Young Thais lead the world in the number of hours spent online each day. That is bad news for parents and educators.
Take a look around practically any primary school, high school or college in Thailand and you will witness most, if not all, students doing the exact same thing. There they are, staring intently at their martphones as if their very lives depended on it.
That is hardly a good thing since most of the millions of youngsters who spend long hours each day on their phones do not do so with the aim of educating themselves about the world at large. Rather, they invariably spend an inordinate amount of time playing games and perusing social media platforms like Facebook where the nature and quality of most content leave much to be desired and tend to have little educational value.
According to the “Digital 2019” global survey by a New York-based marketing agency, Thais lead the world in the average hours spent online each day. In what surely is a dubious record, the kingdom’s citizens spend more time online than the citizens of any other country: they do so for an eye-watering 10 hours and 7 minutes. That is even more than last year when Thais spent 9 hours and 34 minutes online every single day.
Of all that time online Thais, especially those in their teens and twenties, spend well over three hours a day on social media, mostly Facebook. Much of the rest of the time they spend playing games, watching entertaining short videos on YouTube and texting friends.
Yet being glued to smartphone screens is hardly beneficent to young people, especially children. Developmental psychologists have long known that children construct an understanding of the world around them by having direct experiences of it through play, explorations and social interaction. It is a long process of trial and error that enables them to acquire new knowledge and new skills.
Ample face-to-face interactions between children and people in their lives — such as parents, siblings, teachers and peers — are also invaluable for youngsters in developing good social skills. Yet many young Thais are experiencing far fewer such interactions these days because of their extended screen time on their smartphones and tablets day in and day out.
As a result, they end up with a form of sensory deprivation by lacking direct experiences of the off-screen world around them. The long-term outcomes of excessive smartphone use, especially of the kind unsupervised by parents and teachers, could well involve impairments of cognitive functioning in children and teenagers, according to experts. There are also mounting concerns that the radio frequencies emitted by smartphones might harm children’s developing brains in ways that are still little understood.
“[R]esearch has shown that both the temporal and frontal [lobes] are actively developing during adolescence and are instrumental in aspects of advanced cognitive functioning,” explains Dr Jenny Radesky, an American paediatrician. Yet these parts of developing brains are bombarded by endless stimuli from screens and by potentially harmful radio frequencies.
Children glued to screens during their early years may also suffer in other ways. One such way is missing
out on various fun activities that take place off-screen. Another is being unable to acquire important social skills during their formative years. “[Children] learn language, they learn about their own emotions, they learn how to regulate them. They learn by watching us how to have a conversation, how to read other people’s facial expressions,” Radesky explains. “And if that’s not happening, children are missing out on important development milestones.”
