That eleven-year figure pertains to the minutes we give to our handheld devices. Computers, televisions, and gaming consoles soak up yet more adult time and attention. This matters because the hours we spend on screens, unrelated to work, are hours during which we are not doing other things. And it represents a significant chunk of life in which we are not available to people who are physically present in our lives.
There is no doubt that digital communication makes it possible to stay connected with people we love far away. Unfortunately, the same technology has the practical effect of putting distance even between people who share the same home.
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NOT LONG AGO, parents arriving at a day care center in Texas were startled to find the following note taped to the glass front door:
You are picking up your child! GET OFF YOUR PHONE!!!! Your child is happy to see you! Are you not happy to see your child?? We have seen children trying to hand their parents their work they completed and the parent is on the phone. We have heard a child say “Mommy, mommy, mommy . . .” and the parent is paying more attention to their phone than their own child. It is appalling. Get off your phone!!
Popular response to the note was fast, furious, and ran a familiar gamut. On one end was the righteous indignation of those who side with children against their tech-ensorcelled parents. On the other was the righteous indignation of those who side with parents against the finger-wagging busybodies who fail to appreciate that a person cannot hang up on a conference call with the CEO just because he happens to also, at that moment, be collecting a toddler from day care. That the public reaction was both so aggressive and so defensive speaks to the degree to which we remain, as a culture, uneasy about the accommodations we’re making. There’s no disputing the utility of a smartphone for a busy parent—the thing is a minor miracle—but if we draw back and look at the larger effects, it’s an open question whether we are taking the hidden costs into account.
It is becoming clear that heavy digital technology use puts a strain on family relationships. When parents and children are interrupted by technology—when, say, a call or text comes in and the adults’ attention gets diverted—children resent it. They may not say so outright, but a 2017 Pennsylvania State University study found that children may begin acting out after average or even low amounts of tech-based interruption, or “technoference.” This consists of the disruptions that occur, as the researchers wrote, “during face-to-face conversations, routines such as mealtimes or play, or the perception of an intrusion felt by an individual when another person interacts with digital technology during time together.” In the study, researchers tracked 170 families and found that technoference correlated with problematic child behaviors such as whining, hypersensitivity, and flying off the handle.
To children on the receiving end, technoference can feel like personal erasure. Psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair has seen a steady stream of children in her therapy practice and school consultancy who describe feeling displaced, and confused, too, by their inability to get their distracted parents to pay attention. In her book The Big Disconnect, Steiner-Adair quotes a seven-year-old who laments: “A lot of time at home when my parents are home and on their computers, I feel like I’m not there, because they pretend like I’m not there . . . they’re like not even talking to me, they just are ignoring me. I feel like, ughhh, sad.”
One mother could have been describing the family in Goodnight iPad when she described her own to Steiner-Adair: “Our household is eerily silent at night now because everyone is on their own machine, their own little screen. And even after we’ve put our kids to bed, my husband and I don’t spend real time together. We sit at the dining room table, facing each other but staring into our laptops.”
This scenario transpires every night in millions of households. Interestingly, researchers were clocking a remarkable degree of matter-of-fact domestic alienation even before the mass adoption of tablets and smartphones. Between 2002 and 2005, a team at the University of California documented the interactions of thirty middle-class Los Angeles families from a range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The research team videotaped each family over the course of two weekday afternoons and evenings and one weekend. From the outside, these busy, made-for-TV households had everything: decent jobs for both parents, plenty of material possessions, and the temperate loveliness of southern California weather. As a setting for a sit-com, with parents and two or three kids trading wisecracks in a cozy, cluttered family room, any one of these homes would have seemed ideal.
Yet the researchers found a curious emptiness. Members of these normal modern families spent almost no time in each other’s company. On average, they spent just 14 percent of their hours at home together. In nearly a third of these households, parents and kids were never in the same home space at the same time. As the study authors noted, in the long hours of observation, for these families there was not “a single instance” of full unity or close proximity.
To Susan Pinker, author of The Village Effect, these are disturbing realities. “Despite the mountain of evidence showing that family meals and social engagement trump almost everything else in boosting a child’s psychological development and health,” she told me, “many family members are isolated in their own homes, alone with their personal devices.” The world has always had a quotient of dysfunctional, alienated families, she said, but “tech obsessions add a new layer of anomie.”
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THERE IS A remedy to this hollowing out of households, a gentle and powerful way to revive personal contact, ward off interruptions, and strengthen relationships. It may seem a small thing, but it is not: we can read together. By setting aside time every day, we can leave the pixelated wilds and rest at least for a little while in a place of unplugged, authentic human connection.
When the writer Michael Sims was young, he had the sensation that he and his mother and the story she was reading were all blending together. “I could feel her voice through my back and side. Her body was part of the story and she made me a part of the story. When my mother paused to take a deep breath, my body rose up a little with hers,” he recalled.
