Loyalty to the belief that entertainment technologies advance kids’ success is costing our children greatly, as our tech-obsessed kids have less time and inclination to learn educational fundamentals. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests and compares the academic performance of 15-year-old students from countries around the world. The latest results (2012) were disappointing to say the least. America now ranks 30th in math, 23rd in science, and 20th in reading compared to the 64 other countries that took the exam.27
American kids’ 2012 scores remained stagnant from the previous test while numerous countries surpassed us. In 2009, 23 countries outperformed the US in math, 29 did so in 2012. While 18 countries outdid the US in science in 2009, 22 did so in 2012. And 9 countries surpassed the US in reading in 2009 compared to 19 in 2012.28 In the 2012 testing, 18 countries scored higher than the United States in all three subjects, including perennial standouts such as Korea and Japan, yet also Poland, Estonia, Ireland, and New Zealand. This should spur concern, as the PISA measures the skills colleges use to evaluate high-school students for admission.
While America seems enchanted by kids’ ability to multitask between video games, TV, social networks, and texting, our biggest global competitors recognize that educational fundamentals are essential. China and India are embarking on bold programs to increase their investment in public education (China is spending $250 billion each year.29) A recent report, The Competition that Really Matters, warns that our competitors’ greater emphasis on schooling will pose increasing risks to our nation’s ability to compete globally.30
How can we help American kids compete on at least equal footing with children from other nations? A first step is moving beyond the belief that educational funding is a political issue to recognize it as a matter of national economic interest. Yet as three-time Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman and Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum note in their book, That Used To Be Us, adding resources to education won’t help unless American students dramatically cut back their amusement-based technology habits and instead focus on school.31
WHAT CAN WE ASK OF OUR KIDS?
Can we really ask our kids to put more effort into schoolwork? High rates of psychiatric disorders and self-injurious behaviors such as cutting show American children are significantly stressed.32 A series of annual University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) surveys shows that a growing number of college freshmen report they felt “overwhelmed by all I had to do” during their senior year of high school.33 Do high homework demands drive this stress? Let’s take a look.
The same UCLA study asked how much time these kids spent doing homework during their senior year of high school. Since the study only includes students attending college, we would expect them to report more homework than the average high-school student. Counter-intuitively, about 6 in 10 kids said they spent less than an hour per night on homework as seniors. Only about 10% of kids spent more than two hours on homework each night.
There is no doubt that a minority of kids are overburdened academically, and this problem should be addressed. However, UCLA’s study corroborates research that shows the majority of American teenagers actually spend little time studying compared to the tremendous amount of time they spend video gaming, social networking, texting, and watching TV.
So why are our kids so stressed? I believe it’s time to look critically at what’s changing dramatically in our kids’ lives. That’s the exploding use of entertainment technologies that chokes off their connection with family and school—both vital to kids’ emotional health.
Does Homework Help Kids?
Homework is a hot-button issue, as the popular media questions whether it benefits kids and, if it’s helpful, what’s the right amount. Harris Cooper, Professor of Education and Chair and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and the author of The Battle Over Homework, is an authority on these matters. He’s an advocate for not overloading kids with homework, yet he’s found that homework benefits children significantly if the amount is appropriate for their developmental level.
Cooper’s research finds that educators’ traditional “10-Minute Rule,” which multiplies a child’s grade by 10 minutes (e.g., 6th grade x 10 minutes = 60 minutes), provides a good basis for how much homework is appropriate. For high school, especially if a teen is enrolled in honors classes, there may be advantages to increasing this guideline. Cooper says that the maximum amount of time high-school kids should spend on homework is 1½ to 2½ hours per night, after which there are diminishing returns.34 Contrast this with the research that indicates most American teens—who average 5½ hours of entertainment screen use plus 2½ hours of texting and talking on phones each day—put in less than an hour per night on homework.
Some children may benefit from less homework, including kids with ADHD or learning disabilities. Consult with your children’s teacher or counselor, especially if you feel they are spending too much time on homework. Still, I believe the evidence is clear that most American children would gain from powering down their devices and spending more time with their school books open.
In the remainder of this chapter, we focus on strategies to help our kids shift their attention from digital amusements to school-based learning.
TECHNOLOGY USE GUIDELINES
To foster your children’s school success, I suggest setting screen time and cell phone limits very different from what the average American child or teen experiences. I believe a good place to look for guidance is the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that children and teens (ages 2 and older) should be limited to 1 to 2 hours or less of total entertainment screen time per day—including TV, computer-based entertainment, and video games.35 (I will address children’s use of cell phones in the next section.)
If your family puts high importance on children’s academics, there is support for even greater limits on screen use, especially on weekdays.36 Parents I talk with have found that eliminating screen use from Monday to Thursday, and limiting total screen time to two hours per day on weekends (Friday to Sunday) puts their child or teen in the best position to succeed in school.
