What happened to kids playing outside in the fresh air and sunshine, getting exercise and soaking up the vitamin D?
As a health care professional and a parent, I've always been concerned about the health effects of all these electronic gadgets on kids - TV, game boys, computers, mp3s, ipods, cell phones!
Well, I got a first hand experience of seeing what electronic overload is doing to my daughter, which is resulting in limiting her time on these devices.
It used to be that whenever I bought any food I didn't want her getting into, I would find places to hide it in the refrigerator, freezer, pantry, or where ever I thought she wouldn't find it, depending on how badly I wanted to keep her away from it until I was ready to prepare and serve it. There was no hiding place good enough to keep it from her. She found everything.
However, lately there have been foods in the refrigerator or pantry that I bought for her and she never ate because she didn't know they were there. The straw that broke the camel's back, though, was one day this week, I asked her why she didn't have eggs for breakfast. She said we didn't have any. They were right on the shelf where I always keep them!
The nervous system can only take in a certain amount of information at a time. When more information is being directed at us than we can take in, some of it gets filtered out. With all this electronic noise being bombarded at my daughter's nervous system she was not even able to do simple tasks like find food in the refrigerator. Her grades were also down a little on her last progress report, and she got a bad grade on her last geometry test. So now I have my ammunition to limit her use of these devices.
Now, my daughter is not the exception. And I see other kids who are even more tied into electronics than she is.
My concern is that we have a generation of kids, and even adults who have caught the electronic bug, that will be suffering adverse health effects of electronic addiction. We don't even know what all the adverse effects may be. Just like genetically engineered food that has invaded our grocery stores, or the nano particles that have invaded most of the goods on the market today, we are experimenting with things where we don't know all the possible outcomes, some of which could be deadly!
A question I read just the other day seems appropriate here: Will we be the first generation to outlive our kids? A scary thought to say the least.
Share your views.
