How the Tech Effect Puts Children’s Development at Risk
Stimulation has replaced connection, and I think that’s what you need to watch out for.
—NED HALLOWELL, PSYCHIATRIST AND
AUTHOR OF DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION
TOM IS ONE of the most thoughtful, attentive, engaged dads I know, and his sons—four, seven, twelve, and thirteen years old—are good kids. He takes his boys hiking, coaches their sports teams, helps them raise animals, and travels with them to study the world. He is not a man absorbed in tech and he has been mindful about the TV and electronic games he allows the boys to use. This is especially challenging because their range of ages and development means he has to set different limits for his two older boys (“the bigs”) from those he sets for their younger brothers (“the littles”).
Some of the things he might permit the bigs to play—gory war games, for instance—he would never want the littles exposed to. And then there is Grand Theft Auto, a game so vile he never intended to let it in the door. In the game, the player is a sociopathic getaway driver who racks up points for running down pedestrians and other innocents, basically killing anyone who gets in his way just for sport. Between kills he is immersed in a criminal world—not as a cop or heroic good guy, but as a really, really bad guy.
“The guy can go into a strip club. There’s pornography. There’s drugs. There’s shooting police. It’s horrendous,” Tom tells me. “So I kept saying, ‘No, we’re not going to get it. I put my foot down.’” And he stood firm. Then for eldest son Sam’s thirteenth birthday, one of his best friends gave him Grand Theft Auto.
Tom was exasperated but wanted to be reasonable; rather than force Sam to surrender the gift, he modified his strategy. He banned all but Sam from playing it and only when the others were not around. That didn’t work. He made new rules; they got bent. He hid the game; it got found. Finally he thought he had it under control. The two bigs obeyed the limited-play rule and the game stayed out of sight and inaccessible to the littles—four-year-old Ben and seven-year-old Teddy.
One day soon after, Tom was driving “blissfully along,” his younger boys quietly engaged in the back, when he discovered Teddy, the seven-year-old, was playing Grand Theft Auto on his iPhone. He had used the touch-screen web browser to access it. It had never occurred to Tom that the boys could do that—or would. The only reason Teddy even had a phone at his age was because his mother traveled extensively for work, and this allowed them to communicate with each other if need be. Tom had never thought of it as a potential security breach in his protective parental firewall.
Tom could have thrown up his hands, given up, surrendered to tech’s incursion on his parental authority, but instead he immediately set about plotting his next strategic move: downsize the tech capabilities on the phones and update parental controls so he could more closely monitor the boys’ activity. He banned Grand Theft Auto in the house altogether, knowing that his oldest son could and would play it at his friend’s house, but at least his message was back on course and clear.
It is an endless challenge, this role of IT parent in the digital age. Tom wants his children to have the benefits and enjoyment that tech offers, he wants them to be tech savvy and media literate, and his home is outfitted for work and fun on screens. What he does not want to do, he says, is leave his kids on their own with it to “roam and learn” and hope for the best. There is just too much at stake.
ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS ago I began getting calls to visit schools and talk with parent groups about raising children of character. Parents were deeply worried that a breakdown in cultural norms, growing consumerism, cynicism and crass entertainment, overscheduled lives, and an increasing pressure for competitive success in school were shortchanging their children’s moral development. Since screens, tech, and online access became commonplace in children’s lives, the calls now come from parents and teachers of children as young as preschool age, alarmed at the extent to which children’s screen play or online lives are affecting their learning, their social and emotional development, their family interactions, and their school communities. Teachers share their concerns about the subtle but pervasive ways they see tech impinging on the school experience: four-year-olds who want to imitate computer games on the playground and hesitate to play with blocks or peruse books; elementary school children who struggle to problem-solve and who depend on adults to help them with the simplest tasks; high school students who struggle with any assignment requiring more than shallow attention and prefer a virtual tour of a museum to a field trip to see the real thing.
Parents call in a panic. A child is showing signs of gaming addiction or has been caught watching porn on a pal’s laptop. A mom snooping on her fifteen-year-old daughter’s Facebook page has learned that she plans to sneak away to the movies to meet a forty-something man she friended there. Or a twelve-year-old has posted pictures of herself online at “Am I Ugly” inviting anonymous critics to rate her looks.
I also hear much more anxiety from parents about sleepovers than ever before. One of the biggest concerns is that there will be older kids in the home who have been influenced by sexual content or YouTube videos and other sites and will put their children in harm’s way by exposing them to inappropriate content. Or that the sleepover kids will have unsupervised access to computers and go looking for trouble—or find it by accident. “I used to just assume these things couldn’t happen,” says one mother, “and now I have to assume that they can.” That is not only a safe assumption but a wise and durable one for the years ahead. Technological innovation by definition takes us into unknown territory and will continue to alter the landscape of everyday life in ways that hold us in thrall. Research into the effects of those practical innovations on human life, from brain synapses to sleepover experiences, will necessarily lag behind. Every new thing, every upgrade, takes us farther along the slippery slope of the cyber culture where we must expect to be continually challenged in new ways.
The tech paradox we all confront as parents is that the very thing that can get our kids in deep trouble can also deepen and enrich their lives in unimaginable ways. Technology has transformed the ways we can connect with family and friends at a distance and manage the traffic flow of work and family commitments. Our children can access extraordinary resources to explore their healthy interests and connect with others who share those passions. Tech has transformed what it means to be a student, the opportunity for lifelong learning, and the very process of education itself. Tech has transformed what it means to be a global citizen and our capacity to empathize, understand, and truly see the world from the perspective of people we may never meet. The possibilities are nothing short of thrilling, often inspiring.
