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What is Virtual Autism?
This is a term coined by Romanian clinical psychologist Dr. Marius Zamfir. This is when a child exhibits autism-like symptoms due to screen-time (around 4-5 hours a day)... How real is this? We don’t know yet… But we do see a huge spike in autism diagnoses in the past 10 years… This might be one of the reasons why. 

Virtual autism doesn’t mean your child is autistic. It means your child will show autism-LIKE symptoms. Recent studies e.g. https://www.afahc.ro/ro/afases/2018/43-CristinaBalan.pdf have shown that getting the child off-screen time reduces the symptoms. In some cases, the symptoms disappear. When this happens, the child is actually not on the autism spectrum but has symptoms of such because of screen time and the lack of parent-child interaction.

Screen Time is Addictive
Let’s face it, you’re probably reading this on your smartphone. Digital well-being is a huge thing for us adults as well, so it’s should be obvious that it’s many times more dangerous for children. I have had students who can’t speak but were able to type “mickey mouse” into Youtube and find the video s/he want to watch. 

We need to remember that gadgets are great for learning when used correctly. However, it can re-wire the brain to crave for more. Whilst it’s well studied that in an adult brain it releases dopamine and makes us want to keep on doing the same thing over and over. The effects of using the smartphone for entertainment purposes are not well studied in a child’s brain. We need to stop our children from becoming screen junkies - they get mad when it stops and would do anything for another hit.

How Children Learn to Use Language
The main problem with watching videos is that the child won’t know how to use the language. That’s because when s/he is watching, you’re probably not interacting. From experience, children who have both high screen time and low parent-child interaction time suffer the most in language delay. 

What this means is, if the child spends a lot of time watching videos, that becomes his/her language environment. Remember Tarzan? He couldn’t speak all that well because there was a lack of human communication. 

Whereas children are learning language from devices, they can count, say the alphabet, sing songs, and remember phrases even. Children or even us learn a language in chunks (gestalt language processing). That’s why children will pick up whole phrases without knowing the meaning of the individual words. Videos facilitate that, we need to teach more variations of language to help the child learn more and different chunks.

The only way for a child to learn how to use the language is through social interaction. It’s one thing to learn the words, and it’s another thing to use to communicate.