Greetings in Christ! I regret that I have not kept up with the blog. It has been a busy past few weeks. We had a profound retreat last week at the Ave Maria Farm and I will write up reflections about it soon. Lord willing, I hope to get back to a normal routine now and to continue the discussion about living in modernity. In the meantime, I want to recommend the following article: “Screen Time is Stolen Time.” The endeavor to unplug is far more consequential than we suspect. In the meantime, what a wonderful surprise to find, as we rip our hearts away from the screens, that all around us is a beautiful world.
“The positive effect of screens, even when employed for educational purposes, is either negligible or non-detectable; the damage is huge” (Andrey Mir).
“The time spent with screens in early age is simply “stolen time” from kids’ development. Adults usually tolerate the waste of their time on gadgets, as they think they can compensate for this loss through later efforts. It does not work this way for children. Early cognitive development heavily relies on the plasticity of the young brain. ‘The great periods of brain plasticity . . . do not last forever,’ writes Desmurget. ‘Once closed, they can no longer be resuscitated. What has been spoiled is forever lost'” (Andrey Mir).