Several state and federal bills aimed at curbing social media use and relying less on ed-tech products are in play.
Emily Cherkin provides disturbing examples of the “digitization” of children.
She talks of occupational therapists who teach toddlers how to turn pages of a book. She’s heard about elementary school children falling out of their chairs because they lacked the core strength to sit for long periods of time. She knows of a child who watched 13,000 YouTube videos on a school-issued laptop over three months when class was in session, a class of middle schoolers who imitate sex noises they hear online, and a teen who showers with his phone, stored in a Ziplock bag, because he can’t bear the brief separation.
But the most troubling example, Cherkin said during a Jan. 15 Senate committee hearing, was the time a teenager who worked with elementary school drama club members asked the younger children to pretend they were flying, to which they replied: “How?”
“If children cannot pretend to fly, they cannot imagine, and therefore cannot innovate. Creativity means having an original thought,” said Cherkin, a screen time consultant who works with schools.
At the high school level, added Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist who specializes in adolescent brain development, educators are designing instruction around the digital tools, instead of vice versa. The English Language Arts section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, for example, was modified with questions containing fewer words and shorter sentences to resemble texts, not traditional literary passages.
Laptops shouldn’t be used to train novices to become experts, he said. Instead, all subject areas should be learned via “analog,” and then technology is applied “when you already know how to think.”
The ever-growing body of work proving the harms of excessive screen time, ubiquitous digital learning environments, and social media on children, cited by that panel of witnesses, will be referenced often in the months to come as federal and state lawmakers consider bills aimed at returning to traditional learning methods, protecting children’s safety and privacy, and restoring their ability to think in an era of artificial intelligence (AI).
“It’s an incredibly hard time to be a kid right now,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said during the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing, citing the increase in youth mental health problems and social media addiction. “More than half the time a teenager is awake, he or she is staring at a screen.”
Here’s a look at some of the legislation, policies, and public service messages suggested so far.