Yet we know the darker side is there. Research already shows detrimental effects on the developing brain, early learning, and emotional development. We know that the entertainment and online culture is in many ways antisocial, crass, and demeaning and that kids have such easy access to it. In an era when children need adult supervision the most, parents say they feel more ineffectual than ever. They cannot control the landscape and they cannot control their children’s journey through it. They want to trust their children and believe that their children will know how to navigate, protect themselves, and respect others in the chaos and moral indifference of the cyber culture. But as much as parents want to trust their kids to make the right choices, it’s not a matter of trust but a question of whether they are prepared to make their way safely and wisely through what is for all of us new territory. As for trust, at best all you can trust is that they are good kids who will inevitably roam into bad tech terrain. But unlike grown-ups, whose fully matured brain should be able to tell right from wrong, a joke from bullying, and tasteful content from trash, and should be able to exercise impulse control and mature judgment in how we use tech, our children are not there yet. They are still children.
Our species is notable for the amount of growth and length of time required for the brain to mature after birth. Too often, conversations about child development focus on what a child can do and how to make it happen faster, when instead we should be talking about how a child can think, how the developing young brain is prepared to process experience, and how we can support that growth in healthy ways. We know now that it takes twenty-five-plus years for the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that enables us to link consequences to behavior (called executive functioning) to fully develop. In the adolescent brain executive functioning is still a work in progress, neurologically not yet a fully functioning piece of a teen’s decision-making process. So it falls to us. Older and ostensibly neurologically wiser, we are the ones equipped to think of consequences. At times, though, our own love affair with tech clouds our view of the serious consequences the same habits hold for our children.
We all work so hard, juggling life’s big worries and ordinary demands, trying to stay afloat and feel we are competent, doing no harm, being our almost best selves as much as possible despite the one hundred interruptions that splinter our attention and ability to accomplish something. It is easy to slip into denial about the downside, reassuring ourselves: It’s got to be fine, everyone else is doing it. It’s not really that bad—I know other parents are letting their kids do much worse. They’re going to see it sooner or later anyway, there’s nothing I can do.
We delete from memory the steady flow of news stories about the known dangers of texting and driving, or research showing likely links between children’s media habits and health concerns like anxiety, aggression, addiction, attention deficit and hyperactive disorder (ADHD), developmental delays, obesity, and eating disorders. Or the stories that end tragically. If it hasn’t happened to us yet—the crash or the crisis, the diagnosis, or the call from the school or whatever worrisome thing is next—it doesn’t seem likely it will happen at all. But it is happening. Research and behavioral trends already show that when tech becomes an early and continuing presence in children’s lives, it can undermine family and child development. In the struggle to preserve our families and protect our children we are losing ground on some critical fronts. Psychologically, these losses in fundamental aspects of child development and well-being can set our children up for trouble in school and in life.
Tech Replaces Family Primacy: What’s @ Stake as Peers and Pop Culture Delete Parents
What is family? When I ask children that question, their responses reflect the very different things that family represents for children at different ages and stages of development. Four-year-old Amber describes family as “my mommy and my daddy and my sister and . . . what makes me happy.”
“Your family is who loves you,” says Max, five.
“They’re the people who matter most,” says Emory, eight.
Naomi, ten, describes family as “where you learn about your values and love.”
Andrew, thirteen, concludes: “Sometimes they can be pretty annoying but you know, they’re always there for you. Yeah. Good stuff.”
However we describe family in everyday terms, the primacy of family has special meaning from a developmental perspective. The infant’s experience of itself and its environment (everyone and everything included) is undifferentiated; there is no me, only a we. “Family creates our first experience of ourselves in the world, and it becomes the foundation of our view of the world,” writes the psychoanalyst Harvey Rich in his book In the Moment: Celebrating the Everyday. “Family is the organizing theme around which our consciousness grows. . . . It is where we begin to define ourselves relative to others, and as part of the larger story of family, community, history, and humankind. At the deepest level, it is where we first discover ourselves.”
A couple’s relationship and expectations, the constellation of personalities and circumstances into which a child is born, all of that constitutes the so-called nurturing surround that shapes the way a child thinks, grows, and engages the world from birth. In child development, when we talk about “the primacy of family” we are not simply suggesting that family is very important to a child as a home base. We are referring to the family’s role as the deepest, most profoundly defining influence in a child’s formation of self—her neurological, psychological, and physiological growth and development.
The psychologist Selma Fraiberg, in her classic book The Magic Years, wrote that family is “how a child becomes humanized.” Ultimately, she was referring to the way in which family serves as our first and most significant teacher in what it means to be fully human in the best way, from cognitive capacities to qualities of character. We have reason to be concerned, then, when the intimate nurturing surround of family is breached, and media and tech displace family as the context for defining values, modeling relationship, mentoring, and meaning making for our children.
We might think that the transient, insubstantial content of so much of the media and tech culture would be relatively harmless against the deep, primal influence of family. The opposite is true. The content is more powerful. The psychoanalytic theorist Harry Stack Sullivan, whose seminal work in the 1930s defined psychological theory about family primacy, observed zones of interaction between parents and children at every age. These “relatively enduring patterns” of interaction give children a sturdy relational base from which trust, empathy, optimism, and resilience can grow.
Shared rituals or conversations you create with your child around meals, bath and bedtime, playground, and drive times together—all these are zones of interaction. You create them in the repeated resonance of consistent responses to everyday moments: It’s time to brush your teeth . . . I love you so . . . Yes, you have to take a nap now . . . It’s your sister’s turn on the swing . . . I see you are sad but it’s time to leave the playground. Or setting limits: If you can’t take turns with the Wii, off it goes . . . Yes, you have to stay at the dinner table till we are all done. Or when you remind your teen for the umpteenth time: Drive safely . . . Call if you’re not comfortable . . . Curfew means curfew or there will be consequences. And mean it.
It is the talks in the car, the grunts at the breakfast table, the conversations at dinner, over and over, day after day, that weave us together. And perhaps most of all, it is parents teaching their children: what is okay and not okay; what is rude and insensitive; when they have crossed the line from a joke to teasing; the meaning of limits; and the fact that misbehavior has consequences and consequences are enforced. Kids don’t tend to thank us in the moment, and often it is disruptive and painstaking to enforce rules or discipline at home. Yet that is our job as parents. So when we set limits, when we say no, we also teach them. Our children develop their deepest sense of self and internal stability from this pattern of intimate connections. Every time our child’s texting, TV, electronic games, and social networking take the place of family, and every time our tech habits interrupt our time with them, that pattern is broken and the primacy of family takes another hit. “There are a lot of minimoments of disconnect that are cumulative in the lives of children today,” says Liz Perle, cofounder and editor in chief of Common Sense Media. “Kids are bright and they sense when their parents are present and they know when they are not.”