Some parents I talk with understandably question the need to set screen limits, even if their kids spend a great deal of time with entertainment technologies, because they are doing well enough in school, perhaps getting As and Bs. And it’s true, sometimes intelligent kids can get by in school without exerting a great deal of effort—especially in the earlier grades.
In my experience, however, such kids often pay a price in high school, when greater homework demands become a poor match for a lack of study skills. I also think about lost potential—what could these kids have achieved if they hadn’t spent so much time playing with gadgets? Finally, as I mention in Chapter 9, I recommend that parents and teens become aware of today’s increasingly rigorous college admission demands. For example, the high school GPA of admitted college freshman to many schools is often quite remarkable.
THE MYTH OF MOBILE
Industry promises that mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are essential for children’s learning have helped drive a meteoric rise in our kids’ use of these gadgets. The devices are remarkably powerful, but their effect on children’s learning success doesn’t match the hype.
The Mobile Industry Sales Pitch
Emotion-eliciting commercials show kids using mobile devices to achieve dazzling learning feats. A commercial for Google’s tablet computer, the Nexus 7, shows a boy about 12 retreating to his own spaces with the device to study public speaking in order to overcome his speech anxiety.37 He studies so hard that his mother has to tip-toe into his room at night to pull the tablet away from the sleeping boy. The message is clear: Buy your kids this gadget and learning will take care of itself.
While heartwarming, such marketing is disingenuous. As we see throughout this book, our kids focus their technology use largely around gaming and other entertainment applications. Parents I w
ork with tell me that, just like in the commercial, they find their kids using tablets late into the night. The difference is they find their kids using the devices to sneak in more game time. As Mike Vorhaus, a media research consultant responding to a recent survey of kids and adults, says, “The great majority of tablet owners love tablet gaming, and the tablet is becoming their go-to device for gaming.”38
Tech corporations commission their own studies to sway the public. The cell phone company Verizon funded a study that found about a third of the middle-school students surveyed reported using their smartphones and tablets for homework.39 Verizon then issued a press release touting: “Kids FINALLY have a case for why they are using mobile devices for homework.”40
Verizon claimed that the study’s findings might change the minds of parents and teachers who see for themselves how mobile devices can hamper learning. As the press release noted, “Many parents and teachers see these devices as distracting to kids, but this national study proves that even this young age group deserves more credit for how they’re using them as 1 in 3 are using mobile device for homework and they’re helping them learn better.”41
Yet do mobile technologies really help children learn? The Verizon study doesn’t tell us that. It doesn’t report the surveyed kids’ grades. It can’t determine if kids would have been better off spending their time doing something else, or how much these devices distracted kids from their studies. However, we’re fortunate that emerging research is revealing the true impact of mobile technologies on kids’ school success. So back to the science.
Mobile’s Impact on Kids’ Connection to Family and Learning Success
One clear effect of mobile devices is that they dramatically increase the amount of time kids spend using entertainment technologies. As noted by the Kaiser Family Foundation: “The transformation of the cell phone into a media content delivery platform, and the widespread adoption of the iPod and other MP3 devices, have facilitated an explosion in [recreationally-based] media consumption among American youth.… Today, the development of mobile media has allowed—indeed, encouraged—young people to find even more opportunities throughout the day for using media, actually expanding the number of hours when they can consume media, often while on the go.”42
Kids’ top uses for their smartphones include gaming, texting, social networking, and TV watching (all entertainment-focused).43 Look over kids’ shoulders to see how they’re using their phones and tablets and you’ll find them watching TV, a lot of TV, in settings where kids once read a book or did their homework. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports: “Television content [kids ages 8–18] once consumed only by sitting in front of a TV set at an appointed hour is now available whenever and wherever they want, not only on TV sets in their bedrooms, but also on their laptops, cell phones and iPods.”44
In essence, mobile technologies act as portals for children and teens to gain increased access to entertainment technologies, that, as we’ve seen in this book, pull kids away from involvement with family and a focus on schoolwork. This contrasts with the tech industry’s claim of benefits, however, it’s a reality we need to face if we are to help our children thrive emotionally and succeed academically.
COUNTERING THE MYTH OF MOBILE
The following strategies will help you push back against an industry determined to wire up kids with ever more mobile devices.
Don’t Lose Control of Your Kids
Even champions of children’s use of technology acknowledge that mobile devices reduce parents’ ability to manage their kids. The Online Mom organization tends to be an industry-friendly advocate of kids’ tech use, but co-founder Monica Vila acknowledges what happened when she provided her kids access to mobile: “I used to regard myself as one of those tech-savvy moms.… I even had my kids’ tech habits under control. There was a strict ‘no-tech-before-homework’ rule, parental controls on all the computers and a total of three hours a week set aside for video games. It worked well for about a year. Then everything went mobile and I lost control.”45
Vila is right. Mobile technologies weaken your ability to oversee your children’s use of technology and provide the structure to do well in school. “She’s in her room and I walk in and she’s on her phone instead of doing her homework,” a mom told me about her 14-year-old daughter. “But she tells me she was just texting a friend about a homework assignment.… I’d like to believe her yet she’s on her phone all the time.” Privately, many teens tell me that their inability to manage their phone use is hurting their school grades, which is quite understandable considering their struggle with impulse control as we will discuss in Chapter 9.
