by Adam Alter
The M.I.T. psychologist Sherry Turkle has also argued that technology turns children into poor communicators. Take the case of texting, which many children (and adults) prefer to phone calls. Texting allows you to modulate your message more precisely than does speech. If you usually reply “haha” to a joke, you can write “hahaha” to signal that this one is particularly funny—or “HAHAHAHA” if the joke is uproarious. If you’re angry, you can reply with the dismissive “k,” and if you’re furious you can choose not to respond at all. To shout, use a single “!,” and to exclaim loudly, use “!!” or even “!!!!” There’s a mathematical precision to these signals—you can count the number of “ha”s or “!”s—so texting is ideal for the risk-averse communicator who worries about miscommunicating. The significant downside is that nothing is spontaneous and very little is ambiguous when you follow the rules of text-speak. There are no non-verbal cues; no pauses and lilts and unplanned giggles or scoffs to punctuate your partner’s message. Without these cues, children can’t learn to communicate face-to-face.
Turkle illustrates the limitations of cell phone communication by recounting an observation that comedian Louis C.K. shared with Conan O’Brien in 2013. He explained that he was not raising children; he was raising the grown-ups they’re going to be. Phones, he said, are “toxic, especially for kids.”
They don’t look at people when they talk to them. And they don’t build the empathy. You know, kids are mean. And it’s because they’re trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, “You’re fat.” And they see the kid’s face scrunch up and they go, “Ooh, that doesn’t feel good to make a person do that” . . . but when they write, “You’re fat,” then they just go, “Mmm, that was fun. I like that.”
For Louis C.K., face-to-face communication is essential, because it’s the only way for kids to appreciate how their words affect other people.
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As I write this, two weeks ago my wife gave birth to our first child. Sam Alter was born into a world of screens. The screen on his baby monitor carries our voices and faces to his room. The screen on my iPad introduces him to his grandparents and uncle and cousins around the world. The TV in our living room delivers moving pictures and sounds as we soothe him to sleep. In time he’ll learn to use the iPad and the TV himself. Then he’ll learn to use computers and smartphones, and whichever soon-to-be-invented devices come to define his generation as computers and smartphones define ours. In many respects these screens will enrich his childhood: he’ll watch videos, play games, and interact with people in ways his ancestors considered science fiction. But there’s a good chance they’ll also detract from his childhood. Two-dimensional screen worlds are poorer versions of the real thing. Social interactions are watered down, and there’s more room for spoon-feeding and less room for imagination and exploration. As Andy Doan told me, the time we spend with screens as children goes on to influence how we interact with the world for the rest of our lives. It’s easier to strike the right balance earlier than to correct unhealthy patterns later.
One subgenre of YouTube videos shows how infants respond to screen time: they don’t know how to use magazines. One of these videos has over five million views. It shows a one-year-old girl who swipes an iPad screen like a pro. She navigates from one screen to the next and squeals happily as the device responds to her will. The swiping gesture that Apple introduced with its first iPhone in 2007 is as natural to her as breathing or eating. But when she sits in front of a magazine, she continues to swipe, becoming frustrated when the inert photos before her refuse to resolve into new ones. She is among the first humans to understand the world this way—to believe that she has limitless command over the visual environment, and the ability to overcome the staleness of any experience by welcoming its replacement with a dismissive swipe. The video is aptly titled, “A magazine is an iPad that does not work,” and the comments below the video ask questions like, “Can you explain why you’d give a one-year-old an iPad?”
iPads make the job of parenting much easier. They provide renewable entertainment to kids who like watching videos or playing games, so they’re a miracle for overworked and under-rested parents. But they also set dangerous precedents that are difficult for kids to shake as they mature. reSTART’s Hilarie Cash has firm views on the subject. She isn’t puritanical, but she’s seen the effects of overexposure firsthand. “Kids shouldn’t be exposed to screens before the age of two,” she says. Their interactions, Cash argues, should be direct, social, firsthand, and concrete. Those first two years set the standard for how those kids will interact with the world when they’re three and four and seven and twelve years old, and so on. “They should be allowed to watch passive TV till they reach elementary school—around age seven—when they should be introduced to interactive media, like iPads and smartphones,” Cash says. She also suggests limiting screen time to two hours per day, even for teenagers. “It’s not easy,” she admits. “But it’s critical. Kids need sleep and physical activity, and family time, and time to use their imaginations.” Those things can’t happen when they’re lost in screenworlds.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) agrees with Cash. “Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2,” the AAP advised in an online report. “A child’s brain develops rapidly during these first years, and young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens.” That may be true, but abstinence is a lot to demand when screens are everywhere. Even in 2006—four years before Apple introduced the first iPad—the Kaiser Foundation found that 43 percent of children under two watched TV daily, and 85 percent watched at least once a week. Sixty-one percent of children under two spent at least some time each day in front of a screen. In 2014, an organization called Zero to Three reported that 38 percent of children under two years of age had used a mobile device (compared to 10 percent in 2012). By age four, 80 percent of children had used a mobile device.
