Wired Child

by Richard Freed

  Decades ago, we built families out of necessity. Now we must work consciously to create strong families. And while parents could once assume their children understood the responsibility to make a strong academic effort, in an era when tempting apps are released daily we need to be thoughtful about building our children’s interest in education. Interestingly enough, we’ll see that many leading tech execs provide strict limits on their own kids’ use of digital devices.

  This book’s primary emphasis is on children’s and teens’ technology and screen use away from school, which constitutes the great majority of their time with devices. We’ll cover technologies including video games, computer, Internet, talking and texting on phones, TV, online videos, and social networking. I will suggest screen and technology guidelines for kids, however, this book is not primarily a technology guide. I won’t recommend how to monitor your child on various social networks or choose the right video game. I will help you provide a balanced life and suggest practical ideas and activities that science has proved support healthy development for children.

  I want to make it abundantly clear: Kids’ use of technology is not the problem. The problem is our kids’ extreme overuse of entertainment technologies that is displacing the experiences that are fundamental to a strong mind and a happy, successful life. Together, we’ll look at how to help our kids use technology productively, as a positive force for their future.

  I write this book as a psychologist and also a parent. I know the challenges of limiting technologies and screens that can seem to make parenting easier and our kids happy. As we’ll see, though, while technologies may appear to be a godsend at the outset, misused technology denies kids the connection with parents and other caretakers that’s at the very heart of effective parenting and healthy child development. Furthermore, because it deprives them of the bond with parents and hampers their success in school, our kids’ obsessive tech use leads them to be anything but happy.

  One of my main goals is to help parents feel less alone if their child or teen experiences problems as the result of technology overuse. Immersed in 24/7 positive tech spin, parents often believe that their kid is the only one who developed compulsive tech habits, failed classes, or spurned family. Parents need to know that many, many families across America and the world are experiencing the same problems. Rather than feeling embarrassed or blaming yourself, it’s time to peek behind the curtain of tech myths to understand why such problems are quite predictable.

  It’s especially important to tackle head-on the harmful digital native-digital immigrant belief that persuades parents to diminish their role in kids’ lives. This falsehood is at the core of all the digital-age myths outlined in this book. What you almost certainly know in your heart is what science is now revealing: More than ever, our kids need us to be their guide, to help them on their journey to a happy and successful life.

  In each of the following chapters, I highlight a specific digital-age myth that is undermining children’s development. After refuting each myth, we’ll then turn to scientific evidence as a better guide for raising healthy children. Finally, in each chapter I’ll provide you with practical strategies to give your children a loving, rewarding childhood amid the challenges of this digital age.

  1

  Build the Strong Family

  Your Child Needs

  Thirteen-year-old Nina’s parents were incredulous to discover their beloved daughter cutting her arms and legs with a razor—an unhealthy coping mechanism a growing number of kids rely upon in an attempt to distract themselves and seek relief from their loneliness, sadness, and anger. Nina’s parents’ first step was counseling. As Nina and I talked, it became clear that she was depressed, and her increasing sadness was driven by a widening emotional gulf between her and her parents. She was also experiencing a barrage of cyberbullying.

  A major reason for Nina’s problems became clear when I asked her to describe a typical day: “I come home from school, grab a snack, and then I’m upstairs in my room on my phone for most of the night,” she told me. On the evenings she ate dinner with her family, she rushed to get back to her phone. Riding to and from school or on weekend outings, she was usually too busy texting or scanning social networks to engage with her parents. Nina’s phone compulsion was driven in part by her efforts to defend herself from unremitting online harassment. A classmate believed Nina was the reason her boyfriend dumped her, so she and her cadre of friends were increasingly merciless in their targeting of Nina.

  Because I was concerned that Nina’s phone use isolated her from her parents, I asked the family how they felt technology impacted their lives. Nina and her parents raved about how their devices brought their family closer, telling me their phones and other technologies allowed them to be in contact with one another at a moment’s notice. However, it was clear they rarely used technology for this purpose. Instead, they most often used their digital devices to engage with friends and work, or to distract themselves with entertainment.

  I could watch technology’s impact on Nina’s family as they came and went from my office. In the waiting room, Mom, Dad, and daughter usually sat in silence, working their own smartphones. During our meetings, even when family members weren’t actually using their phones, their preoccupation with the buzzing devices—and if that signaled a crisis at work or unfolding teen drama—kept them from being fully present with one another and limited their ability to join as a family. As they left my office, even after talking about weighty subjects such as Nina’s cutting, they didn’t acknowledge each other. Instead, everyone immediately reached for their phones to check what they had missed in the last hour. It was this connective void that had driven Nina to cut her arms, despite her parents’ certainty that their daughter was perfectly fine.

