A book review of Glow Kids by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras

 Glow Kids by Dr. Nicholas Kadaras, Ph.D.

Professional Reading

In this book Kadaras draws our attention to a growing problem...the addiction many children, youths and adults  are developing to digital media. As children have thinner skulls and scalps to adults and their brain neurons are still developing, he believes that children should have limited or even no exposure to the highly influential computer games currently on the market. He states that education in the States enabled a lot of children to have extra time online, exacerbating the problem of addiction. He believes education should foster the arts, the outdoors, structured play (e.g., lego), human interaction, handwritten stories,  discussion, learning in reading, writing and maths and critical thinking. Children should be taught how to think before computers are introduced to the equation even waiting for children to reach the age of 10. Even the engineers from Apple and Google, he claims, send their children to no-tech schools!

According to Kadaras there are newly defined syndromes emerging from the prolonged exposure to game technology that is deliberately designed to pump up the adrenaline and dopamine levels of the players so that they prolong their engagement. Dangerous levels of these two substances can lead to children losing touch with reality and becoming hyper stimulated.  Humans are not able to process sustained levels of these, i.e., for more than an hour, let alone sessions of 10+ hours.  Children  confuse reality with the game they have been playing, often hearing and seeing characters or patterns/images/sounds from that game when they are no longer playing it. The games can erode their self esteem and create paranoia that, at the worst level, make children susceptible to going on a shooting rampage and at the lowest level manifest as an inability to regulate their emotions and aggression, causing problems within school and their family. Radiation from prolonged digital use can affect the brain itself and potentially give rise to brain tumors and cancer.

Syndromes related to the upsurge of digital time are the likes of ADHD which has increased by 800% in the last 10 years, and the inability to focus on non-digital work,  A kid’s brain on tech looks like a brain on  drugs. There is Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD), and Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP) where reality and the game are confused. Dr Victoria Dunkley researched whether the many behaviours that are on the increase shared the same underlying condition, that of hyper stimulation. She researched ODD, depression, ADHD, sleep disorders, mood disorders, aggression, even autism. The common denominator for what these children had been exposed to between 1994 to 2003 was screens. 

One solution for addiction that Kadaras suggests, is for the child to undergo a digital fast. Here the child is gradually weaned off device time by an hour a day until there is abstinence for 3 further weeks, where device time is carefully reintroduced with tight parameters. He suggests that they should not go cold turkey unless the parents are prepared for rage to be unleashed on the home. He says parents should be able to  refuse the use of tech for their child at school. Studies in America showed that after hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent on the 1-1 device programmes that children found plenty of loopholes to access porn and blocked games, so much so that these device programmes were ceased in favour of quality teacher time. 

In addition, this book also lays out the ways in which the economic interests of the tech industry are often at odds with the needs of our children and the growing mountain of findings from research. The start of the 1-1 device programmes in the states was not well researched and was given over to companies that employed 20 somethings to design dopamine pumping “educational” games to replace quality teaching. It became a money making endeavour that made a lot of executives very rich but did little to assist the education of children. 

I found the chapters on how education has been influenced by digital companies and misguided writers of curriculum, very interesting  as I teach in a 1-1 environment. The research from Dr Vallance in Australia, found that the introduction of laptops and tablets  into classrooms has led to less rigor in the classroom and have taken away from teacher preparation, indicating that laptops “ introduced a great deal of slackness” in teaching and “ made it much easier of giving the illusion of having prepared a lesson.” I have wondered throughout this year why some students, in particular boys,  display such high levels of aggression and an inability to regulate their emotions. After reading this book, I can identify several boys who “act out” their games and actively seek them out  even during class time, looking for loopholes to feed their interest and use tech contrary to the school’s guidelines. These boys become very verbally aggressive and angry with each other and oppositional when redirected to other activities. Their focus drifts to the images playing on the class TV screen, interrupting lessons to comment loudly on the images. Their drawings are of game characters, often hideous troll looking characters.

As a result of reading this book I will survey my students gaming habits and think carefully about how often they are online. I will be explicit about what is to be achieved in a short space of time as they use Google apps.  I will prefer hard copy reading as it is espoused to enable children to analyse text better and will introduce more discussion, arts and construction time as well as keeping the TV screen off until it is needed as a tool.