As I noticed the tender cashew nuts covered with red ants, I felt rather awful. The red ants suck the sap from the pulp of tender a nut, which would have become a full cashew nut. If not sprayed with insecticides, these nuts will have considerably reduced pulp inside, sometimes devoid of pulp!
The cashew nuts have to survive this vulnerability!
That is when thoughts about the vulnerability of a human infant dawned on me about the changing circumstances in which they grow up now. For most part of my childhood and later years, till the technology revolution invaded the homes from the nineteen eighties onwards with the use of the colour TV, computer, internet, later the Mobile phone, iPads, etc, parenting was an interactive process between infants and care givers.
I have watched parents sing to their children, tell stories, read stories from picture books, play with them with balls made of paper or coconut palm leaves, go to a nearby stream to play in the water, play in the sand, make clay models, etc. Even when I was training to be a paediatrician in the seventies, it was common for parents to give reasonable attention to communicate and engage children.
Now just as the red ants invade the tender cashew nuts, the mobile phones, TV, internet and iPads invade the attention of children! The machine interface has replaced the normal physiological human environment of an infant or a toddler.
The auditory system of an infant is conditioned to recognise human voice from few weeks after birth. The visual cortical system enables an infant to recognise the mother's face by about three months and develop a reciprocal smile with a familiar person by four to six months. The human voice, facial appearance, the feel of of the person who often carries the infant, his or her odour, the touch and strokes on the face, or hands or rituals during bath time, feeding or changing napkins create a sene of familiarity and curiosity familiarity and for an infant.
An infant who would be babbling or making jargons sounds in the latter half of the first year as early imitations of regular sounds heard at home, goes on to expressing sounds, syllables and words by about an year.
Now the seventy percent of toddlers who come to the place where I work, are brought by their parents, for not having shown the proficiency of language development expected at two or three years. The history of many infants is that, from the time of starting weaning food at six months, they were introduced to the visual screen of TV or Mobile phone, where they watched advertisements, cartoons or other entertainments for four to six hours during the day. Some of them slept late and developed fragmented sleep due to this over-activation of the visual and auditory systems. Since most mothers, if they work outside home, return to work after three months of maternity leave, the breast feeding got discontinued, and the third person would have taken charge of the infant care. This further hampers the attachment behaviour between the infant and parents.
The eco-system of human interface is replaced by the machine interface, which is a major factor in the current explosive numbers of toddlers coming to Child Development Centres for delay in their language, social skills and behaviour. This is the consequence of making the TV or Mobile phone as the 'Third parent' !
The machine interface is an invader that displaces infants and toddlers from being attentive to human voices, their faces, and interactive communication. Adding to this, if the infant is left without the usual rituals of being sung to (not listening to music form the phone), played with, taken for social contacts with adults and children, or engaged in play at home with toys and household articles, then the delay in interactive and communication process would be even more.
The mind set of some parents currently from what I come across, is Internet, Mobile phones, cartoons, etc are good for children as they would develop proficiency in language early, by listening. Instead what toddlers do is to repeat the machine language in the way they heard in the cartoons without knowing meaning or context. They parrot a language which is too early for the the brain to process.
The American Paediatric Association suggested that children below four years watch mobile phones or the TV only when one adult accompanies a child, in order to explain to the toddler what is on the screen that too less than half an hour in a day. It is not ideal to have children below one year to watch TV programmes.
So where are we now as parents!
We seem to have created an iatrogenic developmental delay of language, communication and social behaviour in infants and toddlers by overexposing them to the visual screen!
Another dis-service professional do to the parents is to announce this, as autistic spectrum disorder, without carefully studying the causal pathway for this developmental delay. Only a few children might have an unknown cause for the developmental delay. Most of the toddlers were already vulnerable due to hereditary factors, antenatal events or perinatal risk factors, which initiated their developmental delay. This got compounded by lack of human interface, which if present would have naturally enhanced the neuro-plasticity for some recovery from the developmental delay.
Seeing the cashew nuts invaded by the red ants, got me thinking about how infants and toddlers are invaded by the machine interface, to their detriment in child development! Let me ring this alarm bell!
It is the COVID season which brought this to its current serious situation. All were advised to keep 'social distancing'. But what was needed was to practice physical distancing and still have creative ways of having social communications. The on-line schooling legitimised use of the visual screen. The inadequate social vigilance by the professionals added to the current woes of the parents suffering from seeing their toddlers struggle in their development.
The post-COVID season calls for urgent corrective measures and emergency action plan to help toddlers and preschool children, who are currently struggling to catch up in their language, communication and social skills!
M.C. Mathew (text and photo)
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