Zero to Three takes a softer approach than the AAP, acknowledging that some screen time is all but inevitable. Rather than banning screens outright, Zero to Three recommends specific kinds of screen time. Its report begins:
A robust body of research shows that the most important factor in a child’s healthy development is a positive parent-child relationship, characterized by warm, loving interactions in which parents and other caregivers sensitively respond to their child’s cues and provide age-appropriate activities that nurture curiosity and learning.
The AAP obviously agrees: its statement on infant media consumption ends with the words “young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens.” The difference between them is that Zero to Three acknowledges that children can develop healthy interactions with screens, as long as parents are involved as well. Instead of banning screens, it lists three major qualities of healthy screen time.
First, parents should encourage their children to connect what they see in the screen world to their experience of the real world. If an app asks children to sort wooden blocks by color, parents might ask those children to label the color of clothes as they sort the laundry together. If an app presents wooden blocks and balls, children should play with real wooden blocks and balls afterward. No experience should be confined to a virtual world that was designed to mimic reality. This screen-to-reality bridging is known as transfer of learning, and it improves learning for two reasons: it requires children to repeat what they’ve learned, and it encourages them to generalize what they’ve learned beyond a single situation. If a dog on the screen is the same as a dog on the street, the child learns that dogs can exist in many contexts.
Second, active engagement is better than passive viewing. An app that requires children to act, remember, decide, and communicate with their parents is better than a TV show that allows them to absorb content passively. Slower-paced shows, like Sesame Street, encourage participation and engagement, so they’re superior to faster-paced shows
like SpongeBob SquarePants (which isn’t designed for children under five). In one study, four-year-olds who watched SpongeBob (rather than a slower-paced educational cartoon) for nine minutes struggled to remember new information and resist temptation afterward. Consequently, the TV should rarely be on in the background, and TV time should be separated from the rest of the day.
Third, screen time should always focus on the content of the app rather than the technology itself. Children who are watching a story unfold should explain what they think might happen next; to point to and identify the characters on the screen; and to move slowly enough through the process that they aren’t overwhelmed by navigating the technology. To the extent possible, a screen-based story should mimic the experience of a book.
Like younger children, adolescents tend to be vulnerable to addiction. reSTART uses the metaphors of dieting and environmental sustainability to describe when and how often older children should interact with screens. Cash told me that she preferred not to use the term “addiction,” which implies all the trappings of disease. Instead, the center adopts the language of the environmental movement. Its homepage declares that reSTART is a “Center for Digital Technology Sustainability,” and that it teaches people to live sustainable lifestyles. The center is a “retreat” rather than a treatment facility. “It’s impossible to avoid technology altogether, so our aim isn’t to teach our clients to go cold turkey,” Cash told me. “We teach people how to problem solve, which isn’t a traditional form of therapy.” Cash explained that problem solving was critical, because the treatment plan lasted only forty-five days. After that, the boys were on their own.
reSTART’s treatment plan has three phases. During the first phase, the patients aren’t allowed to use technology at all. They go through detox, which typically lasts around three weeks. “Some of the guys are very resistant, but others embrace the process,” Cash said. “We can usually tell by the end of the first phase who will benefit from the treatment, and most of them do.” For the remainder of the first phase—another three or four weeks—the boys continue to live at the center. They learn the basic life skills that many of them lack, like cooking an egg, cleaning a toilet, making their beds, and, most important, managing their emotions. (One of the boys told me that he had played several games of chess since joining reSTART, and they usually ended when he threw the loaded chess board in anger.) They also learn to exercise and to embrace nature, which is a big part of reSTART’s philosophy: if you’re going to strip away a major component of their lives, you have to replace it with something that engages them and allows them to escape technology. Cash’s cofounder, Cosette Rae, told me that her husband leads nature walks. reSTART is nestled in a large forest, but beyond that the boys also hike nearby Mount Rainier. They train at the center’s gym every day, and many of them become quite fit. Cash cited an independent study, which found that 78–85 percent of the boys improve over this initial phase.
During the second phase, the recovering patients move into halfway houses that are similar to the houses managed by Alcoholics Anonymous. There they learn to apply the skills they learned at reSTART. They apply for jobs or volunteer positions, or they take college classes. The houses run according to stringent rules, and the patients receive support from reSTART in exchange for showing up at the center for regular outpatient check-in appointments. I asked Cash whether the program had been successful, and she told me that it had, but that she couldn’t provide firm numbers. reSTART is small, and the nature of each boy’s problem is slightly different, so it’s difficult to measure relapse rates. A graduate student was in the process of working with Cash and Rae to implement a more rigorous measurement plan.
The third and final phase begins when former patients are ready to return to life without supervision. Many of them stay in Washington, near the center, which allows them to check in with the center every few weeks or months. Since they come from all over the country, and occasionally from outside the United States, they’re also less likely to be tempted by old habits if they avoid the people and places that characterized their former addictions. (Remember the Vietnam vets who escaped their heroin addictions when they returned home from Vietnam.) Isaac Vaisberg discovered this the hard way when he returned home after his first visit to reSTART, and couldn’t resist playing World of Warcraft. He decided to stay nearby after leaving the center for the second time, and he still lives a short drive from reSTART.
