Children's mental health in digital world

There is increasing awareness and affirmative action for children’s mental health.

Mental health for children refers not only to prevention and treatment for mental illnesses but also to growing up well and having adequate skills to navigate life challenges. We need to pay attention to everything that supports development and builds resilience.

Mental ill health in children often emerges from suboptimal development and resilience.

Resilience does not imply being immune to illness; it means nurturing children to develop the skills to overcome problems and creating environments that help them to deal with difficulties.

In this brief reflection on children’s mental health, the writer discusses supports for optimal development and the emerging epidemic of excessive engagement
with gadgets. 

A parent brought her 9-year-old daughter for consultation for ‘various fears’. She wondered why her daughter was unable to overcome these ‘child-like fears’, remarking, “My daughter has been shy and fearful, but I just assumed that she would grow out of it. Does that not happen?” This mother’s observation is a mix of truth and misconceptions.

Having some fears is a normal part of childhood, and most children grow out of them. However, children develop best when their environment positively responds and assists their development. Anxious and fearful children tend to retain fears if their parents are also anxious and unable to facilitate the exposures needed to overcome them.

Childhood fears also persist if parents forcefully push the child to face their fears. Supportive, gradual exposure in a playful, rewarding manner helps more. Growing up well requires conscious support and scaffolding. Everyone who engages with children needs to understand their purposeful and intentional roles. As the adage goes, children will not do as told but will do as they see being done. Children learn through imitation and social observation, especially of the adults around them.

If our intention is to support children’s development, we must focus on what we do, how we face challenges, how we talk about problems, and how we seek help. 

An emerging epidemic in children’s mental health is the excessive time they spend on gadgets. Even mental health consultations for children frequently involve these concerns.

How do children get hooked on these devices? If one observes young children, it is evident that the quality of engagement that best holds their attention is characterised by novelty, change or movement, and cause and effect. Anything that children like to do—sit on a swing, play in the sand, explore a new toy, play with their parents—engages them best if something new happens, if the activity involves movement or sensory changes, and if they can produce an effect through their activity.

Gadgets exemplify these engagement characteristics perfectly! Technological advances have made gadgets highly intuitive, so much so that a 2-year-old can successfully operate them. The trouble happens when the time they spend on gadgets or social media starts to increase and their engagement with everything else decreases. Their brains become accustomed to a certain quality of engagement, the absence of which leaves a void that other, ‘slower’ activities cannot fill. 

Gadgets are here to stay. Rather than wish them away, we need to take on a more conscientious role. If we pay attention to how children engage with gadgets when young, we can support their long-term outcomes in engagement with technology. Parents say, “What can I do? My child just doesn’t give up the phone.” The conscientious role starts when children are first introduced to gadgets. How do we do that? Is a child just ‘given a phone’ or is he/she socialised to the phone? Gadgets are ultimately tools of a digital world that children will sooner or later inhabit alongside their real worlds. It, therefore, follows that the socialisation rules that apply to other spaces that children occupy also apply to gadgets in the digital world.

When a child goes to school, parents start by talking about it. Then, along with teachers, they consciously scaffold the child’s entry into and flourishing at school. They don’t  ‘just send the child to school’. Similarly, just giving a gadget to the child is where the problem starts. Children need to be socialised to it and introduced to limits around gadget use from the very beginning. This helps build healthy, positive engagement with the digital world.

As adults who care about and for children, we have to focus on playing more conscientious roles in their individual development and their engagement with the world around them. 

(The writer is Associate Professor at the  Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, NIMHANS, Bengaluru. This is the sixth of a DH-NIMHANS series on mental health)