Wired Child

by Richard Freed

  A regular contributor to CNN, The Early Show, and The Today Show, Katie Linendoll is typical of authorities mainstream media and the technology industry use to dismiss parent concerns—promoters focused on selling tech products instead of children’s needs. Her chief qualification? She hosts Spike TV’s All Access Weekly, essentially a televised trade show promoting video games and other tech products.

  The push to “mobilize tech optimism” is working in spades. A poll by the marketing agency Kids Industries found that 77% of American and British parents believe tablet computers benefit children.20 Such goodwill gets parents to open their pocketbooks and doors to more and more devices. The Associated Press article “Squirmy Toddler? There’s an App for That” shows parents are increasingly comfortable using tablets and smartphones as babysitters. One mother said the iPad keeps her three-year-old son busy for hours, and taking it away “is the greatest punishment … he loves it that much.” A mom of 3-and 6-year-old sons was equally forthright about her iPhone: “I’m buying my kids’ silence with an expensive toy.”21

  Exploiting a Mother’s Instincts

  A particularly shrewd strategy is outlined in the 2012 Yahoo! and Starcom MediaVest (a market research agency) strategy report Brave New Moms: Navigating Technology’s Impact on Family Time.22 This study was a huge undertaking, as the marketers researched moms in nine countries through interviews, videotaping families, and reviewing moms’ social network conversations.

  At first glance, the Yahoo!/Starcom MediaVest(SMV) marketing report seems empathetic to today’s moms fragmented by the demands of childcare, work, and technology: “We witnessed moms struggle with the power technology has to pull families apart.”23 They concede that more than half of moms “say their family is often distracted by technology during time together.”24

  During a poignant videotaped moment from the study, a mom somberly comments about the distancing effects of technology on her family: “Most people are going off into their own worlds, into their own space, doing their own thing, my husband and his iPad, my son with his DSI, and I’m on my laptop.”25 Another mom notes, “At my kids’ birthday party the grandparents wanted to see the children, but could not because they were attached to the computer. They did not look at us or hear us talk to them.”26

  Yahoo! fittingly concludes that what today’s mothers truly crave is time in which they can bond with their kids and families. However, Yahoo! is in the business of selling technology, and if moms focus on the hurtful effects of technology, it’s bad for business. To solve this conundrum, the Brave New Moms marketers advocate for the use of some marketing judo. Companies should exploit a mother’s desire to be closer to her children to sell her stuff via technology. As Yahoo! explains, this “desire by moms to create special moments with their families creates an unprecedented opportunity for brands [emphasis mine]”27—brands Yahoo! can insert via technology into the emotional space you and your child share.

  The Yahoo! report cites a prime example of this marketing strategy—a Kraft Foods iPad app called “Big Fork Little Fork,” purportedly developed to help parents teach their kids about healthy eating. The app features Kraft foods such as Cool Whip and Oreos, and provides parents lots of iPad videos on how to make Kraft-branded recipes. The app also keeps kids occupied with Kraft video games and videos featuring a Kraft Foods “mom” teaching kids cooking skills like how to crack an egg.28

  The moments you share with your child in the kitchen can provide wonderful, attachment-building experiences. Even showing your child how to crack an egg is rife with bonding ingredients: you as guide, child as learner, the physical elements of eye contact and the holding of your child’s hand as you crack the egg together, and sharing a laugh at the inevitable mess you make.

  Experiences like this are important because they trigger the release of chemicals that promote pleasure and bonding into young brains; chemicals such as dopamine and oxytocin, released during close family times, facilitate your child’s attachment to you. On a personal level, such loving moments are vital to building the relationship your child needs with you to grow up happy and successful.

  What happens when we bring attention-demanding technologies like the iPad into moments like the one above? Are you and your child closer? Not likely, since iPads and their competitors are often used as babysitters precisely because of their uncanny ability to preoccupy children for long periods without parent attention. Today’s interactive technologies and the sophisticated marketing they deliver are purposely designed to distract users of any age from attention elsewhere. In other words, why should your child crack an egg with you when there are cool videos to watch and video games to play?

  DO TODAY’S KIDS REALLY NEED TO BOND WITH THEIR PARENTS?

  My concern about technology’s effect on parent-child relationships isn’t due to a Norman-Rockwell-era sensibility. It’s based on the body of scientific research on attachment and years of counseling families and children. Pioneering investigations by brain researchers Daniel Siegel and Allan Schore at UCLA, amongst others, show us children’s brains are highly plastic, and that their interactions with parents have a powerful effect on brain architecture. As Siegel and child development specialist Mary Hartzell say in Parenting from the Inside Out, “Experience shapes brain structure. Experience is biology. How we treat our children changes who they are and how they will develop. Their brains need our parental involvement. Nature needs nurture.”29This applies to all caregivers who take on a parenting role, including foster parents, grandparents, childcare providers, teachers, and other caring adults who are invested in children’s well-being.

