The issue of social interaction of schoolchildren is increasingly being raised by specialists in parenting and health care. The inability to recognize emotions, the desire to spend more and more time behind the screen is one of the main problems of our time.
In the United States, they are quite active in researching children's problems. It is no secret that modern children spend more and more time in front of screens, which have changed constructively, but still affect the psychological state of the viewer.
Of particular concern were the results of a survey of California sixth graders on the ability to recognize emotions. Participants who were not exposed to the screen during the work week read human emotions better than children with regular access to phones, computers, and televisions.
Reducing the time of direct contact with people led to a deterioration in the skills of reading emotional information from the face and other non-verbal signals. Meanwhile, there is no talk about the dangers of smartphones, tablets and other on-screen attributes, they are actively introduced into the educational process as technical teaching aids.
Signal to educators
Man-made suppression of the ability to recognize emotions is undoubtedly a warning bell for teachers and parents. Since a new psychological limitation can grow into a problem of social interaction of schoolchildren, which is always carried out face to face, and the factor of emotional assessment of an action or a decision made plays an important role.
At the level of common sense, the result obtained means a recommendation to reduce the screen time for the child. A supporting argument is a view of the development process: from infancy, a person interacts with parents and other people face to face, and this way of modeling behavior should not disappear. In a world of increasing technological innovation, the social value of direct human communication only increases.
It is no coincidence that, when communicating in chat and in telephone correspondence, young people have created a whole culture of substitute visual signals of emotional reaction to on-screen text and its content. Dots with brackets and a whole galaxy of emoticons are undoubtedly designed to satisfy the need for emotional communication.
Screen time limit
For many decades, science and practice have accumulated experience in disseminating warnings about the need to cut screen time to children. If the age is 3-18 years old, then 2 hours a day is enough. Up to 2 years - not a single hour at all.
Troubled sixth graders in a California study watched TV and played video games for more than 4 hours a day. Similar experiments show that children under 8 years old spend about 2 hours a day in front of the screen. Children from 2 to 10 years old work less than half of the screen time with educational material. However, in less well-to-do families, focused on education as a factor of further life well-being, schoolchildren are given more time and attention to screen teaching compared to families with high incomes.
The purposeful and reasonable use of digital media is recognized as quite justified and useful, but only a part of life is connected with the screen, which should not deprive children of other wonderful things.
The negative consequences of screen time are studied: childhood obesity, irregular sleep, problems of social communication and adaptation, as well as intrafamilial behavior. All of them accompany a decrease in the skills of social interaction inherent in human evolution. The resolution of conflicts of interest is seen in the family "media diet", jointly adopted by parents and children.