Most teens don’t need to spend time at a facility like reSTART, but their parents still worry about how they interact with games and social media. Catherine Steiner-Adair, the psychologist I mentioned in chapter 1, interviewed thousands of teens and their parents to formulate a set of basic parenting principles. The teens, she explained, react badly to parents who are “Scary, Crazy, and Clueless.”
Scariness comes in the form of rigid, judgmental intensity. As parents become more worried, their claims naturally escalate. Statements like, “You’ll ruin your chances for college!” or “You will never bring that friend into this house again!” are guaranteed to alienate kids. Crazy parents overreact when their children come to them with problems. Steiner-Adair describes the case of a twelve-year-old girl who received a hurtful email from her friend. “She couldn’t talk about things like this because mom always had a way of ramping up the drama on everything. ‘She’ll say “that’s horrible!” and then get started, and then I not only have my friend to deal with but my crazy mother, too.’” It’s clear that the girl’s mother cares—she wants her daughter to feel better—but her instinctive, escalating response makes the problem worse. Clueless parents, on the other hand, are objects of pity. They either don’t understand the lives their children lead, or they find it overwhelming. “A clueless parent tries too hard” to befriend his kid, says Steiner-Adair. “He misses cues, often engaging over superficial things while failing to have meaningful conversations with his child about life values and about expectations and consequences.”
In contrast to the scary, crazy, and clueless parents are those who are “Approachable, Calm, Informed, and Realistic.” They understand that social media is a part of the real world. Sometimes their children will be upset, but overreaction makes the problem worse. These parents take the time to understand how their kids interact with social networking platforms. They ask non-judgmental questions of their kids and do their own research. They also impose boundaries, creating the sort of sustainable relationship with tech promoted at reSTART. The family engages in meaningful offline conversations, and at certain points in the day, everyone is offline together. Some of these ideals might seem obvious in the abstract, but they’re not always easy to achieve in the heat of the moment. Steiner-Adair’s mantra—Approachable, Calm, Informed, Realistic—is a useful rule of thumb when tensions rise.
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So far, the U.S. government has chosen not to intervene on the relationship between children and behavioral addiction. There are no state-sponsored treatment clinics, perhaps because a relatively small percentage of addicted children need psychiatric help. The East Asian response to behavioral addiction, particularly in China and South Korea, has been far more adventurous than the U.S. response. In 2013, two Israeli filmmakers released a documentary called Web Junkie. For four months, Hilla Medalia and Shosh Shlam interviewed doctors, patients, and parents at an Internet addiction treatment facility in Beijing, China. Several years earlier, China had become the first country to declare Internet addiction a clinical disorder, labeling it “the number one public health threat” to its teenage population.
There are more than four hundred treatment centers in China, and, according to the country’s definition of Internet addiction, more than twenty-four million teen Internet addicts. Medalia and Shlam visit one of these centers, the Daxing Camp at Beijing Military Hospital, where they speak to the doyen of Internet addiction treatment in China, Professor Tao Ran. Ran is a soft-spoken psychiatrist who nonetheless inspires hatred in the center’s
patients. Most of them have been tricked into visiting the center, where they spend three or four months as involuntary inpatients. They are forced to take a regimen of pills and to march in military formation, even as temperatures plunge in the midst of the harsh Beijing winter. Their parents, many of whom weep openly on camera, commit their sons (and occasionally daughters) because they feel they have no other option. Early in the documentary, Professor Ran explains the problem and his role as the center’s director:
Internet addiction is a cultural problem among Chinese teenagers. It has surpassed any other problem. As a psychiatrist, my job is to determine if this is a disease. We notice that these children have a bias towards virtual reality. They think the real world isn’t as good as the virtual world. Our research shows that addicts spend more than six hours a day online, not for the purpose of work or studying . . . some kids are so hooked on these games that they think going to the bathroom will affect their performance. So they wear a diaper. They are the same as heroin addicts—they crave and look forward to playing every day. That’s why they call it “electronic heroin.”
Later, Professor Ran implies that the problem is structural—that it isn’t a disease, and that it lies with society. He meets with a group of parents in a small, depressing room at the center. “One of the biggest problems among these kids is loneliness. Loneliness. Did you know they feel lonely?” he asks, speaking through an oddly echoing microphone that seems better suited to an arena. One parent replies, “I think it’s because they’re the only child in the family. And as parents we fail to make friends with our children. We only ask them to study hard. Their stress, their worries, their pain—we can’t see any of it. We care only about their studies.” Ran agrees. “So where do they look for their friends? The Internet. The virtual world has all sorts of grand audio and visual extravaganzas. Simulations that you won’t be able to find anywhere else. It becomes their best friend.” It’s clear that Professor Ran is ambivalent about the nature of Internet addiction. On the one hand he forces his patients to take psychotropic drugs, while on the other he implies that it isn’t a disease at all. When a society churns out millions of lonely, overworked children, why wouldn’t they turn to a boundless source of companionship and escape? That seems like a rational response to their disaffection. What brings about their undoing isn’t that they’re suffering from a disease, but rather that this digital world is so clearly superior to the real world they’re supposed to be inhabiting instead.