2. Social media takes control away from you and gives it to your peers.
Social media’s reliance on quantifiable lists of friends, likes, and follows worries us, particularly with girls. A recent study found that increased time spent on Facebook is associated with a decreased sense of well-being.23 If you post a photo of, say, your sandwich, and it gets seventeen likes, you might feel great. But what if the next day a new photo of your sandwich garners only six likes? It’s all too easy to get sucked in by a swirl of questions: Did I choose the wrong sandwich? Bad photo? Are my friends not paying as much attention to me? Maybe I upset them, acted too needy, or am I losing my connection to them? It may seem silly to those of us who grew up with Polaroids instead of Instagram, but for a generation that does so much of its socializing online, those highs and lows are just as real as our feelings when a friend embraces or snubs us in person.
It’s hard to imagine a purer externalization of the locus of control. Instagram and the like are akin to a real-time 24/7 beauty pageant, and any of your 867 online friends can tell you you’re not so hot today by firing off a snarky remark or just neglecting to like your latest post. Social media turns our attention from our own experience (Did I enjoy my sandwich? Or the people I actually had lunch with?) to what other people think of our experience. Adolescents are already inclined to care deeply about what their peers think of them. By making more of their lives public, they give up the few parts that belong solely to them.
In a powerful Washington Post piece, Jessica Contrera followed thirteen-year-old Katherine Pommerening, whose phone was the social nexus of her life. Like many teens, Katherine would carefully cull through the photos she wanted to post on Instagram, choosing the ones she thought would garner the most likes: “Over 100 likes is good, for me,” she said. She described the importance of a “tbh,” which stands for “to be heard” or “to be honest.” “If someone says, ‘tbh you’re nice and pretty,’ that kind of, like, validates you in the comments. Then people can look at it and say, ‘Oh, she’s nice and pretty.’”24
It’s no wonder that heavy social media users—any one of whose hundreds or thousands of friends or followers can reflexively pass judgment—disproportionaly suffer from anxiety, depression, and narcissism.25 It’s a bleak reality, and one that kids don’t necessarily even want. In a recent poll of thirteen- to thirty-year-olds, most reported feeling defined by their online social profiles, exhausted by always having to work at it, and yet utterly unable to look away.26
3. Technology sucks time away from activities the brain needs to develop a healthy sense of control.
Technology keeps kids from getting the things that we know they need for healthy development: sleep (at least 84 percent of teen cell phone users have slept right beside their phone, and teens send an average of thirty-four texts per night after going to bed),27 exercise, radical downtime, unstructured child-led play, and the real-life, face-to-face social interaction with friends and parents that is such a powerful antidote to stress.
While social media is a greater concern for girls, video games tend to be a bigger problem for boys. Video-game developers are geniuses of motivational science. They know just how to keep you engaged and rewarded enough so that it’s hard to stop. And as we’ve already seen, adolescents are particularly vulnerable to not being able to stop because they haven’t yet fully developed that all-important self-control. Leaving aside the argument that first-person shooter games cause more aggression (which we believe they do) and the benefits kids reap from playing video games (which are real), they are highly problematic and even addictive for approximately 10 percent of the kids who play them.28 This is especially true for multiplayer role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, which are immersive and promote a sense of relatedness to other players, including players in other countries and in different time zones. One of Bill’s colleagues evaluated a twenty-three-year-old young man a few years ago who, according to his parents, hadn’t left their basement in four years. He spent all his waking hours playing World of Warcraft. The family actually moved from Massachusetts to Maryland as part of a strategy to get him to make a clean break.
Technology is highly implicated in sleep problems. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at data from twenty studies involving more than 125,000 children ages six to eighteen. If a child had access to a screen at bedtime at least three times a week, the researchers saw an 88 percent increase in the child’s risk of not getting sufficient sleep and a 53 percent increased risk of poor sleep quality. The findings held up even if the devices weren’t used. Just having a phone or a tablet in the bedroom increases sleep problems.29 As the study’s lead author Ben Carter told the New York Times, “The most important point is that we need a communitywide strategy to empower parents so that it becomes an acceptable routine to remove devices prior to bedtime.”30
I got my first glimpse of how addictive video games are when I was giving a lecture on sleep and sleep disorders to a group of parents and professionals. During the question-and-answer session, one mother stood up and said that her adolescent son had been uncommonly tired and almost impossible to wake up for several weeks. As a result, she scheduled an extensive sleep evaluation through the sleep disorders clinic at a local pediatric hospital. The evaluators told the mother that during the assessment her son had admitted that he had been setting an alarm for 1:00 A.M. and playing an interactive role-playing game with players from all over the world until 4:00 or 5:00 A.M.—and then telling his parents that he had insomnia and was unable to sleep. The diagnosis was “feigned sleep disorder.”
