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There is a pause button, you know?

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Cris Rowan, a pediatric occupational therapist, was on the Coast on Sept. 23 to give a talk about children and technology, titled Disconnect to Reconnect.

Her main point was that children are spending too much time engaged with leisure technologies – things like social media or video games. Whether it’s on hand-held devices or on stationary consoles in your home, the kids are doing too much of it.

It isn’t just Rowan who’s saying “too much” – she cited statistics from the American Academy of Pediatrics  (AAP) and the Canadian Paediatrics Society (CPS).

“Zero to two-year-olds are using about three hours a day, the three to five-year-olds are using around five hours a day, school entry kids – six to 12-year-olds – are using seven and a half hours a day,” Rowan said. “Our teens – our 13 to 18-year-olds – are using nine hours a day. The duration is too much.”

Recommendations from both the AAP and CPS is about two hours a day max.

“There are four critical factors that kids need to engage in to develop optimally,” Rowan said.

They need to be active, they need physical contact, human connection, and they need to go outside and be in nature. “When they’re exposed to those four critical factors and they get enough of that really good and enriched environment stuff, then we don’t see problems,” Rowan said. “But when they’re not getting any of that – when they’re using technology – they’re sedentary.”

My interview with Rowan came at an interesting time for me because lately I’ve been playing way too many video games.

The thing about video games is that you are challenging yourself somewhat. There are objectives to complete, and some of those require critical thinking to accomplish. I can play video games for most of a day and still feel accomplished because I spent the day overcoming obstacles.

The more I play video games though, the more I want to play even more video games. That feeling of satisfaction from getting to the next level doesn’t diminish over time, it gets stronger.

So I decided to try Rowan’s advice. Last weekend, instead of booting up my console as soon as I woke up, I went over to my parents’ house and had coffee with them.

After coffee, I experienced a strange phenomenon. I didn’t want to play video games, not in the middle of the day anyway. Instead I went for a run in the woods, then I did some stuff around my house. Then I played video games for like five hours and went to bed at one in the morning, but I felt great.

For weeks I’ve felt too tired to do anything with my free time other than play video games, but this week I had way more energy and drive to take care of simple life tasks, like laundry and cooking and getting exercise. I know, what a shocker.

I love video games, I’m not going to stop playing them. I even think they’re beneficial in some ways. But I have to agree with Rowan on this one – a little goes a long way.