  The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child at Harvard University recently said that young children frequently left for hours at a time in front of the TV are prey to a type of under-stimulation that can damage brain development.30 Today’s parents may recognize why using television this way may be bad for children, however, they may be swayed by promises of a high-tech babysitter in the form of a tablet or smartphone. Yet often young children engage in exactly the same activity, watching TV (or its equivalent), on mobile devices. Moreover, the potentially addictive qualities of the newer technologies may prove even more powerful competition for caregiver interaction.

  Children’s relationships with their parents profoundly impact nearly every facet of their behavior. Kids with a healthy parent attachment regulate their emotions better, score higher intellectually and academically, and have higher self-esteem than kids without a healthy parent bond. Attachment remains vital into the teen years. Adolescents with healthy bonds to parents are less likely to be depressed; they also receive better grades in school and have fewer behavior problems. They’re also less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol compared to kids with poorer family bonds.31 There is also irony, in that a close relationship with a parent from birth to late adolescence fosters a child’s autonomy. Kids raised in strong families are emboldened to explore the world and, as they grow older, have the courage to venture out on their own.

  Healthy attachment also allows us to parent effectively. The emotional dependence associated with attachment is why kids consent to our guidance. What helps an 11-year-old girl realize the importance of putting effort into her homework? What would encourage a 13-year-old boy to resist drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol, unlike many of his peers? Children and adolescents bonded to their parents are more likely to make good decisions and respect parents’ advice because they identify with their families and feel beholden to them.

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF LIFE WITH DIGITAL MACHINES

  Popular culture portrays the most tech-involved kids as competent, happy and successful, but because the wired life costs our kids connection to their families, it’s not surprising to see our “digital native” kids struggling emotionally and with other elements of their wellbeing. A Kaiser Family Foundation study notes that: “Heavy media users are also more likely to say they get into trouble a lot, are often sad or unhappy, and are often bored.”32 A study
in the journal Pediatrics found that 10-to 11-year-old children who played on a computer (not for homework) for more than two hours a day were more likely to suffer from psychological distress than kids who used less.33

  The plugged-in life also puts kids at greater risk for cyberbullying. As noted in a Children & Society journal article: “Cyberbullies and cyber-victims are generally heavy Internet users.”34 Likewise, kids who say they have high levels of Internet expertise are more likely to be a victim or perpetrator of cyberbullying than kids who don’t claim such expertise,35 and kids who attach high levels of importance to the Internet are more likely to cyberbully than kids who consider it less important in their lives.36 Concerns about cyberbullying are serious because online harassment increases the risk that kids will skip school or consider suicide.37

  Cyberbullying is more common among tech-heavy kids because children’s tech time is spent almost entirely in entertainment domains, including social networks and online games, where mean things are easier said than in real life because kids don’t have to face the target of their comments. Moreover, as we have seen, kids more engaged with technology are less engaged with parents—parents whose involvement could help kids treat others better. Research shows that a strong emotional bond with parents diminishes the risk that kids will be cyberbullied.38

  A similar pattern emerges when we look at teens’ involvement with sexting, the transmission of sexually explicit information using technology—most often on cell phones. Pew Research Center’s Teens and Sexting shows us that teens who use their phone more often, tend to leave their phones on, or have an unlimited texting plan are at higher risk of receiving sexually suggestive messages. The Pew researchers identified which kids are more likely to sext, noting that they “are likely to be those whose phones are more central to their lives than less intense cell phone users.”39

  It’s time to change our priorities, to make family (and school) central to our children’s and teens’ lives, not phones and other tech gadgets kids rely upon primarily for self-amusement.

  HOW TO GIVE KIDS THE FAMILIES THEY NEED

  While your child needs a close bond with you, there are obvious, real challenges to building this relationship in our myth-filled culture. We’ll look at strategies to help you overcome these in the following pages.

  The Sacrifice

  Until fairly recently, no deliberate effort was needed to build a family, as a strong connection grew out of necessity. Families throughout most of human history have been faced with hostile landscapes and threatening circumstances that required all family members—parents, children, and teens—to work together to achieve success or simply survive. In our present age of abundance, characterized by our ability to spend so much of our lives being entertained by screens, there are fewer outside forces pushing family members together, and instead finely segmented commercial technologies targeting smaller and smaller demographic groups that are pulling us apart.

  Every day, radio, TV, and online marketing promote the latest devices’ and data plans’ ability to provide moms, dads, younger kids, and teens 24/7 real-time access to whatever their own hearts could desire—online gaming, streaming TV, sports and fantasy football coverage, any of a number of social networks, and on and on. At the same time, because news sources have a tremendous financial interest in having us all stare at screens (Yahoo! is the most-read news site in the US with more than 100 million monthly viewers),40 there is nary a mention of how devices are pulling us away from one another.

