Limit screen time for your children

DONNA HERNANDEZ-HADEED

To screen or not to screen

That is the question

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or take up arms against a sea of troubles

This offshoot of the well-known soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet conjures the issue at hand for this writer. The opulence of screen time is the "outrageous fortune" that is plaguing our youth. Be it that I am a relic/dinosaur, born in the late fifties, when communication was simpler and delayed. However, the immediacy of obtaining feedback has destroyed the excitement and patient awaiting of a response…the microwave age…"ah want it now!”

Nevertheless, this is not to say that there are no benefits for the GenZ computer-age group. Certainly there are, and were (especially during the covid19 lockdown), gains. Students received their academic tuition via the screens, and dinosaurs such as I learned new skills. However, in the midst of this exposure, “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” emerged.

For me, as a primary five creative writing teacher at this time, and a past high school teacher, I witnessed the “outrageous fortune” in the classroom, especially when students returned to face-to-face learning. Where were my engaged, young minds? Where were my critical thinkers? Ah! The screens shrunk their hippocampi (the complex brain structure embedded deep into the temporal lobe. It has a major role in learning and memory).

My younglings were starved of vocabulary to create/describe movement, colours in all their glory, discern tone, describe the physical environment around them in this beautiful Caribbean space. They needed responses from their teachers…their minds were almost like parched lands, thirsting for a plethora of images, vocabulary.

My training as a visualising and verbalising (Nanci Bell’s programme) tutor accentuates that the imagery/language connection is crucial in comprehension and thinking. The screens stunt this development. They freeze the mind. They shrink the hippocampus.

The solution, the call to “take up arms against a sea of troubles,” for me is to get our children outdoors, now! Let them climb trees, hills, get a bruise, dig holes in the dirt, breathe in the outdoor air, go to the beach, hear the rippling of the waves, play an outdoor game, exercise, ride a bike…and, yes, laugh a lot…the latter is absolutely so ministering. Allow their eyes, our eyes to see the beauty around us.

According to Nanci Bell, “The brain sees to remember, to process, to interpret, to problem-solve, to decode, to encode, to communicate and to think.”

So, let’s wake up our brains, our children’s brains, to the wonders of our world. Limit the screens! Allow our charges, our children to be fully human!