Ziggy Marley Concerned About Smartphone Addiction Among Teens And Young Children
Ziggy Marley has joined the call for teenagers to, at all costs, avoid being addicted to their smartphones, a problem which has mushroomed globally, over least the last decade.
“A public service announcement from Z. The addiction is real my teens and tweens especially. A prison isn’t always walls and bars. Free yourselves from the psychological reliance and comfort of having devices constantly in your head space freedom is more than physical,” Ziggy noted on Wednesday on his Instagram page.
“Control your phone. Don’t let your phone control you,” he added.
Ziggy has been expressing concern about the impact of excessive screen time on the brains of children for a long time.
In December 2018, he shared on his website, the contents of the ABCD Study which was commissioned by the National Institutes of Health, a preliminary report for which, found that there were significant differences” in the brains of children who spend excessive time online.
That NIH study which is scanning their brains and following 11,000 nine and ten-year-olds over a decade, had revealed that in the first wave of data from brain scans of 4,500 participants, their MRI’s found significant differences in the brains of some children who use smartphones, tablets, and video games more than seven hours a day.
The scans had found that the children had premature thinning of the cortex, the wrinkly outermost layer of the brain that processes information from the five senses.
A June 2019 article by the Harvard Medical School titled Screen Time and the Brain, had presented information showing that “digital devices can interfere with everything from sleep to creativity”.
It quoted Pediatrician Michael Rich, an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, as saying that it was not the length of screen time that mattered but how digital devices were being used “and what’s happening in our brains in response”.
Professor Rich, a director of the Center on Medical and Child Health at Boston Children’s Hospital and associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, had said that the “much of what happens on screen provides ‘impoverished’ stimulation of the developing brain compared to reality”.
The professor had said that children need a diverse menu of online and offline experiences, including the opportunity to “let their minds wander”, as “boredom is the space in which creativity and imagination happen”.
The Harvard article had also said that a good night’s sleep is also key to brain development, and that the use of blue light-emitting screen devices such as smartphones before bedtime can disrupt sleep patterns by suppressing secretion of the hormone melatonin.
The report also said that because many teenagers who stay up late texting are not only getting less sleep, they are also lacking the deep REM sleep essential for processing and storing information from that day into memory.
“So even if they stay awake in algebra class, they may not remember what happened in class yesterday,” Professor Rich had explained.
The paediatrician had also said that seductive digital pursuits such as gaming, social media, and other online activities appear to activate the brain’s reward system, as they work on what’s called a variable reward system, similar to slot machine gaming, as they balance the hope of big winnings “with a little bit of frustration, and unlike the slot machine, a sense of skill needed to improve”.
In further explaining the phenomenon, Professor Rich had said that “a young person’s brain lacks a fully developed self-control system to help them with stopping this kind of obsessive behavior”.
He had also recommended a balanced approach to screen use, initiatives aimed at enhancing the positive and mitigating the negatives, as “we don’t want to be in a moral panic because kids are staring at smartphones”.
The focus he said, ought to be on what is happening when children are “staring at their smartphone, in terms of their cognitive, social, and emotional development”, since as with most things, “it will probably be a mix of positive and negative”.