The Self-Driven Child

by William Stixrud

  If your child is not learning from his teacher, acknowledge this without blaming the teacher. “Mr. Cooper is doing the best he can. He just doesn’t know how to teach you the way you learn.” Encourage your child to think of what will motivate him to master the material being taught in the class anyway.

  Remind your child of the big picture, that grades matter less than the ways he or she develops as a student and person.

  Resist the pressure to push your child if he’s not ready, be it reading in kindergarten, algebra in eighth grade, or AP classes in high school.

  Create an advocacy group made of up teachers, parents, and kids to talk about what you can all do to make school a less stressful experience. Consider advocating for brain-friendly experiences in school such as exercise, the arts, and meditation.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wired 24/7

  Taming the Beast of Technology

  PARENTS HAVE ASKED us a lot of questions over the years. Some are anchored to a particular cultural moment: How should I talk to my ten-year-old about terrorism? A few seem to come up over and over: How can I help my child who doesn’t like to read work around his dyslexia? How can I get him to do his homework? But if we made a graph of the questions we hear most often over time, it would show the rapid rise of one in particular: How can I get my kid to stop playing video games every second he’s not in school?

  It was tough enough for parents in the 1980s and ’90s, when games had to be connected to the family television or purchased cartridge by cartridge for a prized handheld device. At least then consoles and televisions could be locked away and were off limits during dinnertime, sleep time, and schooltime. But now that a critical mass of young people have their own smartphones—about 73 percent of thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds, according to a recent Pew study1—it’s gotten a lot harder to get kids to limit the time they spend on video games, texting, and social media. By the time they’re seven, most American kids have spent the equivalent of one full year 24/7 in front of a screen.2 While only 35 percent of teens socialize in person after school, and almost as few speak on the phone to one another, 63 percent exchange text messages daily.3 Kids between the ages of eight and ten use screens seven and a half hours a day, which is high enough, but then that number jumps to eleven and a half hours for kids ages eleven to fourteen.4 This means that most of this generation’s social and cognitive development is happening through a screen. Technology addiction is the new norm for young adults, many of whom will actually panic if they are unable to use social media for as little as a few hours.5 Some parents are left befuddled by it all. Adam Pletter, a psychologist and the creator of a program that educates parents about the technologies their kids are using, points out that making decisions about kids’ use of technology is unlike other parenting decisions because parents know relatively little about the tools they’re placing in their children’s hands.

  One father of a technology-addicted seven-year-old recently approached Ned after a presentation. He was beside himself with concern for his son, who spent every waking moment—and many when he should have been sleeping—playing video games.

  “I’ve begged him. I’ve threatened him. I’ve bribed him. Nothing,” he said. “He’s in his room all day. He doesn’t talk to me or his mother or his brother, he just yells things at strangers on the computer.”

  The game itself wasn’t his main concern; it was the fact that his son was isolating himself and wasn’t talking to anyone in the family.

  Technology is an incredible tool with the great power to enrich lives, but the things it displaces—family time, face-to-face interaction with friends, study time, physical activity, and sleep—are invaluable, and the way technology trains the brain to expect constant stimulation is deeply troubling. In Adam Alter’s book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, he makes the condemning point that many of those who work in technology and best understand its power don’t want their kids using it.6 Many of them send their kids to Waldorf schools, which ban technology from the classroom and make a point of actively discouraging it at home up until the age of twelve. The king of tech himself, Steve Jobs, was careful to limit his kids’ technology use, and wouldn’t get iPads for his own kids. Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, told Nick Bilton of the New York Times: “My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech. . . . That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”7

  Devices are constantly evolving. Technology moves fast, and we’re learning more about its impact all the time. But we already know more than people realize about what constant technology use does to young people’s brains. Some think video games can save the world, and others are convinced that technology is poisoning us. This chapter will explore the science behind both points of view.

  Technology can be daunting (Snapchat replaced Instagram which replaced Facebook and now I don’t even know what’s up. . . . Or is it WhatsApp?), frustrating (My kid was doing better until the latest Minecraft came out; now it’s like we’re back to square one), and it can inspire a feeling of helplessness (How can I deny my kid a phone when everyone else her age has one?). We’ve heard it all. But it also represents a great opportunity. Think of it as a beast that, when tamed, can bring joy and possibility into your child’s life. Learning to tame the beast is a powerful skill—one that will stay with them for years to come. The key is to teach your kids how to stay in charge.

  Teens find it thrilling to be constantly connected. Forget love letters or surreptitious notes: they can now reach one another instantaneously, anywhere at any time. A friend with an au pair marveled at how technology eased the au pair’s transition to a new country. She was just eighteen and far away from home for the first time but she could join WhatsApp groups to conveniently meet up with other au pairs (an instant community) and post photos to Instagram so her parents and friends back home could keep up.

