Cose is a collective composed of child psychiatrists, psychologists, pediatricians, speech therapists and letter teachers.
These children’s specialists organized for action to alert authorities and public opinion to their struggle about the harmful aspects of the overexposure of very young children to screens. They want overexposure to screens to be recognized as a major public health issue.
In their practice, they found that digital media and screens are now ubiquitous in the lives of children and that this had deleterious impact on their own way to interact with others. Some children may present autistic symptoms e.g. delay of normal communication development, excessive motor agitations or conversely very passive.
They also find that excessive exposure to screens may cause problems, such as learning disabilities in children and adolescents. Children are more difficulties to focus, to mobilize their attention. Symptoms can emerge quickly as attention deficit disorders, frustration intolerance or sleep disorders.
For many months several scientific publications and research papers on this topic have been published. For example, Poulain, Peschel, Vogel, Jurkutat et Kiess (2018) have analyzed the effects of screen time and physical activity with school performance among teens aged 10 to 17 years. They conclude that media consumption has a negative effect on school achievement whereas physical activity has a positive effect. Recently, a Canadian study was conducted to assess the direction al association between screen time and child development in a population of mothers and children (Madigan et al., 2019). Descriptive statistics are presented Children were viewing screens a mean 17.09 hours per week at 24 months, 24.99 hours per week at 36 months, and 10.85 hours per week at 60 months. It’s really a lot!
According to the authors, one-quarter of children are not developmentally ready for school entry and an excessive screen time has been associated with various negative outcomes, including cognitive delays and poorer academic performance.
To spread awareness of the risks of overexposure to screen time among people, members of the collective COSE are a regular contributor and commentator for various TV programmes and radio shows. The collective has also contributed an opinion column which has been published in the French daily newspaper “Le Monde” on 16 January 2019.
Finally, they also organize conferences throughout France, in partnership with the association “Joue, pense, parle”. Last year, I had an opportunity to go to a conference. It was in St Herblain and the debate was entitled: Screens from 0 to 6 years, warning danger?
Should you have an interest in this topic I encourage you to look at their website: COSE
Useful words:
Overexposure : Surexposition
Ubiquitous: Omniprésent
To spread awareness: Pour sensibiliser
Opinion column: Tribune
Ressources:
Madigan, S., Browne, D., Racine, N., Mori, C., & Tough, S. (2019). Association Between Screen Time and Children’s Performance on a Developmental Screening Test. JAMA Pediatrics, 173(3), 244. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2018.5056
Poulain, T., Peschel, T., Vogel, M., Jurkutat, A., & Kiess, W. (2018). Cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of screen time and physical activity with school performance at different types of secondary school. BMC Public Health, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-5489-3