Here are some tips to increase the frequency and pleasure of family meals:
•Go distraction-free: While it’s common for kids and parents to text during meals (70% of parents allow this49), it’s vital to set digital devices aside to allow the benefits of eating together. As noted by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University: “Compared to teens who have five to seven family dinners per week without distractions at the table, those who have fewer than three family dinners per week and say there are distractions at the table are three times likelier to have used marijuana (12% vs. 40%) and tobacco (9% vs. 31%), and two and a half times likelier to have used alcohol (25% vs. 63%).”50
•Accept imperfection: If one member of the family can’t share a family meal due to work or extracurricular obligations, don’t give up the effort. The key is to have at least one parent or caregiver sit down to eat with kids. The meal doesn’t have to be a traditional dinner. Kids tell me that the simple act of a parent sitting down to share a bowl of cereal with them in the morning helps them know the parent is invested in them, and helps them take on the challenges they face at school.
•Keep it simple: In my clinical experience, meals can separate rather than bring families together. Even after working a long day, parents may feel compelled to cook involved meals for kids and spouses. The result? Parents are kept busy in the kitchen while kids are occupied by screens. Offering leftovers or healthy frozen foods are better alternatives, as the parent-child bond is infinitely more important than gourmet meals. As kids get older, have them help make the meal and set the table as much as they are able.
Make Family Stories Triumph
My family is lucky. Our daughters revel in the captivating stories told by their grandfathers—both are true raconteurs. They also can’t wait to tell me how much fun they had making cookies, banana bread, and other treats with their grandmothers. When children turn inward and recall their most treasured and vibrant memories, we—and they—need those stories to be about us—their parents, grandparents, teachers, and other real people who take care of them. We need our children’s time with family to outshine their experiences with electronic toys.
Technology domination in the lives of children and teens I work with can be powerfully negative. As a matter of course, I ask the kids who are old enough to know what their parents do for a living. The shocking reality is that many have no idea what their parents do for eight-plus hours a day to support the family. Honestly, many of these kids don’t care. The overriding narrative for these children is their superior gaming abilities or the latest social network gossip. A gap like this leads kids to lose touch with familial expectations about making an effort in school or helping out around the house.
Research shows us that kids are helped when families share moments together at home. A study in the journal Attachment & Human Development reveals that when parents help their preschool children talk about the emotional experience of shared parent-child moments, it builds kids’ attachment.51 Similarly, preliminary research suggests that helping preadolescent children reminisce about what happened that day or in the distant past helps limit emotional problems and acting-out behaviors.52
Take these steps to build family stories that will foster your child’s connection to you:
•Make time for family: Kids’ perceptions of how we choose to spend our time—playing with them even after a long day at work vs. indulging in our own screens—can win or lose a healthy attachment. Bonding occurs through sharing what could be considered ordinary moments: giggling over the ball that rolls down the gutter, chatting on a late-night walk to the ice cream shop, or laughing at the antics of a pet.
•Make screen time shared time: Watching a movie or a favorite TV show can provide moments when parents and kids can laugh or cry together. Such common experiences can be remembered together later (“My favorite part of the movie is…”).
•Don’t miss opportunities: “Yet when is there even time to talk?” bewildered parents ask me. In the fairly recent past, busy parents and kids could talk while waiting for food to arrive at a restaurant or sitting at a doctor’s office: “Is Billy still giving you a hard time at school?” “Hey, who do think will make it to the Super Bowl?” If you lose such moments to checking email or gaming on a phone, one day you may wish you could have them back to do over.
BUILDING A FAMILY DESPITE THE HYPE
The routines, rituals, and traditions you choose are deeply personal and unique to your family, however, key to all efforts—whether these are a day trip together, shared time at home, or even the ride to and from school—is to recognize how bonding moments are undone by a parent or child who is gaming, texting, checking scores, or responding to social network posts. Kids I work with tell me they don’t want to have dinners or take trips with the family because their parents ignore them in favor of a phone, painfully dashing children’s positive expectations.
Psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair vividly describes how parent overuse of technology affects kids in The Big Disconnect: “The message we communicate with our preoccupation and responsiveness to calls and e-mail is: Everybody else matters more than you. Everything else matters more than you. Whatever the caller may say is more important than what you are telling me now.”53 When this happens day after day, kids are likely to “check out” of their families. They may live at home, but they begin to look elsewhere for comfort—often in technology.
I know it’s difficult to contain our own technology use. Even though I’m acutely aware of how important it is to spend quality time with my kids, I struggle to break free of my computer. What helps? Consciously thinking each day about my priorities. I’ve learned from years of working with families that we only have one shot to raise our kids. There are no second chances.
