Researchers confirm excessive screen time can irreversibly harm kids’ brains

( Natural News ) Digital devices and other electronics are at the top of many kids’ wish lists this holiday season. If you’re considering upgrading your teenager’s cellphone or getting your preschooler their first tablet, you might want to keep in mind the early results of a groundbreaking study that confirms many parents’ fears about the effects of all that screen time . The preliminary results are in on a huge study carried out by the National Institutes of Health. The $300 million project known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study enrolled 11,874 children aged 9 and 10, 2,100 of which are twins or triplets. The study will follow the children throughout young adulthood at 21 research sites in the U.S. Although not all of the data are available yet, the early results are as insightful as they are alarming. Just as many experts and parents alike have long suspected, all that screen time is impacting not only children’s mental health and emotional development, but it’s changing the physical structure of their brains. Not surprisingly, the researchers discovered that children who spend more than two hours per day in front of screens get lower scores on thinking and language tests. Teenagers, by the way, spend 4.5 hours, on average, with their mobile phones each day. That finding should be enough to give most parents pause, but the situation is even more serious for those who spend more than seven hours per day in front of a screen. MRIs of these children showed a premature thinning of the outermost layer in the brain, the cortex, when compared to their peers who don’t use as much technology. The cortex is responsible for sensory input and the type of higher-order functions that make us humans. Mother Nature’s micronutrient secret : Organic […]

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