info@businessghana.com
Early exposure of children to electronic and digital screens distorts their development in speech and other behavioural actions.
Described as a “silent epidemic,” experts have warned that too much exposure to screens for children under five years has dire consequences such as loss of speech, restlessness, avoiding eye contact, speaking with a foreign accent and abnormal behaviours.
A Development Paediatrician, Dr Yvonne Brew, who gave the warning, stated that many parents found it convenient to buy mobile phones and tablets for their children as a way of stopping them from disturbing.
She, however, advised parents against it, saying it was destroying their development.
“We are losing our children, not to war, or hunger but to screens, and we are doing it with our hearts.
This is no longer a parenting issue, this is an emergency,” she explained.
Dr Mrs Brew, paediatrician with the Greater Accra Regional Hospital Ridge, was speaking in an interview with the Daily Graphic on screen addiction among children in the country.
“The reality is that we are having a lot of children coming to the hospital who cannot speak.
“Some of them were just singing rhythms over and over again.
The striking thing is that such children cannot sit down at one place, also they are always very anxious,” Dr Mrs Brew stated.
The Development Paediatrician appealed to the government for a policy on the screen use of children in pre-schools and of preschool age.
“We want a policy that would help parents to know that they should not let their children watch cartoons either on television, phones or tablets, but rather children should learn to play outside.
“We would want that all children below three years should not have access to screen time at all, and that pre-schools should not use the screen to teach the children,” she stated.
Additionally, she appealed to pre-schools and Sunday Schools to stop using televisions and other screens as learning materials.
She quoted the World Health Organisation (WHO), saying that children below two years should not have access to the screen at all, and all those from three to five years should have access to the screen for a maximum duration of one hour a day.
Throwing more light on the development, she said, “the reality is that we are having a lot of children coming to hospital who cannot speak.
“In the last four years after the 2020 lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we started seeing children who could not speak and those who spoke were speaking like cartoon characters or with a foreign accent.
“In trying to diagnose what the issues were, we realised that all those children were spending a lot of time with phones or tablets.
They were spending between six and 10 hours on the screen,” Dr Brew revealed.
She said once the hospital detected that their problem was a result of exposure to the screen, “we started advising the parents to take the screens away from them and also teach them the therapy and how to rehabilitate them.”
Dr Mrs Brew said so far, the data available at her department indicated that there were over 200 children currently undergoing rehabilitation.
She said the impact was more severe with children below three years, but she was happy that at that level, it was easier to treat, and therefore, advised parents to report to the hospital with their children for a checkup.
