The psychologist expert in suicidal behavior from the Psychiatry and Psychology Service of the Sant Joan de Deu Hospital, Francisco Villar, has welcomed the new regulatory framework on mobile phones in schools approved this week by the Government. “The Department of Education has already done its part, now it is up to families to ask what we are going to do” regarding the age of the first delivery of a smartphone and its regulation at home. In his opinion, a debate is now opening in the family environment conducive to adopting regulations for children and adolescents. Villar’s suggestion is to delay the delivery of a smartphone as long as possible: “the best thing you can do with your children is not to give them the cell phone until they are eighteen years old.”
Villar has participated in the colloquium ‘Digital Health and Education: Challenges and Opportunities in the Child and Adolescent Population’, held yesterday at the Abat Oliba CEU University, in which the neuropsychologist and spokesperson for the Mobile Free Teens platform, Marina Fernández, also participated. who has defended the total ban on cell phones in schools (and not leaving it to the discretion of the teacher for pedagogical uses) and zero screen contact before the age of 8, and not at 3 as proposed by experts and institutions, such as the Association Catalan Pediatrics.
In his opinion, it is advisable to delay the use of mobile phones and digital devices until the individual’s cognitive functions are fully developed. For the also professor of Neuropsychology at the Abat Oliba CEU University, there should be a “total restriction” of mobile devices in secondary schools, as well as drastic regulation of the internet and social networks. “Digital devices are not made for learning but to capture attention. Their use in educational centers must be highly justified.”
For Villar, it is very important to distinguish that the brain of a child is not the same as that of an adult. That is to say, “it is not realistic” that someone who is twelve years old will know how to manage a device designed to “manage you and not the other way around.”
From Villar’s experience, there is a clear relationship between the world of social networks and suicide, insomnia, bullying and self-esteem problems. The good part is that “when you remove the contaminating object, life springs forth immediately.” And what must be promoted is for minors to “relate to life”, that is the way to generate “the bonds” they need. “Children today are not a digital generation, they are no different from us. “All we have to give them is a safe environment and the rest goes out on their own.”
However, his argument continues, there is an economic interest in this not being the case. “There are people in Silicon Valley who, with what they earn every time our children use a device, enroll theirs in an elitist mobile-free school,” Villar has warned.
As a neuropsychologist, Fernández has explained that the use of screens fundamentally affects the frontal lobe of the brain, which is the last one to develop and on which higher executive functions depend, to a large extent. That is, those functions that have to do with attention, decision making, inhibition, self-control or emotional regulation.
Attentional control is not achieved until the age of six or seven and the processing of complex information until the age of ten. For all these reasons, “there should be zero screens until the age of eight.” In this sense, he recalled that “our brain is prepared to process information through the maximum number of senses, which with screens is limited to two: sight and hearing.”