—Bill
4. Technology appears to lower empathy.
Staring at a screen instead of a person is having a measurable effect on our kids’ levels of empathy. There’s been a 40 percent drop over the last thirty years in levels of empathy reported by college students, most of which has occurred in the last ten years.31 This can easily be connected to a decrease in face-to-face communication. Think about it: if someone is cruel online, he doesn’t have to deal with seeing the object of that cruelty in the flesh.
Sherry Turkle, a research psychologist at MIT and the author of Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, calls what’s happening a new “silent spring.” Where Rachel Carson saw an assault on the environment, Turkle sees an assault on empathy. She reports that 82 percent of Americans say that communicating via media has reduced the quality of their conversations. When she was interviewing people for Reclaiming Conversation, again and again they would say, “I’d rather text than talk.” But it’s through conversation and face-to-face interaction that we learn intimacy and empathy.
5. Technology offers easy access to pornography, leading to a more violent sexual culture.
Technology’s dark underbelly keeps getting darker. Porn is available everywhere, and seeps in where it is not welcome and at moments when we are not looking for it. Nancy Jo Sales, author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, argues that pornography is normalizing a new kind of sexual violence. Consider what are called “slut pages.” If you don’t know about them, you should. Slut pages are when someone, typically a boy, collects nude photos of girls in his school and posts them online. It’s not a consensual sharing, and sometimes occurs without the girls’ knowledge. For this reason, among others, we strongly recommend letting your child know that you will be checking her texts and social media until you feel comfortable that she’s safe. This practice is completely consistent with giving kids a sense of control, by the way. First of all, you’re letting them know instead of checking their phone on the sly; and second, you’re signaling that there are some areas where they still need training wheels. As we covered in Chapter Three, giving kids a sense of control doesn’t mean that you let go of all restrictions and rules, and in order to feel safe themselves, kids need to know that you’re there to help them navigate deep waters. There is perhaps no deeper w
ater than technology.
Taming the Beast
Now that we clearly understand what we’re dealing with—the good, the bad, and the ugly—we can fashion an approach to helping our kids tame the beast so it works for them and not against them.
The principle of “It’s your call” still applies to technology: be very thoughtful about setting parameters, work with your kids to set them, and let them work within them.
Kids want their parents to help. Most recognize that their tech use can get out of control. But at some point they’re going to have to learn to self-police their limits. You can’t exactly go to college with them if they’re struggling to manage their gaming or social media use. You have to step back over time. It’s a progression, and here are some of our best tips for teaching your child (and perhaps yourself) how to tame the technobeast:
It starts with you.
Recognize that you may very well have unhealthy habits when it comes to technology—most people do. In a British study, 60 percent of parents worried that their kids engaged in too much screen time, while 70 percent of kids felt their parents used technology too much.32 You have to model responsible use of technology. Talk to your kids about the universal struggle to regulate technology use, including your own. Offer tips that have worked for you or other people you know. Give your kids permission to call you out when you check your phone when they’re trying to talk to you. Apologize. Show them you’re working on it. When a friend of ours was on vacation with her family, she gave her phone to her husband to stash out of sight. She knew if she had access to it, she’d be too inclined to check her e-mail, taking her out of the moments she wanted to focus on her family.
Seek to understand.
Although children often will adapt to the mores of their parents, many teens won’t. Rather, they adapt to the mores of their peers. They need to learn to work successfully within the world they will inhabit, not the world you were raised in. They will have to navigate a whole set of social rules and manners that may be foreign to you. Seek to understand them, so you can respectfully help your child shut her technology down when it’s time.
If you are the parent of a teen, understand that online is where your child most often socializes. Just as you wouldn’t interrupt your daughter when she was midsentence with a friend and say, “Stop talking this moment,” you can’t tell her to stop typing when she’s midtext.
When it comes to video games, we hear so many parents say things like, “He’s wasting his life away playing video games.” The conversations they’re having with their kids take on a disrespectful tone. Instead, play video games with your kid. Try to understand what’s appealing about it. You might be surprised. Acknowledge that you “get” it, that it’s fun, and that you know it’s important to them, but also that it’s important not to become dependent. Showing an interest and being knowledgeable will help you to effectively negotiate limits and intervene if problems arise. We’re much better able to influence our kids when they feel respected and emotionally close to us. Learn about their interests for these reasons, but most important, because doing so matters to them.
Get back to nature.
