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The Youth Mental Health Crisis Needs Our Attention

If the adults are feeling this way, what about our children? 
This brings me to the topic of our kids. How are they to navigate amidst our current state of affairs? Our children have had information overload coming out of the pandemic in addition to the constant change in their routines with school closures.The Surgeon General has described mental health as the “defining public health crisis of our time” and made a mission to address the health crisis that is defining a generation.
A recent CDC reportTrusted Source showed the alarming increased statistics of Emergency Department-related visits associated with mental health diagnoses — anxiety, eating disorders, depression, etc.The call to action for many in the healthcare space is to advocate for solutions that help to prevent, identify, and address these issues in our youths before they are in crisis mode.
I wholeheartedly agree with this approach so that we can bring the right resources to improve the infrastructure for education and literacy, access improvement, and programming development.
But more than anything, we need to address that access to devices and social media at a young age can result in the culmination of what we are seeing today in our preteens and teens.The Sapien Labs recently published a pioneering global study with over 27,000 young adult participants. The conclusion is that the later a young adult receives a smartphone the better their mental well-being as adults.
Much research on child brain development has focused on how neural pathways — or the connections within the brain are made by the stimulation of our senses from an early age.
While it certainly is convenient to hand over our mobile device when a child asks for it, the amount of time spent on a device can potentially be re-wiring those connections that are changing sleep patterns and/or creativity as suggested by this Harvard study.
I saw this in my own children after a limited amount of screen time when they were toddlers — the disrupted sleep that ensued.

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