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Boost Children’s Self-Control
Turn on the TV or read online parenting articles, and you may be prodded to expose your child to video games to help build a better brain. Consider these headlines: “High-action Video Games Benefit Brain” or “7 Games That Expand Your Brain.”1 A Parents.com article “8 Reasons Video Games Can Improve Your Child” claims: “Video games can help children’s brain development.”2 Another online article declares: “Parents, the next time you fret that your child is wasting too much time playing video games, consider new research suggesting that video gaming may have real-world benefits for your child’s developing brain.”3 These messages are enough to make you run out and buy your child a gaming system.
IT’S A FACT: VIDEO GAMES IMPROVE CERTAIN BRAIN FUNCTIONS
There’s little doubt that the long hours kids spend video gaming is changing their brains. That’s because of a neuroscience principle: “Cells that fire together, wire together.” Activities stimulate development of particular areas of the brain, which in turn fosters children’s ability to succeed at those activities. The reverse is also true: Brain areas that aren’t stimulated tend to atrophy and become less able to support other skills.
Do video games improve children’s brains? The answer is a qualified yes, as exposure to video games develops specific skills. For example, playing action video games slightly reduces reaction time, e.g., the amount of time it takes to push a button in response to a flash of light.4 Playing action/violent video games also improves visual attention.5 Visual attention includes the ability to rapidly process visual information—for instance the ability to detect objects in one’s peripheral vision. As we’ll see, this skill is much different than the ability to focus and maintain attention during challenging classroom activities.
Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, whose research has shown how video games foster visual attention, describes how video games build better combat soldiers: “It is certainly good training for people in situations where they need to detect things in their visual environment at any time in any location, like ground troops going through uncharted territory.”6 Militaries a
round the world have turned to video games to train recruits. The US Army has invested tens of millions of dollars in its latest video game simulator, the Dismounted Soldier Training System, or DSTS. This simulator helps combat soldiers survive in war environments and uses the same technology as the popular off-the-shelf first-person-shooter game Crysis 2.7
BRAIN TRADE-OFF REVEALS A MYTH
While action video games prepare the brain for “kill-or-be-killed” environments, these same attributes appear to create a liability in settings where kids need the skill of self-control most. Technology writer Nicholas Carr brought attention to this trade-off in his book The Shallows,8 a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Iowa State psychologist Douglas Gentile similarly suggests that while video games give, they also take away: “The same attentional skills that are learned by playing action games (such as a wider field of view and attention to the periphery) are part of the problem. Although these are good skills in a computer-mediated environment, they are a liability in school when the child is supposed to ignore the kid fidgeting in the chair next to him and focus on only one thing.”9
Numerous studies show that the more children play video games or watch entertainment TV shows, the more likely they will struggle with self-control skills needed for the classroom or homework.10 This may surprise parents who believe video games improve their child’s focus abilities, because it’s the one activity that can hold their attention. Still, think about the vast differences between the focus demands for slow-paced, complex ideas vs. video games, which use constant movement and reward to keep users’ attention. Christopher Lucas, associate professor of child psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, notes that focusing on school and most other real-world activities requires “sustained attention in the absence of rewards,” while video games and TV rely on “frequent intermittent rewards” to keep kids staring at the screen.11
Self-control, which encompasses the ability to not only focus attention, but limit impulses, belongs to a set of brain skills referred to as executive functions. Executive functions get that name because they manage other brain areas and help people apply their intelligence to a wide range of challenges at work, home, and school. The power of executive functions to influence our lives and success is so profound that the brain area that controls them, the prefrontal cortex (or PFC), is referred to as the brain’s CEO. Of the executive functions governed by the PFC, none is more important to our kids than self-control.
So while digital immersion changes our children’s brains, it’s a myth to say that they’re changing for the better. There’s no evidence that the combat-like skills enhanced by video games help children in the real world. Instead, as we’ll see next, there are strong signs that the self-control skills which appear to be harmed by gaming are vital to our kids’ health and success.
HOW IMPORTANT IS SELF-CONTROL? CONSIDER A MARSHMALLOW
Walter Mischel, a psychology professor at Columbia University (and formerly Stanford), has long studied how children’s self-control skills affect their lives. In the late 1960s, he tested four-year-olds’ self-control using a simple but ingenious procedure he calls the “Marshmallow Test.” At a nursery school on the Stanford University campus, a researcher would put a marshmallow in front of a child, who was then left alone in a room. The child was told that if he or she could resist eating the treat until the researcher came back (about fifteen minutes later), the child would get a second marshmallow and be able to eat both. About 30% of four-year-olds could resist that first marshmallow.
After the original experiment wrapped up in the early 1970s, Mischel continued to have casual conversations with his three daughters (who attended the same nursery school as the kids in the study) about how the original participants’ lives were going. These talks led him to suspect that self-control played a powerful role in later life success.