I remember the same sensation, reading Treasure Island to my family years ago. Molly was pressed against my side; Violet and Phoebe, who were toddlers, sat heavy on my lap; and Paris had draped himself across the back of the sofa, languid as a jaguar. My husband, just home from work, was stretched out on the floor in his suit. It was a golden moment.
None of us knew it at the time, but we were partaking of what clinical psychologist Hilarie Cash calls “a whole bouquet of neurochemicals.” Human beings produce this bouquet when we’re physically close to people we love, and its effect is to help us stay emotionally and physiologically regulated. We are social animals, after all, not just creatures of social media. Being in affectionate company feels good to us.
Susan Pinker prefers a stronger metaphor than bouquet. She told me: “A tsunami of neurochemical benefits gets unleashed when a parent and child cuddle together over a book. Stress and anxiety downshift, for starters. As soon as the parent puts his or her arms around the child hormones flood their bloodstreams, relaxing them and engendering mutual trust.”
This is the chemical explanation for Kate DiCamillo’s description of existing together in a patch of warmth and light. The book itself gives off a kind of warmth, like a little campfire, because it intensifies natural feelings of shared purpose. If it happens to be a picture book about love, and loving feelings, and be filled with intentional, affirmative love language—books like Mary Murphy’s Utterly Lovely One, or Guess How Much I Love You, by Sam McBratney, or Amelia Hepworth’s I Love You to the Moon and Back—a child gets the extra pleasure of hearing tender words spoken in a parent’s voice. “The script is right there to start having an emotional connection,” in the words of read-aloud advocate Katrina Morse.
The act of reading together secures people to one another, creating order and connection, as if we were quilt s
quares tacked together with threads made of stories. That’s not just another metaphor, as a team of neuroscientists at Princeton has discovered. Even as a reader and listener are enjoying their bouquet of neurochemicals, or being swept away by a tsunami of them, their brain activity is synchronizing, creating literal order and connection in a process known as neural coupling.
“Storyteller and hearer are connecting in a deep way,” Geoff Colvin writes of the phenomenon in his book Humans Are Underrated. “We not only experience the story; we and the storyteller are having the same experience.”
It should not be surprising, then, that the emotional rewards of reading aloud are wildly out of proportion to the effort it takes. When we settle in with a book and a child or two, we get to engage in a “kind of conspiracy,” as the Australian writer and illustrator Mem Fox puts it, in which we “bond closely in a secret society associated with the books we have shared.”
Incredible to relate, reading books out loud can establish an emotional connection even when the listener is too small, too frail, and too young to know what is happening.
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“WHEN I GOT here, they said I should talk to them, and you can only think of so many things to talk to babies about before you run out of topics, so we started reading to them,” Claire Nolan told me when I met her in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC. The room was hushed and busy. Doctors, nurses, and visitors moved around in the twilight, speaking in low voices. Monitors beeped and chirped like the tech in Goodnight iPad.
Nolan was sitting in a little valley between two large pieces of medical apparatus, with a tiny son, Dale, swaddled in her arms. His twin, Tyrone, was resting in the humid warmth of a nearby incubator, one Lilliputian foot glowing ruby-red from a monitor clipped to it. Tyrone was a little wrinkled and delicate to the point of translucence. He weighed one pound.
The boys’ mother said: “We started with little books, but they only last, like, two minutes. And then you end up telling them, ‘There’s a green frog,’ and trying to describe the pictures. It’s more fun to read to them. I tried reading them adult books, but they got too adulty—even though they can’t understand,” she said with a smile, indicating the babies. “I didn’t want to be telling them about that stuff.” So she and her husband, Jason, started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
Dale was luckier than his brother from the get-go because he weighed more. His parents could hold him close while they read. Tyrone, who was born a third of his brother’s size, was still bristling with tubes and hard to cuddle. He could, however, be touched and caressed by his parents’ voices.
“We know that parental voice is important in neurological development,” Dr. Mohammed Kabir Abubakar told me as we stood together in the NICU a short distance from the Nolan twins. “There is some assumption, though we don’t know for sure, that babies in the womb can hear the voice. How muffled it is, we don’t really know. Nobody has been able to put a sensor in there,” he said with a chuckle, “and measure the decibels or how much exactly babies hear or how they interpret that sound. Is it just vibration that they feel? Is it the sound that they feel?”
We know that newborn babies are primed to recognize the voices of their parents, in particular their mothers, thanks in part to research at the University of Montreal. Writing about a 2011 experiment there, Susan Pinker notes that “the language circuitry in a newborn’s brain comes alive at the sound of its mother’s voice. . . . Compared to what happened when a female stranger’s voice was played, a brief snatch of the mother’s voice provoked a dramatic neural response in the tiny subjects.”
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THE EARLIER A child arrives in the world, the greater the odds against him. Important brain development takes place during the final weeks before an infant comes to term at forty weeks’ gestation. A baby born at even thirty-six weeks has a heightened chance of developmental and academic delays before the age of seven, according to a 2011 study at Queen’s University Belfast. The more parents and doctors can do to encourage brain activation, the better.
