School tells parents to beware of kids’ excessive screen time

Parents of children attending the Archbishop’s Seminary have been advised by the school to limit the time their children spend look at screens of electronic devices to not more than two hours a day over fears that excessive exposure could negatively impact their development.

In a recent letter, psychotherapist David Grillo, the pastoral care co-ordinator at the school, warned parents that research showed that there was a link between “excessive screen time and depression and other mental health issues”.

One reason for this, he said, was the fact that electronic devices emit blue light – light with a higher amount of energy and greater ability to bring about physiological changes – which can cause sleep pattern disturbances, leading to “mental health difficulties”.

In addition to the disruption of sleeping patterns, parents were warned of the dangers of gaming addiction, both when it comes to the children’s ability to form social bonds, as well as their dependency on games.

Contacted by MaltaToday about what had prompted him to write to parents, Grillo, who said he has been practising psychotherapy for 18 years, and working in education for 20, described encountering situations where children who were usually “calm and organised” started becoming careless and forgetful.

“They come to school with missing or incomplete homework, which would clearly have been done in a hurry,” he said.

More worryingly, he added, the school started to observe a pattern of children becoming “verbally and sometimes even physically abusive with their parents when told to stop playing online”. He insisted that there was a clear pattern and his observation was not limited to a one-off case.

Grillo stressed that he was not against the use of electronic devices and online gaming, pointing out that satisfying play time was fundamental to psychological and social development. Despite this, he said problems start when “excessive screen time and the virtual world take over reality”.

“We meet students who are good at sport for example, but who now prefer to stay at home playing online, and who end up abandoning their favourite sport,” he said. “We also have children who recite games in their head while at school and who lose concentration easily as a result.”

“Children who are usually calm and organised become careless and forgetful… they come to school with missing or incomplete homework”

Grillo also pointed to the fact that the fast and immediate gratification we get from games and the internet means children are less patient and more easily bored when they are away from their devices.

Like social media, digital games give users a quick surge of happiness mediated by the pleasure chemical dopamine whenever they are used. The more of the chemical the body gets, the more it wants, leading users to spend more and more time using their devices if not controlled.

As technology has developed, screens have become increasingly more ubiquitous and are now an essential part of life but Grillo insisted that this was no reason to give in. “Do we stop fighting pollution just because cars are necessary?”

He said that while it was true that most adults spent much more than one or two hours a day looking at screens, their brains weren’t as “fast-developing” and vulnerable as those of children and that understanding the concept of limits and excesses was just as important  and a part of life.

Asked whether he was aware of other schools having sent similar letters to parents, Grillo said he was.

Moreover, he said he believed there needed to be more information made available to parents by local authorities about the risks on children of over-exposure to technological devices, and that children who were addicted to games needed to be helped and treated as such.