As the original study subjects approached adulthood, Mischel tracked them down and was able to prove his hunch correct. Subjects who had been able to delay gratification as young children (resist the marshmallows) generally had fewer behavior problems during adolescence than those who showed less self-control as young kids. Moreover, those who avoided eating the marshmallow at age four went on to perform much better academically than subjects who were unable to resist eating the marshmallow, scoring an average of 210 points better on their Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).12
Is Self-Control More Important than I. Q.?
Since the Marshmallow Test, Mischel and many other researchers have continued to demonstrate the profound importance of children’s self-control. A New Zealand study followed subjects from birth to 32, and discovered that those who possessed greater self-control at ages 3 to 5 performed better in numerous domains throughout their lives. They were less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, to be convicted of a crime, or to have financial problems. In good news for parents, the scientists also found that children’s self-control can be improved, and this is associated with better life outcomes.13
In another compelling study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania compared the effects of self-control vs. intelligence in 8th graders. Teens who had greater self-control spent more time on homework and less time watching TV, were more likely to be accepted to a competitive high school, and had higher grades. In what should give us all pause, the researchers found that a child’s level of self-control was more than twice as important as intelligence in predicting his or her academic success.14
Why Self-Control is Vital in a Digital World
How important is self-control in an age of flashy gadgets that can capture even the most distractible child’s attention? It’s more than important; it’s crucial. As Walter Mischel remarked, no matter how smart a child is, he or she still needs to do homework.15 Nonetheless, getting kids to open schoolbooks after they arrive home is harder than ever. The afterschool entertainment I was offered years ago consisted of Leave it to Beaver and Gilligan’s Island reruns on an old TV. Today’s kids have 24/7 access to profoundly enticing digital distractions. They desperately need self-control to resist the temptations of games and social chatter for the long-term payoff of algebra, chemistry, and other academic subjects.
THE DISTRACTED GENERATION
Many parents and teachers are noticing that something is not right with our wired-up kids. In 2012, the New York Times reported that surveys showed, “There is a widespread belief among teachers that students’ constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks.”16 Many parents see the same thing. When I talk to parent groups at schools, I sometimes ask the audience what one word gamers use to describe school. Every time, parents call out in unison “Booorrrring!”
The increase in children’s screen-focus is implicated as a reason for the exploding rate of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a behavioral condition in which self-control is compromised. In March 2013, the New York Times reported the rate of children 4 to 17 diagnosed with ADHD is up an alarming 41% in the last decade. The same article, reporting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, said that almost 1 in 5 high-school-age boys now receive a diagnosis of ADHD.17
I’ve tested a number of children for ADHD, only to find that their symptoms, falling grades and lack of homework completion, were caused by overuse of video games and TV. Once parents got control of these children’s tech habits and provided structure around homework, the symptoms went away. Would these kids have been diagnosed with ADHD if no one asked questions about their screen habits? Probably.
I believe the problem often goes deeper than behavioral symptoms. It’s even more serious: Our children’s early and heavy exposure to screens may be altering their brains and denying them the ability to develop self-control skills. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or its characteristic symptoms can result. Seven-year-old Caleb is typical of many kids I see. From the time he was a toddler, he was raised on cartoons and, later, high-action video games
. His mother says he never seemed interested in reading or playing creatively at home. Now in 2nd grade, Caleb is struggling—understandably—with slower-paced classroom and homework tasks. His mother and teacher have asked for professional assessment of a possible attention disorder.
In meetings with Caleb, he tells me that he finds real-world tasks intolerably slow and dull. While we talk, he fiddles with the game player buried in his pocket and then impulsively pulls it out to show me the games that are the love of his life. His mother and teacher tell me they’ve tried many things to help Caleb sit still and complete schoolwork, but no matter what they try, he can’t seem to focus.
Caleb’s mom and teacher are right. His low levels of self-control suggest that he does have ADHD. Would he ha have the same difficulties, or to the same level, if he had grown up in an environment that fostered patience and perseverance rather than the quick-twitch skills gaming hones? My belief is he would not. Has Caleb’s brain actually been changed by extensive screen exposure? I believe it has.
PROMOTING CHILDREN’S SELF-CONTROL
How can you promote your child’s self-control? By following the “cells that fire together, wire together” principle that says a child’s prefrontal cortex is much like a muscle. If we want our kids to be able to focus on slower-paced, less immediately-rewarding activities such as schoolwork, we need to engage them in activities that exercise similar skills, and minimize their exposure to activities likely to diminish their self-control capacity. The remainder of this chapter suggests strategies to achieve this goal.
LIMIT SCREEN COMPETITION
It’s vital to recognize that your efforts to promote your child’s self-control can be undermined, or even negated, by kids’ unfettered access to digital technologies and TV. Parents often tell me they can’t interest their children in activities like reading or playing creatively, which demand focused attention. When I ask them what their child does instead, the answer is often, “Play video games and watch TV.”
Wired Child Page 4