And to think… –

August 16, 2020 – Bekaroglu said “addiction” in children emerges by the age of 4, when the parents and child cannot establish quality communication and interaction. Sometimes the child cannot achieve a secure attachment, she said.

“As the attachment gets harder to obtain, the sense of addiction start to develop. So children who were unable to establish healthy relations with parents at age 0-4 are more prone to addictions,” she said. “This addiction does not necessarily have to be to screens, it could be to humans, food and other thing later in the person’s life.”

Bekaroglu said addiction is much harder to deal with after adolescence years and easier to have an intervention during childhood. 

She stressed that before the age of 6, children should not be exposed to screens because later in childhood there would be other problems, noting children can learn a lot from phones, tablets and computers, but they lose a lot of neurons while taking in information from those platforms. 

“The more the child gains neurons, their capacity will be larger and as they grow up they will be more creative.

“A 30-year-old person watching a screen for three to four hours, and an average child younger than 12, being exposed to the screen for three to four hours, will not have the same effect,” she said. “While the adult can tolerate the time, the child has difficulty even with one hour because a child has rapid development.”

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