of other effects like cognitive memory function, since the memory temporal lobes are where we hold our cell phones.”
Um. Okay. Brain cancer. Tumors. Cognitive deficits. But hey, I can take a selfie!
The World Health Organization finally made the “oh yeah, by the way, cell phones can cause brain cancer” announcement after a team of 31 scientists from 14 countries, including the United States, considered peer-reviewed studies on cell phone safety. In the largest international study on cell phones and cancer that the WHO team looked at, from 2010, researchers found that participants who had used cell phones for ten years or more had double the rate of brain glioma, a type of tumor. They also found evidence of an increase in acoustic neuroma brain cancer for mobile phone users as well.
As a result of the WHO announcement, the European Environmental Agency has pushed for more studies, saying that cell phones could be “as big of a public health risk as smoking, asbestos and leaded gasoline.”
And to all those parents who think it’s a swell idea to give smartphones to your little ones, Dr. Black sheds some very sobering light on that idea: “Children’s skulls and scalps are thinner. So the radiation can penetrate deeper into the brain of children and young adults. Their cells are dividing at a faster rate, so the impact of radiation can be much larger.”
This, then, begs the question: is any ostensible educational benefit or ability to “stay connected” worth getting brain cancer?
Indeed, today there is an entire movement that encourages people to use antiradiation hollow-tube headsets with their phones and to keep phones as far away from peoples’ bodies as possible. Personally, I need to spend a lot of time on my phone for professional reasons and have found the hollow-tube headsets to be a godsend. My friend Dr. Caroline Fierro, a wellness M.D., encourages her clients not to have phones in their bedrooms or anywhere on their bodies; if you do have it in your bedroom, she tells them, put it in a radiation-proof lead box.
That’s the advice for the adults. The advice for kids is simpler: don’t give them a phone. Don’t give their little brains and thinner skulls the glowing little microwave ovens to put next to their heads.
And what about EMFs with tablets and computers?
Computers generate both low-frequency (LF) and radio-frequency (RF) EMFs (the same as cell phones). Both types are potentially harmful. All computers, no matter what the technology, radiate a relatively strong EMF consisting of 5–60 Hz and higher.
The EMFs don’t come only from the computer screen; the electronics inside the computer generate a powerful EMF as well. Studies have shown EMF exposure above 2 milligauss (mG) begins to harm biological organisms; prolonged exposure to higher levels, from 2 mG up, has been associated with cancer and immune system effects. How much is your typical desktop computer throwing off? At three feet away, computers typically measure from 2mG to 5mG; at four inches and closer, computers measured from 4mG all the way to 20 mG.12
But tablets and laptops are even worse than desktop computers.
Tablets that connect to the Internet via WiFi and cellular connectivity emit EMF radiation like the WiFi from your laptop and cellular transmissions from your cell phone. This means that you are now being hit from two radiating sources. There is also a third source of tablet radiation: tablets emit extremely low frequency (ELF) radiation from the components and circuitry found within them; desktops also have low frequency radiation, but we are typically not very close to it (although it can register up to 18 inches away).
The bigger problem with laptops and tablets is that unlike desktop computers, by their very design, they are carried close to the body, thus increasing the exposure to tablet radiation. Many people actually work with their laptops or tablets on their laps. This is the worst possible way to use the device, as it maximizes EMF exposure—especially to the reproductive organs. There is research about EMF causing damage to sperm and affecting male fertility; for a woman, the concern can be even greater, as damaged eggs can never be replaced.
Researchers are also exploring other EMF dangers. Research has been done at Harvard on a potential correlation between EMF exposure and autism. According to the authors, EMF is suggested as a contributing factor in the disruption of normal bioelectrical synchronization, which is believed to aggravate autism spectrum conditions.
In August 2009 researchers at Columbia University published a paper describing how EMF can interfere with and break down DNA.13 In a Hungarian study from 2000, EMFs were documented as a cause of irreversible structural and functional changes to cells and organelles, the specialized subunits within cells that allow them to work. Perhaps more troubling, morphological signals associated with cell death were also triggered. In an Italian study from 2005, independent research corroborated the Hungarian findings; EMFs were shown to induce apoptosis, or programmed cell death, in human recombinant cells.14
We had always known that our screens glowed; now we are also realizing that they are making us—and our kids—glow as well. Unfortunately, it ain’t a healthy glow.
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We’ve examined some psychological, clinical, developmental and physical problems associated with glowing screens. But what about behavior? Can the content of what a child sees on a screen actually shape the way that the child behaves?
As we shall read in the next chapter, that debate has raged for decades.