The Winter of Our Disconnect

by Susan Maushart

  “Wow. Egg rings! I’ve always wanted egg rings!” I sighed as we passed a display in the kitchen gadgetry aisle.

  “You say that like it’s some impossible dream, Mum. They’re two ninety-five, for crying out loud. Just buy them.”

  The lunacy of it all cracked us up. By the time I had the strength to reach out and take a packet, our faces were streaked with mascara and shoppers were giving us a wide berth. For the next week, we enjoyed a festival of unnaturally round fried eggs. It was as I’d always imagined. They do taste better.

  To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.

  —Walden, chapter 2

  As our overall rate of blobbiness declined—in our eating habits, in our eggs—we also started to firm up the boundaries between night and day, sleeping and wakefulness. At the outset, giving up the 24/7 lifestyle that had featured cruising for eBay bargains at midnight, posting status updates at four a.m., and sleeping with phones under our pillows “just in case” (of what? falling finally into REM sleep?) was a rude awakening for the whole family. Yet it soon became apparent that the less we used our technology to “chill,” the more rest and sleep we enjoyed. For me, that was a real wake-up call.

  It’s not as if I didn’t know that sleep was important to the way we function. The dawn of every day brings a new study about the dangers of “sleep debt.” Like most educated parents, I was well aware of the alarming [sic] evidence that most of us are getting far less sleep than experts tell us we need. It was the direct link we experienced between sleep (or lack thereof) and technology (or lack thereof) that started to sound in my head like a gong. In fact, plugging back into our diurnal rhythms—getting more and better sleep each night—arguably had a greater impact on the quality of our lives and relationships than any other single factor during The Experiment.

  In Sussy’s case, “sleep debt” was too weak a phrase. “Sleep bankruptcy” was more like it. When she’d started fifth grade at a pricey private school—think tartan pleats and hair-extension-destroying berets—and received her own MacBook as part of the school’s laptop program, I’d watched her confidence grow like corn in the night. Bit by bit, her dependence on the laptop did too. The “learning aid” that was genuinely helping her to be a more creative and more productive learner by day was opening a totally different can of worms as soon as she left the classroom. In the months leading up to The Experiment, she was spending virtually every waking after-school hour in its company: slumped on her bed, her fingers flying as she flitted between half a dozen windows of MySpace and Instant Messenger, pausing to check the done-ness of an assortment of music or video downloads.

  I’d wake at two or three in the morning, channeling Madeline’s Miss Clavel (“Something is not right!”) and stumble down the hallway to behold my baby still astare, often in full school uniform, her eyes as wide and glassy as DVDs. Most of the time she surrendered the device wordlessly, though whether from exhaustion or obedience it was impossible to tell. I had noted that her resignation as she handed over the goods seemed mingled with relief, like a five-year-old playing with matches—fascinated but at some level frightened. Half wanting to be caught.

  When we first talked about The Experiment, Sussy warned me she wouldn’t be able to sleep at all without her laptop. I pointed out that she wasn’t able to sleep at all with it. “It’s not like I’m not trying,” she insisted. “I just . . . don’t ... sleep.” I was reminded of the time some years earlier when she declared herself unable to smile for a family photograph. “It’s not my fault,” she wailed pathetically. “I’ve forgotten how!”

  Our Wi-Fi didn’t extend as far as Bill’s room—thank the Lord for low signal strength!—but Anni’s room, like Sussy’s, had a sweet spot if you angled your laptop just right (and trust me, she did, even if it meant hanging sideways off the top bunk). Anni had gone as a scholarship student to the same laptop-centric school Sussy now attended, and she’d been equally vulnerable to the siren song of 24/7 connectivity. The difference was, then there’d been so much less to connect to. The four years between the girls had seen the dawning of the golden age of Web 2.0.The ensuing rise of interactivity and social-networking utilities had turned the Internet from a glorified public library to a transglobal theme park. Forget about heading to the malt shop after school. With the appearance of MySpace the world was their malt shop. It never closed, and it never stopped serving.