Too Much, Too Soon: The Premature Loss of Childhood Innocence
Children come to life innocent, unaware of the harsh aspects of pain and suffering and how cruel people can be. Part of the job of parenting is to protect them from that harsh truth long enough for them to develop a sense of goodness and core values of optimism, trust, internal curiosity, and a hunger for learning. If they see too much too soon—before they’re neurologically and emotionally ready to process it—it can short-circuit that natural curiosity. Boys and girls alike are easily traumatized by premature exposure to the media-based adult culture that cultivates cynicism and cynical values, treats sex and violence as entertainment, routinely sexualizes perceptions of girls and women, and encourages aggression in boys.
Today’s kids are growing up in this culture that normalizes lying, cheating, crass sexuality, and violence. These things are nothing new, of course, but prior to the Internet and personal tech that put it within reach, children generally did not have access to that world without parental permission. We have lost a protective barrier, individually as parents and collectively as a culture. When you go into a drugstore and see the Playboy magazine discreetly displayed under partial cover behind the counter it harks back to a sweeter, more innocent time when grown-ups at home and in the community together would protect children from premature exposure to unhealthy values and behaviors.
Children are no longer sheltered in this way. Further, the adult culture “adultifies” children. Some of it is incidental: kids tap into general content that is intended for grown-ups—graphic coverage of disturbing news events and rants and rhetoric that adults understand with a maturity and a context that children lack. But plenty of it is intentional, backed by big-bucks research and product marketing interests that target children as consumers. These marketers cultivate kids’ “must have” consumer appetites, right down to click-’n’-buy options on free app games for toddlers—linked to the parent’s credit account. Much of so-called children’s programming isn’t tailored to protect children from those exploitive cultural messages; it is simply tailored to package them in language and content that appeal to kids and gets the okay from parents who assume it is okay for their children. The same cynicism, cruel humor, destructive gender stereotypes, and disrespect that distinguish so much of popular adult TV and online commentary is shrunk to fit for children’s viewing in the likes of Bratz Dolls, Power Rangers, and SpongeBob SquarePants, and later on, Gossip Girl and the like.
With TV tutors like that for hours a day, it shouldn’t surprise anyone when girls approach adolescence with a jaundiced view of themselves and what it means to be pretty, popular, and powerful. Or when boys act on the behavioral scripts they find in computer and digital games, media, and porn that promote the “boy code” of sarcastic, aggressive, humiliating one-upmanship of each other and of girls.
Early exposure to sexualized images and gender messages goes straight from screen to real life and often into my office. A well-behaved, sweet third-grade boy explains why he recruited a girl friend (not a girlfriend) to go into a school closet, pull up their shirts, and kiss each other’s nipples. Cruising the Internet on the family computer in the kitchen, he had stumbled onto a YouTube vein of videos depicting adults doing that, suggested it to his friend, and she went along with it. At a middle school, a sexting incident shocks everyone: a naive and obliging eleven-year-old girl sexted a topless photo of her barely developed breasts to a twelve-year-old boy who had asked her for it and then showed a friend, and the friend e-mailed it to the entire school. At another school a nine-year-old girl sent a ten-year-old boy several graphic e-mails alluding to the size of his genitals and other sexual innuendo that she clearly did not even understand but found online. Sadly, these are no longer unusual calls for me to receive.
One afternoon I get a call from Sarah, a distraught mother, who is unable to calm her usually sturdy daughter. Amy, age ten, had come home from the after-school program hysterical and had been on-and-off crying for hours. It was now 9 p.m. That afternoon Ginny, a thirteen-year-old friend with whom she often hung out happily at after school had showed her a YouTube video that Ginny thought was “hilarious.” It was a promo trailer for a horror film depicting sexual violence and sadistic torture. Amy had been mortified. When her mom called the school to see how this could have been allowed to happen, she learned that while the school has a no-Internet policy during the day, including after school, students with smartphones and tablets are on the honor system after 4 p.m. Ginny had been genuinely surprised that Amy was so upset by something she herself had found laughable. After meeting with the school principal, Ginny willingly wrote Amy a sincere apology; she truly had meant no harm. Ginny also did detention, where she had to research more about inappropriate online content for kids. But Amy couldn’t shake the images for days. Any humor was lost on her young brain, and the shocking, sadistic, gory details became pop-ups in her head when she tried to fall asleep. I gave Sarah some ideas about how to help Amy shed the disturbing images and in a few days Amy was able to concentrate again. But she lost a piece of innocence that afternoon, and it crushed her heart as well as her mother’s.
In each case, this behavior clearly ran counter to the family’s values. What it means to be a good person or a good friend, how boys and girls act and treat one another: all those messages that used to come from family and friends are now being challenged by outside sources—programs, people, and profiteers with their own agendas. Protecting your child’s innocence is not one of them.
Tech Trades Away Family and Personal Privacy and Exposes Vulnerabilities
Privacy is fundamentally a way we have of protecting ourselves. As media and social networking have erased the boundary between protected childhood and the adult world, they have also blurred the distinction between the public and private dimensions of life, especially in our children’s minds.
Family traditionally was a private, protective realm for children. It provided a safe place to be yourself, at times your most unflattering self, your scared or sullen or angry self. You whined and aired petty grievances and social revenge fantasies to your mom or dad (or perhaps your diary, secreted away). You teased your siblings, sometimes cruelly. After a long day at school, you brought your woes home and debriefed with your parents or the family dog. Your parents comforted you or corrected you or talked things through with you, however clumsily at times. You experienced consequences, learned important lessons about love, life, and relationships. You were forgiven and you grew up, your early missteps relegated to family lore. In the privacy of family you shared your hurts and failures. If you were shaken up, they were the people you would turn to first—not a public chat room or online stranger.
