Wired Child

by Richard Freed

  In 2001, video game developer Marc Prensky described his vision of what should be the appropriate relationship between children, parents, and technology in his article “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.”1 He called children “digital natives” because they’ve been raised amidst technology, while parents and teachers are “digital immigrants,” suggesting they’re much less sophisticated on tech matters. He argued that by virtue of growing up “surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age”2 kids gain wisdom that their parents and teachers don’t possess.

  In his 2006 book with the telling title Don’t Bother Me Mom—I’m Learning!: How Computer and Video Games Are Preparing Your Kids for 21st century Success—and How You Can Help!, Prensky uses the digital native-digital immigrant narrative to inform moms and dads how to parent. He lavishes praise on video-game-focused kids while reserving criticism for parents who he says just don’t understand the value of gaming and instead have unfounded “fears about games.”3 Prensky is also disparaging of teachers, noting that game-playing kids “are totally frustrated by their parents’ and teachers’ uninformed attitudes, and who, given half a chance, would happily explain why video and computer games are a positive part of their life, and why they spend so much time playing them.”4 With absolute faith in gaming, he asserts: “Kids learn more positive, useful things for their future from their video games than they learn in school!”5

  Prensky therefore argues for a reversal in the traditional family hierarchy: Parents should obey their children when they demand more video games, cell phones, portables, and online subscriptions.6 For parents who are concerned about allowing children to decide how much they should video game, Prensky has an answer: “The true secret of why kids spend so much time on their games is that they’re learning things they need for their twenty-first century lives.”7

  A DESTRUCTIVE PARENTING MYTH

  While the digital native-digital immigrant belief has gained widespread popular acceptance, it doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. As noted by Sue Bennett, Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong in Australia, “The idea of the digital native captured the imaginations of teachers, parents, journalists, commentators and academics. Closer examination of Prensky’s arguments, particularly in his influential 2001 paper [“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”], reveals little in the way of evidence to substantiate his claims, however. He relies on anecdotes, conjecture and speculation. Nonetheless his ideas have often been uncritically repeated and cited as if fact.”8

  The research simply doesn’t support the idea of a generation of young tech experts who are more adept than prior generations—after all, prior generations created the technologies kids now use. Neil Selwyn, formerly with the Institute of Education at the University of London and now a professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash University in Australia states, “The findings show that young people’s engagements with digital technologies are varied and often unspectacular—in stark contrast to popular portrayals of the digital native.”9 Similarly, we have seen in this book that our kids’ technology use is marked by an overuse of entertainment technologies at the expense of a focus on family and school, and is putting them at risk of addiction.

  The digital native-digital immigrant belief is in fact a remarkably harmful myth. Simply growing up in a world surrounded by digital gadgets does not give children the ability to understand how the use, or frequently the overuse, of such devices affects their lives. Kids can be astoundingly adept at swiping through phones or tablets, however parents—by virtue of their more developed brains and greater life experiences—are much better able to understand how technology can impact emotional well-being, academic growth, and life success. And that is far more important than knowing how to access all of a phone’s features or rack up points playing a video game.

  A PARENTING MYTH THAT IS ALIVE AND WELL TODAY

  Prensky’s original description of the digital native-digital immigrant belief came one year after the new millennium, so many of those he would have considered digital natives are becoming parents themselves. Nonetheless, the main thrust of the native-immigrant belief continues to be advanced: that by virtue of growing up with the latest technologies from ever younger ages and for greater amounts of time, each new generation of kids supposedly knows more about how digital gadgets should be used than their parents.

  The website advertising the recent book Toddlers on Technology: A Parents’ Guide notes: “Does your toddler seem to know more about the iPad than you do? Welcome to the world of the Digitods: the young children born into the era of mobile technology. These kids are learning faster and better than any generation that has come before them. And they are loving it!”10 Reminiscent of Prensky’s argument, it’s by virtue of being born amidst the latest digital devices that gives kids a leg up on their parents.

  Likewise, Hanna Rosin advocates for modern-day digital-native-digital-immigrant-parenting in her recent Atlantic article “The Touch-Screen Generation,” as she says: “This term [digital native-digital immigrant] took on a whole new significance in April 2010, when the iPad was released.”11 She argues that today’s “touch-screen generation” understands technology in a way that their parents simply can’t, noting of her four-year-old son, “To us (his parents, I mean), American childhood has undergone a somewhat alarming transformation in a very short time. But to him, it has always been possible to do so many things with the swipe of a finger, to have hundreds of games packed into a gadget the same size as Goodnight Moon.”

  Like Prensky, Rosin demeans parents who are concerned about technology’s effect on their kids, suggesting this is based on their own “neurotic relationship with technology.” She also suggests there has been a shift of power on matters of technology from parent to child. Reflecting on her toddler son’s use of the iPad, she writes, “I must admit, it was eerie to see a child still in diapers so competent and intent, as if he were forecasting his own adulthood. Technically I was the owner of the iPad, but in some ontological way it felt much more his than mine.” Rosin therefore decided to provide her toddler son what she termed “Prensky rules” for the iPad: “Whenever he wanted to play with it, I would let him.”