When Bill’s son took part in a three-month outdoor leadership education program after college, he returned saying that he hated his phone. Having lived three months without it, he loved the freedom of not being available, of not being interrupted, and of realigning with nature. Nature has a way of resetting us and relaxing us. This isn’t a new observation. In George Beard’s 1881 book on nervousness, he wrote about how noises like the moans of the wind and rustlings of leaves are rhythmical, while the sounds of civilization are “unrhythmical, unmelodious and therefore annoying, if not injurious.”33 Studies show that kids feel and perform better after they’ve been immersed in nature—or even after they’ve looked at nature posters.34 The Japanese have a term for this: shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” Walking in nature “cleans” the prefrontal cortex of its clutter, calming us, centering us, and allowing us to perform better on tasks or tests that demand working memory. Another study showed that after five days in tech-free summer camps, kids demonstrated improvement in empathy.35 We’ve personally known dozens of technology-sick kids who went to summer camp and said that after the first week, they didn’t even miss their phones or games.
If you’re not the backpacking or hiking type, still make an effort to plan excursions where you and your child are surrounded by natural beauty—even if it’s in a city park. It may not feel like it’s making a difference, but trust us, it is. Chances are, the longer you stay at that park or river or beach, the more you’ll notice it.
Inform rather than lecture.
Your job is not to admonish or lecture your kids about their technology use. One of the best things you can do is express confidence in your child’s ability to regulate her own technology use and offer to help. As a consultant, you don’t need to pass judgment; you get to inform and make recommendations. It’s stunning how effective this is.
Ned had a student who was scheduled to take the ACT at her school, but the test was not offered on the weekend. She had to take the exam after a long day at school. Fortunately, she had a free last period so she would have a bit over an hour before she needed to take the test. Ned worried that her brain would be frazzled after a whole day of school, and he knew she was a tech-addicted kid who would likely spend that hour staring at her phone. So he told her about what would be going on in her brain during that hour if she didn’t unplug. Then he said, “Do you want my suggestion?” She did. “In a perfect world,” he said, “you’d be able to have a good night’s sleep, get up, warm up, have a good breakfast, and go take your test. You wouldn’t have had all your classes, interactions with teachers and friends, and all the decisions of school before sitting to take the ACT. So here’s what I’d recommend you do. After your last class, turn off your cell phone. Put it in your locker. Then, because I know you have those woods behind your school, go for a walk. Maybe for fifteen or twenty minutes. Walking in the woods will allow your brain to space out and forget all the things you’ve been trying ‘to keep in mind.’ By clearing your head, you’ll have more headspace and will be able to think a bit more clearly and do better on the test.” She ended up feeling great about her test performance that day, as her score exceeded her expectations.
Collaborate on a solution.
A few years ago, Janell Burley Hofmann wrote a letter to her thirteen-year-old son on the occasion of giving him his first phone, and it went viral after it was published on the Huffington Post. It was filled with warmth, humor, and some excellent advice: “Do not text, e-mail, or say anything through this device you would not say in person.” In total, eighteen points were included in what was ultimately a contract for him to accept and sign on to. The letter’s popularity spoke to just how familiar this scenario was for so many parents. Without taking anything away from Ms. Hofmann, we suggest that you take the contract idea a step further and create one with your children. If they are a part of the decision making around technology use, they will gain practice thinking critically about the need to self-regulate, and will be much more apt to stick to the agreement.
If you unilaterally clamp down, your child is apt to rebel. Bill saw a kid years ago who would constantly circumvent his parents’ efforts to limit his television use. They locked the TV in a cabinet, so he called a locksmith. They cut off cable, so he called the cable provider, skipped school, and had it reinstated. The point is, he was always one step ahead of his parents—and this was twenty years ago, when you could actually physically lock up technology in a way that’s near impossible today.
Don’t try to work toward a solution in the midst of an argument, or when you’re asking your child to shut their technology down. As with any such conversation, find a time when no one’s back is up and no action is required immediately.
As the parent, you should not agree to anything that makes you uncomfortable. Bu
t hear your child out and don’t be afraid to relent if his or her argument seems reasonable, even if you might like to do things differently.
I recently evaluated a thirteen-year-old boy named Ian who has a great talent for graphic design. He’s had major companies (who don’t know his age) contact him about using his designs for their catalogues and video productions. In many ways, Ian is one of the most successful young adolescents I’ve ever met. At the same time, he is impulsive, has ADHD, and is somewhat obsessive, which places him at greater risk than most children of having trouble regulating his technology use. The same intensive drive that allows him to hyperfocus on his design-related work for hours at a time makes it very difficult for him to “shift” his attention and transition to less stimulating activities such as homework, chores, or getting ready for bed. Although he has to use his computer for homework and the design work he loves, the more he uses his computer or his cell phone, the more stressed and irritable he becomes. His parents say that trying to get him not to use his laptop or cell phone in bed has provoked such terrible fights that they have had to give in—and just let him be sleep deprived. They point out that the times when they have been able to limit his screen time by simply taking away his computer and phone he has been a much happier and more agreeable boy.
The Self-Driven Child Page 21