  Bill, who was in public school, had never acquired a laptop. His nighttime ritual, pre-Experiment, was all about television. He had the monster set in his room—the only child in our family who enjoyed that dubious privilege—and formed the habit of falling asleep to its comforting flicker and drone. Even if the girls were watching the same show in the family room, Bill preferred to watch his own set—occasionally making a cameo appearance during commercials. Lord knows why he was so attached to it. As described, it was old, and the reception was laughable, despite—or possibly because of—a primitive set of rabbit ears he’d rigged up out of a wire coat hanger. Most mornings when I’d go in to wake him for school, I’d find the television still on, its hectic presence dominating the tiny bedroom like graffiti that could talk back.

  During the midterm interview—in the bleak midwinter of our disconnect—Bill was as uninformative as . . . well, as a fifteen-year-old boy being interviewed by his mother. I was not overly concerned. The impact of the previous three months had been so obvious in Bill’s case, I was really only going through the motions. “Do you miss TV?” I asked him almost as mechanically as he’d been answering.

  “Not really,” he grunted. And then, just as I was ready to move on from this stunning adventure in self-analysis, he added a postscript: “Anyway, I sleep better.” When I pressed him for details, as a mother does, he went all evasive on me again, as a son does. He insisted the phenomenon couldn’t be described. “How can I describe it? I don’t understand the biomechanics of sleep!” he protested—a deliberate misreading of my desire to know more. “I just feel more refreshed after my sleep, okay?”

  Because Bill had always been such a reliable sleeper, generally dropping off (in his own words) “like a man falling into a sewer,” it had never occurred to me to worry about the quality of his sleep. Later, when I read that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends parents remove television sets from their children’s bedrooms, I realized I’d been dreaming.

  As we have already noted, a bedroom television predisposes kids to eat more junk food, read less, and—most obvious of all—watch more TV: four to five hours more a week. The 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study found “more and more media are migrating to young people’s bedrooms,” with more than three-quarters of eleven-to eighteen-year-olds owning a personal TV and a third enjoying bedside Internet access. Twenty-nine percent of Americans eight to eighteen years old own a laptop: the ultimate in wall-to-wall media convenience and increasingly the device du jour for watching video content anyhow. The evidence is incontrovertible: The more time kids spend “screening,” the less time they spend sleeping. Less obviously, the relationship between family meals and sleep is highly correlated too: The more time children spend at family meals, the more time they spend asleep (presumably not simultaneously), according to research published in the Journal of Family Psychology in 2007.

  When researchers Steven Eggermont and Jan Van den Bulck examined the use of media as a sleep aid among 2,500 teenagers, they found that more than a third watched TV to help them fall asleep; 60 percent reported listening to music; half read books, and more than a quarter of boys—but only half as many girls—played computer games. Across the board, teens who fell asleep to music, TV, or the computer screen “slept fewer hours and were significantly more tired” than those who read or used no sleep aid.11 The real question—apart from “How the hell can anybody fall asleep playing a computer game? ”—is Why?

  No one knows for certain why screen-based media seem to wreak havoc with children’s sleep pa
tterns in a way that reading doesn’t. But one hypothesis is that the bright light emanating from computer, TV, or even MP3 screens may interfere with the release of melatonin, a naturally occurring hormone important in the regulation of circadian rhythms.12 The so-called hormone of darkness, melatonin is normally secreted by the pineal gland in the middle of the night, but exposure to light can significantly reduce melatonin levels, which in turn disturbs the sleep-wake cycle. There is also a link, albeit less understood, between melatonin and immune function.

