hey, parents. what that ipad is doing to your kid is kind of shocking
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Kid Is Kind of Shocking.Every parent needs to read this...
Margaret Rock in Modern Parent
he restaurant is overrun with children. Some kids are antsy,
others are well-behaved, but a good number of them have one
thing in common: their heads are facing down, as they play games on
smartphones and tablets.
Oh, and 1-in-10 have ADHD.
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the
U.S. alone, over six million children aged 4 to 17 have, at some point,
been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Before
1990, less than 5 percent of school-age kids were thought to have the
condition, but data from the CDC reported that, in the two decades
since, those numbers more than doubled to 11 percent, making it the
most common childhood behavioral disorder.
It has become an epidemic.
Meanwhile, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, children, on
average, spend nearly seven and a half hours each day staring at those
tiny displays, up 20 percent from just five years ago, leading some
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experts to believe the surge of ADHD diagnosis coincides with the
skyrocketing use of mobile devices, the New York Times reported.
To be clear, these findings are correlations, and not causal links. But to
understand any relation between the two, we need to explore how our
gadgets are affecting the developing minds of our children.
Let’s go back to our restaurant and shine a spotlight on that 1-in-10 kid
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with ADHD. Since boys with the condition outnumber girls, we’ll call
him Josh.
Josh is playing Minecraft. His head is down, his attention rapt, his eyes
riveted on the display. He looks like every other child his age, but as he
plays on the tablet, his mind is processing information in a much
different way than the other kids running around the room.
If we could scan his brain, we would see that his mind is working harder
to absorb the barrage of sensations, and that increased neural activity
makes it more difficult for him to focus on any one task. In fact, his
ability to concentrate on the game, and not anywhere else, is a hallmark
sign of hyperactivity.
It might look like concentration, but it isn’t — at least not in the way we
think of it. According to Christopher Lucas, associate professor of child
psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, Josh’s focus on
video games and television isn’t the same form of attention he’ll need to
thrive in school and life.
“It’s not sustained attention in the absence of rewards,” he told the New
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York Times. “It’s sustained attention with frequent intermittent
rewards.”
When kids play games, they rack up points, move to higher levels and
unlock characters and goodies, and their brains are rewarded by one
thing: dopamine, a neurochemical that’s released every time they “win.”
That sensation of pleasure is often the reason they love electronics, and
some experts even believe they seek out gadgets because they have
problems with their natural dopamine systems.
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Medication, like Ritalin, attempts to control ADHD by increasing
dopamine activity, the Wall Street Journal reported, so when Josh plays
Minecraft, it’s as if he’s self-medicating, giving his brain that extra boost
of pleasure that his internal circuitry doesn’t release.
That’s why separating Josh from excessive use of his iPad isn’t easy. To
make matters worse, when kids with ADHD are ridiculed and
ostracized, the isolation sends them back to those gadgets, and they
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end up developing an emotional dependency to their consistent
electronic companions that extends beyond dopamine.
When Josh is utterly focused on the iPad, he keeps constant eye-
contact with the display. But without it — or his computer or portable
gaming console — he’s a handful. That’s because it’s far easier for him to
find solace in screens. They don’t shun him. They give him a place to
escape and become a different person.
“They can also create false personas about themselves that are more
positive than is realistic and thus make virtual friends online better
than in person,” Russell Barkley, a clinical professor of psychiatry and
pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina, said.
More than anything, Josh would benefit from taking an electronic
“time-out.” But ironically, he can’t pull himself away.
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No one knows the origins of ADHD. Its symptoms, of course, have been
among us for as long as recorded history. But the modern study of the
condition was only brought to the laboratory, from the realm of
punishment, within the last century.
In 1902, George Frederic Still, the father of British pediatrics, presented
a study to the Royal College of Physicians in London about a group of
20 children, who were “excessively emotional or passionate… and had
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little inhibitory volition.”
