Bonnie Gasper - The Shallow Brain

Bonnie Gaspar, Child Protection League, spoke about the shallow brain.

Have you ever wondered what the effects of too much screen time will have on the younger generations? As a grandma, I'm amazed at how technologically "smart" my grandchildren are. Often I have to ask these young ones to help me with my devices. Once while finding myself alone with my 3 year old grandson. He wanted to watch a certain show. I couldn't understand his words. Using an unfamiliar remote for a television that was set up differently from mine, trying to find WHAT show, I didn't know! Boy was I challenged! When I FINALLY landed on the right program, my little guy tossed the remote across the room! Guess he didn't want to risk grandma touching another button!

While that is a funny story, and a sign of how technology has infiltrated our homes, lives, and the children. Bonnie warns of the effects of too much screen time for our children.

At their Join the Movement Conference in April of this year, I learned of some of those effects and more. Please allow me to share.

There are the obvious dangers that most of us know about; sexual predators that invade social media outlets, preying on young children, many times disguising themselves as a young child, too, to gain knowledge and trust of the child.

But then we might wonder, what happens when technology enters the classroom? Bonnie challenged us to research this. "Take any state NAEP data, compare that to when that state adopted one to one technology widely and watch what happens. The NAEP will plateau and then start to drop.....when tech enters education, learning goes down."

She points out that as children skim content on computers, they lose their ability to learn to read. A realization I know all too well. How often have I read an email and missed important information because I was skimming the content?

Bonnie warns that too much screen time is dangerous. And now that technology has entered the classroom, it is affecting our children.

A close look at our state of Minnesota, (NAEP data) shows that our fourth and eight graders started a precipitous decline (in learning) in 2019, now it's on a catastrophic decline. According to Bonnie, much of that is related to technology.

From preschool to college, Bonnie laid out statistics and spoke of how technology is changing the brains of our children.

In this article I'm sharing a few things that I learned from her presentation.

Bonnie shared a preschool teacher with 20 years experience claiming that children don't know how to do things for themselves anymore. Some do, the teacher says, but more don't. Many don't know how to use a crayon or scissors. And upon giving the children the school issued tablets, teachers learned that some kids would cry when they were to be put away. In this case, teachers quit using the tablets as the tantrums weren't worth it the few moments of "peace" it brought to the children.

Fine motor abilities have decreased in young children, they are unable to manipulate their fingers, hands and hand-eye coordination skills, largely due to lack of use.

According to another study the average middle schooler spends about five hours on devices during the school day. Add that to the time that they're not in school and these children can be on devices up to 12 hours a day. That's 12 of the 16 hours that they're actually awake.

One study noted, that students check their devices an average of 64 times a day! These constant checks result in fragmented attention, attention deficit, weakened self-control and a massive disruption of instructional time. This particular study claims middle schoolers spent nearly a third of their school day, about 20 minutes every hour, on their phones, even during instructional time. It was pointed out that parents of these students expected to be able to contact their children during the day.

The "skimming" mentioned earlier results in shorter attention spans. The child isn't able to stick with a long text or understand complicated words. The child is unable to grasp abstract thoughts from the concrete and their working vocabulary is shrinking causing an expanding comprehension gap. Another study states that reading rates fell from 27% to 14% between 2012 and 2023.

While many of us learned to take notes, these young ones don't bother because they can just look it up tomorrow. We, as parents, know that when we write things down it helps us process and remember it. There's a study out of Norway, that shows that in reading a hand writing our brains "triggers all kinds of elaborate brain activity, including memory retention, conceptual understanding, and imaginary visualization."

Future generations have a different view of education-that is it something "to be found" instead of something to be known. An interesting thought to me as I realize that we live in this Age of Information, and now AI tools seem to have all the answers.

Speaking of AI, one professor said that students are using AI to write their papers so that they don't have to read the books.

This presentation, The Shallow Brain, gave me much food for thought. I've tried to highlight a few of the ideas here, but there was so much more to be gleaned from Bonnie's short presentation.

May I encourage you to listen to The Shallow Brain? I believe you will be blessed by the information she shares. She gives her resources and adds much that I didn't include here, such as the $375 million fine against Meta for their lack of child safety safeguards, their negligence and child endangerment that were exposed after a sting operation, how Meta's algorithms push exploitative content to our children.

Bonnie added a slideshow and a few videos that manage to be both fun and incredibly poignant. They bring some humor, while giving you a sudden, quiet check in your spirit about the fragile state of the world today."

Is it time to consider the effects of technology on our future generations? And what can we do to alleviate some of the dysfunction?

To quote Bonnie from her opening of this presentation, where she shares the two truisms that she has learned in her own journey; "God will equip who He calls, He will use anybody who's willing AND if you see a good fight, get in it. And I think there's no better fight that to start, you know, protecting our children, right?"

For more information go to Child Protection League. Want to Join the Movement? Scroll to the bottom of the page and take the pledge!

*Above picture copied from CPL website.