  TELLING PARENTS NOT TO PARENT

  It’s often argued in modern culture that kids’ adeptness at swiping screens and manipulating gadgets should trump the traditional family structure, that parents don’t have the right to guide their kids’ use of screen technologies. This suggested shift in family power is remarkable because kids spend more time with entertainment screen and phone technologies than any other waking activity—far more than school. Essentially, parents are being encouraged to back away from guiding kids in the activity that now dominates their lives.

  However, kids don’t have the ability to understand how an overfocus on gadgets denies them the connections with parents they need for emotional health. They don’t get that time spent gaming or social networking is time spent away from activities that help them prepare for their future. Whether they are toddlers or teens, kids are simply not capable of this level of insight and instead will enthusiastically disappear into cyberspace amusements for hours or even days on end. Parents therefore have a responsibility to help kids make good choices about the use of screen and phone technologies.

  When Parents Back Away, Corporations Profit

  While kids need strong guidance about technology from their parents, tech corporations have a multi-billion dollar stake in parents not setting limits on their children’s use of technology—as kids with few or no media rules use significantly more technology products.12 So it’s not surprising that the tech industry advises moms and dads to back off.

  Like Marc Prensky, Danah Boyd, author of It’s Complicated,13 is a vocal advocate for getting parents out of the business of guiding their kids’ technology use, including social networks and cell phones. In her Time magazine parenting article “
Let Kids Run Wild Online,” she repeats the theme of belittling parents who are concerned about their kids’ tech use, labeling those who set limits as “fearful.” She also rehashes a main point of the digital native-digital immigrant belief that parents should not guide their kids’ use of technology. Instead, she claims, “The key to helping youth navigate contemporary digital life isn’t more restrictions. It’s freedom—plus communication.”14

  Danah Boyd’s bio printed at the end of her article mentions she is employed by Microsoft as a researcher, but she says nothing in the article about this conflict of interest—Microsoft is a leading producer of the entertainment technologies Boyd suggests kids be turned loose with. Unfortunately, failing to disclose such conflicts of interest is common practice by industry-connected pundits so that parents really don’t know what financial interests lurk behind the advice they are given.

  Boyd’s advice also sets up a double standard because her parenting recommendations as a Microsoft researcher conflict with the child rearing the company’s co-founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda provided their own children. In the Reuter’s article “Bill Gates keeps close eye on kids’ computer time,” it’s reported that the Gates parents set strict limits on their daughter’s gaming, and their son had his own screen limits. Bill Gates quipped, “My son said, ‘Am I going to have limits like this my whole life?’, and I said, ‘No, when you move away you can set your own screen limits.’”15

  The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) also advocates that parents back off from guiding their children’s technology use. The organization portrays itself as a research-based organization; it creates official “standards”16 intended to guide schools and parents about how kids should use technology. In truth, leading purveyors of the tech products kids use for entertainment (including Microsoft, Apple, and cell phone company Verizon) help fund the ISTE, and it acts as a lobbying and marketing body for its funders, e.g., advertising its ability to help corporate members “gain visibility and build brand awareness.”17

  Is it surprising that the ISTE encourages parents not to limit their kids’ tech use? The organization hosted Marc Prensky as a speaker at a recent conference and articles on its website suggest that kids know what they’re doing with technology and adults should largely stay out of their way.18 In “The Many Benefits, for Kids, of Playing Video Games,” author Peter Gray asserts: “Children are suffering today not from too much computer play or too much screen time. They are suffering from too much adult control over their lives and not enough freedom.”19

  FALSE FREEDOM

  I agree with an assertion Danah Boyd makes in her Time parenting article, that the freedom prior generations of kids had to explore the real world, e.g., ride their bikes and visit friends, was helpful to their development, and I am a believer in having modern-day kids be able to experience this. However, I strongly disagree with her contention that turning today’s kids loose in cyberspace results in their greater freedom.

  Kids can tweak their games, avatars, social network profiles, or phones in innumerable ways, but this only provides an illusion of control. Malleability is purposely built into these products to encourage kids to spend more time in for-profit domains looking at ads and racking up digital minutes. Children and teens are also tracked and data mined on these sites so that content and advertising can be better tuned to their whims—all for the sake of the corporate bottom line. This in no way resembles the relatively unconstrained lives of former generations of youth. A sad irony is that all the “freedom” present-day kids have on their gadgets displaces the educational experiences that would provide greater long-term independence by increasing their job choices and incomes.