You also learned that you were responsible for protecting others—that family loyalty meant protecting your family, recognizing boundaries, and thinking carefully before you revealed family information or troubles to people outside the family. No one thought to post complaints about family members or embarrassing pictures of them in a public place.
Now, instead of coming home to a snack and telling us the stories of their day as they unpack their backpacks, kids mark the transition from school to home by plugging into screens. Social networking has switched out the private family space for a public square that promotes freewheeling communication, impulsive sharing, and uncensored feedback. It has turned what was once a child’s private life into a universe where personal disclosure plays out to that infinite audience of intimate strangers. It has also replaced the old family teaching that some matters involving others aren’t for public sharing. Now everyone is fair game and the inner voice of restraint is lost in the impulse to join the carping chorus in texts and posts.
Not all families are safe places for children to share their vulnerability, and at times a young person’s online disclosures—about traumatic events, social cruelties, sexuality, depression, and suicidal thoughts, for instance—have connected him or her to needed acceptance and support not found at home. For some kids going online is a lifeline in this way, even lifesaving. As is often the case with discussions of our relationship with tech, the issue is not only whether there is potential for good, but how certain patterns of use are diminishing our children’s experiences in ways that put healthy development—and basic safety—at risk.
The Indelible Digital Footprint Makes Errors Costly
The family album or a child’s scrapbook or diary used to be the extent of the physical evidence of our younger childish days. Kids hated it when Mom pulled out the snapshots of them as bare-bottomed babies or awkward broody teens; when you are still in the process of growing up, it is embarrassing to see the younger you whom you are trying so hard to leave behind. Today, the private scrapbooks and diaries aren’t private anymore. Children (and many parents, too) are sharing everything online: photos, video clips, rants, reflections, gossip, and secrets—theirs and others’. Never before have children grown up with such a public and permanent record of their daily lives. This includes their immaturity and poor judgment.
Jake Strong, a middle school principal in the Midwest, sits with me one afternoon sharing stories from the front lines where kids’ texting, Facebook, and Internet activity have transformed incidents that might once have been disciplinary misdemeanors—literally, mistakes in demeanor—into unforgivable offenses. In a more serious case he recalls, a boy posted a “racist, homophobic, and exceedingly explicitly violent post” on a classmate’s Facebook wall. Other students saw it and, understandably, “were horrified.” They reported him, and when Strong got a transcript of the post, he felt he had no choice but to expel the student.
What I ultimately told him was, there are lots of opportunities for making mistakes and for recovering from it, but this was one you can’t come back from a year from now. Because here, in this school, you’re going to always be the person who said this. . . . There are very, very few things which are not fixable—especially for kids—but the explicitness of this, and the horrifying choices of language and imagery were unforgettable, and in some ways, unforgivable. I couldn’t justify allowing the student to continue in the community having said things that would make it so that there would be many people who would not ever feel safe.
The parents argued that their son deserved another chance, that his comments did not reflect the family’s values, and that he clearly had picked those ideas and that language up elsewhere and had tried them out impulsively—like scrawling graffiti—on the Facebook wall.
In pre-Facebook days, had this boy spoken this way in the lunchroom or at recess, or even scrawled it as graffiti on the side of the building or in the restroom, his actions would have deserved serious consequences. But the impact of his comments could have been contained. The graffiti could be erased and the offender required to atone for his comments. His parents and teachers might have been able to make more of the teachable moment. Given the boy’s general history of behavior, Strong says, it is doubtful he would even have expressed those ideas and acted so recklessly in a personal setting. But once he posted on Facebook, the deed was done. He couldn’t take it back. And he couldn’t control its life online: who saw it, who shared it with others, how far and how long his hate-filled message would travel on the Internet.
None of us can know the long-term effects of public self-disclosure in online posts and photos, saved texts, tweets, and YouTube videos. Children are especially vulnerable both as instigators and victims as they develop online personas even as their own identity development is a work in progress. Every day there are adolescents posturing online as haters, hookers, and hell-raisers. There are shy kids trying out bold personas and ambitious kids testing the limits. They may use language from a popular song that they think will make them look cool, only to land them in the principal’s office. They may post, as some seventh-grade girls did, photos of themselves in bikinis, pouty-lipped and posturing seductively as if for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Or they may join the ranks of college kids posting photos of themselves drunk and puking, naively thinking that their privacy settings will protect their privacy, when in fact those settings offer only scant protection. Many employers now routinely review applicants’ online lives before making a hire. More important, we know that this kind of online socializing can spiral out of control and hurt our kids.
We are often absent, distracted, or unaware when our children take missteps online; we miss the teachable moments and they miss the needed guidance. Whatever the reasons for our absence, it is amazing how little all of us, as parents, know about our children’s lives online and the identities they are creating for themselves there. It is where they regularly hang out and socialize, and they are wildly unsupervised. Kids want to—and need to—own their identity in a way that’s not accessible to parents and the online world has given them a place for that. But the sad truth is that it is not as protected a place as they need.
Empathy Is the Missing “E” in Our E-Culture
Think back to the kinds of notes you passed between friends at school when you were sitting quietly working on an assignment. Recently I asked high school students attending a conference for girl leaders to write down memorable ugly posts or texts they saw or received while doing homework at school. Here are a few of the milder ones:
“You are a lonely disgusting human being.”
“Someone ought to kill that bitch”
“Everyone knows that your friends hate you, why are you even trying?”
“You r an ice cold bitch”
“U just want to get your hands dirty”
Our children are growing up immersed in a culture where it is cool to be cruel, where media influences encourage it and social networking facilitates it. In my work as a school consultant, I spend a lot of time helping schools get to the heart of what is amiss in their school culture. Parents and teachers describe a disturbing new presence of sarcasm and meanness across age groups. I see the effects in my patients, often children struggling through situations in which their own or others’ lack of empathy is problematic.
Eight-year-old Ellie is refusing to go to school and can’t sleep at night. She tells me:
I was on Google Buzz and these girls who I thought were my friends were really mean. They told me that I was fat and that I wasn’t going to be invited to any of their birthday parties. I keep seeing those words “u r FAT” when I try to go to sleep.
