At Age 2, 58% of Toddlers Use the Internet and Show No Interest in Insects or Outdoor Play
Nonfiction writer Kouta Ishii takes a close look at the society and incidents that are looming! Shocking Reportage
At one daycare center, a smartphone app is used to put children to sleep during nap time after lunch. The app is called a “bedtime routine app,” and it features a character that sings lullabies and counts the number of sheep for the children. The childcare workers put the children to sleep by showing them the apps as they lay down to sleep.
The director of this preschool says, “These days, we don’t allow children to sleep at home.
Recently, some parents are using apps to put their children to sleep at home. I personally think it is best if parents and childcare workers lie down together and rub their backs to put the children to sleep, but some children have become accustomed to the app and don’t want to be put to sleep. When the childcare worker sings a lullaby, they say, ‘Sensei, heh, heh, heh,’ and want the phone. So we have no choice but to use the app for naps.”
According to the preschool teachers, there are many children who have already been unable to let go of their phones by the age of one. When the teachers at the preschool tell these children that they are free to do as they please, they ask, “Where’s your phone? they ask.
What is the current relationship between children and their smartphones? In a recent book entitled “Reporto: Smartphone Raising Children Will Destroy Them” (Shinchosha), we interviewed more than 200 educators from nursery schools to high schools to highlight the difficulties faced by children and consider the current smartphone situation among preschoolers.
Only Smartphones for Play.”
Today, it is no longer unusual to see children riding on the back of a bicycle looking at their smartphones while being picked up from or dropped off at daycare, or an entire family eating at a restaurant while looking at their smartphones. It is not uncommon to find smartphone holders attached to strollers and car baby seats.
Even at daycare centers, it is not uncommon to find children who want a smartphone. The head of a preschool in Tokyo said.
Children who are constantly on their phones at home are no longer able to play outside. Even if you take them to the yard or to the neighborhood park and say, ‘You can play,’ they don’t want to play like other children. They stand there like they don’t know what to do. They may not be able to come up with any other option than to manipulate their phones. Some of them will pull on the teacher’s sleeve and say, ‘Give me your phone. The phone has become the only thing they can do for fun.
What the preschool teachers were unanimous in saying during our interviews this time was not that “children are playing outside less and less,” but that “the number of children who are not interested in playing in the first place has increased.
There are various reasons why children no longer play outside. Play is forbidden in parks, the COVID-19 crisis has reduced the number of opportunities for social interaction, high summer temperatures make it difficult to be outside, and parents are too busy to take their children out. ……
The combination of these factors is causing children to spend more time at home browsing their phones and tablets than playing outside. This would inevitably lead to children losing interest in play itself. This is not only due to parents and smartphones, but also to numerous social factors.
As the situation becomes more serious, preschool teachers are concerned about “stimulation addiction” caused by smartphones: children who have grown up watching short, extreme videos for hours on end from the age of 1 are no longer interested in the trivial details of daily life, as the stimulation has become the standard. For example, when a preschool teacher walks a child on a walk, the child may not be interested in the smallest things.
For example, when a preschool teacher says, “This bug is beautiful,” or “Let’s play with water” during a walk, some children are not interested at all and do not even try. Compared to the stimulation they get from their phones, they don’t find these things appealing.
The head of the school said.
I feel that children’s interest in playing is waning year by year. I’m not saying it’s all because of smartphones, but what I do feel is that smartphones have had a small impact is when parents come to pick up their children. At the preschool, the children are in a daze and show no interest in anything, but as soon as the parent comes to pick them up and hands them a smartphone, their eyes light up, they look into it, and they are immersed in it. Whenever I see such a scene, I feel gloomy and wonder what preschool means to this child.
I don’t believe that smartphones are absolutely wrong. There are things you can only get from a smartphone. But conversely, there is a power that can only be gained by playing outside. For example, the power of communication, athletic ability, empathy, and self-affirmation gained through physical exercise in the midst of miscellaneous human relationships. A bias toward one or the other could distort the development of a child’s holistic abilities. This is what teachers are concerned about.
More than 33% of one-year-olds use smartphones
How often do Japanese children use smartphones?
According to the “2023 Report on the Internet Use Environment of Youth” by the Agency for Children and Families, 58.8% of children use the Internet when they are 2 years old. 15.7% of children are 0 years old, and 33.1% of children are 1 year old.
The two-year olds are at the age when they are finally beginning to speak in a verbal manner. In light of this, it can be said that many children are familiar with smartphones even before they can speak Japanese.
Some of the preschools interviewed for this report investigated the time and characteristics of children’s smartphone use. The results revealed some surprising findings. The director of one of the preschools said the following.
The longer a child spent on the phone, the more likely he or she was to stay up late and have a disrupted rhythm in his or her life. Moreover, they were significantly more likely to have trouble getting along with the other children around them and to get into trouble. I feel that communication in general is becoming a problem.”
A similar finding can be seen in a paper by Professor Shinichi Kuriyama and colleagues at Tohoku University’s Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization: In a study of 7,097 children, developmental delays appeared to depend on the length of screen time experienced by one-year-olds.
According to the paper, children who had 4 or more hours of screen time were 4.78 times more likely to experience developmental delays in the area of communication and 2.67 times more likely to experience developmental delays in the area of problem solving at age 2, compared to children who had less than one hour of screen time.
If this is the case with 2-year-olds, the problem may become more pronounced with 4- and 5-year-olds. In this sense, the results of the previous survey at the preschool may be considered reasonable.
The headmaster continued, “Another thing I feel is that the children are not being taught in the preschools.
The director continued, “Another thing we found is that children who are considered to have strong developmental traits spend more time on the phone than those who are not. I don’t know if the children spend more time on the phone because they have stronger developmental characteristics or if they spend more time on the phone because they have stronger developmental characteristics. But in a survey we did across our affiliated preschools, that was commonly true.”
Some psychiatrists have noted that prolonged smartphone use can result in characteristics similar to developmental disorders. They say that similar problems are not congenital developmental disorders, but rather that smartphone use interferes with development.
For more details, please refer to this book, but according to teachers in the field, this trend is not stopping, but accelerating. In Part 2, we will take a look at the reality of childcare being replaced by “apps.
Interview and text： Kota Ishii
Born in Tokyo in 1977. Nonfiction writer. He has reported and written about culture, history, and medicine in Japan and abroad. His books include "Absolute Poverty," "The Body," "The House of 'Demons'," "43 Killing Intent," "Let's Talk about Real Poverty," "Social Map of Disparity and Division," and "Reporto: Who Kills the Japanese Language?