  A Finnish study of more than seven thousand children aged twelve to eighteen found that intensive media usage was associated with poor perceived health, especially (or in some cases only) when kids’ use of technology was interfering with their sleep. Not surprisingly, there was also a correlation with increased daytime tiredness. Among older teens, researchers noted a clear gender divide, with boys most at risk from intensive computer usage, and girls from overuse of cell phones.13

  What’s so important about sleep in the first place? Researchers are only just waking up to the facts themselves, now that the entire developed world is staggering under an unprecedented burden of sleep debt. Recent surveys show that about one-fifth of adults report insufficient sleep. Among teens, the figures are even worse, with as many as a quarter clocking in six hours or less a night, compared with a recommended minimum of nine hours for their age group. Disturbed sleep is associated with a nightmarish range of psychological, social, and physical problems. Teenagers who sleep poorly report more depression, anxiety, hostility, and attention problems. They also struggle more at school, and they are at greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse. Physically, they are more fatigued, less energetic, and more prone to headaches, stomachaches, and backaches.

  The effects of insomnia have been widely studied. The long-term consequences of what researchers call “short sleep”—the real epidemic among our Digital Natives—are less well understood, but are believed to have even broader negative consequences for later functioning involving somatic health, interpersonal relationships, and even general life satisfaction, according to a wide-ranging review of the current literature published in 2009 in the respected Journal of Adolescence.14

  Yet if it’s true, as one recent study found, that only 17.2 percent of young people are actually getting the sleep that experts insist they need, isn’t some degree of sleep deprivation . . . and I hesitate to use this term to describe teenagers . . . normal? Absolutely, note researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center. “Sleep deprivation among adolescents appears to be, in some respects, the norm rather than the exception in contemporary society.”15 For once, when our kids tell us, “But Mum, everybody else is doing it!” they are making a statistically accurate observation.

  Nonetheless, when you dig a little deeper, it’s clear that “normal” is not the same as “the norm”—and neither term necessarily implies “healthy” or “recommended practice.” A generation ago, it was “the norm” for adults to smoke in the car with small children present. Seat belts in those same cars, let alone car seats, were not “the norm.” Now we know better, and we wish they had. Traveling on a plane recently, I watched a Mad Men episode in which an attractive, affluent family eats lunch in a wooded picnic area, circa 1963. When they finished, the impeccably groomed young mother simply shook their rubbish onto the lawn, folded up the blanket, and drove away. It seemed such a heavy-handed period detail—surely no one ever did that? But I am old enough to know that they did. I remember when the anti-littering slogan “Keep America Beautiful” seemed downright radical. In fact, I swear I remember when the verb “litter” appeared for the first time, in 1960. (Yes, okay. I admit it. I Googled it.)

  The “normal” but still mind-blowingly destructive sleep patterns we tolerate today are the result of a huge range of changes in the way we live, from the long-hours lifestyle our jobs demand (or encourage) to the trend toward smaller families and more relaxed household rules. (Behavior that would be untenable in a bigger brood—kids going to bed when they feel like it, for example—can be accommodated when there is only one child at home, or even two widely spaced ones.) Technology is therefore not to blame for our global sleep debt. But the role that it plays in extending and entrenching those dysfunctional patterns within families is significant and, especially as far as our teenagers are concerned, alarming.

  I observed it firsthand in my own household, as we wound back the clock to simulate a simpler and yes, sleepier, era.

  When Sussy returned home in mid-February and surrendered her laptop, she was more square-eyed and exhausted than I’d ever seen her. The six-week stay of execution at her dad’s had been fun, she reported, but also a little lonely. She missed the chaos of kids coming and going, of the pets’ annoying but adorable attention-seeking. And Hazel the Handheld Kitten was a powerful draw card. She may even have missed having her mother breathing down her neck, who knows? (Although she maintained that her father and I were equally strict, only about different things—probably a fair call.)

