Children and Stimulus Addiction
by Gloria DeGaetano
[The following article first appeared in the editorial section of The Providence Sunday Journal, March 4, 2001, Providence, Rhode Island.]
When my sons were 7 and 9, they told me they were bored and I, like the conscientious Mom, went through our regular routine of me pushing and them resisting: "Why don't you write that thank you note to Grammy?" NO! "Well, go out and play on the swings." NO! "OK, I got it, why don't you get your legos out?" NO! With vigorous head shake. I just about had it, so in my best parent authority voice, I said: "Sit down on this couch right now. And just be bored. Sit there until you're done being bored. Get up when you figured out what to do." HUH?
Luckily, I was getting wiser about my children's role in making their own decisions about self-directed activities. Why be afraid of boredom? It's the natural and necessary part of a child's growing into self-awareness. It requires respect. Not quick fixes.
Cyber-children are often lost when they begin to enter that fertile void of nothingness. The way out of boredom is to go inside. But our kids' lives today are so externalized; so "out there" that they don't know how to enter the internal landscape; they don't know how to introduce themselves to themselves, missing the delight and dignity which come from discovering untapped, inner resources.
Instead, the TV is on 7 hours and 44 minutes in over 90% of North American homes, distracting the child from any hope of discovering personal potential. If a video game system is in the home, the kids are playing an average of three hours daily, according to research done by the non-profit group, Mediascope. It's so much easier to put the face into the game boy and succumb to someone's else constructed reality; than to construct one's reality from scratch. But what is lost for our children and what's at stake for our society?
On March 5 at Brown University's Conference, The Dignity of Children, I will discuss how bored kids who turn to screen technologies too often quickly become boring kids who lack intrinsic motivation for doing much of anything else. The insidious habit of keeping kids busy in front of screens instead of balancing their lives with down-time inside their own imaginations, is the first step in habituating, if not addicting them, to the physiological need for hyped stimulation in order to feel any type of pleasure or satisfaction.
The second step is untimely introduction to manufactured horror when they are too young to understand what's going on. Before the age of twelve, U.S. children witness about 20,000 murders and at least 80,000 assaults on television. In children's cartoons, violent acts are five times higher than those in adult programming. The young brain, overloaded on stimulus and under-equipped to analyze emotionally laden images, basically gets confused. Instead of healthy disgust over the violence and feelings of empathy with the victim, the child walks away from the manufactured madness, identifying with the perpetrator, and thinking hurting others is "cool."
As the child gets older increased levels of violence are necessary for fun feelings triggered by watching human suffering. This naturally leads to the sociopathic violence of video games: severed heads, limbs crunching, humans begging for mercy are now cause for celebration because they bring even more feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.
It is a sobering thought to realize that the American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend video games for children under 10, yet there are thousands of young children exposed to these types of frightful, graphic, and dangerous images on the pervasive video game systems throughout North American homes.
Finding solace in screens at an early age combined with violence as "child's play" overstimulate our kids and overstress their brains. As our society tolerates this abuse of children, here is the message we are sending: "Your own ideas are not as important as the ones on the screen. Arouse instead of awaken; excite instead of examine; splatter instead of study." This is what we are telling our kids. And they're listening.
Gloria DeGaetano, Founder and CEO of The Parent Coaching Institute, presents keynotes and workshops to parents, educators, corporations, and professional organizations. She may be contacted at (425) 401-1519. Her latest book is Parenting Well in a Media Age: Saving Our Children from the Corporate-Controlled Culture, Personhood Press, January, 2004.