As a piece of medical technology, a copy of E. B. White’s Stuart Little or George Selden’s The Cricket in Times Square would seem to be out of place among the sophisticated machinery of the NICU. A book is a primitive artifact made of paper, ink, and glue; it’s the stuff of kindergarten art projects. Yet in concert with the human voice, this quaint, Gutenberg-era object is a potent tool for stimulating infant brains—and kindling the emotional connections that babies need to develop with the people closest to them.
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IN THE SPRING of 2017, Georgetown researchers finished a small study into the effects of reading aloud on twenty babies between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-four weeks. The babies were monitored for ninety minutes, with machines capturing and recording measurements of their physiological state; that is, their heart rates, blood pressure, breathing, and oxygen levels. It was not easy to arrive at a standard method of reading. Some of the babies had been flown into Georgetown from smaller, distant hospitals, and their families couldn’t come in often, or at all, to read in person. There were concerns that opening incubator portholes to read to the babies would cause the temperature inside to fluctuate. No one wanted a delicate occupant to get cold.
In the end, the team settled on using recorded narration. Parents taped themselves reading aloud for thirty to forty-five minutes from whatever source material they liked. One mother, a medical student, read passages from a neurology textbook. Some people read children’s books or prayer books, and some even read to their babies from the Wall Street Journal.
“Inside the incubator it gets really humid, and we wanted something that didn’t interfere with any of the equipment,” said Dr. Suna Seo, a neonatologist who worked on the study. “We realized we could load the books onto a small iPod, like an iPod Nano, and then have Bluetooth connected with a shower speaker that attaches to the incubator.” She laughed. “We have a sound meter that measures the decibels so that they fall within the parameters of the protocol, and then the nurses are able to play the recordings when the parents aren’t there.
“They just love listening to the parent’s voice,” Dr. Seo told me. “We’ve seen some amazing things.” One girl had been born at twenty-five weeks and had suffered complications, including bleeding on the brain. Two weeks later she was stable and snoozing when a nurse pressed a button and her incubator was filled with the sound of her mother’s voice. In an instant, the tiny girl had shot to alertness and had begun groping around inside her incubator. The voice of her mother was not a bit of background noise. It was not a matter of indifference. The intonation reached her baby brain and, we can assume, set it sparkling in the sort of dramatic neural response the Montreal researchers had seen.
The doctors and nurses at Georgetown noticed something else: the voice that excited the brain had the paradoxical effect of soothing the body. Babies in the study registered fewer physiological fluctuations during and immediately after the readings. “We can see that during the duration of the reading you have fewer events, of changes in oxygen saturation—it’s much more stable, the breathing is much more stable, the heartbeat is much more stable,” Dr. Abubakar told me. “And it had a lasting effect for at least an hour after the reading.” He knows it lasted for an hour because that’s how long the monitors kept running. Had the tabulation been extended, it’s possible that the babies would have been seen to enjoy the calming effects even longer.
To appreciate the significance of these preliminary findings, it helps to keep in mind the fragility of the babies. For you or me to have stable oxygen saturation, regular breathing, or a predictable heartbeat is a matter of course. For precarious infants inching their way toward the date at which they ought to have arrived in the world, when all their systems would ordinarily have been at a safe point of development, these can be hard-won achievements. Think what it means, then, for a baby’s heart rate and respiration to st
abilize when she hears her parents reading out loud. Their voices are a kind of curative.
“Reading promotes better interaction between parent and child. We know for sure that it does,” Dr. Abubakar said. “It makes the parent much more actively involved in their child’s development. We think if you establish this relationship much earlier, it’s much more likely to continue as the baby goes home. And if they keep reading to that child, it’s going to promote better child and parent interaction, and that will definitely have an effect on their development, but also on their intellectual abilities.”
The story of one Georgetown NICU patient, Sam Green, would seem to bear this out. Twelve years ago, Sam came into the world at twenty-eight weeks weighing just two pounds, four ounces. A photograph of him from the time shows a tiny, almost spectral creature, curled up and stuck full of tubes. Sam’s mother, Lori, had read every night to his two older sisters, and she was determined to do the same for him. Day after day, hour after hour, she sat in the NICU with her son’s body pressed against her bare skin, in the therapeutic practice known as kangaroo care, and read out loud. There was no way of telling if Sam knew or noticed, but the reading at least gave her a boost. “It helped me bond with him, made me feel useful, and gave our unfortunate circumstance the illusion of normalcy,” she told me.
Sam’s physical complications took the form of bronchopulmonary dysplasia, a lung disorder that followed him out of the hospital after his NICU “graduation” and kept him attached to a nasal cannula that supplied oxygen until he was eight months old. When he started talking, he had a mild speech impediment. So far, so normal, as far as the bumpy road of preemie childhood is concerned. Yet Sam’s brain didn’t show any impairment. He never had any cognitive delays.
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