What’s the best way to maintain control of your kids? Don’t buy smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices for your child. It’s much harder to limit misuse once your kids have the 24/7 ability to use time-wasting applications out of your sight. Just as the best way to limit kids’ use of sugary soda is to not bring it home, the same is true of mobile devices.
Why Kids Deserve a Basic Phone Rather Than a Smartphone
As a parent, I understand the instinct to be in contact with our children. I also appreciate that we all want the best for our kids, for them to have nice clothes, the latest sports equipment, etc. Understandably, this has led many parents to decide that when their child gets a phone, it may as well be a smartphone, perhaps one with all the bells and whistles. However, it’s increasingly clear that smartphones pose more risks than rewards to kids. I therefore suggest that when kids are of the age that they need a phone, they are better served by basic phones that don’t provide Internet access and unlimited texting with peers. This can be achieved by purchasing a basic phone and then accessing parental controls on the phone or through your cell phone provider.
“So at what age… ?”
“So what’s the right age for a child to get a smartphone (tablet, or other mobile device)?” This question is often asked by parents who believe mobile technologies help children learn, yet as we’ve seen in several contexts, the opposite appears to be true. There doesn’t seem to be an age when the risks mobile devices pose to academics fade, as the possession of such gadgets encourages both younger kids and adolescents to overuse entertainment technologies. I therefore believe it’s time to stop viewing children’s ownership of mobile devices as a beneficial rite of passage and to recognize it as a threat to family connection and school success for kids of all ages.
Specifically regarding cell phones, I think that kids are better served by basic phones than smartphones through their high-school years. Although this runs counter to the direction our culture is moving in, the very nature of kids’ smartphone use (providing addictive entertainment technologies away from parental oversight) makes it likely that children with smartphones will be indulging in digital amusements harmful to their well-being. If you feel it’s important for your kid to reach you during the school day, give him or her a phone that provides only that capability without Internet access or the ability to text peers.
I realize that parents may feel that their child will feel left out without a smartphone or tablet. If you feel at some point that your child should have a device due to social pressure, it’s understandable. That said, we best serve our children by working together as parents, schools, and a nation to use research rather than corporate-sponsored myths in making decisions about our kids’ use of mobile devices.
Redefining Luxury
One of the reasons kids demand smartphones is that they want them as status symbols. Marketing research shows that if we can be convinced a product connotes “luxury,” we are more likely to demand it for ourselves,46 so cell phone makers try to convince us that their products are indicators of wealth and status.
Yet the mobile industry appears to be a victim of its own success. Cell phone companies have sold so many smartphones to families of all economic levels that it’s undermined their ability to claim their products are a luxury item. As noted in the 2013 Teens and Technology report by t
he Pew Research Center and Harvard’s Berkman Center: “Teens living in the lowest-earning households (under $30,000 per year) are just as likely as those living in the highest-earning households ($75,000 or more) to own smartphones.”47
I suggest that it’s time to redefine luxury in order to shift consumer demand. What is in fact increasingly rare for today’s children and teens is to have undistracted, device-free moments with their parents or school studies. If we begin to view the parent-child bond and academic success as luxury goods, we may make more effort to attain them.
An Exception for Devices that only Play Music
The mobile devices that pose the most risk to children’s learning are those that facilitate video games, social networks, video, and texting. There isn’t evidence that listening to music detracts from children’s school performance, so I don’t think that you should be concerned about providing kids devices that are designed to allow music listening without other features. That said, I believe parents should insist that personal music-listening devices not be used to shut parents or siblings out of kids’ lives, e.g., these devices shouldn’t be used during moments when family members could converse, such as during drives to and from school.
If Kids Have Mobile Devices, Limit Their Use Because Kids Can’t
If you decide to provide your child a mobile device, you need to limit how it is used, as we’ll see the addictive potential of the content mobile devices make available in Chapter 4. The combination of addictive content and a child’s or teen’s less-developed prefrontal cortex (the brain’s judgment center) is a poor match.
Even fully mature adults struggle to control their technology use. In a Huffington Post article, Jennifer Meer, mother of two, says, “Last week, I almost killed my daughter.”48 She says that she put her 3-year-old daughter in the tub and started the water, and then went to another bathroom to start the shower for her 5-year-old son. Before she got back to her daughter, she heard the ping of her iPad, saw an email from a friend and felt compelled to respond to it. Doing so, Jennifer left her daughter alone in the tub for about two minutes. When Jennifer returned to her daughter, she found her asleep, slumped against the side of the tub. By tremendous fortune, her daughter had not slipped under the water.
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