Managing Screen Time: Raising Balanced Children in the Digital Age

By Edmond Schoorel

Screens and digital devices are everywhere in our modern world and it's becoming increasingly common for even very young children to regularly use tablets and smart phones. Many parents struggle to know what's best for their children. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the pros and cons, to help parents make their own choices. It explores the health effects of screen time as well as the benefits of new technology and the implications for education. Much writing on this subject is one-sided and dogmatic. This thought-provoking book is not designed to make parents feel guilty, but to empower them to find their own balance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Floris Books
• Release date: Feb 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781782502579

Edmond Schoorel

Edmond Schoorel was born in Indonesia in 1947. He studied medicine and pediatrics in the Netherlands. Since 1996 he has worked as a pediatrician at the Children's Therapy Clinic (Kindertherapeuticum) in Utrecht, Netherlands, which specialises in anthroposophical approaches to children's health and wellbeing.

Book preview

Chapter 1.

How Digital Media Are Changing the World

Whatever happened to the friendly paperboy, who cheerfully passed the time of day while delivering newspapers? This role has largely been relegated to the realm of nostalgia. Even personal letters have been replaced by emails and our letterbox replaced by an inbox, containing dozens of emails each day that we don’t have time to read. When we go on holiday we can ask neighbours to make sure our letterbox doesn’t get clogged up. At least this encourages us to talk to our neighbours for once. Fortunately we can programme our electronic mailbox to automatically delete emails.

We no longer need newspapers to be delivered to our door. Within a few minutes, or at most a few hours, we can be abreast of everything that’s going on in the world – especially if there was a microphone or camera nearby, which is almost always the case, because any self-respecting mobile phone today has both. When we’re listening to the radio or surfing the internet, sounds and sights from the other side of the world force themselves upon us. The news finds us; we don’t have to look for it.

Of course, we can’t be aware of everything that happens in the world. But who determines which events from our ‘global village’2 arrive on our doorstep? We can choose the TV channel, radio station or website, which makes some difference, at least to the tone in which reports are presented: biased or neutral, in depth or brief, with or without background music. But do we have a real understanding of why there are reporters in certain parts of the world and not in others?

And how much news can we bear? We see and hear other people’s misery, we want to help, we want to do something, but how? We can send money to charities providing relief in Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Gaza or Ukraine. A drop in the ocean, the realist in us says. Or we can do battle on the right side, says our inner crusader. Or shall we pray for them, for all those perpetrators and victims and the families of perpetrators and victims? Then we’d be praying all day long. Or should everyone solve their own problems and seek peace and justice in their own small world, the best they can?

The ‘global village’ has enormous consequences for our moral choices. Digital media, especially social media, have been decisive in the dissemination of social revolutions and popular revolts all around the world. The election of Obama as President of the USA, the overthrow of old regimes in North Africa and the rise of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq are examples of this. Who would have imagined we could contribute to such worldwide events and movements from our own doorstep.

Infrastructure

The earth has acquired a different complexion. How romantically charming old telephone wires and electricity lines now seem, although they were, of course, also products of a technological culture. But they ‘stand’ in the landscape. Swallows and sparrows give them an almost photogenic appearance. Wind Turbines and huge modern pylons are by comparison horizon-polluting junk, and there have been claims that they can impose a risk to the health of those that live nearby to them.

Wherever possible we have put electric cables under the ground, out of sight. There they lie next to sewers, which take our waste to treatment plants. Once in a while when the street is dug up for the umpteenth time so the umpteenth provider can put its cables next to the rest, we can see how many pipes and cables lie underground. Imagine a map of our country showing all the sewers, pipes and cables: that would give us a clearer sense of what the earth has to endure from all our waste and information streams.

And it’s the same above ground. Transmission masts have been erected in strategic locations to guarantee that everybody has ‘signal’ everywhere. Church steeples are also used as masts, serving a new, secularised purpose. Imagine what our world would look like if we had a map of all the invisible signals and carrier waves! The whole world would be encompassed by a gigantic spider’s web. We can’t see this web, but it is there, and it has transformed the appearance of the world. It confuses migratory birds, disturbing their long-standing routes.

Electricity

Anyone who has experienced a power cut lasting a few hours will realise to what extent our lives depend on electricity. Without electric lights we can no longer extend the day and push back the night. An entire neighbourhood or city without light feels ominous; it attracts thieves, and anxiety creeps into the soul.

Without electricity, not only are the lights extinguished, but the heating and refrigerator also stop working. Some people may have a wood-burning stove or an open fireplace, and food will keep for a few hours in the freezer and refrigerator with the doors closed, but not for long. Our first instinct may be to check our power supplier’s website to see when they expect the problem to be resolved – but the computer doesn’t work either. We may choose not to use up precious battery power on our phone, tablet or laptop for a while because who knows when we’ll really need it.

It’s only when we stop to think about the number of things in our lives that are powered by electricity that we realise to what extent this great achievement of humankind has penetrated our daily lives. How would our lives change if we were without electricity for a week or a month? What would we do, what would remain of our way of life?

It’s hard to imagine how people existed for so many centuries without electricity. Great works of art were created before the discovery of electricity. Would these works of art have been created if people had electricity back then? But that is art-from-then – what is art-from-now? Video installations? Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet, which involves musicians and pilots in four helicopters, audio and video technicians and equipment?

Information

How did people find out information before the internet existed? This is probably an easy question for you, but will your children know, or your grandchildren? Before the internet, we learned through direct conversations with people more knowledgeable or experienced than ourselves, and in doing so we not only found out the facts we were looking for, but also something about our teachers’ lives: how they had gained their knowledge and how they had applied it.

For a great many centuries people have had the irrepressible impulse to write down what they have experienced, learned or imagined in the form of books. Libraries came into being, where people who were able to read could become acquainted with the knowledge and experience of others.

The invention of the printing press brought with it a huge development in the history of learning, making printed copies of books available to all those who could read. Many more people then learned to read and write and the Western world quickly became literate. Reading books and therefore gaining knowledge meant conquering the world. A country’s literacy rate became a measure of its levels of civilisation, influence and power. Knowledge became power and the library it’s admission ticket.

These days our trips to the library are less common – although libraries still provide a wonderful resource for people of all ages and from all walks of life. We tend to buy books or borrow them from one another, not from the library, and we are much less inclined to go to the library to find out information. Instead we turn on the computer and ask a search engine, in most cases Google. The worldwide proliferation of Google is so extensive that ‘to google’ has become a verb in itself. Whatever we’re searching for, Google will find a range of websites, which may or may not provide relevant information. How Google searches, and why certain answers stand at the top of the list, only Google knows. It has something to do with money; that much is certain. It seems like our search doesn’t cost anything but, of course, that’s not true. We don’t immediately pay a fee, but our mouse-clicks make us objects of research and our search in itself becomes merchandise. For example,