Wired Child

by Richard Freed

  In the book they wrote soon after the Columbine shootings, Stop Teaching our Kids to Kill, military science scholar Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and media-literacy educator Gloria DeGaetano offered prescient advice: “The trend of giving video games to toddlers, preschoolers, and elementary school children must stop. Even if parents are introducing only nonviolent video games at this stage of development, it is going to be so much more difficult to keep the kids away from violent ones. Just the nature of video games in and of themselves make them potentially addictive. Video game systems are just not developmentally appropriate for children.”38

  Of course, almost all kids will try video gaming and social networking at some point. Yet what parents need to know is that the later we introduce these technologies (if at all), the less risk there appears to be of kids developing addiction: high school is better than middle school, and middle school is better than elementary school. Grossman and DeGaetano suggest that if parents are going to provide kids video games, that waiting until kids are at least 12 to 14 is best.

  Sure it can be difficult to set strict gaming limits on young kids, but the challenges of doing so pale in comparison to the struggles of many families who introduce gaming and then watch it take over their kids’ lives. And while social networking appears to pose a lower risk of addiction than video games, the risk of addiction to these products remains. I therefore suggest following Grossman and DeGaetano’s recommendation for gaming, and waiting as long as possible before introducing social networks to children.

  I fully recognize that these recommendations are more conservative than what many others recommend. However, because of emerging research and my own experience of seeing families turned upside-down by children’s tech addiction, I can’t in good conscience recommend any other course of action. So I am hopeful that you will consider the steps to limit exposure to entertainment technologies described in prior chapters. And in the remainder of this book I will introduce many more actions to limit kids’ use of technologies that pose the risk of addiction.

  5

  Tackle the Unique Tech Problems Faced by Boys and Girls

  Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, has strong words of advice for parents. To increase girls’ chances of success in today’s high-tech work force, she says, “Let your daughters play video games. Encourage your daughters to play video games!”1 Boys tend to video game more than girls, and males tend to dominate the computer science field,2 however does video gaming help kids become successful?

  BOYS: FALLING HARD FOR TECHNOLOGY

  In the US, boys have immersed themselves in digital entertainment technologies far more than girls. Boys spend over an hour more each day using entertainment screen technologies (excluding phones) than girls: 5 hours, 56 minutes for boys compared with 4 hours, 51 minutes for girls.3 Looking at the details of this difference, boys typically spend more time than girls using the computer for entertainment, for example watching online videos, but video gaming time makes up the biggest difference. Among kids who use video gaming consoles such as Xbox and PlayStation, boys spend nearly an hour more each day gaming than girls.

  How Are Our Nation’s Tech-Heavy Boys Doing?

  If Sheryl Sandberg’s suggestion that video gaming promotes success is correct, we would expect our gaming-heavy boys to thrive compared to our gaming-light girls. So how are our boys doing? Not well. Just as Chapter 3’s research showing that entertainment technologies hurt academic performance would predict, boys now earn significantly lower grades in elementary, middle, and high school than girls—including in math and science.4 Girls also dominate the high school honors ranks.5

  Boys’ poorer performance in high school is an important reason they struggle more than girls do to gain college admission. Young men once dominated the college ranks, yet they now represent only 43% of college admissions,6 despite the fact that some college counselors acknowledge giving admission preference to males in order to attain gender balance in the student body.7 Factors other than gender tech-use differences likely play a role in college admission differences, including changing social norms. However, we shouldn’t ignore the negative impact of gaming and other entertainment technologies on academic performance because it’s so well documented.

  Male college students also video game at significantly higher rates than their female peers.8 Unfortunately, evidence shows that their greater gaming time hurts college academic performance,9 and is likely a reason college-age women earn higher grade point averages and more college honors, and graduate at higher rates than men.10

  Considering that a college education is an important prerequisite for getting many jobs and it also raises lifetime earnings, we shouldn’t be surprised that the relatively tech-heavy, education-light lives of today’s boys lead to less career success. Although males dominate the computer science field, they are increasingly losing out to women in many other professions. According to recent research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, males’ lower level of college achievement erodes their prospects for workforce success.11

  Boys’ and young men’s overuse of technology is not the sole reason for their current woes. We face a difficult economy and the US is losing manufacturing jobs that allowed generations of young men to earn a good living. Video game advocates will say the presence of such non-tech factors negates the possibility that boys’ overuse of entertainment technologies is hurting their chances of school and career success. Yet there are surely multiple factors explaining the struggles of our boys and young men. And it’s getting difficult to ignore this basic formula: overuse of entertainment technologies hurts pre-college and college academic performance, boys use significantly more of these technologies than girls, and therefore boys are paying a price in an economy that increasingly demands a college education.

