MRI Study Associates Screen Time Exposure In Children To Lower Brain Development By John Vibes for Natural Blaze
GNN Note – In my opinion screen time impacts adults, not like children, but has a major impact on our lives, not just our eye sight, that we currently do not understand.
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According to a new study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, too much screen time for young children could be linked to slower brain development. The study’s lead author Dr. John Hutton, a pediatrician and clinical researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, says that this is the first known study to examine how screen time affects the actual structure of a child’s growing brain.
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In the study, Hutton and his team scanned the brains of children in the sensitive age group between 3 and five years old. They found that the white matter in the brain was less developed in children who spent more time in front of screens. White matter is important to thought processing and the development of speech and literacy.
Hutton says that the first five years of brain development is extremely important.
“This is important because the brain is developing the most rapidly in the first five years. That’s when brains are very plastic and soaking up everything, forming these strong connections that last for life,” Hutton told CNN.
Hutton said that children who spent more time in front of screens spend less time interacting with actual people, which is an essential part of creating the pathways in the brain that will make it easier to develop social and cognitive skills.
“It’s known that kids that use more screen time tend to grow up in families that use more screen time. Kids who report five hours of screen time could have parents who use 10 hours of screen time. Put that together and there’s almost no time for them to interact with each other,” Hutton said.