In a suburban school, a seven-year-old boy taunts another boy, telling him that he is going to go to the boy’s house and shoot his dog and his brother. His teachers have been concerned because he plays video games for hours after school and now he is quoting them, using the same threatening game language with other students.
A seventh-grade teacher asks me to help her deal with a “culture of fear” that has permeated their entire grade and its counterpart at another school. Two boys called a girl “a fucking bitch” online, adding “you know what is ugly/your face is ugly,” she says. Others sent online Valentine Day cards designated “for sluts.” They are falsely outing kids online in the other school, spreading rumors about sexual activity using innuendo and language that many of the girls don’t even understand. I get similar calls from so many schools and I know this is not just about “that school” or “that child.” It is about us, about our cultural crisis.
Incident by incident, we put out the fires, but the damage remains. Child victims of this kind of cruelty, and perpetrators of it, too, are psychologically affected. The effects of being bullied by peers as a child or adolescent are direct and long-lasting, according to a 2013 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study focused on 1,420 people who reported having been bullied and/or having bullied others multiple times between the ages of nine and sixteen. Victims and perpetrators were at higher risk of psychiatric problems as children, although it was unclear whether the risk continued into young adulthood. In addition to an increased risk of young adult and child psychiatric disorders that might also be associated with other life circumstances, the researchers found that victims had a higher prevalence of agoraphobia (feeling unsafe in public places), generalized anxiety, and panic disorder. Bullies were at higher risk for antisocial personality disorder. And those who were both victims and had bullied others were at increased risk of young adult depression and panic disorder. Of that group, only girls were at increased risk of agoraphobia. Boys were at greater risk for suicidal thoughts and behavior.
Empathy might seem a “soft” skill for children when compared to reading, writing, and math, but it is actually a neurological phenomenon as well as a soulful one. The development of empathy comes from direct experience that lays down neural pathways in both the left and right hemispheres of the brain and through the body: to say we “feel” empathy for someone is biologically accurate. Those pathways expand and deepen with experience, creating what the noted child psychiatrist and author Dan Siegel has called a “neural map” of our interdependent selves, a system designed by nature to enable us to pick up cues about other people’s feelings and intentions and to be moved by their experience. When those neurons fire “they dissolve the border between you and others,” he says. That’s empathy.
The development of empathy is a critical step in early childhood and over a lifetime. Empathy is the caring glue that creates our humanity, our compassion. It has been identified as one of the key markers for success in school, family, and work life. Empathy also enables us to have compassion for ourselves, a vital component of mental health. Absent experiences that cultivate emotional awareness and empathy, the neural map takes shape differently.
“The brain is what it does,” says Duke University professor Cathy Davidson in her book on brain science and learning. What it does in this regard has changed dramatically in the past twenty-five years as the media themes in children’s and young adult entertainment have made teasing, sarcasm, bullying, and physical aggression the norm. On your child’s neural map, an afternoon spent with TV’s mean-spirited Angelica on Rugrats is a far cry from Mister Rogers and his kindly neighborhood.
Neurologically speaking, empathy takes time and practice to sink in. The neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf writes extensively about the tech effect on cognitive processes in the young brain in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. She explains that the speed and superficiality of the tech experience have thinned the neural experiences that create empathy. In contrast, activities such as reading books or other substantive content create complex arrays of neural pathways, the necessary rich weave of interconnectedness that develops empathy and allows it to deepen.
We each have what Wolf describes as a “beautiful embroidered circuit” of interconnected neural networks that are “connected to everything.” However, she says, “if you’re just going super-fast, you’re not making those connections. . . . All these things take extra time.” The deeper connections that children make through reading, reflection, and conversation are what teach them “this is what it means to be good, this is what it means to be callous, this is what it means to be evil,” Wolf says.
Common sense tells us that communicating via e-mail, texting, and other media does not make us uncaring. The fact that social networking and online activity have been used so successfully to rally support for altruistic initiatives suggests there is something in that collective connection that can nudge our neurons toward compassion. At the same time, a Stanford University review of research findings showed that increased dependence on tech has resulted in the diminishing of empathy by reducing the amount of direct human interaction involved. One analysis of seventy-two studies performed on nearly 14,000 college students between 1979 and 2009 showed a sharp decline in the empathy trait over the past ten years. That is an outcome; the groundwork for it likely began a decade or so earlier in children’s day-to-day lives.
In his wonderful description of family’s role in empathy development, Ron Taffel in Parenting by Heart describes family as an “empathic envelope . . . like a container around your kids in your family . . . made up of your values, your expectations, and your ways of being with your children.” In that environment, he says, a child learns empathy in the experiences of compassion, consequences, and communication through meaningful time together and in conversation.
Through playing and fighting and sharing and pushing, through put ups and put downs, through all the messiness that is sibling relationships and family dynamics, we learn to empathize, to say I’m sorry, to understand when we’ve crossed the line. We learn to be accountable for our words and actions and their impact on others. We learn to live with each other. When those experiences go missing, so does a child’s training ground for empathy.
Tech Takes Away Time for Independent, Self-Generated, Creative Play at Every Age
The American Academy of Pediatrics has for years urged parents to eliminate or at least minimize TV and tech time for young children and monitor it closely for older ones. Based on an extensive review of three decades of research, the AAP concluded that unstructured, unplugged play is the best way for young children to learn to think creatively, to problem solve, and to develop reasoning, communication, and motor skills. Free play also teaches them how to entertain themselves, the report said, concluding: “In today’s ‘achievement culture,’ the best thing you can do for your young child is to give her a chance to have unstructured play—both with you and independently. Children need this in order to figure out how the world works.”
Nonetheless, recent research shows a mass exodus of children from outdoor free play and free time to the glowing screens of video and computer games, TV, and, increasingly, apps and games for handheld devices. At the same time, childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past thirty years, with more than one-third of children and adolescents overweight or obese. It’s not just that they are sedentary, it’s that marketing of junk food has become so pervasive—and successful. When we connect those dots, the unhealthy picture only gets worse with the expansion of digital products and junk marketing to infants and toddlers.
