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Many daycare providers ask the question: How does access to technology (television, video games, computers, etc.) affect young children in my daycare? What are acceptable limits per day with regard to access to technology? We picked the brain of Cris Rowan, pediatric occupational therapist and sensory specialist with expertise on the impact of technology overuse on child health and academic performance, and CEO of Zone’in Programs Inc. In our interview with Cris Rowen, Rowen describes how technology impacts child development and solutions to its impact.

OwnADaycare: Isn’t technology supposed to make our lives and the lives of our children easier and more efficient?

Cris Rowan: Technology is the single most destructive factor to child health ever witnessed by humankind, and has gravely put the sustainability of our children’s future in peril. Children who are high users of technology may not outlive their parents. Sedentary aspects of technology use, combined with inherent isolation from other human beings, is resulting in a host of physical, mental, social and academic impairments that the health and education systems are just beginning to detect, much less understand.

Connection to technology is disconnecting human relationships.   Preferring devices over time spent in human connection, reflects a society that has lost the significance of the “pack”.  For hundreds of years humans hunted, gathered and farmed in groups.  Work was highly physical, and isolation from the tribe meant certain death.  Survival required members rely on each other, resulting in the formation of close relationships and attachments.

Now, socialization is minimal.  The family dining room table has been replaced by the “big screen” with vibrating cell phones, classrooms are rapidly becoming “virtual” as playgrounds disappear, and workplace cubicles become a haven to increasingly depressed, anxious and compulsive employees. The actual values we used to build the foundations and structures for home, school and work systems are disappearing before our very eyes.  Communication, discipline, caring, playfulness, independence, and exploring nature don’t seem to be important constructs anymore – we simply just don’t have time.

While technology may appear to be making life easy, processing multiple incoming stimuli is overloading the brain and actually reducing overall productivity.  Have we evolved to accommodate this sedentary, yet chaotic existence?  With brains moving faster and faster, and bodies moving slower and slower, the sustainability of the human species is truly in peril.

OwnADaycare: What types of access to technology should daycare providers allow young children? In other words how can they use technology in the preschool or daycare setting to a child’s benefit?

Cris Rowan: None! Children in daycare and preschool settings are there to enhance developmental skills for pre-literacy. Children who are sedentary are not stimulating their sensory and motor systems required for literacy. Movement stimulates the vestibular and proprioceptive sensory systems integral for eventual attainment of core stability, motor coordination, eye tracking and optimal arousal for paying attention.

OwnADaycare: How many hours per day or per week should daycare providers allow children access to technology?

Cris Rowan: None! The overwhelming research showing the detrimental effects of technology on the preschool population indicates that the use of technology in daycares and preschools should be prohibited by licensing bodies.

OwnADaycare: What are some things daycare providers can do to address the impact of technology on child development?

Ensure children receive adequate amounts of the critical factors for child development e.g. movement, touch and human connection. Ensure playgrounds adequately stimulate the vestibular, tactile and proprioceptive sensory systems, while also encouraging social communication. I have a webinar on my website www.zonein.ca on how to create sensational yet safe playgrounds.

Read Part I Here

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Long gone are the days where a few packed animals, a few dolls or a few trucks and a set of blocks would be the essential toys a child would have in their space. Today the standard child’s room will have these belongings plus at least two or three electronic toys whether they are for cooperate only or for instructive play.

Nowadays, toys are not just for amusement. There is a rising emphasis on opening children to learn just a few months once they are born. A doll was on one occasion something easy and cute for a child to grasp. Currently, dolls can chat, munch as well as walk off to the bathroom. Teddy bears were in fact a moment ago a cuddly buddy. Now a number of teddy bears have turn into teaches. For many years, instructive toys meant blocks, beads, puzzles, and balls. These toys assist kids learn about color, shape, and statistics by allowing kids to explore the ideas of better and smaller, more and less. But that was “the past”.

Today, toys that typically don’t have a characteristic connection to knowledge are newly wired. There is a novel generation of packed animals and dolls that are at the present attached to internet sites so that kids can hug and dress them one minute, and then go online to social-network them the next minute.

Over the past five years there has been a signifigant augment in the figure of technology enabled toys obtainable to children that make the unique Tickle Me Elmo and Baby Born look like very old relics. Kids have turn out to be key customers, so it is only usual that children’s toys would go with the same pace as adult knowledge.

Some parents as well as some in the instructive field, may sense that with so a great deal knowledge a child does not have the opportunity to truly be creative. It seems that the whole thing is either previously completed for them or is effortlessly finished by just about a few buttons. Years before preschool as well as kindergarten were chiefly about engagement in recreation. Today parents expect their child’s daycare to have at least two or three computers the length of with a good curriculum for knowledge.

Some toys may be educational, but what do brood think of these toys? “Many, who have studied kids and toy technology, say that children have a real charm with new technology. When busy in creative play with technically enhanced toys they can learn and have fun. While that may be true, the query is – are they really having more fun than other kids did before all this new toy skill, or have they just been “automatic” that method?

See: How to start a daycare center

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