  You don’t have to be living across the world from your family to benefit from social media. Shy kids are often more forthcoming when they interact online, and kids can get help with schoolwork through study groups and note sharing.8 Others who might feel marginalized or alienated can connect online with a community of people who are more like them.

  Even as recently as a few years ago, it seemed like children and teenagers who spent a lot of time on video games would have nothing to show for it as they got older, but the landscape is changing as video games are now part of a $20-billion industry. This means that there are many jobs and that gamers can make a living doing something connected to their passion. At video-game competitions, the total “purse” might be worth millions of dollars. Bill consulted with a brilliant twenty-one-year-old who spent many hours a day playing an interactive strategy game. He was in the top 1 percent of players in the world, but in his words, he was nowhere near being good enough to play professionally. His plan was either to become an agent who represents top game players, or to get the training and experience necessary to be able to do play-by-play commentary for the gaming competitions.

  Many video games are “hard fun,” exercising cognitive skills like pattern detection, eye-hand coordination, and hypothesis construction, which may explain why a study at Beth Israel found that laparoscopic surgeons who played video games for more than three hours a week made 37 percent fewer surgical errors than their nongaming peers.9 Daphne Bavelier, one of the preeminent researchers in this area, points out that action-game players have to make fast decisions, divide their attention, and then switch quickly to a single narrow focus of attention. In the lab, she and her team have found that people who play action (first-person shooter) video games between five and fifteen hours a week have a better ability to perceive salient details and to remember landmarks. Gamers are better able to filter out irrelevant information.10 Bavelier has reported that gamers als
o appear to be more efficient at multitasking. (Though this is still not as efficient as doing one thing at a time.)11

  Game designer, speaker, and writer Jane McGonigal, an unabashed advocate, argues that people who game extensively develop four useful characteristics: 1) urgent optimism—the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, accompanied by the conviction that they can be successful; 2) enhanced sociability—research suggests that we like people better after we play a game with them, even if they’ve won, because playing a game together builds trust; 3) blissful productivity—we’re happier working hard to win than we are relaxing or goofing around; and 4) epic meaning—gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions. These four superpowers, says McGonigal, result in “superempowered hopeful individuals.”12 Just imagine what we could accomplish if we could channel this energy for the good of the planet.

  From a brain science perspective, video games produce spikes in dopamine and induce a state of flow. They require kids to focus and to think hard for long periods of time. For many children, electronic games are the single most powerful venue through which they experience a sense of control. Game designers have long programmed games that induce “total immersion” by adjusting the difficulty of the game to the skill level of the player—creating a perfect setting for concentration, effort, and involvement. They also offer up a safe environment in which mistakes are never shaming and are instead a means to learn new skills and become a better player. Scientists have concluded that gaming satisfies the needs for competence and a sense of control—and that multiplayer games satisfy the need for relatedness. (It’s worth remembering what we learned in Chapter Five, that all these things are important drivers of motivation.)

  But much work is still to be done in this area, and there is no compelling evidence yet that the sense of control and motivation one feels when playing video games translates to real life. And with the exception of the improved surgical ability, there is no evidence that gamers will complete non-game-related tasks or assignments with greater focus or accuracy. Even McGonigal acknowledges that the four qualities of gamers don’t show up much in the less action-packed world we actually live in.

  What we do have evidence of is that technology is changing our brains. The most recently evolved, “plastic” parts of the brain change in direct response to experience. Because of technology, today’s kids have a better memory for visual images and a greater facility for learning how to navigate and decode the digital world by doing it. Digital bombardment has changed the way that children process visual information, and even how they read. Reading used to be linear—there were no distractions, it was just line after line, page after page after page. Now anyone who spends significant time on a computer reads differently. They look for keywords, for links. They skim. Maryanne Wolf, a scientist whose book Proust and the Squid is one of the best books written about reading and the brain, has seen these changed patterns in her own brain. After a day of computer work, she tried to read a lengthy and complicated novel. “I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed,” she said.13 This change of reading style is affecting everyone, but children—who are growing up with iPads instead of books, with Wikipedia instead of the encyclopedia—are most impacted.

  Research psychologist Larry Rosen and education consultant Ian Jukes have concluded that, due to their exposure to technology, kids’ brains work “completely differently” from their parents’ and from kids’ brains of previous generations. One of the manifestations of this change is that many kids can’t stand a minute of boredom or tolerate doing just one thing at a time.14 Interestingly, though, the more primitive parts of our brains are not much different than they were a hundred thousand years ago. Our stress response is about the same as when our ancestors faced off with woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. Our amygdala still activates and starts the same freeze-flight-or-fight response. The brain systems that help infants develop secure bonds with their parents still depend on face-to-face interaction. The ones that run our biological clocks and determine our need for sleep also haven’t changed much. What this means is that while technology may be changing parts of our brains for the better, it’s chipping away at things that the other parts of our brain need. Which leads us to the downsides.