  Her first reaction to the sensory deprivation tank that we now called our home was to flop heavily on her bed and lose consciousness. This didn’t surprise me much. Before The Experiment, Sussy catnapped like a newborn or a narcoleptic. She napped after school. During school (or so I suspected). Even in the morning, after she’d put on her uniform, when she’d clump back into bed with her black lace-up Oxfords. Or she’d sleep through all of Saturday, waking up at four or five p.m., bright as a button and agitating for a sleepover. Come Monday morning, I’d practically need a forklift to drag her out of bed. She also had a knack for what I thought of as “defensive napping.” If there was time to kill before a big event, or an obligation she preferred to avoid, she could somehow will herself into an accommodating slumber. On Christmas Eve, while the other kids lay wide awake for hours with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads, Suss went out like a blown fuse. “How do you do that?” we’d all beg to know. She’d smile mysteriously. “I just tell myself!” was the only explanation she’d give us. It was all the more magical given that, on a normal night, she was capable of fussing and fighting sleep for hours. “Just friggin’ TELL yourself!” I was often tempted to shriek.

  Now, recovering from a nonelective laptop-ectomy, she channeled her extraordinary capacity for inner hypnotic suggestion once more. But this time, it went way beyond the usual defensive napping. Not only did she sleep until noon, she slept until noon having gone to bed at 7:30 p.m. And she did that not once or twice, but on and off for a month. On the weekends, she was in virtual hibernation, emerging like a bewildered bear cub to seek sustenance (usually at odd hours), or to call Maddi on the landline. Despite this, she also missed some school, pleading tiredness. I tried to discourage this, but there were days when I didn’t have the heart. She seemed so listless, so wrung out.

  Under other circumstances, I would have had her assessed for clinical depression. As it was, I decided to bide my time, choosing to frame it as a withdrawal, not a clinical mood disorder. It was comforting to see that when Suss was awake—admittedly a rare occurrence—she was cheerful. She also stayed in touch with friends after school and her appetite seemed fine.

  Equally important, while the behavior was slightly pathological—or at least way beyond the norm—it also made sense. At one level, it was just another manifestation of the ingenious avoidance tactic she’d perfected years ago. The prospect of life without screens was simply too unpleasant, or perhaps too confusing, for her to confront head-on with full conscious awareness. But I also became convinced that her oversleeping was a way for her body to literally make up for lost time—to pay off a sleep debt that had been compounding menacingly for years.

  Well, that was my theory. And when, at length, she awoke from her torpor by around week five, I’ll admit I felt vindicated. It would be an exaggeration to say Sussy arose like Snow White (albeit sporting hair extensions and DIY fake tan), the spell broken forever. There were no bluebirds twittering from he
r shoulders on a school morning, trust me. But something did, rather suddenly, switch on for her—or off again. On school nights, she started going to bed before eleven, and within another week or two by ten. She allowed herself to be roused by seven—and I no longer had to play my part of human snooze button to make it happen. Most mornings, there was time for breakfast. Sometimes—and here’s where it gets really weird—eaten at the table in the kitchen. On the weekends, instead of sleeping in until noon, one, or even two p.m., she woke up at around 9:30 a.m. “Random!” she cried the first couple of times it happened. “What is wrong with me?”

  The Experiment confirmed my strong suspicion that media had been robbing Sussy of sleep for years. She’d been our family’s most militant multitasker, and the one who’d gravitated to a digital lifestyle at the youngest age. Unplugged, the changes to her sleep patterns, energy levels, and mood were correspondingly dramatic.

  The evidence strongly suggests she is no isolated case. For Generation M, the links between our diurnal habits and our digital ones are as direct as they are disturbing. Add this to the already crumbling boundaries around family diet, and the synergy is unmistakable.

  A 2009 study of one hundred Philadelphia-area children aged twelve to eighteen, published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics—the same respected body that has recommended banning TV from children’s bedrooms—found that kids who spend more time online also drink more caffeinated beverages, with a resulting one-two punch to their prospects of good sleep hygiene. “Subjects who slept the least also multitasked the most,” the authors concluded succinctly.16 Among heavy multitaskers, more than a third took naps after school; 42 percent did so on the weekend; and a third reported nodding off at least twice a day. One child in the study, who slept for an average of five hours a night, reported falling asleep eight times during a typical school day. In the opinion of the researchers, the upshot was a recipe for “changes in school performance, difficulties with executive function, and degradation of neurobehavioral function.”17