Jj is for Jottings: 8. Effects of Screens on Children – My Observations, Part 2.

Here is the list of some of the changes I have seen in children and families, partly as a result of technological growth:
• Poorer listening skills.
• Lowered literacy and numeracy skills.
• Reduced ability to focus on a task (except for focus on screen games).
• Reduced levels of conversation in the home, to the detriment of language skills. Many more children have a poor vocabulary and poor grammatical skills these days. In many families, parents are spending much time playing games themselves or accessing their phones, when previously they might have been interacting with their child/ren.
• Poor fine motor skills – children are spending less time drawing, cutting out and pasting and other craft-type activities so that they don’t develop the fine muscle movements required for writing, and as a result…..
• Poor, illegible handwriting. You wouldn’t believe some of the dreadful handwriting you see, and the amount of effort it takes for these students to physically write. I’m talking secondary students here, as well as primary.
• Visual perceptual problems. We are programmed to vary our range of vision between close up and distance, such as would naturally happen if you were, say, out on a walk. You’d get the full range between looking at your watch or bending down and examining an ant dragging along the corpse of a much larger insect and the treetops against the blue sky in the distance. Medium, distance and peripheral vision are not stimulated by screens.
Of course, changes in education haven’t always been positive, either, and I suspect there may be less emphasis on handwriting in the lower grades in general these days, and of course the children get less practice with their handwriting because some of it has been replaced by typing. Back to those pesky screens again!