It’s bad enough that time for unstructured, imaginative play is shrinking for children of all ages as they become as overscheduled as everyone else, their days packed with school and organized activities or tutoring after school, squeezing out downtime. But adding hours of TV and computer play to the mix (65 percent of families have TVs in their kids’ rooms) means that technology-focused play has taken the place of unplugged play. With more than half of families with TVs in kids’ rooms, it is no wonder.
Computer play in moderation has merit for the school-age crowd. But they rarely play in moderation, and for children on the whole, TV and screen time has replaced the kind of old-fashioned free play that develops children’s capacity for creativity, deep thinking, social interaction, emotional self-regulation, and reflection.
On the bright side, Pew research says games can have positive effects. They can connect children with their peers, promote social interaction, create opportunities for strategic thinking, and teach collaborative play, as well as develop the capacity to think quickly when solving problems. Pew found that prosocial games encourage prosocial behavior off-line. Tech and games that have positive themes can be a good source of family and peer fun and promote some of the values—collaboration, optimism, stick-to-itiveness—that we want for our children. When the tech or games include voice-to-voice or text chats, kids do socialize in the tech sense. What and how kids play makes a difference.
So let me be clear: there are excellent TV programs and computer games for children. Mr. Rogers, LittleBigPlanet, Planet Earth, SimFarm, and Minecraft quickly come to mind. But we are talking here about losses, and the math is simple: For every minute or hour your child spends on screens or other digital diversions, he or she is not engaged in healthful, unstructured, creative play. When they’re engaged on screens, as social as it may be in one sense, they are not outside with other kids, taking in the day, relaxing and chatting, inventing games, and interacting directly—or arguing face-to-face, debating fairness directly, not via a game or headset. They are not running around, shooting hoops, and skateboarding, developing coordination and physical strength. Yes, they may be learning some computer skills and online etiquette (such as it is), but the issue is what they are not learning, the loss of which undermines healthy development. They are not learning how to deal with the frustration of real forts crumbling and block towers falling, of having to rethink and start over again. They are not alone with themselves, learning to be comfortable with solitude, with their own thoughts, with no alternative but to let their mind wander and drift, explore, discover, feel.
This is necessary throughout childhood—not just for young children. When little children make their own worlds with sticks or figurines, they are discovering the joy of making meaning, making story, creating drama, and problem solving. At every age, children use play and the realm of imagination to understand their selves and the world, to integrate learning, process conflict and loss, to replay again and again moments of anguish or joy. Eventually with that comes a capacity to think more deeply, to reflect, and to muse. Interactive games do not invite a child to daydream or ponder life’s big questions. If you give them too many programmed games or if they become addicted to playing on screens, children will not know how to move through that fugue state they call boredom, which is often a necessary prelude to creativity. We talk so much to children about finding their passion, but the capacity to fall in love with a subject or a sport or an instrument begins with the capacity to cultivate a deep connection, a drive that comes from the inner self.
Michael Rich, a pediatrician and director of the Center on Media and Child Health, says that unplugged downtime for kids doesn’t get the respect it deserves from adults. “We have to be very careful, particularly around the brain development period, but I think throughout childhood, that we’re not so busy stimulating these kids that they don’t have any downtime in their brains. The mind needs time to wander, the mind needs boredom, basically, to work well. Both to do maintenance, but also to do the kind of free-form creative thinking that none of these activities let you do.”
“Computers are the new playground,” laments Michael Thompson, a psychologist and the author of numerous books on child development. In his most recent one, Homesick and Happy: How Time Away from Parents Can Help a Child Grow, Thompson suggests that one of the most valuable aspects of sleep-away camp is that it typically provides what has become almost impossible for parents to provide: a tech-free environment and immersion in outdoor play. “It is so unusual to see a group of twelve-year-olds without handheld electronic devices that seeing them that way at camp is startling,” he writes. “At most camps, the children have turned in their cell phones and there are no computers for them to use. And they thrive. They are happy and they are proud of themselves.”
Tech Is Eroding the Capacity for Sustained Attention
Marina, age fourteen, was sent to see me when her parents grew alarmed at how long it routinely took her to complete relatively simple homework assignments and how agitated she became. She would take three or four hours to do assignments that her teachers claimed should take no more than an hour and a half, two hours at most. Her parents worry she has attention deficit disorder (ADD). They know she labors over her homework each night; she isn’t out partying.
As we sort out what might be ADD from what might be caused by other factors, her online activity quickly stands out as a contributing factor. When I ask her to keep behavioral charts of every time she does something different while doing her homework, it becomes clear that her multitasking is the culprit, not her neural wiring.
She would start an assignment, then video-chat with a friend working on the same assignment; she would receive from six to more than a dozen texts during those three hours, have many IM conversations, and “have to check Facebook” two or more times. She often received e-mails from her teachers, too. There were so many distractions that she could rarely sustain focused attention for as little as five minutes. The longest time she focused on any one assignment was fifteen minutes. In addition to those interruptions, she’d be distracted by online pop-ups and find herself checking out new UGGs, YouTube videos, and favorite Glee songs—all part of a night’s work.
As Marina identifies each distraction that was getting in her way, I ask her what she could do to get rid of it so she could achieve her goal of getting her homework done more efficiently and effectively. The result is that she decides to do her homework in the kitchen and to keep herself honest adds a self-imposed ban on the POS (Parents over Shoulder) screen switch kids routinely use so their parents won’t see what they’re doing when it’s not the homework. She also decides that, in order to eliminate temptations, she would do homework for periods of half an hour to an hour and then reward herself with twenty to thirty minutes’ play time. She would also put up an away message if she was anxious about her friends being mad or upset at her absence online, telling them when she’d be available. She tells me later that, although at times she regrets the no-POS plan, she knows it is working, and the best part was that she told her parents what she was going to do, not vice versa. She is in charge and it is working.
A 2006 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that middle and high school students spend an average of 6.5 hours a day hooked up to computers or otherwise using electronic devices, and more than a quarter of them are routinely using several types of media at once. It also found that when teens are “studying” at the computer, two-thirds of the time they are also doing something else.
