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Language Therapy as a Game
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===Watching Movies Undermines Therapy=== None of the popular children’s programs, not even the educational ones, like Sesame Street, develop voluntary imagination. All the developmental activities we talked about in the previous chapter require that the child focus his mind on creating new mental images. Watching a video blocks this effort and replaces it with readily manufactured ones. What’s worse, watching videos becomes an addictive habit with some children. They get used to the instant gratification of artificial imagery and refuse to do the mental work necessary to develop voluntary imagination. The critical period for combinatorial language acquisition lasts approximately between the ages of two and five. That’s only three years or about 1000 days, and it can be shorter in some children. During this time, the brain is building neural pathways every second of every day. Language pathways compete for molecular building blocks with the pathways leading to nonverbal existence. The early signs of autism are proof that the nonverbal pathways are “winning,” and therapy is an attempt to reverse this process. Can an hour of screen time a day make a difference? It can and it does. It makes no sense to give the other side a break when we’re already behind. To measure the impact of TV and video watching on voluntary imagination, we observed 3,227 children between the ages of two and five over a period of three years. All else being equal, the children who watched videos 40 minutes a day or less improved their MSEC scores on average by extra 40 percent, compared to the children who watched 2 hours a day or more. Is 40 percent worth fighting for? When you recall that each MSEC point represents a critical milestone on your child’s way to combinatorial language, the answer is obvious. If we can shave off another point or two by eliminating the last half-hour of daily screen time, that’s the best bargain we will make in our lifetime.
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