What is virtual autism?
- Virtual autism is a phrase formulated in 2018 by Marius Teodor Zamfir, a Romanian psychologist. He found that children, 0-3 years, who stared at screens for over 4 hours a day, had “sensory-motor and socio-affective deprivation”.
- These activated “behaviours and elements are similar to those found in children diagnosed with ASD [autism spectrum disorder]”.
- Autism is a pervasive development disorder, meaning it affects all areas of early childhood development, including speech, sociability, play, and skill development.
- The nervous system is not ready for screens at an early stage of life.
- A parent or sibling blowing bubbles and a child reaching out to touch them is not the same as the simulated video game on a tablet.
- Children at this age learn a variety of skills as they discover their bodies, simple objects, and the voices of family members.
- By using screens as a substitute for self-soothing or as a distraction, we are destroying five levels of learning, These include
- Interoception (awareness of body cues),
- Sensory learning that is not restricted to the visual,
- Muscle memory to enables a lower-level skill to progress into a higher-level skill,
- Emotional learning, and other forms of learning (including school work, regulation, and problem-solving).
- For a child who has been spending long hours in front of screens and is showing signs of uneven development, there is a combination of ways of reversing the prognosis.
How to treat virtual autism
- Treatment of virtual autism is to be structured by professionals (child psychologists and occupational therapists), but not restricted to the therapist’s office.
- It is about changing the home environment to be more stimulating — letting babies be idle and not having to engage them all the time it can be treated through using various therapies like-
- Play therapy
- Psychomotor stimulation therapy to language stimulation
- Cognitive behaviour therapies.