From The Vigilant Fox:
Researchers scanned the brains of 60 preschool-aged children—and what they discovered about screens was “truly shocking.”
“Interactive screen time causes a LOSS of white matter in the brain.”
In simple terms, Prof. Mike Nagel calls it a measure of “BRAIN DAMAGE.”
What is white matter?
White matter is the part of the brain made up of insulated nerve fibers that help different areas of the brain communicate quickly and efficiently.
It acts like the brain’s wiring system, carrying signals from one region to another so thinking, movement, emotion, and learning can work smoothly.
“So if we’re seeing deficits in myelin production early in life, we’re probably seeing deficits in neural connectivity,” Prof. Nagel warns.
“The study shows the more screen time a child is exposed to, the greater the loss of white matter.”
But it’s not just loss of white matter we have to worry about. When you understand how screens rewire dopamine in developing brains, the story gets even darker. (Read more.)
Outsourcing our children. From Claremont Review of Books:
The culture quickly changed, however, with the arrival of a career-oriented feminist movement. Feminists successfully propagated the message that homemaking and childrearing were second-class endeavors, which prevented women from achieving the personal fulfillment and social status secured by participation in the paid work force. Our society, in particular the media and academia, wholeheartedly endorsed this feminist ideology, and homemakers were consistently disparaged and their social and economic security were fatally undermined by the enactment in all 50 states of no-fault divorce laws that warned mothers it was unsafe to devote themselves to raising children. The result was an unprecedented influx of mothers into the workplace so that, by 1985, the majority of mothers with children under six were working outside the home.
In her wonderfully insightful and eminently sensible book, Mary Eberstadt, a mother of four children who works from home for the Hoover Institution, sets forth evidence of the harm done to children by the maternal exodus responsible for the “Home-Alone America” she rightly deplores. Discussing many facets of children’s lives, she may tell us what we already know, but she analyzes the subject with a fresh insight. She recognizes that her book violates a major taboo today about any discussion of “whether and just how much children need their parents—especially their mothers.” This taboo seeks to protect working mothers from feeling guilty, and Eberstadt sensibly concludes her book by observing that those who “cannot choose otherwise,” such as single parents, “have nothing to feel guilty about.” As for those who do have a choice, perhaps the “continuing complaints about the guilt felt by absent mothers” may be “further proof of a social experiment run amok.”
This social experiment is, of course, the mother-child separation required by the feminist notion that a woman’s personal fulfillment requires her energetic participation in the workplace. Eberstadt calls defenders of this conceit “separationists”: those who believe that women’s freedom to work in the paid marketplace justifies separation from their children, and who refuse to consider whether the children and adolescents left behind by the adult exodus have suffered. She challenges a society, which only seems concerned with making it easier and cheaper for women to “combine work and family,” to consider how small children actually experience being in daycare all day. She makes the very sensible point that the daycare debate is never about what it feels like for the infant and children in day care, but always about what the outcomes are in terms of personality development and cognitive ability. “The daycare proof,” separationists believe, “is in the achievement pudding.” Separationists, however, are often not around children, who, in their lives, have been made “someone else’s problem.” (Read more.)
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