According to PBS, he had noticed a pattern of behavioral issues
appearing in children before the age of eight, occurring in three times as
many boys than girls, and afflicting those even raised in decent, stable
households. The disorder, he concluded, might be related to biological
traits inherited from families, similar to conditions like depression and
alcoholism.
His theory was groundbreaking.
Before then, uncontrollable behavior was merely chalked up to a failure
of moral conduct by the child, or bad teaching by the parent. Or both.
And the prescribed “treatment” was often physical punishment.
Then, in 1934, Eugene Kahn and Louis Cohen extended Still’s research
and published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that
described a biological link to hyperactivity. And as scientists began to
suspect that neurology, rather than the devil, was causing the behavior,
a different method of observation emerged.
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In the ’60s, when researchers began to study families, especially
children, it became clear that the syndrome was in some way connected
to genetics. A decade later, the condition had been defined to include
not only hyperactivity, but also subtle signs like being impulsive or
distracted. By then, scientists understood that the use of medication
could improve, but not cure, the imbalance.
ADHD continues to elude science. Like autism, there is no conclusive
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test to diagnose it, so doctors must learn by observing for one of several
developmental or behavioral problems, such as depression or bipolar
disorder.
Researchers are reluctant to say whether there is a direct link between
gadgets and ADHD, but there are strong parallels between the upswing
in diagnoses and an increase of screen time. One important finding:
children and young adults who overdo TV and video games are nearly
twice as likely to suffer from a variety of attention span disorders,
according to the Journal Pediatrics.
“ADHD is 10 times more common today than it was 20 years ago,”
Dimitri Christakis, a George Adkins Professor of Pediatrics at the
University of Washington in Seattle, said. “Although it is clear that
ADHD has a genetic basis, given that our genes have not changed
appreciably in that timeframe, it is likely that there are environmental
factors that are contributing to this rise.”
In other words, while the disorder tends to run in families, gadgets may
also play a role in the condition.
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Advertisement
Part of the problem is the fragmented, action-packed nature of
electronic media. Christakis found that fast-paced TV shows increased
the risk of attention issues. And when the children adapt to those
speeds, they struggle to pay attention in the slower pace of life because
it’s less stimulating and rewarding.
When Josh puts down his iPad, his brain finds the real-world
underwhelming compared to his virtual realms.
Take a closer look at his beloved Minecraft: the game operates on its
own day and night schedule, so he experiences three days’ worth of
action within one hour. When he goes back to life, he literally feels a
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drag, like the feeling we get from stepping off a movable walkway at the
airport.
Christakis, though, concedes the science is still emerging. “If I thought I
knew the answer definitively, as to what was causing ADHD,” he said, “I
wouldn’t still be doing research.”
ADHD isn’t a short-term condition. While sufferers often outgrow the
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symptoms, others — like high-profile Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps
— must learn to deal with it well into adulthood. And the continued
bombardment of technology requires changes in the way we deal with,
accommodate and even think about the condition.
“There continues to be, in the media and the public, this idea of ADHD
as an overblown problem that’s being over-treated,” William Barbaresi,
director of the Developmental Medicine Center at Boston Children’s
Hospital, told Forbes. “We have to create a system that’s designed to
treat ADHD as chronic health issue, not just a kid disorder.”
But some experts believe the growing attachment to our gadgets is
actually part of the solution. “Maybe the kids’ focus on games could be
used to draw them out as a way of developing social skills,” Stephen
Shore, author of “Beyond the Wall,” told me. After being non-verbal
until the age of four, he was diagnosed with “strong autistic
tendencies.” Today, he’s a professor of special education at Adelphi
University.
Rather than look at the issue as a problem, Shore believes we need to
view it as a challenge. “These games are compelling to the kids,” he said.
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Modern Parent
“Instead of battling to eliminate them, we could use them to actually
develop social skills.”
In the end, the first step to finding a cure to ADHD is to understand its
causes and conditions, and one piece of the puzzle, it seems, is to
determine the impact of technology on kids like Josh, and let him enjoy
his iPad, instead of being inadvertently harmed by it. ♦
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