Nicholas Kardaras > Quotes

“If you really want a child to thrive and blossom, lose the screens for the first few years of their lives. During those key developmental periods, let them engaging creative play. Legos are always great, as they encourage creativity and the hand-eye coordination nurtures synaptic growth. Let them explore their surroundings and allow them opportunities to experience nature. . Activities like cooking and playing music also have been shown to help young children thrive developmentally. But most importantly, let them experience boredom; there is nothing healthier for a child then to learn how to use their own interior resources to work through the challenges of being bored. This then acts as the fertile ground for developing their powers of observation, cultivating patience and developing an active imagination-- the most developmentally and neurosynaptically important skill that they can learn.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids -- And How to Break the Trance

“Digital vegetables can be a healthy use of screens (researching a term paper), while digital candy (Minecraft, Candy Crush) are hyperarousing and dopamine-activating digital stimulants without any ostensible 'health benefit'.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids -- And How to Break the Trance

“The trap that many parents fall into is in believing that when their kids are hypnotically looking at a screen, they are demonstrating a profound ability to stay focused. after all, they maintain a laserlike attention on the screen, so how can there possibly be an attention problem?”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids -- And How to Break the Trance

“Yet, ironically, the most tech-cautious parents are the people who invented our iCulture. People are shocked to find out that tech god Steve Jobs was a low-tech parent; in 2010, when a reporter suggested that his children must love the just-released iPad, he replied: “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” In a September, 10, 2014, New York Times article, his biographer Walter Isaacson revealed: “Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things. No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer.” Years earlier, in an interview for Wired magazine, Jobs expressed a very clear anti-tech-in-the-classroom opinion as well—after having once believed that technology was the educational panacea: “I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody on the planet. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.”34 Education”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“Unfortunately, it seems that we, as a society, have entered into a Faustian deal. Yes, we have these amazing handheld marvels of the digital age - tablets and smartphones - miraculous glowing devices that connect people throughout the globe and can literally access the sum of all human knowledge in the palm of our hand. But what is the price of all this future tech? The psyche and soul of an entire generation. The sad truth is that for the oh-so-satisfying ease, comfort and titillation of these jewels of the modern age, we've unwittingly thrown an entire generation under the virtual bus.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“What’s more, an ever-increasing amount of clinical research correlates screen tech with psychiatric disorders like ADHD, addiction, anxiety, depression, increased aggression and even psychosis. Perhaps most shocking of all, recent brain-imaging studies conclusively show that excessive screen exposure can neurologically damage a young person’s developing brain in the same way that cocaine addiction can. That’s”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“Socrates did not think much of books and the written word; as a proponent of oral storytelling, he thought the written word would kill our memory skills and make us all bloody idiots: “[It] destroys memory [and] weakens the mind, relieving it of . . . work that makes it strong. [It] is an inhuman thing.”5 In addition to memory atrophy, Socrates was also concerned that books would allow information to be communicated without the author or teacher being personally present.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“As I worked with hundreds of gamers, it became apparent to me that many of these kids were looking for some sort of deeper connection and a sense of purpose. Alienated and adrift in soulless and institutional high schools, the meaning-starved kid finds purpose in a digital fantasy realm of adventure where there are monsters to slay, competitors to vanquish and prizes to attain; there is a soul-satisfying sense of purpose—and, if the games are played with others, a shared sense of purpose. As I treated and talked to my various young clients, another dynamic also revealed itself: escape.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“That's right - a kid's brain on tech looks like a brain on drugs.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids -- And How to Break the Trance

“Most people are shocked to hear that a video game can actually be more potent than morphine. While this is a phenomenal advance in pain-management medicine and treatment of burn victims, it begs the question: just what effect is this digital drug—which is more powerful than morphine—having on the brains and nervous systems of seven-year-olds—or fourteen year-olds—who are ingesting very similar digital drugs via their glowing screens? And, further, if stimulating screens are indeed more powerful than morphine, can they be just as addicting?”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“One professor from MIT made the passionate plea that we must encourage children to develop the ability to think first, and then give them the computer. After that, the sky's the limit. But if you introduce the computer before the child's thought processes are worked out, then you have a disaster in the making”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids -- And How to Break the Trance

“Brain-imaging research is showing that glowing screens - like those of iPads - are as stimulating to the brain's pleasure centre and as able to increase levels of dopamine (the primary feel-good neurotransmitter) as much as sex does. This brain-orgasm effect is what makes screen so addictive for adults, but even more so for children with still-developing brains that just aren't equipped to handle that level of stimulation”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids -- And How to Break the Trance