  PERCEPTION VS. REALITY

  Like Nina’s family, apparently most in the US are sure technology brings their families closer. In a survey of Americans’ perceptions about the effects of technology, the Pew Research Center found our culture holds rosy beliefs, noting “A majority of adults say technology allows their family life today to be as close, or closer, than their families were when they grew up.”1

  A similar survey commissioned by the Microsoft Corporation also looked at American parents’ perceptions of technology’s family impact. Microsoft’s poll found that 64% of US parents aged 22 to 40 believe technology helps bring their family closer. Younger parents are even more upbeat. Seventy-four percent of parents between 22 and 30 believe that technology brings their family closer.2

  Popular media report such studies as evidence that technology supports family ties, but what’s measured is perception, not the reality of how technology affects the family. In the next section, we’ll look at research that measures the actual effects of technology on family relationships. It’s increasingly clear that our perception doesn’t match what’s actually happening in our lives.

  HOW CHILDREN’S TECH USE REALLY IMPACTS THE FAMILY

  I see shining examples of technology bringing family members closer together. Kids with parents serving overseas can connect with them via video chat. Children with distant siblings or grandparents can catch up digitally. Unfortunately, many parents and kids often go separate ways, focused on their own devices as they walk in their front door. Most of us have seen families eating in restaurants individually engrossed in their gadgets at the expense of engaging with one another.

  So what’s the real effect of our increasing digital immersion on families? To find out, we need to look beyond perception to research that measures technology’s impact on the family. When we do, increasing evidence shows that our kids’ digital immersion divides them from family. In Wired Youth, technology researchers Gustavo Mesch and Ilan Talmud sum up their findings this way: “Most of the empirical evidence on the association between Internet use and family time shows a reduction in the time parents and youth spend together.”3

  The effects of tech use extend beyond time to other measures of fami
ly closeness. In a study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, teens who spend more time playing on the computer (not for homework) or watching TV were less attached to their parents than kids who spend comparatively little time with the screens. In this study, the level of a teen’s bond with parents was determined by an objective measure of teen attachment.4

  Interestingly, studies show that how kids use technology—whether as entertainment or school/education focused—impacts how it affects relationships with parents. While entertainment applications such as online gaming appear to hurt kids’ relationships with parents, using the Internet to study for school does not.

  As noted in a study of 4th to 6th grade Korean children which parallels the findings of studies from other parts of the world: “The impact of Internet use depends specifically on what children do online. Playing online games decreases both total time with family and time communicating with family members. However, for children who frequently use the Internet for homework and searching for educational information, the Internet is not a medium that threatens family relationships.”5 Unfortunately, as we will see in Chapter 3, kids use the Internet and computers primarily for entertainment rather than education.

  Why does a child’s use of computers and the Internet for entertainment negatively affect families? There’s a simple explanation: Interactive amusement-based technologies negate the need for interaction with family. Instead, they offer the remarkably seductive alternative of gaming or connecting to life outside the home.

  The exploding use of mobile technologies only amplifies kids’ separation from family. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that providing kids phones and other mobile devices dramatically increases their use of digital entertainment.6 Kids using mobile devices are not only more distracted by screens, the devices also encourage children to retreat to their own spaces so that shared time with parents is lost. Even when kids use their mobile devices in the presence of family, the devices’ engaging content often leads children to ignore family members. As noted by child advocate Raffi Cavoukian in his book Lightweb Darkweb, “Family space has been hijacked by the very devices that are supposed to enhance our lives. They’ve taken over the family dynamic.”7

  A Window into Gadget-filled Lives

  A remarkable UCLA study brings what happens in today’s gadget-filled homes to life. Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century describes how researchers videotaped everything a sample of middle-class families did throughout their homes from the time children and teens woke up until they went to bed.8 They found that kids’ use of electronic gadgets profoundly impacted these families.

  Lead researcher Elinor Ochs says, “I’m not certain how the children can monitor all those things at the same time, but I think it is pretty consequential for the structure of the family relationship.” Reviewing the footage of kids welcoming their dads home from work, Dr. Ochs tells us, “About half the time the kids ignored him or didn’t stop what they were doing, multitasking and monitoring their various electronic gadgets.” Commenting on how frequently parents play second fiddle to kids’ devices, she says, “We also saw how difficult it was for parents to penetrate the child’s universe. We have so many videotapes of parents actually backing away, retreating from kids who are absorbed by whatever they’re doing.”9

  HOW PARENTS’ TECH USE AFFECTS THE FAMILY

  Does parents’ tech use contribute to family disconnection? Debates about this frequently play out in my office. Gabe, a father of two, animatedly described how he used digital machines: “Technology’s what allows me to be at home instead of spending evenings at the office. Email and texts are how I catch up with the kids.” Gabe’s wife, Rebecca, acknowledged these benefits, nevertheless, she had a different take on the attention her husband and kids devoted to their devices, telling me, “We may be at home, but often we barely notice one another. It doesn’t feel like a family.”

