Is smartphone making your kids anti-social?

As a parent it is your responsibility to restrict the unnecessary usage of mobile phones in you kids.

Experts say smartphone addiction may impair the ability of brain functioning of kids.

A new study in UCLA has revealed that increased use of smart phones and lesser time spent for face-to-face interaction leads to the decline in social skills among kids.

Experts also say that kids need more face-to-face interaction for the development of social skills. But when they become more dependent on digital media for social interaction, they spend less time for developing social skills and learning to read nonverbal cues. Patricia Greenfield, a distinguished professor of psychology in the UCLA College, said that many people are looking at the benefits of digital media in education, but not many are looking towards decreased sensitivity to emotional cues, thus losing the ability to understand the emotions of other people.

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This results in the displacement of in-person social interaction by screen interaction and thereby reducing social skills among the kids. Yalda Uhls, a senior researcher with the UCLA's Children's Digital Media Center also accepted their ideas and said that kids can't learn nonverbal emotional cues from a screen in the way they can learn it from face-to-face communication. The research will soon appear in the October print edition of Computers in Human Behavior journal.

Apart from developing social skills there are other health risks of smart phones on kids. Some of these are:

Hampers normal physical and mental growth
Loses emotional bonding with close family members.
May lead to aggressive behavior among kids. An increased rate of ADHD among kids may be related to mobile phone addiction.
Enhances emotional and psychological problems.

As a parent it is your responsibility to restrict the unnecessary usage of mobile phones in you kids. Instead you can keep them involved by spending time with them, make a habit of reading story books and make them get necessary information through books rather than internet, take them to the your relatives houses over the weekend and tell them about the health hazards that may occur due to constant usage of mobile phones. To know more about detrimental effects of mobile phones on health read health hazards of mobile phones.