Me, Mini-me, and Me-dia

I have been spending a lot of time with my son who starts school next week (my other two children started their new semester last week). We’ve been doing a lot of things such as playing, ice skating, watching movies, and playing video games. It has been hard finding games that he can play (he’s six). One that he really enjoys is Loco Roco on the PSP. The controls are fairly simple (tilting a 2D screen, and pressing a button to separate or merge your characters), there is very little violence, there are elements of exploration and puzzle solving, and it lends itself well to a cooperative form of play (I help him out when he gets stuck).

What has been very interesting to me in engaging him in different activities, particularly watching movies and playing video games, is how tense his body can get when under “perceived stress” playing the games or emotionally identifying with the characters on-screen. For adults who have built up their “muscle armoring” which help protect or “cope” emotionally with stress, the body has the ability to dampen the physiological effects (http://users.mrbean.net.au/~wlast/emotions.html). However, with my son at his early age, the effects are quite pronounced.

As we become emotionally identified with ideas, objects, and virtual characters, it is interesting to observe how our physiology responds to the threats (and the triumphs) that these ideas/objects/characters face. Fears and anxiety create tensions in the body (fight or flight - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_or_flight), and even success triggers the pleasure system of the brain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine) and alters the biochemistry of the body. Television has been shown to “bypass” the more analytical aspects of the brain. Your metabolism is actually HIGHER when you sit and do nothing vs. watching television. There’s a great article in Scientific American that summarizes many of the studies of television (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0005339B-A694-1CC5-B4A8809EC588EEDF).

We’ve been working towards making my son more aware of the physiological effects of media. We’ve spent some time before making him aware of the effects of junk foods and sugar, lack of sleep, and the need to hydrate. Rather than just saying “NO,” to his requests, we’ve been trying to make him more aware of what he is experiencing in his body (in how he feels, tension in him body, motivations behind feelings, etc.). Interacting with my son also serves to deepen my own understanding on what media does to a person. It is surprising that these basic physiological effects are not brought to children’s’ attention in their early development.