Society’s fear of what a potential distraction like the smartphone is doing to our kids has reached a fever pitch. Articles with headlines like “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” and “The Risk of Teen Depression and Suicide Is Linked to Smartphone Use, Study Says” have, ironically enough, gone viral online.
Psychologist Jean Twenge, the author of the former article, writes, “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”
Convinced by the ominous headlines and fed up with their kids’ tech distractions, some parents have resorted to extreme measures. A search on YouTube reveals thousands of videos of parents storming into their kids’ rooms, unplugging the computers or gaming consoles, and smashing the devices to bits in order to teach their kids a lesson. At least, that’s their hope.
I can certainly understand parents’ feelings of frustration. One of the first things my daughter ever said was “iPad time, iPad time!” If we didn’t comply quickly, she’d increase the volume until we did, raising our blood pressure and testing our patience. As the years passed, my daughter’s relationship with screens evolved, and not always in a good way. She was drawn to spending too much time playing frivolous apps and watching videos.
Now that she’s older, new problems associated with raising a kid in the digital age have cropped up. On more than one occasion, we’ve met up with friends and their kids for dinner, only to find ourselves sitting through awkward meals as the kids spend the entire time tap-tap-tapping away at their phones instead of engaging with one another.
As tempting as it may be, destroying a kid’s digital device isn’t helpful. Surrounded by alarming headlines and negative anecdotes, it’s easy to understand why many parents think tech is the source of the trouble with kids these days. But is it? As we’ve seen is the case in the workplace and in our own lives, there are once again hidden root causes to kids’ distraction.
My wife and I needed to help our daughter develop a healthy relationship with tech and other potential distractions, but first we needed to work out what was causing her behavior. As we’ve learned throughout this book, simple answers to complex questions are often wrong, and it is far too easy to blame behavior parents don’t like on something other than ourselves.
For example, every parent obviously knows children become hyperactive when they eat sugar. We’ve all heard a parent claim the reason behind their kid’s bratty behavior at the birthday party was the ominous “sugar high.” I must admit I’ve used that excuse on more than one occasion myself. That is, until I learned that the concept of a “sugar high” is total scientific bunk. An exhaustive meta-analysis of sixteen studies “found that sugar does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children.”
Interestingly, though the so-called sugar high is a myth for kids, it does have a real effect on parents. A study found that mothers, when told that their sons were given sugar, rated their child’s behavior as more hyperactive—despite that child having been given a placebo. In fact, videotapes of the mothers’ interactions with their sons revealed that they were more likely to trail their children and criticize them when they believed they were “high” on sugar—again, despite the fact that their sons hadn’t eaten any.
Another classic excuse in the parental tool kit of blame deflection is the “common knowledge” that teens are rebellious by nature. Everyone knows that teenagers act horribly toward their parents because their raging hormones and underdeveloped brains make them act that way. Wrong.
Studies have found that teenagers in many societies, particularly preindustrialized ones, don’t act especially rebelliously and, conversely, spend “almost all their time with adults.” In an article titled “The Myth of the Teen Brain,” Robert Epstein writes, “Many historians note that through most of recorded human history, the teen years were a relatively peaceful time of transition to adulthood.” Apparently, our teenagers’ brains are fine—it is our brains that are underdeveloped.
Innovations and new technologies are another frequent target of blame. In 1474 Venetian monk and scribe Filippo di Strata issued a polemic against another handheld information device, stating, “the printing press [is] a whore.” An 1883 medical journal attributed rising rates of suicide and homicide to the new “educational craze,” proclaiming “insanity is increasing . . . with education” and that education would “exhaust the children’s brains and nervous systems.” In 1936, kids were said to “have developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the [radio] loudspeaker,” according to Gramophone, the music magazine.
It seems hard to believe that these benign developments scared anyone, but technological leaps are often followed by moral panics. “Each successive historical age has ardently believed that an unprecedented ‘crisis’ in youth behavior is taking place,” Oxford historian Abigail Wills writes in an article for BBC’s online history magazine. “We are not unique; our fears do not differ significantly from those of our predecessors.”
When it comes to the undesirable behavior of children today, convenient myths about devices are just as dubious as the blame parents deflect onto sugar highs, underdeveloped teen brains, and other technologies like the book and the radio.
Many experts believe the discussion regarding whether tech is harmful is more nuanced than alarmists let on.
In a rebuttal to the article that claimed children are on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades, Sarah Rose Cavanagh wrote in Psychology Today that “the data the author chooses to present are cherry-picked, by which I mean she reviews only those studies that support her idea and ignores studies that suggest that screen use is NOT associated with outcomes like depression and loneliness.”
One of many studies not cherry-picked was conducted by Christopher Ferguson and published in Psychiatric Quarterly. It found only a negligible relationship between screen time and depression. Ferguson wrote in an article in Science Daily, “Although an ‘everything in moderation’ message when discussing screen time with parents may be most productive, our results do not support a strong focus on screen time as a preventative measure for youth problem behaviors.” As so often is the case, the devil is in the digital details.
A closer read of the studies linking screen time with depression finds correlation only with extreme amounts of time spent online. Teenage girls who spent over five hours per day online tended to have more depressive or suicidal thoughts, but common sense would have us ask whether the kids who have a propensity to spend excessive amounts of time online might also have other problems in their lives. Perhaps five hours a day on any form of media is a symptom of a larger problem.
In fact, the same study found that kids who spent two hours or less online per day did not have higher rates of depression and anxiety compared to controls. A study conducted by Andrew Przybylski at the Oxford Internet Institute found that mental well-being actually increased with moderate amounts of screen time. “Even at exceptional levels, we’re talking about a very small impact,” stated Przybylski. “It’s about a third as bad as missing breakfast or not getting eight hours sleep.” When kids act in ways we don’t like, parents desperately ask, “Why is my kid acting this way?” There’s certainty in a scapegoat, and we often cling to simple answers because they serve a story we want to believe—that kids do strange things because of something outside our control, which means that those behaviors are not really their (or our) fault.
Of course, technology plays a role. Smartphone apps and video games are designed to be engaging, just as sugar is meant to be delicious. But like the parents who blame a “sugar high” for their kid’s bad behavior, blaming devices is a surface-level answer to a deep question. Easy answers mean we can avoid having to look into the dark and complex truth underlying why kids behave the way they do. But we can’t fix the problem unless we look at it clearly, free of media-hyped myths, to understand the root causes.
Parents don’t need to believe tech is evil to help kids manage distraction.
Learning to become indistractable is a skill that will serve our children no matter what life path they pursue or what forms distraction takes. If we are going to help our kids take responsibility for their choices, we need to stop making convenient excuses for them—and for ourselves. In this section, we’re going to understand the deeper psychology driving some kids to overuse their devices and learn smart ways to help them overcome distraction.
REMEMBER THIS
• Stop deflecting blame. When kids don’t act the way parents want, it’s natural to look for answers that help parents divert responsibility.
• Techno-panics are nothing new. From the book, to the radio, to video games, the history of parenting is strewn with moral panic over things supposedly making kids act in strange ways.
• Tech isn’t evil. Used in the right way and in the right amounts, kids’ tech use can be beneficial, while too much (or too little) can have slightly harmful effects.
• Teach kids to be indistractable. Teaching children how to manage distraction will benefit them throughout their lives.