The world is changing rapidly. Medicine is part of that change, and so is paediatrics, the part that deals with children. As important as these remain, paediatrics is no longer only about pneumonia and cancer and heart disease, etc. There are now more children with serious, life-threatening social lifestyle illnesses than physical illnesses.
Two of these are “nature deficit disorder” and its natural follow-on, “Smartphone Anxiety”. Nature deficit disorder is described as “an environmental ennui flowing from children’s fixation on artificial entertainment rather than natural wonders.”
Basically, it’s children spending too much time inside rather than outside and the effects of this. It’s about children who are obsessed with computer games and spend little time outdoors, “touching grass”. It’s about children who are driven from sport to sport by their parents and miss out on developing the nimbler bodies, broader minds and sharper senses that are developed during random running around. It’s not the same to walk or bicycle from home to the Savannah as to be driven or taken from home to a sheltered playing field where an adult tells you what to do, where to stand, what to practise, when to run, where to sit and what to drink.
That’s not playing; that’s drilling. That is not encouraging the development of a child’s mind; that is being schooled a particular way that inhibits decision-making capacity. That is not being confronted with different scenarios and having to make choices. That is not learning to take care of yourself in the street and to adapt to various kinds of street behaviour; that is about following orders and surrendering the street. Street smarts are important, more so in these difficult days.
Children spend too much time staring at video screens, booked up for sports or lessons or sequestered by their parents against the remote threat of abduction. This fear of abduction is highly unlikely in a small island like ours, and we should be doing what children did years ago.
Fifty years ago, a nine-year-old boy could get up in the morning in Woodbrook or Diego Martin, go outside and disappear for the day with a group of boys the same age, and nobody worried, as long as you came home that night for supper. Occasionally, your mother would phone around for you, and since everybody knew you, unless you were in the middle of the Savannah or up somebody’s Down’s tree, someone would soon shout out to you, “Go home, yuh mudder looking for you!”
Those days of free-range childhood seem to be over. Some years ago a group of paediatricians began looking at the range of play of a typical English family’s son and found in one village a classical answer. In the home, there lived a grandfather, father and grandson. When the grandfather was a boy, he typically ranged up to ten miles from his house. His son started the decline but still managed to find himself several miles from home in the course of his wandering. The grandson, born in 1990, was forbidden to play more than 100 yards from the same house. The results are there to see: fat kids, scared kids, bored kids, depressed kids, and anxious kids.
This leads into the second common childhood lifestyle disease of today: “Smartphone Anxiety”.
The widespread introduction of the “smartphone”, which should really be called “the dumbphone”, which is making adults and children dumber, is one of the great, spontaneous, non-controlled experiments in humanity’s history. And it’s being done on children!
Parents who oppose some of the most rigidly studied medical topics possible, eg, immunisations, and refuse to give their children vaccines because they are afraid of side effects, have no problem in giving their ten-year-old free access to the Internet. This is akin to leaving your child alone for months in a cinema where you do not know what films are playing and the place is filled with adults, many of whom are criminals and perverts.
Frankly, it’s remarkable. Parents who would not allow their child to look at photos of beheadings or naked men and women or take them to meetings to listen to the gibbering of deranged people see nothing wrong with allowing them to watch adult porn movies or be influenced by sick minds on social media.
When the era of social media began, 15 or 20 years ago, it did seem like something positive, perhaps an easier way for children to learn. That is not true. The opposite is. Apart from the sick side effects of anxiety, self-harm, violence and suicide, it is clear that smartphones hinder learning, and thankfully, their use, at least in school, is rapidly being restricted in progressive countries.