  The result is that family members focus increasingly on their own screens rather than one another, splintering family, undermining it. Helping children requires that we see through the hype to understand that the self-amusement-focused life promoted as the height of progress and enjoyment is depriving kids of the families they need for health, happiness, and success. Parents can make a powerful contribution to improving their kids’ well-being by making a sacrifice that our culture tells them they shouldn’t: to not overindulge in their own screen and phone entertainment and instead devote all the attention and energy they can to their family.

  I know that many of us work harder and spend less time in our homes than we used to, making it more challenging to be with our families. Yet somehow American parents and their kids have the ability to spend tremendous amounts of time recreating between screens and phones every day. If we make connecting with our kids rather than connecting with digital devices a priority, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

  Build Your Own Routines, Rituals, and Traditions

  Earlier we saw how the media/tech industry is intent on inserting distracting technologies and marketing into loving moments you might share with your child. Thankfully, industry marketing materials also share how their strategists plan to accomplish this, which helps us thwart their efforts. Describing practices that are used across the industry, Yahoo!’s Brave New Moms recommends that companies sell their brands by targeting the “building blocks of family time,” namely a family’s routines, rituals, and traditions.41 Yahoo!’s suggestion of inserting an iPad with a Kraft Foods app into the ritual of a mother teaching her child in the kitchen is a good example. The recent effort to copyright the tooth fairy and build a Web presence and product line around this tradition is another.42

  Family routines, rituals, and traditions exist because they build strong ties and help raise healthy children. They give our children something tangible that says, “This is my family, this is what we do together, and this is how we connect.” A family’s togetherness suffers if we allow distracting technologies to compete for love and attention. We need to root family traditions in sources that don’t have corporate profits as their first goal, and instead have our children’s best interests at heart. These include extended family, friends, religious institutions, cultural heritage, and other trusted sources.

  Consider the tradition of teaching your children cooking skills. Rather than looking to Kraft’s iPad app, consider having a grandparent cook with your child. Experiment with your own food combinations in the kitchen, or host a barbeque and have your kids help make the meal. During everyday routines and rituals like doing errands or watching a sibling play soccer, keep gadgets out of sight, talk about plays, cheer for your team, or reminisce about something in your shared lives.

  Carve Out a Family Space

  Spending time together as a family is made easier by putting time on the books. Daniel, the father of pre-teen twins, says his family never skips a weekly bowling night together. Other families save a specific time in their week for family night, movie night, playing board games like Pictionary, or other traditions that get parents and kids together. Special moments don’t necessarily mean spending money. As eight-year-old Jeff told me with a smile on his face, “On Saturdays, I help my dad in the yard.”

  Read To Your Child

  Kimberly, the mother of two young boys, told me about reading to her kids at least a couple of times a week: “I love this time and I think they do too. We snuggle up and it’s a moment when time stands still.” Science says Kimberly’s on the right track. Younger children whose parents read to them frequently are more attached to their parents than children who are read to infrequently.43 Reading builds kids’ bonds to parents because they look to parents for the pleasure-filled activity. Moreover, books often provide a jumping-off point for remembering shared experiences (“I remember we saw animals like that at the zoo.…”).

  The parent-child moments fostered by reading books together contrast sharply with the experiences of children sitting alone, getting stimulation from a digital device. In my work with families, a steady diet of tech-heavy, caregiver-light experiences—especially when kids are young—can form the basis of tech addiction. We’ll look at this issue more closely in Chapter 4.

  Rituals of Affection

  Many kids get half-hugs or half-glances from parents as they come and go from school, head to bed, or otherwise transition, while parents keep one hand and one eye on their gadgets
. Sherry Turkle found in her research that children often named the same three examples of being emotionally hurt and not wanting to show it when their parent was using a device rather than paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup either after school or an extracurricular activity, or during sporting events.44

  We’re all harried, but it’s vital to make time to honor our kids’ transitions by putting our phones away and offering our undivided attention. If we don’t, our kids are likely to seek comfort in their own devices and shut us out in turn.

  A Health-Giving Tradition: The Family Meal

  Caught up in a whirlwind of recently-emerging technology myths, we too easily let go of family traditions that reach back into our distant past. For instance, the frequency of family meals is down greatly from prior generations, in spite of strong evidence for its benefit.45 An article in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found that the more often families ate together, the less often adolescents (ages 11–18) smoked cigarettes or marijuana, drank alcohol, had poor grades, were depressed, or had thoughts of suicide.46

  When families eat together, much more is shared than food. As educational consultant Kim John Payne and Lisa Ross note in their book, Simplicity Parenting, “The family dinner is more than a meal. Coming together, committing to a shared time and experience, exchanging conversation, food, and attention… all of these add up to more than full bellies. The nourishment is exponential. Family stories, cultural markers, and information about how we live are passed around with the peas.”47

  The good news is the desire for being with one another is there. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reports that 66% of teens and 75% of parents said they would give up a weeknight activity in order to have dinner with their family.48