Five Essential Things to Know about Speech Delay

The research that is coming out about what screen time, especially too much screen time, can do to children’s brains is really shocking. It is changing the way that a child’s brain works, functions, and reacts. The biggest problem with screen time is that it is time away from other people. It’s time away from real life and real tangible items in the world. Not only is it causing social delays, but it’s also causing brains to act much like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) brains and/or Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) brains. This happens because screen time usually consists of short and quick clips, and you can change the video easily whenever you want. Have you noticed your child doing this? They’re on YouTube for a long time, and they keep clicking “next,” often not even finishing half of a video. If so, your child’s attention span is probably short and getting shorter. This short attention span probably carries into other things. For every game, toy, activity, and food item that they are presented with, they are easily bored of it. That’s because they’ve been training their brain to be that way all day with the screen. 

Children do get addicted to the kind of constant reinforcement they get from the screen. It’s exciting. There’s a funny noise. They just got a big burst of bubbles and balloons. And that is addicting, just like adults get addicted to things like Netflix shows or games on the phone. We really want to take care of our children who don’t know how to take care of themselves and help them avoid getting too trapped. We want them to be looking up at the world, into people’s eyes, talking to people. If you think about the screen, why would you talk to a screen? There’s no reason to talk to a screen even if it’s a video that is saying, “Did you see that?” The child’s not going to respond to that because it’s a video, right? They need to be working, talking, and playing with people to have healthy social skills, a healthy attention span, and other life skills. They need to know how to play with tangible toys. I’m really passionate about this, but I don’t want you to feel bad. I do want you to be educated on the choices that you make for your child and your child’s future.

Going cold turkey would be really hard. I’m sure your child would react very negatively to that. So you need to think about how to decrease the screen time over time and replace it with something else. If you just take away a phone from a child and you leave them with nothing else, like no books, no crayons, no ball, or no cars, they are going to freak out. This is because they don’t have anything around to entertain them. So if you’re going to take away the phone or screen, then you need to distract them with something else. Make sure that you are providing something else for that child’s brain to grow in a healthier way. I recommend hiding the phone/screen or letting it die so you can say, “Oops, It’s broken.” or “I can’t find it; it’s gone.” That usually goes over the best. 

I have a lot of people say, “But my child has learned about words from videos because he watches kids’ shows. He’s learned all the colors and shapes and numbers.” Typically, I find that it’s kind of rare that children actually do learn those words from videos. And if they do learn it, they often don’t use it at the right times or in inappropriate ways. The child will say square or hexagon when they see it in the video, but when I ask and show them a square or hexagon in another context, they don’t know what it is, or they know, but they won’t answer me because they’re not used to being asked the question by another person. They’re used to seeing it on a video and being told, “Hexagon! Square! Oval!” It’s different when it’s human to human. Kids’ videos can be educational, but they can not beat and should not replace teaching from parents, teachers, loved ones, and peers.