  Like their kids’, American parents’ lives are increasingly screen-focused. Ball State researchers find that the average adult spends an incredible 6½ hours a day between television, computer, mobile phone, and other screens—with the majority of this use entertainment-based and outside of work. If screens used together (e.g., watching TV while using the computer) were counted separately, this would rise to 8½ hours.10 How does all this parent screen time affect the family?

  According to Stanford University researchers, each hour an adult spends on the Internet at home reduces family face time by 24 minutes. The researchers therefore concluded that the best way to represent adult Internet time is a “displacement” or “hydraulic” model.11 This is what children in my practice describe to me, that the time their parent spends at home on the Internet and their phone tends to squeeze out time they would otherwise spend with them.

  Researchers from the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication report that our culture’s move towards personal interactive technologies leads to increased relational distance between parents and kids. Measuring the time family members 12 and older spent together, these researchers found a significant decrease from 2005 to 2008, crediting that to individuals’ increased online engagement.

  Michael Gilbert, Senior Fellow at the Center, cautions: “Many technology issues are pulling on the family which, in the modern world, has enough pressures…. Certainly a lack of collective experience and face-to-face time will lead to a breakdown in communication, decreased opportunities to experience the world together, increased alienation of children.” And he warns of a troubling outcome: “Family breakdown leads to destructive behavior.”12

  The Painful Reality of Wired Families

  MIT professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle describes the consequences of our wired lives in her book Alone Together. Studying modern families, she finds a generation of children who often “contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.”13 Parents take the time to pick their children up from school, still they’re so caught up in their phones that they don’t acknowledge their kids.

  Catherine Steiner-Adair, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, is also looking at technology’s distancing effects. She interviewed more than 1,000 children, 500 parents, and 500 teachers for her book The Big Disconnect. Like Sherry Turkle, she finds many children suffering from our embrace of 24/7 “connectedness.” As seven-year-old Annabel describes, “My parents are always on their computers and on their cell phones…. It’s very, very frustrating and I get lonely inside.”14

  Talk with parents, and they will often tell you they are “staying connected” using their phones and other gadgets. However, this focus on matters outside the immediate family can be at the expense of those who need our love and attention more than anyone else: our kids.

  WHEN FAMILIES FADE AWAY AND NO ONE NOTICES

  Research showing that technology is distancing kids from their parents and parents from their kids matches what I see nearly every day in my clinical practice. Parents report their children attend dinner less and less because they are happier to game or text in their rooms. Children who a decade or so told me that their relationship with their parents was stifled by their parents’ overuse of TV now say it’s their parents’ intense focus on phones—which extends screen use to out-of-home settings—that’s denying them the ability to connect.

  So why are we missing what we’re missing? Parents’ instincts to care for their children are quite powerful. One would think we’d see what’s going on around us and act to strengthen our families—unless of course, we’re misled by an industry that provides most of the media content the average American parent uses to make decisions, and which loses revenue every minute people shut off their screens.

  Let’s look at the messages the media/tech industry provides, especially to mothers who are viewed by the industry as the primary decision makers on family matters.

  Ignore Your Concerns—Buy More Gadgets Now!

  At the 2011 Marketing to Moms
(M2Moms®) conference, two leading marketing firms described their sales approach in Tech Fast Forward: Plug in to see the brighter side of life.15 This report identifies many concerns about technology’s impact on children and the family, but it makes clear that the key to selling moms tech products is to ignore these concerns and instead promote the supposed benefits of technology, concluding, “It may be that having a positive attitude enables faster and more seamless adoption of technology.”16

  Tech Fast Forward is filled with selling points that show contempt for the science I describe in this book, including: “Digital distraction has its benefits,” “Gaming our way to genius,” and “Families that tech together stay together.”17 These typical industry catch phrases distract and confuse parents with faulty positives and get them to ignore the negatives research shows. This strategy is encapsulated by a key selling tactic suggested in Tech Fast Forward: “Mobilize tech optimism.”18 Media/tech companies use this strategy across many platforms, from the nightly news to online magazines, and the friendly “tech expert” the industry calls on to give parents advice. The intention is clear. Get parents to disregard concerns about technology and embrace the use of more digital machines.

  The Parents.com article “Best Baby Apps” is an example of the push to “mobilize tech optimism.” In spite of public health groups’ concerns about using screens to babysit, the piece suggests the iPad is a cheap, effective childcare tool. “Best Baby Apps” calls on Katie Linendoll, identified as a “tech expert,” to give the following guidance: “I call the iPad the ultimate babysitter…. Because it’s very easy to use, there’s no manual, and when the price point [for apps] is typically free or 99 cents, you can’t go wrong in downloading a bunch and seeing what you like.”19