  Boys’ Struggles Are Not Going Unnoticed

  A number of authors are calling attention to the academic and life struggles of boys and young men, associating them in part to the overuse of entertainment technologies. Family physician and psychologist Leonard Sax, in Boys Adrift, notes: “The destructive effects of video games are not on boys’ cognitive abilities or their reaction times, but on their motivation and their connectedness with the real world. These boys may be highly motivated, but their motivation has been derailed: I’ve seen boys who care much more about their success at Halo than about their grade in Spanish…. The video game world is more real to them than the world of homework and grades and college applications.”12

  Psychologist Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan raise similar concerns in The Demise of Guys, in which they describe a generation of boys and young men who, from very young ages, are “seduced into excessive and mostly isolated viewing and involvement” with various technologies, especially video games.13 Echoing Sax, they state, “The disadvantage of playing video games, especially a lot of exciting video games, is that it can make other people and real life seem boring and not worthwhile in comparison.”14

  I run into this phenomenon frequently in my work with boys and male teens. For them, the real world simply doesn’t stack up to the virtual one, so they gravitate towards the enticing world of gaming—especially the games offered online. However, their parents are less apt to show concern because of the ubiquitous culture of boys’ gaming. “He doesn’t game any more than his friends,” the mother of 14-year-old Matthew told me. But Matthew’s four-hour daily habit of gaming was clearly hurting his school grades.

  Why Boys Get Hooked on Games

  Stanford University researchers’ use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, brain scanning that shows active areas of the brain) confirms many parents’ observations that their boys are more drawn to gaming than their girls. The scans showed that video gaming activates the mesocorticolimbic center—an area of the brain associated with reward and addiction—much more in men than women. This study’s authors conclude: “These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more lik
ely to become ‘hooked’ on video games than females.”15

  Helping Our Boys

  Serious problems in tech-obsessed boys are commonplace in my practice. Seventeen-year-old James’ family was new to me, however the family’s problems were not. Over the past year, James and his parents were increasingly at each others’ throats but couldn’t understand why. The reasons emerged in our first meeting.

  Like most parents, James’ mother and father had an unconscious archetype of what an older teen son should be: hardworking, responsible, and ready to take on the world. Their archetype increasingly clashed with their son’s real life: gaming alone in his room with no real plans for the future. James’ parents were increasingly agitated and even downright angry, even if they didn’t understand why.

  I helped James’ parents bring their unconscious expectations to the surface. This began when I asked them to describe the life they envisioned for James. They told me they wanted him to realize he would be 18 in a short time and to recognize what this meant. Their expectations were not ambitious, still they wanted their son to take visible steps towards his post-high-school life, looking into college or work options.

  I asked James’ parents to describe their son’s current life. “He just stays in his room and does nothing,” they told me. “Nothing?” I asked. They went on to describe James’ fixation on video gaming, and how this habit prevented him from helping around the house or doing schoolwork. In the process, James’ parents began to realize that the 40 or so hours a week their son spent gaming wasn’t only an activity he did because he couldn’t figure out what else to do, but that it also diverted him from becoming productive and taking steps towards growing up. In our work together, James’ parents also were helped by learning that their teenage son’s less developed prefrontal cortex meant they would have to provide more structure to help him control his gaming.

  With his parents’ help, James was able to distance himself from gaming. He started to gain the perspective to recognize that real life was right around the corner, and that he needed to plan for his future. The last I heard, James was doing well at junior college and considering transferring to a four-year-school.

  WHY GIRLS DO BETTER YET HAVE THEIR OWN CHALLENGES

  Today’s entertainment tech-heavy boys can learn much from the entertainment tech-lighter girls around them. In Chapter 3, we looked at how video gaming displaces reading and homework. It’s therefore not surprising that girls, who game less than boys, tend to read more than their male counterparts.16 Likewise, University of Pennsylvania researchers found that 8th-grade girls started their homework earlier in the day and spend almost twice as much time on it as boys.17 Since reading and homework completion are vital to learning, these gender differences help explain why girls outperform boys in high school and college admission.

  What’s the Bad News?

  While girls use less amusement-based technologies than boys, they still spend nearly five hours a day using entertainment screen technologies.18 The research described in Chapter 3 and my experience with families suggests that even this lesser time spent in digital self-amusement poses risks to academic performance and can separate girls from their families.

  There are also two important exceptions to the general rule that girls use less entertainment technology than boys: compared to boys, girls spend significantly more time social networking and using cell phones to talk and text with friends.19 While typical high-school-age boys spend 1 hour and 42 minutes talking and texting every day, high-school-age girls spend an incredible 2 hours and 36 minutes doing the same.20 While boys average 50 text messages per day, for girls, it’s double this amount.21 Remember, all this time with phones adds to the time kids spend with other screens.

