Woodstock psychiatrist schools parents on how media affects their kids
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As technology rapidly evolves, children in this day and age are being introduced to media in many different ways.
Psychiatrist Dr. Shabbir Amanullah gave a keynote presentation at CASS Cares on Saturday, speaking about the issues surrounding media and social media, and how it pertains to children.
Amanullah said the basis for his discussion was to touch on a few different areas, including technology and media.
“We also looked at the process in which (media and technology) evolves,” he said. “For example, look at the television. It took 30 years before it became completely mainstream and everyone had televisions. With the Internet, we didn’t have that time. We were not prepared for the problems that came with it.”
When the Internet became so individualized and personal, Amanullah said things people could do with the medium could no longer be restricted, making children very vulnerable.
“To add to it was a dimension of people exploiting others, with its bullying and sexualized behaviour,” Amanullah added. “When you’re anonymous, you’re more likely to be impulsive … So then the problem is that if anyone is remotely lonely, you’re more likely to do get over the loneliness and, when you do something exciting, there’s an adrenaline rush.
“Once you get used to that rush, how do you control it? That’s the problem with pornography, because it’s similar – they’ve found – to cocaine addiction. Every time a person gets a rush, you like that state but then you crash. If you don’t stop it early, it becomes such a repetitive behaviour that the only source of excitement is pornography.”
Older generations didn’t have access to social media, and Amanullah said that language is very powerful when it comes to giving a title to this form of expression.
“The moment you tell someone this is social media, you’re primed to behave in a way where, even if you don’t like it, you accept it as social, not antisocial,” he said. “So when you react to it, you want to conform to a certain model. But because the Internet is so vast, you have to identify the group you belong to, so unfortunately you don’t identify yourself by what you like. You start identifying yourself by what you don’t like because it’s easier.”
The Internet has been widely available since the mid-1990s, but the way people use the Internet has changed greatly since then. Amanullah said the evolution of the Internet has people becoming disadvantaged in some areas for these “temporary conveniences.”
“In terms of development, it affects it in a major way,” he said. “Children can no longer learn how to cope with face-to-face rejection; they don’t build up resilience.”
Amanullah said it’s important to talk about these issues for a couple of reasons.
“There’s all this research available globally, and for most people that read a piece of research they don’t know who did the research … They don’t know the methodology is sound,” Amanullah said. “You can twist statistics in any way you want, it’s so easy … Only if you know how to ask these questions can you figure out if the methodology is sound or flawed. When you have meetings like this, it helps clarify.”
The last thing, Amanullah said, is if people don’t take stock of where society is with technology, many of the conditions that are found won’t have an effective intervention because people won’t be able to recognize what it is.
“These discussions raise questions about where things stand with the kind of group that schools are struggling with,” he said. “It helps their developmental processes.”