“Dan went on to describe his WoW-playing experiences. He was so addicted to WoW that he’d play straight through the night and wouldn’t eat, sleep or go to the bathroom; when nature called, he’d simply pee in a mason jar next to his computer. I would eventually find out that peeing in jars isn’t uncommon for World of Warcraft enthusiasts; the addictive gravitational pull of the game is so powerful that they’ve been known to wear diapers, like deep-space astronauts or long-haul truckers, so as to not miss a moment’s playing time.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“In almost every house we’ve been, We’ve watched them gaping at the screen. They sit and stare and stare and sit . . . Until they’re hypnotized by it, But did you ever stop to think, (What) This does to your beloved tot? it rots the senses in the head! it kills imagination dead! . . . it makes a child so dull and blind he cannot think he only sees! —Roald Dahl Excerpt from the Mike Teavee poem from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as sung by the Oompa–Loompas”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“Even if a child can’t experience something firsthand, then at least when he or she reads about it, the process ignites the child’s imagination—another critically important developmental process. But if the child passively views something on a two-dimensional screen, rather than creating his or her own interior imagery of it, the imagery is programmed for them.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“I was amazed that this kind, compassionate, physically fit and respected physician had once been a very unhealthy, overweight and rage-filled video game addict. Interestingly, beyond coming to understand that his video game addiction was ruining his own life, he became aware of some of the darker aspects of tech addiction when he started realizing that many military vets who were involved in violent episodes—homicides and suicides—were also violent video gamers, and that more often than not, they were sleep-deprived gamers.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“Education psychologist and author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds, Dr. Jane Healy, spent years doing research into computer use in schools and, like Jobs, had expected to find that computers in the classroom would be wonderful for learning. Yet she found exactly the opposite and was dismayed by the lack of research indicating any benefit”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“The view of addiction from Rat Park is that today’s flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, hypercompetitive, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel socially and culturally isolated. . . . They find temporary relief in addiction to drugs or any of a thousand other habits and pursuits because addiction allows them to escape from their feelings, to deaden their senses, and to experience an addictive lifestyle as a substitute for a full life.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“without healthy socialization and connection, a rat seemed to be much more vulnerable to addiction.19”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“But the research doesn’t bear that out. In fact, there is not one credible research study that shows that a child exposed to more technology earlier in life has better educational outcomes than a tech-free kid; while there is some evidence that screen-exposed kids may have some increased pattern-recognition abilities, there just isn’t any research that shows that they become better students or better learners.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“video game can actually be more potent than morphine.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“Then there is Attachment Theory, according to which an addict is a person who may not have been consistently and appropriately nurtured in childhood and who then grows up prone to codependence, forming a pathological attachment to an external entity,”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“Let’s all do a little experiment. I ask adult readers of this book to watch the most high-speed and intense two-hour action film they can think of—something that really gets the old adrenaline going, maybe one of Liam Neeson’s Taken movies, let’s say. Or to simply take about two hours to surf the Net—rapidly skimming along as many hyperlinks as they can. At the end of those two hours, pick up any one of your favorite books and start reading. Now notice how far you get before your attention begins to wander. If you’re like most of us, you won’t get too far. It takes time to calm down a hyperaroused nervous system; you can’t just downshift from fifth to first gear. Now keep in mind that, as an adult, you have a fully developed brain and nervous system; your frontal cortex—which controls your executive functioning, including impulsivity—is fully formed. Your adrenal and nervous systems—fully developed. And your attentional abilities have been hardwired since your childhood. Yet you still have a hard time staying focused after just a couple of hours of intense, rapid scene changes in the movie or the rapid content shifting that occurs while you are surfing. Now imagine if hyperarousing screen stimulation was a condition under which you spent the bulk of your time—like the seven-plus hours a day that kids do.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“Let’s all do a little experiment. I ask adult readers of this book to watch the most high-speed and intense two-hour action film they can think of—something that really gets the old adrenaline going, maybe one of Liam Neeson’s Taken movies, let’s say. Or to simply take about two hours to surf the Net—rapidly skimming along as many hyperlinks as they can. At the end of those two hours, pick up any one of your favorite books and start reading. Now notice how far you get before your attention begins to wander.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

“Meanwhile, China has identified Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) as its number-one health crisis, with more than 20 million Internet-addicted teens, and South Korea has opened 400 tech addiction rehab facilities and given every student, teacher and parent a handbook warning them of the potential dangers of screens and technology.”
― Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance