Growth and the environment!

The first photo in both the set of flowers were taken about two weeks ago. The second photos were taken about two weeks later. 

I did not anticipate to see more flowers, but new buds kept appearing and opening to make both the bunch of flowers different at the end of two weeks. 

During the two weeks the plants received the regular care-watering and protecting them in shade, as the temperature soared high during the day. 

 

I have recently been disturbed by the hurried conclusions parents come to about their pre-school child with regard to their behaviour, attentiveness, social and communication skills. 

Most pre-school children in many homes are used to long hours of watching cartoons in the mobile phone or in the TV. Even the feeding is done while the children watch the animations in the screen. 

With so much of domination of visual and auditory overload to the brain, brain growth which is developing to form the different functions around 2 to 3 years of age, gets deranged. Instead, children have more of visual and auditory stimuli with less exposure to social engagements, language interactions, motor activities of movements, and play, exploration of the environment, story and singing time, or play based entertainments! 

No wonder they are less interactive, communicative or explorative! They were conditioned to be different by the way we altered their growing process by the prolonged hours of exposure to the screen time. In fact, parents notice that their child's language is cartoonish in composition, accent, semantics and pragmatics. Most of the programme that a pre-school child watch is in other languages than the language spoken at home.

The message I share with families in such situation, is based on the two flower patterns above. In two weeks time, in a normal environment, there were more flowers in the blossoms. 

Let me suggest that, instead of parents becoming anxious about the delay in development of some skills of their pre-school child, if only they can begin to interact with the child with gradual reduction in the screen time, by about three weeks, parents are likely to observe a change in the behaviour of the child, with incremental interest in play, moving around in the house and outside to explore and get more tuned to a structure and plan!

Let me recommend that there is lot more in a pre-school child, which can be brought forth, when we take away the screen time and fill the day time with activities in which children ought to be engaged in normally. The surrogate parenting with the prolonged screen time is an aberration, which although looks comfortable to 'get the child out of the way' for parents to pursue what they want to do, is robbing a pre-school child of his or her childhood experiences essential  for normal growth and development!

In two weeks, more flowers were added to the few that were in the beginning! It is an object lesson to parents about child development. If only we can turn the environment of a preschool child to be play based, activity oriented, socially interactive, exploratory, participatory with plenty of time to develop the attachment process between the child and parents, most parents would find dramatic changes in the orientation and behaviour of their pre-school child in about 4 to 6 weeks. 

A child is born with an endowment of abilities, skills, and growth and development trajectory. It is for the parents to create the environment at home for that to unfold. The social milieu is what is needed for this to happen  and not a screen dominated ambience!

The picture of the flowers above would stay with me as a message about who a pre-school child can be, if he or she had a parenting environment, instead of the screen environment! Many children get indulged in the screen time because parents substitute their presence to their child with screen time. 

I write this with sorrow and grief, having seen scores of children every month in the recent years, more so during and after the COVID season. Parents engaged their child with screen time, when they worked from home during the COVID season. Older children had their on line classes, which legitimatised the screen time for children. The infants and toddlers by default got used to the screen time!

It is time that parents undo this by a proactive planning. 

All pre-school children are to be occupied in play based activities and not by the screen time! We limit the development of a pre-school child with over exposure to screen time and think of him or her as having a developmental dysfunction. That is exceptional. What is more likely is that parents deranged the developmental process of their child inadvertently by offering screen time as a  substitute for their interactive time with their pre-school child!

I get a feeling that parents are aware of this and a change process is in sight!

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)