  Technology’s Downsides

  In 1881 (yes, that far back), a physician by the name of George Beard offered up a theory as to why more and more Americans were suffering from nervousness. His main culprit was technology: new “conveniences” were making life go faster—like the railroad and telegraph—and making people pay more attention to small details—like the pocket watch.15 It’s well known that technological breakthroughs commonly create more work rather than freeing up time. Consider the steam iron. It aimed to make life more convenient by making ironing easier . . . only now instead of ironing just once a month, people began ironing every week and even every day. We do more of something if it’s easier, whether it’s e-mailing rather than sending a letter, or texting rather than trying to reach someone on the phone. Technological breakthroughs almost by definition must make life more stressful, because they quicken the pace and raise the bar of what can be accomplished. Beard was on to this even before the greatest technological breakthrough in history: the use of electric light, which enabled us to live outside of nature’s rhythms.

  But if you can imagine the stress that a pocket watch caused (according to Beard, watches “excite the habit of looking to see the exact moment, so as not to be late for trains or appointments”), then it’s no wonder that with tweets coming in at the speed of rain, our stress levels are many times what they were in 1881. A typical adult checks his smartphone forty-six times a day.16 Eighty percent of teens report they check their phones hourly (which in our experience seems low), and fifty percent say they are addicted to their phones.17

  So how do we help our kids foster the self-control not to look at Snapchat every couple of minutes? Moderating technology use has proven to be tricky even for adults, and kids’ brains haven’t yet developed to the point of being great at resisting compulsion or distraction.

  When you refresh your e-mail, look at your text messages, or check your Instagram account, you get a hit of dopamine, and an especially big one if you encounter something positive. This taps into a basic psychological construct: intermittent reinforcement. With intermittent reinforcement, you don’t know if you’ll be rewarded for something each time you do it, but you might be, and the anticipation drives you. This is the reason why dog trainers advise a “jackpot” rewards system: if you want a dog to perform a task, don’t give him a treat each time he does it—give it to him every third time, or every fifth time, and make it a good treat. He never knows when a treat is coming, or what’s coming. So when you say “Come!” he might get nothing, or he might get a piece of flank steak. Anticipation is addictive, so he’ll come every single time. The same phenomenon is at work when people sit at slot machines for hours, and when kids check their texts. That incoming text could just be from their mom, reminding them to be on time. Or it could be from a guy or girl of interest. Every text contains the possibility of being juicy. So it will probably come as no surprise that adolescents are more influenced by the whiff of what’s possible than people at any other time of life. Also, kids often tell us that what makes it so hard to resist checking their devices is FOMO, or the fear of missing out.

  If you’re a kid, the formula begins to look like this: the more technology you use, the poorer your self-regulation.18 The more technology you use, the worse your executive function (your Pilot). This matters a lot; self-regulation and executive function are about twice as good predictors of academic success as IQ at all grade levels, including college.

  That’s the 360-degree view of the problem. But let’s take what we know about technology and dopamine generally and apply it to the areas where
it affects kids specifically. We have five main areas of concern about technology and our kids:

  1. Screen time is an independent risk factor for many of the things we don’t want for our kids—or for ourselves.

  The research of Larry Rosen and his colleagues has shown that time in front of a screen is positively correlated with increases in 1) physical health problems, 2) mental health problems, 3) attention problems, and 4) behavior problems.19 Similarly, in her troubling recent article, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” Jean Twenge (whose research we discussed in Chapter One) argues that smartphones and social media are making the current generation of children, teens, and young adults “seriously unhappy.” Her research suggests that despite their constant connections through media, contemporary young people increasingly feel lonely, tired, and left out.20

  Screen time has a whole host of physiological effects that make it different from other sedentary activities like reading or drawing, and make it an independent risk factor for many physical and mental health problems. In children, every hour of screen time is associated with increased blood pressure, while every hour spent reading is associated with decreased blood pressure. These effects are independent of how much time kids spend exercising. It’s not enough to run laps for an hour if you’re then going to sit in front of a screen the rest of the day.21

  Screen time brings violent news—from live shark attack footage to police shootings—home like never before. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at the stress responses of people who had direct exposure to the Boston Marathon bombing, and those who were exposed to six hours-plus of media about the bombing. Believe it or not, it was the latter camp that reported the higher levels of stress.22 You can be scrolling through your Facebook feed and, whether you’re looking for it or not, see a link to some sort of violent death or crime. It’s unsettling for adults, so imagine the impact on kids.