From Hyperconnection To Disconnection And Social Isolation
As a child and adolescent psychologist, I witness the change in demands and needs that are observed among the child and adolescent population and also among families.
As a mother, I am devastated by the helplessness and also the unconsciousness that I observe in the face of the scope of health changes, social changes, or learning that are occurring and that we want to alleviate with more health professionals.
We are increasingly witnessing the call for attention that is made from different professional fields, whether educational, social or health, regarding the effect that screens have on development Calls of attention that among so much digital information, is lost in the data cloud and impacts for a few seconds on some retina and perhaps on the emotion of one of the readers.
We have research that shows us how screens at an early age affect visual, psychomotor and emotional development this impact involves loss of opportunities, games, looks, unrealized social enjoyments and how they subsequently influence the different maturation stages.
Research tells us about how sleep rhythms are affected and altered. Many of our children and especially adolescents invest eternal hours that go unnoticed, they do not know how to quantify them, they navigate without a route, and float in the immensity of memes that occupy and saturate their minds. Losing opportunities to stimulate the higher executive areas of the brain that lead them to develop creativity, generalization, abstraction, critical thinking, and mental flexibility.
That saturated mind is unable to remember the conversation held with its parents, they cannot join family activities, they delay sitting at the table, or watching a movie together because they have something very important and urgent to do. The next tic-toc awaits them, they visually devour one after another. Either they have to continue with a game that does not allow a delayed response, or they urgently need to take instant photos to respond with grossly artificial poses to the reels they have just received, where the words have disappeared and are submerged between apparently real images that enhance postures. , grimaces and exaggerated smiles outside of any present social contact.
And of course they anxiously wait for the like, letting you know brings a torrent of anxiety, which makes them nervous, that emotional disappointment unites the fruitless wear and tear of that brain hyperabsorbed by images that flow without discourse and without logic. They swim or rather are carried along by the currents of wild images that appear on the screen, the succession, the rhythm do not induce reflection, except an agonizing distraction. If you ask them what they just saw, they don’t remember, if they look at you they do so with glassy eyes and smile, not at you but at the screen.
Thus, the following response, when someone asks you for something, even if they look at you when speaking, will lead to a response that goes beyond discontent, it is the reflection of stress and dissatisfaction that digs a hole in itself. Their response can be from the void, remaining in their lair without responding, dazed between the hole of darkness that they do not know how to identify or the overturned rage, like an enraged dragon, an enrage that they do not know. A disproportionate response to the present moment. And if at any point they stop, look at the interlocutor, and he is worried about them, they may burst into tears, and they will scream or drown in crying at everything that is not formulated, and they will say that their life is shit and they want to fucking disappear. her. On other occasions, parents, in their desire to know what is happening to them, will search and investigate their networks, notes or notebooks that blur poorly contained feelings.
And if as health professionals we look for a history of trauma, sometimes we will find them and other times we will find unremarkable experiences, with a lack of real experiences, with a multitude of unintegrated images, with lost time and with unmanaged states, with a great emotional lack of culture or with a hyperpsychological discourse soaked in networks and YouTubers that explain reality.
To do?
The hyperuse of screens requires paper and pencil education, park games, with face-to-face interaction, where you learn social language and of course limit its use. There are several countries that are already committed to this, from Switzerland to China.
Not long ago I read that in the future a mark of social class will be the comfort you feel in social communication. The elites remove screens from their children and computers are removed from their schools. I hope these measures reach public schools before we all become disconnected asocials, addicted to mental illness.
