In the past two years, there have been many early childhood education, interest and musical instrument classes near your home. Although some parents may just want to find a place to "storage" their children, I can feel that parents are becoming more and more involved in "making their children smarter".
"Smart" in the eyes of parents can include many aspects, which should include the executive function (although some parents may not necessarily know this word).
executive function can be defined as a neurocognitive process related to the regulation of target-oriented behavior .
looks a bit complicated. Intuitively speaking, low-level executive functions will reduce academic success rate, health status, financial stability, and increase the possibility of illegal behavior and drug dependence. It is probably what parents say that learning is poor and learning is bad.
execution function involves several specific abilities, such as suppression control and working memory.
Inhibitory control allows people to regulate their behavior, attention, thoughts, and emotions. Working Memory enables people to keep a piece of information in their minds to accomplish specific tasks.
This year, a paper in The Journal of Pediatrics studied whether executive function levels in 2-year-olds will be associated with some healthy behaviors, such as controlling screen time per day within 1 hour and participating in physical activities every day (a data indicator mentioned in the article is moderate to high-intensity physical activities at least 60 minutes a day).
Research found that
(1) Compared with children who spend more time watching mobile phones, flat screens, TVs, and computers, children who have been exposed to the screen for less than 1 hour every day have better performance in overall executive function, inhibition and control, and working memory; compared with children who have participated in less physical activities, children who have participated in more physical activities have better performance in working memory. In terms of the specific mechanism of
, the second result is easier to understand. Physical activities can promote neurodevelopment and cause functional and structural changes in brain regions related to executive function.
But the connection between screen time and execution function is not very clear yet. There are two possible reasons:
(1) Children usually watch some fast-paced, fantasy video programs on their mobile phones and tablets. These programs do not require children to understand the contents too much, which may further affect children's perception of society and the world;
(2) Watching the screen for too long will compress the time of children on other activities, such as participating in physical exercise and sleep, and these activities themselves are related to the improvement of executive functions, so watching the screen for a long time will indirectly cause the decline of executive functions.
So in a simple summary, 2-year-old children should watch the screen less and move more.
I feel that for parents, the advantage of these two methods is that they don’t have to pay extra money, but the “inconvenience” is that they need to spend more time and energy on their children.
Considering that the two measures mentioned in the paper are actually from the American Academy of Pediatrics’ actions to prevent childhood obesity, it should be very "cost-effective" from the results.
References:
McMath, A. L., Iwinski, S., Shen, S., Bost, K. F., Donovan, S. M., & Khan, N. A. (2022). Adherence to screen time and physical activity guidelines is associated with executive function in US toddlers participating in the STRONG Kids 2 birth cohort study. The Journal of Pediatrics.
