How screen time is locking up kids vision and causing behavioral issues

On average, children spend a staggering seven to eight hours per day on screens, and one expert is warning that we’re not seeing the full picture of these devastating devices.“Screen time has become the new pandemic and it’s ruining all of our eyes and brains,” Dr.Bryce Appelbaum, board-certified optometrist, tells The Post.He noted that in addition to cognitive, social, and emotional development, screen time negatively affects vision development — and could be partially to blame for the rising cases of behavioral issues.“We get locked in and collapse our periphery and get this tunnel vision, and then we get the dopamine release in our brain, and it makes us want to come back for more and more,” Appelbaum said.So yes, screens are addictive — but the problem he’s pinpointed is that they can also impact kids’ still-developing eyes.

And when kids have functional vision issues, the doc said, the symptoms can look a lot like ADHD.The visual skills needed for screen engagement are vastly different than those needed to engage in a three-dimensional space, he explained.“Vision is intended to guide our movement, not to be staring at these machines all day long,” he said.“We need to maintain that flexibility.

When we’re on screens for too long, our focusing muscles — the inside muscles behind the eyes that make things clear — are literally locked up and under tension.”According to Appelbaum, these inner muscles are not designed to work that hard for an extended period of time, and tasking them with bearing that load leads to inflexible visual systems and inflexible visual thinking.“Children don’t have the brain and vision development to handle staring at screens,” he said.“It’s creating a world of kids with a visual system that’s locked up, causing nearsightedness, mental health and depth perception issues, and poor interpersonal connection because we’re stuck on these 2D devices, inches from our face, blasting all this high-...