“Children’s rooms are now almost pathogenic because they have so many distractions,” says Martha Bridge Denckla, a neuroscientist at Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins University who studies attention deficit disorders in kids. “I think the most devastating thing that has happened is giving a child a room with a computer in it—you think you’re being a good parent by doing so. Well, a funny thing can happen on the way to the homework.” If we are going to give children computers to keep in their rooms, we can set controls when they are young, but ultimately, they need to learn—we have to teach them—to self-regulate, self-monitor, and stay on course.
Scientists don’t yet know how screens and media use may shape the brain in ways that contribute to serious attention disorders, but research has shown negative effects in terms of distractibility and reading comprehension. In a Pew Internet/Elon University survey, tech experts acknowledged mixed feelings about the hyperconnected generation, dubbed AO for “always-on.” On the plus side, they said, teens and young adults brought up with a continuous connection to each other and to information will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who count on the Internet as their external brain and who approach problems in a different way from their elders. However, the experts also predicted this generation will have “a thirst for instant gratification and quick fixes, a loss of patience, and a lack of deep-thinking ability” due to this “fast-twitch wiring.”
Multitasking has become an asset and for many a requirement in our pressure-cooker culture, so much so that we’ve come to think of it in positive terms. It suggests a quickness, clarity, and efficiency of thought. But those who study the brain describe it differently. “It’s not really that you multitask, it’s that your brain oscillates between two activities,” says the noted pediatrician and researcher Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior, and Development at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Christakis’s research aims to identify optimal media exposure for children and his findings thus far suggest that multitasking undermines the capacity for sustained attention and deep thinking.
“The young, nimble minds that have trained themselves to do it do so quite well,” Christakis says. “But they nevertheless are oscillating and paying a price for it. They’re not focusing as well.”
A brilliant, beloved high school teacher, Steven Fine, tells me about the growing number of students for whom even the most engaged, creative teaching “just can’t hold their attention.” His greater concern is that screen-based learning is training the brain to process information more superficially through screens rather than through the printed page or human interaction. Once the brain has become accustomed to the more superficial screen-based learning, then this is what it is best prepared to do. Superficial thought processing becomes its default mode. Each year Fine sees the tech effect eroding students’ capacity for sustained attention, reflection, and deep thinking.
“The Internet promotes a hunt-and-bump dynamic—you hunt and bump around looking for information,” Fine says. “When you go on a web site you jump around a lot through very small, compartmentalized and very manageable pieces of information. Our students have more difficulty going more deeply into content.” He now assigns long magazine articles as a way to counteract the hunt-and-bump mentality.
Based on studies of highway accidents involving drivers who were texting and reports of pedestrians injured while reading or texting, we know that the distraction factor is real and significant, even when our life and the lives of others depend on our staying focused. A sixteen-year-old boy told me about getting hit by a car while crossing the street at a major intersection because he failed to heed the “don’t walk” pedestrian signal. He hadn’t gotten a text or heard from anybody in what felt “like forever,” and thought he’d take a quick look to see if he had missed something. With his attention half-focused on his phone, he heard the warning buzzer on the pedestrian signal but didn’t look up and stepped into the path of an oncoming car.
We have to be concerned about tech habits that train our children for compulsive connection and fast-twitch wiring. We may feel that by the time a kid is sixteen, he is old enough to know he has to pay attention when he crosses the street. But the fact is that when our tech habits condition the brain for distraction and dopamine hits, then that is what the brain seeks. We know it from our own experience. We can hardly resist checking e-mails or texting while driving, so self-assured are we that we are in total control of our car and fully present to anticipate any oncoming car. This despite public health warnings that texting and driving is equivalent to driving drunk and that the risk of an accident increases by 50 percent. What but an uncontrolled compulsion would lead us to risk our lives and the lives of others, often those we love the most, to “just check” what could easily wait for a safer moment? With digital tablets and apps in the hands of infants and preschoolers, we are fast-twitch wiring them younger than ever.
Can You Hear Me Now?: The Art of Conversation Is Getting Lost in Tech Translation
My friend Martha remembers when she was young and visits with her grandparents and extended family included cooking together, eating together, and relaxing together after the meal. In the migration from kitchen to dinner table to family room, the intergenerational conversation was continuous. The young cousins might convene a board game or maybe watch a TV show together, but family conversation wove through it all.
“We used to sit around with my aunts and my uncles and they would just talk about anything,” she says. “There was no point to it, it just went, but it had this great sort of humanizing, literary kind of impact on you.”
The contrast between that rich conversational flow and the relatively shallow, staccato one that dominates her own household today is dramatic—and discouraging, she says. Absent the texture and cadence of old-fashioned family conversations, she believes her children are growing up in “an extremely isolated little bubble” of digital dialogue, a kind of conversational Muzak that fills the space, mimicking style but lacking substance. She and her husband routinely text with their college-age kids, more than she ever communicated with her parents at that age. Yet something is missing in all the quick quips and updates. She has lamented this loss to her children, who don’t have a clue what she is talking about.
A generation ago a mother like Martha might have complained about her kids’ lack of interest in family conversation, but at least she could have assumed that their “extremely isolated little bubble” included direct face-to-face visits and conversations with their friends. That is how children forever have learned and practiced the skills of dialogue: mutual listening, talking in sentences, extracting meaning from events and feelings, and sharing feelings in the give-and-take of conversation. Not so much anymore. Children have turned instead to texting and posting online, eliminating the need to participate in a full-fledged conversation, and losing those skills or failing to develop them at all. Many report an inability to sit, listen, and participate in a family conversation without texting. “It’s too slow, so boring,” they complain.
In focus groups with more than six hundred teens over the past four years they described texting as their primary way of communication. Teens don’t even consider calling anyone anymore, and if you want to call your teen, you probably know by now that you are better off texting first to set up the call.
