Signs of screen dependency in young children

[Dr. Angie Neal] What might be some of the signs that screens are becoming an obstacle to building a brain that is ready to learn? Which is good to know, because trying to figure out whether screen use is or isn’t harmful and how much or how little, it can be kind of complicated. So first, if your child is getting very angry and very upset when they’re asked to turn off a screen or put them away, that is a big red flag. Why? Because essentially what this is saying is that your child is overstimulated. And so that is why it’s hard for them to get off of the screen, because they have to go from being way up here with all this stimulation coming right at them all the way back down to the pace of real life. Similarly, when children can’t calm down when they’re without a screen. So if you think about it like a pacifier or when children suck their thumbs, they use those tools to calm and soothe themselves as infants until they learn how to do it without them. And just as we wouldn’t expect to see children walking around with pacifiers for extended period of time as they get older because they’ve learned how to calm down without them, it’s the same thing as it relates to children and screens.