In my home, my DS who is 6 years old has no screentime except for Dreambox math and EPGY online once a week. He watches sporting events on TV on rare occasions or a youtube documentary or a Khan academy video. The restrictions are due to the fact that he has had problems sleeping as a toddler and our pediatrician advised us to cut out screentime as it could be one of the factors leading to sleeplessness because of the overstimulation to kids' brains and making it hard for them to unwind.
But, recently, I got into a discussion at my workplace (a tech company where everyone has a pro-tech bias) and a lot of people seem to think that it is old school to restrict access to children to electronics. They believe that playing video games and computer games dramatically improves the processing speed of those kids who are slow to respond to visual and auditory stimuli. And they also believe that small motor control improves with regular usage of a game console. There is some truth to it, I guess. I am looking for information or sources that can back up these thoughts (the discussion was water cooler talk and not serious, but it has made me speculate if there is truth behind it). If this is indeed true, I could implement a restricted usage of electronics for game playing to see if it helps focus and processing speed. Thank in advance.