As our kids have grown accustomed to the detached and superficial quality of texting and online messaging, they have become averse to spontaneous conversation. They’d rather avoid it: with you, with their friends, with anyone. They describe a phone conversation, even with a friend, as “too intense,” or “so intrusive.” To call someone and have direct personal contact with your voice feels too needy, too forceful, too “in your face,” they tell me. A conversation by phone or in person feels too risky. You can never be sure what the other person is going to say, and the immediacy of it puts you on the spot to respond. With texting, the other person can’t see your emotional response so you are not nearly as vulnerable as in a live conversation. You can think before you text or not respond at all.
Absent conversation, kids are developing a seriously disordered understanding of what it means to truly communicate: to hear a voice, process the incoming and outgoing messages, engage directly with someone that way. The result is a new cautiousness, a tentativeness about the art of talking and the psychological capability of being direct or intimate with another person. This extends to e-mail, which they have long since abandoned for similar reasons. To e-mail a friend would be, as one older teen told me, “too weird, too personal.”
This disconnect is most concerning when we see it eroding the foundations of communication on which love, deep relationships, and emotional commitments are built.
Lucy, a college sophomore, tells me, “The irony is that although our generation is in touch with each other all the time texting, video chatting, on Facebook and all that, we are really bad at intimacy. It’s really kinda sad.” The emotional detachment of digital correspondence is now the norm.
Adolescence is an awkward time anyway, and socially anxious kids always hate making phone calls. So for many kids, texting facilitates connection because it does feel safer. But what heavy texters are losing is the opportunity to practice: first to get up the nerve and then to carry on a spontaneous conversation directly with someone else. Never before has it been possible, probable, or preferable for two people to sit on a couch next to each other and “talk” with each other by texting! I’m seeing it more and more with teens and adults whose texting habits have put all sorts of relationships in jeopardy as their fast-twitch communications careen from high-speed emotional fights to the deliberate detachment that kills emotional intimacy.
In studies of infants’ responses to their mother’s voice, researchers have found that even a very young baby can discern between the sound of its mother’s voice in person and the sound of her voice through a screen presence, with the baby being more responsive to the “real” embodied voice. This example of “embodied cognition” is a new area of scientific study, but we know from our own experience that in-person conversation resonates in ways that deepen our experience of one another, and that with practice we become more comfortable and confident communicators. When texting begins to take the place of substantive in-person conversations for any of us, we are training the language and speech centers of our brain for a new, unnatural, and superficial model of connection. When that training starts early, as it does now for young texters, they get so used to it at such a young age that, unlike the newborn baby who innately knows something is missing and complains about it, our older tech-trained children don’t even know what they have lost.
For many kids texting and the urge to spontaneously communicate also is taking the place of conversation within themselves—the capacity for reflection—that enables them to sit alone, think about things, and come to insights. To enjoy the experience of solitude, their own company, is an unfamiliar and often uncomfortable experience.
Lisa: I Text Therefore I Am
Lisa, age fifteen, comes to the therapy session one day still fuming from a school-sponsored weekend team-building retreat with her classmates at which they were not allowed to have their phones. She and her close-knit circle of girlfriends were used to sharing their thoughts about everything instantly in their secret online journal, in online chat, and through texting. The tech-free experience was boring and unsettling, she said. She especially disliked what was called “the solitude activity” in which each of the students sat alone on a rock, separated from the others doing the same thing throughout the woods.
“Why would anyone with best friends want to be alone in nature when you can text?”
As she shares her thoughts with me, Lisa doesn’t hear that her own inability to “be alone in nature” speaks to the very experience that the school was trying to create for these endlessly wired, hyper-connected kids: the capacity to have oneself be the “other” with whom you share your observations and insights. Lisa had been unable to experience any calm, creative, meaningful connection with herself, a capacity that comes with practice.
Like many children I work with, Lisa expects to be able to text her feelings as she is feeling them. For her, texting is often the medium that leads to self-awareness, much as an extravert needs to hear herself speak to know what she thinks. Lisa will say things like, “when I texted her I realized that I felt” as if her experience doesn’t register inside her until she texts it to her friends. In fact, she struggles to generate this kind of insight and self-awareness off-line. (Lately she is working in therapy on texting herself—to strengthen her connection to herself and to learn how to be her own ally.)
The neurological impulse to communicate, coupled with the addictive impulse to hit the keyboard to text, can be overpowering. It overrides what in other times would have been a pause and a thought—I need to call, what do I want to say? I need to write a letter, what do I want to say?—in which you would first connect with your own thoughts before you would address the other person. The immediacy of connecting as we do in texting interferes with the natural neurological and psychological process of communication.
Thoughtful conversation is one way we humanize our experience in a largely dehumanized digital culture. It remains a universal way in which parents provide something children need that they can’t get from tech. Kids depend on their parents for caring, candid conversation about life. Not just life with a capital L, and all the big issues and long-range plans that implies, but little-l life, not small at all, but personal and individual, teeming with the details of the day. For that kind of textured, nuanced conversation, reflection and hashing things through, tech can’t deliver. That’s what parents are for.
Our children may roll their eyes at required attendance for family dinners or at the stories we share and others we ply from them about their day. And while they may not miss the practice of conversation, they do feel a sense of loss when that connection is missing. “My family is sort of busy,” a middle school boy tells me. “My dad works late hours, my mom works all day, and then she has to cook dinner, and wash clothes, and stuff. Then I have homework to do. When we finally get family time, it’s sort of like awkward cause we don’t really talk to each other much. So it doesn’t really feel very close.”
Closeness counts. There is no substitute for genuine felt connection. We cannot control the culture outside our homes, but as parents we can create the culture we choose inside our families and communities. Our children need us to step into that role, reclaim our parental authority to “know what’s best,” dig deep for resolve, and tap the resources available to help us do it. Especially in today’s tech-oriented environment, it is in the humanizing qualities of family and empathy, of a protected childhood rich in play, with sheltered time for reflection and conversation that closeness grows.
The more we learn about the architecture and interior design of child development, the more we see that windows of opportunity and vulnerability exist at different ages and developmental stages. Although exciting new research is showing that the brain can continue to grow anew as we grow old, long-standing research also shows that in the earliest days and months of life the brain organizes itself for lifelong learning in deep, defining ways. The windows are wide open.