  Just as gender differences in brain physiology help explain why boys are more attracted to gaming than girls, developmental differences between genders help us understand why girls are drawn to social networks and texting. Mirroring what many parents see for themselves, research shows that girls are more driven to seek out peer relationships and are more influenced by them than boys.22 The connections and politics played out on social networks and cell phones can therefore be an almost irresistible draw for girls.

  Shifting from a Life Online to Life in the Real World

  Fifteen-year-old Sarah’s life was typical of many high-school-age girls I work with. Much like our National Security Agency monitors electronic chatter, Sarah constantly checked posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a host of other social networks. She scanned for conflict between peers, especially if she was involved. She worried that if she didn’t have a strong online presence, or if she wasn’t there to stick up for herself and her friends, her social world would crash and burn in an instant. So she checked her phone first thing in the morning, at breaks during school or sometimes during class, lived on her phone after school, and was online until late into the night. “Things were really going last night,” she told me, looking exhausted, “It didn’t quiet down until past one in the morning.”

  This hyperawareness of everything online undermined Sarah’s focus on the two things that should matter most to her: family and school. She had a hard time engaging in conversations with her parents because she couldn’t keep her mind off online peer drama. Even if she wasn’t on her phone in the moment, she was preoccupied by the possibility of a returned text or a flare-up between enemies or even friends on social networks. Teen gossip, which for prior generations used to quiet down at the end of the school day, now continues around-the-clock for kids like Sarah because of their continual access to technology.

  Additionally, Sarah’s attempt to fit homework between texts and posting to social networks hurt her grades. “I’ll probably go to college,” she told me. I tried to bring up how much effort she’d need to make in high school to accomplish this goal, but she wasn’t really listening. She was too distracted by peeking at the phone clutched in her lap.

  What helped Sarah? I talked with her parents about how their daughter’s overpowering connection to her phone affected the rest of her life. I asked Sarah and her parents if they spent time together as a family. They replied that traditions like family dinners or trips no longer happened because family members were all so busy. However, looking more closely, Sarah and her parents actually were often home at the same time; it was their respective screen engagement—Sarah on her phone in her room and her parents watching TV downstairs—that kept the family from coming together.

  I talked with Sarah and her parents together about how important family is, even to teens. Sarah’s parents decided to change the dinner hour. They created a new family ritual. Everyone would meet in the kitchen several nights during the week to prepare and eat meals together—with all devices turned off. Sarah complained that she couldn’t be without her phone. Then we all took a look at what had happened to Sarah’s grades after she’d received her smartphone about a year earlier—how As had turned to Bs and Cs, and how this could put her college chances at risk. This helped persuade Sarah to put her phone away for family and study time at home.

  Helping Girls Take an Interest in Computer Science

  So what about Sheryl Sandberg’s claim that video gaming will help girls gain the skills needed for success in the high-tech workforce? First, we need to remember video gaming’s negative impact on academics as noted in Chapter 3. And, as we will see in Chapter 10, high-tech companies typically hire computer scientists out of college or graduate engineering programs—schooling that kids are less likely to obtain if they game a lot. I therefore question the industry’s advocacy of girls’ video gaming. There’s no proof that video gaming turns kids on to computer science, but lots of evidence that gaming hurts important stepping stones to the profession.

  There is evidence of what can increase girls’ interest in computer sciences from Stuyvesant High School, an academically competitive public school in New York City. In The New Republic, Lydia DePillis describes how Stuyvesant—with the encouragement of comp
uter science teacher Michael Zamansky—tackled the underrepresentation of girls in computer science. It required that all students at its coed campus take an introductory computer science class in order to graduate.23 The result: Female students now say they’re more comfortable taking computer science classes because they aren’t the only girl in class. Stuyvesant’s policy has also encouraged girls to take advanced computer science and software development classes.

  Stuyvesant’s efforts work for many reasons. One is that adults who have teens’ best interests in mind developed the program. Also in contrast to Sandberg’s solution of more video gaming, Stuyvesant’s computer science classes help provide the structure kids need to use technology effectively.

  HOW TO HELP BOYS AND GIRLS IN A DIGITAL AGE

  As seen throughout this book, biological and developmental vulnerabilities make both boys and girls susceptible to overusing their gadgets. Our kids need our help if we hope to protect them from an industry intent on exploiting these vulnerabilities. In the following chapters, we’ll explore more actions to address the real challenges of reducing children’s and teens’ immersion in entertainment technologies and increase engagement with family, school, and productive technologies.

  6

  Be the Loving, Strong Guide Your Child Needs

  Until quite recently, parents have been considered the primary family authorities since children and teens need substantial guidance to become healthy adults. More recently, the belief that kids’ use of technology is the key to their happiness and success has left us susceptible to a destructive myth about the defining qualities of effective parenting.