María Angustias Salmerón: "If you need your child to carry a mobile phone to go buy bread, it's better not to let them go."

María Angustias Salmerón is one of the most insightful voices on the impact of digital media on child development. A pediatrician specializing in digital health, she argues for the urgent need for regulation because it affects us all. Following her participation in a debate on digital well-being and minors held at the Macaya Palace of the "la Caixa" Foundation, María Angustias Salmerón speaks of recovering social relationships in the face of an increasingly "complex" digital ecosystem and calls for "technology that adds value, educates, protects, and truly serves society."

"We see parents in the park looking at their phones, children in restaurants isolated behind a screen, and people walking down the street without looking at their surroundings. Social relationships are becoming increasingly impersonal." Attitudes such as using a mobile phone as a security tool are also completely inappropriate: "If you need your child to carry a mobile phone to go shopping for bread, it's better not to let them go because you probably think they're not ready yet," she asserts. The pandemic marked a turning point in the physical and mental health of the entire population. Rapid increases in myopia and strabismus, sleep disturbances, changes in eating habits and physical activity—"the list keeps growing." Pornography consumption at very young ages, violent behavior, and various addictions such as cosmeticorexia in eight-year-old girls are other consequences. María Angustias Salmerón explains that this problem with screens is not new. It dates back to the television era in the 1950s, but "now we have devices with which we can watch movies and do many other things anywhere. That's why many pediatricians insist on bringing back the desktop computer: a child is less likely to use it without parental supervision."

Regarding the use of screens in education, this expert emphasizes that "real stimulation—that of the physical world—is much richer than digital stimulation." So, "if you leave a child playing with a screen, they will receive immediate gratification just for moving a finger. On the other hand, if they play with real materials, they will surely look for a partner, experiment with textures, temperatures, colors… In a single activity, they will be developing many skills."

The recommendation is that screen exposure for young children should be "the later the better," and there is no justification for allowing it for teenagers to avoid isolating them from their social circle: "Except for instant messaging, on all other networks we are consuming content, clicking 'like,' doing scroll "It's infinite... It's a system similar to slot machines." And, in reality, "they have more difficulty establishing deep relationships."

Conscious digital disconnection is, therefore, the only way for María Angustias Salmerón. "I think life is short enough for us to ask ourselves what we want to do with what we want to do to guarantee sleep and avoid inappropriate content. Also, avoid constant background noise, because it has been shown to affect the development of short-term memory. The brain needs boredom and silence."

Protecting children involves "legislating with measures like those we use with the pharmaceutical industry, which we ask to demonstrate that the products it puts on the market are not harmful." risks," she concludes.