How Smartphone Addiction Affects Your Kindergarten-going Child’s Cognitive Development
How Smartphone Addiction Affects Your Kindergarten-going Child’s Cognitive Development
Smartphones seem to have taken over our world today. People from different age groups seem to carry around a smartphone and use it for a variety of purposes. Smartphones aren’t just devices to communicate via calls and texts anymore – they’re so much more. People can play games, find directions to places, browse the web, and even work from the comfort of their smartphones. Surprisingly, even some kindergarten kids seem to be using smartphones to play games and are glued to these devices. Smartphone addiction among kindergarteners can negatively impact their cognitive development. Here’s how:
Piaget’s stages of cognitive development
According to psychologist Jean Piaget, children pass through 4 stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational stage, with kindergarteners being in the preoperational stage.
Children need to actively interact with their environments in order to develop cognitively. Greater development of language is also a key feature of this stage. Smartphone addiction can delay cognitive development in kindergarteners at this stage in the following ways:
Reduces their attention span
Smartphone addiction negatively impacts the attention span of kindergarteners for both focused and divided attention. Distractions become common, and this translates into daily interactions. Excessive screen time can change neural pathways in the brain and have long-lasting effects on attention.
Hampers concentration
The addiction to smartphones can hamper concentration for other tasks as kids may be automatically directed to notifications and other activities that they can do on their smartphones.
Lowers cognitive capacity
When kids are involved with activities on their smartphones, they’re already utilizing a portion of their cognitive resources for it. This leaves them with lesser cognitive resources to use for attending to other activities. Excessive use eventually results in brain drain and lesser cognitive capacity to deal with tasks on a daily basis.
Hampers childhood curiosity and leads to laziness
The preoperational stage of cognitive development is generally when children explore the world around them; interact with adults and peers alike, and model their behaviour based on what they experience through their interactions with others. Childhood is a period of curiosity, and children have so much to learn about the world around them. Physically interacting with the larger world around them is crucial for the overall development of children. Their curiosity causes them to ask questions and be excited about learning. Smartphone addiction keeps them glued to their phones and miss out on the real-world interactions that are so necessary for their cognitive development. There’s no longer any fascination associated with learning something new as everything is available at the click of a button.
In this way, smartphone addiction delays cognitive development in children, the effects of which are long-lasting, whether it relates to academic performance later on or other interactions in life.
Monitoring your child’s smartphone use with our apps can help you keep them safe and intervene if you notice that they’re getting addicted.