Tag Archives: children

  By Claudia Ehrenstein DIE WELT/Worldcrunch   BERLIN – Dr. Manfred Spitzer knows that people find his arguments provocative. In his first book, he warned parents of the very real dangers of letting their children spend too much time in front of the TV. Now, in a second book called Digitale Demenz [Digital Dementia], he’s telling them that teaching young kids finger-counting games is much better for them than letting them explore on a laptop. Spitzer, 54, may be a member of the slide-rule generation that learned multiplication tables by heart, but his work as a neuropsychiatrist has shown him that when young children spend too much time using a computer, their brain development suffers and that the deficits are irreversible and cannot be made up for later in life. South Korean doctors were the first to describe this phenomenon, and dubbed it digital dementia – whence the title of Spitzer’s book. Simplistically, the …

Childhood obesity is a growing health concern in the public sphere, but for many of us, it also hits close to home. But while public health campaigns have singled in on parents providing children with unhealthy nutrition options and with poor examples of healthy eating, new research indicates that some of the problem may lie with fast food companies and their overly effective marketing campaigns. A study has found that fast-food logos are branded into the minds of children from an early age. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood obesity has more than tripled over the past 30 years. And perhaps more damning, the government bureau reports that “[the] percentage of children aged 6-11 years in the United States who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 20% in 2008. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents aged 12-19 years who were obese increased from 5% …