  WHEN PARENTS STOP PARENTING

  Tech corporations should be quite pleased with the present state of affairs. When the Kaiser Family Foundation measured US parents’ rules for the use of TV, video games, and computers, they found: “The majority of 8-to 18-year-olds say they don’t have any rules about the type of media content they can use or the amount of time they can spend with the medium (there is one exception—a bare majority of 52% say they have rules about what they’re allowed to do on the computer).”20

  Specifically, today’s kids have few if any rules about the technologies that, as we saw in Chapter 3, are shifting their focus away from school and hampering academic performance. For example, the Foundation reported that few seventh to twelfth graders have any rules about how much they can talk or text on the phone (27 and 14 percent respectively), while a meager 18 percent of American kids ages 15–18 have any rules whatsoever about how much time they can spend playing video games.21

  FLAWED PARENTING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

  Research by Diana Baumrind at UC Berkeley and Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin at Stanford University shows that parenting is defined by two factors: 1) responsiveness (a high or low measure of warmth and attachment in the parent-child connection), and 2) demandingness (a high or low measure of how much parents supervise and provide expectations for their children).22 From these factors emerge four types of parenting: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved.

  Authoritative parenting has a high level of responsiveness and a high level of demandingness. Authoritative parents do their best to maintain a strong, loving relationship with their child, while providing high expectations and definite limits that help kids to meet parental expectations. There is a clear hierarchy in which parents are the primary authorities in the home, although this is conveyed warmly to kids through a close relationship rather than coercion.

  Authoritarian (different than authoritative) parents tend to score low on responsiveness but high on demandingness. They are less concerned with a loving connection yet set strong limits for kids. Permissive parents are high on responsiveness but low on demandingness. They tend to be loving, have relatively low expectations, and there is no clear hierarchy in the home. Finally, uninvolved parents score low on responsiveness and demandingness. They tend to be relatively disconnected from their children’s lives and there is a lack of hierarchy in the home.

  Of the four parenting styles, authoritative parenting produces the best emotional health and academic outcomes. Children raised using this parenting style have higher self-esteem and life satisfaction, and lower levels of anxiety, depression, and delinquent behavior than those raised using other parenting styles.23 Kids raised with authoritative parenting also are more likely to be engaged in school, and tend to have a higher GPA in both high school and college than kids raised with other parenting methods.24 Uninvolved parenting leads to the unhealthiest outcomes, while authoritarian and permissive parenting outcomes tend to fall somewhere in between.25

  How is our children’s immersion in entertainment technologies affecting how they are parented? As we have seen throughout this book, kids’ high usage of entertainment technology diminishes the parent-child connection (responsiveness) and school performance (demandingness), creating an environment best characterized by the least effective parenting style: uninvolved parenting. Nevertheless, our culture’s message to parents to step away from guiding children’s use of technology is highly seductive, as uninvolved parenting demands less effort and involvement from parents than authoritative parenting.

  Myth-Inspired Uninvolved Parenting

  The uninvolved parenting style is evident in many of today’s families. Parents heavily rely upon tablet computers and other e-devices as babysitters for infants and toddlers, displacing positive interactions with parents or other caregivers. Many preschool-and elementary-age kids carry mobile devices around the home, on car rides, to appointments, and elsewhere—minimizing parent-child exchanges and displacing the reading that supports school success. By high-school, many teens are in full retreat to their rooms where they play on their phones and other e-gadgets until late into the night.

  Moms and dads using uninvolved parenting also have been convinced that they don’t have a right to oversee their kids’ use of gadgets.
In my office, many parents look at me quizzically when I suggest they need to limit their kids’ use of fun-time gadgets to promote school involvement and success. “But I don’t know if I can limit how much she uses her phone... she gets so angry when I try to say no,” parents tell me. The same parents would never let kids make their own rules about curfews, chores, etc., yet a digital-age parenting myth has helped convince numerous parents that children should run the show regarding tech matters at home.

  KIDS NEED AUTHORITATIVE PARENTING

  I suggest that you take your rightful place as your kids’ leader by using authoritative parenting strategies at home. How can we provide our children responsiveness and demandingness in this frenzied digital age? It’s less about what we say to our children and more about the environment we provide.

  While it’s great to tell our kids that we love them, taking actions that limit distracting technologies and provide kids a strong family connection are hallmarks of responsiveness (See Chapter 1 for reminders). To provide demandingness, take the steps provided in Chapter 3 including setting up a home environment that limits playtime devices. The good news is that it’s never too late to start using authoritative parenting.

  While sitting at the top of the home hierarchy, authoritative parents don’t simply lay down rules. They make an effort to explain the reasoning behind their rules in a developmentally-appropriate fashion. Authoritative parents also listen to their children’s viewpoints, especially as kids grow older, and consider adjusting the rules based on their kids’ concerns, although parents maintain final say.

  Authoritative Parenting in Action

  What does authoritative parenting look like in real life? The following examples show how authoritative parenting is used to address typical technology issues.

  Scenario 1: A nine-year-old boy complains to his parents that they don’t allow video gaming during the school week.