Chilling Warning For Parents As MRI Scans Show Phones Are Damaging Kids' Brains | 10 News+

0:00 This is a special 10 News Plus program. We've seen the meltdowns when kids are pried away from screens, but frightening new data shows those devices could be causing deeper problems. Tonight, the experts call to radically change the rules. I'm sorry, but you can't have iPad. Parents, we already know it. Excessive screen time, excessive emotion. But what if it's much worse than that? Can you see the screen all right? This is five-year-old

0:46 Rose. She was one of 60 kids to undergo an exhaustive study in the US using an MRI machine to scan the brains of kids aged three to five years old. The results? Truly shocking. Interactive screen time. causes a loss of white matter in the brain. Well, in the simplest terms, we could actually refer to some measure of brain impairment or brain damage. Professor Mike Nagel from the University of the Sunshine Coast has spent a career studying child brain development. So white matter in the brain is a material called myelin. So what myelin does is it wraps around the axons of neurons and acts like an insulator or conductor, not too dissimilar to the plastic coating of a wire. So if we're seeing definites

1:33 in myelin production early in life, we're probably seeing deficits in neural connectivity. The study shows the more screen time a child is exposed to, the greater the loss of white matter. Can you remember your first reaction to those results, not only as a professional in this field, but as a father. My gut reaction was, wow. I was not anticipating seeing anything like that. It hadn't occurred to me at the time that something as little as, and it said two hours a day, was having such a profound effect on the white matter associated with sort of language development. And by association, literacy, it was a shock, to be honest. He also believes big data backs it up. In 2010 smartphones became mainstream and affordable. Apps and social media exploded. So now we can track the impact.

2:22 Psychological distress in our teenagers has skyrocketed. And look at the dates. It's all after the 2010 smartphone revolution. Mental illness through the roof. Hospitalisations for mental health. Girls up 81%. Self-harm. huge increases for kids aged 10 to 12. The percentage of children sleeping less than seven hours a night, look at that, all since 2010. The only graph that goes down the time kids spend with their friends face to face. Hello, how are you? I'm good, thanks. It's great to finally see you. Good to see you as well. Thanks for your patience. Professor Hutton is a man in demand.

3:08 it was his research that proved the link between screen time and the loss of white brain matter. Yeah, I think, I mean, it's really the elephant in the room. It's such a, to me, an obvious relationship. John, what is your fear if we don't address it? The fear is just losing a generation of kids, just kids growing up not meeting their potential. The continued rise in self-harm and body image disorder, anorexia, bulimia. Smoking causes mouth cancer. The professor believes screen time will be what smoking was to a previous generation. For decades, we pretended like smoking, you know, everyone kind of knew that it was probably harmful, but, you know, the industry pushed back and said, no, this is, it's not. I think the same thing is going to come down the road for devices. But I think we are at risk of

3:56 really having a lot of kids and a whole generation that's going to struggle unnecessarily. As a parent, there are already more than enough dangers to navigate, but clearly screen time is something we need to pay attention to. So what should the guidelines be? How much of this is too much? In fact, is there any safe limit at all? So what is the balance, Mike? What is the right balance? Well, you know, that's the million dollar question. There really isn't any necessity for a child from zero to eight to be using screens on a regular basis. The advice from our experts, no devices in the bedroom, no devices at mealtime, that's adults included. No interactive screen time for any child up to the age of five. For older

4:46 kids up to 12, no more than 30 minutes a day. Limits for teenagers, well, that's easier said than done, right? But fear not, there are more extreme options. If they knew full well what they were in for, they got a bit of a rude shock.