The big disconnect: protecting childhood and family relationships in the digital age

365 Pages·2013·1.53 MB·English

by  Catherine Steiner-Adair

Dedication
To Fred, Daniel, and Lily,
my beloved home page
Contents
Dedication
I : T R L R
NTRODUCTION HE EVOLUTION IN THE IVING OOM
CHAPTER 1
Lost in Connection: How the Tech Effect Puts Children’s Development at Risk
CHAPTER 2
The Brilliant Baby Brain: No Apps or Upgrades Needed
CHAPTER 3
Mary Had a Little iPad: The Wisdom of Tradition, the Wonder of Tech: Ages
Three to Five
CHAPTER 4
Fast-Forward Childhood: When to Push Pause, Delete, and Play: Ages Six to
Ten
CHAPTER 5
Going, Going, Gone: Tweens, Screens, and the Perils of Independence: Ages
Eleven to Thirteen
CHAPTER 6
Teens, Tech, Temptation, and Trouble: Acting Out on the Big (and Little) Screen
CHAPTER 7
Scary, Crazy, and Clueless: Teens Talk about How to Be a Go-To Parent in the
Digital Age
CHAPTER 8
The Sustainable Family: Turning Tech into an Ally for Closeness, Creativity,
and Community
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
The Revolution in the Living Room
All the wisdom in the world about child-rearing cannot, by itself, replace intimate human
ties, family ties, as the center of human development . . . the point of departure for all
sound psychological thinking.
—SELMA FRAIBERG, THE MAGIC YEARS
ALARM TRAVELS FAST through the human brain. Awareness dawns more slowly. It
is a cognitive process, a matter of comprehension that involves a different part of
the thinking brain. It’s how we connect the dots. Parenting has always included
both. But parenting in the digital age challenges us in ways the human brain—
and heart—can hardly process fast enough. The dots rush past in a blur: flashes
of insight with no time for reflection, downloads of details with too little time to
both feel and respond thoughtfully. Once in a while a moment seems to hang for
a fraction in time—OMG moments—when we sense we are glimpsing a piece of
some larger picture taking shape around us—something important—but it’s hard
to tell exactly what. As a psychologist, a child and family therapist, a school
consultant, and a mother of two, I see a lot of dots.
Sally, the mother of four school-age children, comes to a parent coffee I’m
facilitating. She is at her wit’s end and goes on to describe a domestic scene from
the night before. She had been folding laundry while keeping an eye on her
children—ages four, eight, eleven, and fifteen—immersed in their various
activities in the adjoining family room. Their family room is off the laundry
nook but not quite visible, so Sally was multitasking, folding clothes and
checking her e-mail on her smartphone, as many of us do, alternately stepping in
and out of the family room for a few moments at a time to keep an eye on the
kids. Finally she needed a solid five minutes to search for socks without
partners, and she asked the two older children to keep watch on their four-year-
old brother. The fifteen-year-old was on her iPad, and the eleven-and eight-year-
old brothers were playing a two-player racing game on the Wii. The four-year-
old was romping around them as four-year-olds do. As usual, the older siblings
nodded their agreement without looking up; Yes, they indicated, got it. So mom
left them all together and took the laundry upstairs, tending a few e-mails while
there. When she popped back into the room five minutes later everyone was
precisely as they had been—except the four-year-old. He was putting the
flourishes on a colorful wide-tipped purple Magic Marker trail that looped and
snaked across the hardwood floor and beautiful wood cabinetry, weaving
throughout the entire room. It was Harold and the Purple Crayon come to life.
When Sally saw this she went ballistic, she tells me. “How could you let him
do that?!” she shrieked at her older children. And in that nanosecond before her
children could even look up to see what she was talking about, she saw the
answer to her question. All three of them were so transfixed in their screen
activities that they hadn’t noticed the four-year-old running wild, decorating the
floor and walls. This might just as easily have occurred if they’d had the TV on
or if they’d had their noses buried in a book, reading the afternoon away like
generations before them. But in that instant Sally saw something more
worrisome, felt something deeper and more ominous. First, she realized that
when she had turned her attention to e-mail, however briefly, her intuitive “third
eye”—the parental antenna—had instantly lost its signal. Honestly, she’d lost
track of time, too; had it really been “just five minutes” or had it stretched
beyond that? She had no idea; it was as if she’d been lost in another world. And
then there was the specter of her three older children, each lost in a mind meld
with screens. “I know this could have happened without the iPad or the Wii,” she
says, “but I feel there’s something about those screens that sucks my children
away from me. Something that I don’t think watching The Brady Bunch did to
me and my siblings when we were growing up.”
The other mothers nod in agreement. She is right. Our screens are sucking us
in—all of us—in ways that shows like The Brady Bunch never did circa 1970.
But it wasn’t nostalgia for The Brady Bunch that made Sally wistful; it was
remembering what it was like to be a kid and watch a TV show. You could love
watching it but then you would leave the screen and get on with your real life:
homework, outdoor play and after-school hours with friends, a solid dinner hour
with your parents and siblings, and unhurried telephone conversations that
arrived on your family’s landline. Whoever answered the phone might ask
“Who’s calling?” and then yell the name out for all to hear as they called you to
the phone. TV had its allure—we have a few generations of couch potatoes now
to prove it—but it was essentially a passive activity, contained and time limited,
and it was something a family often did together; not the stimulating, interactive,
mesmerizing 24/7 experience we can access solo today through the media and
technology.
Tech Is Our New Home Page
We live in the glow of the digital age and we’re hooked on tech—an ever-
expanding array of electronic devices and capabilities designed to enable our
every wish. Few of us would even consider trading our wired (or Wi-Fi) ways
for the unplugged and bucolic Brady Bunch life. We’ve adapted happily, for the
most part, to the convenience and connectivity of the computer age. Our
children, born into the digital culture, are natives; they speak the language, tech
is their frame of reference, their mind-set. Kids between the ages of eight and
eighteen, according to a 2010 Kaiser Family report, are spending more time on
their electronic devices than any other activity besides (maybe) sleeping—an
average of more than seven and a half hours a day, seven days a week (i.e., every
day). Not only that, they typically multitask on computer, simultaneously instant
messaging (IM), uploading YouTube videos, posting updates on Facebook, and
continually searching the Web for fresh diversions. The so-called downtime they
spend on computers is neurologically, psychologically, and often emotionally
action packed. Stimulation, hyperconnectivity, and interactivity are, as the
psychiatrist and creativity expert Gene Cohen put it, “like chocolate to the
brain.” We crave it.
Designed to serve us, please us, inform us, entertain us, and connect us, over
time our digital devices have finally come to define us. We step in and out of our
various roles throughout the day as coworkers, family, and friends. But with our
phones in our pockets, our laptops handy, and our panoramic screens, game
systems, and online lives just a click away, for many of us our relationship with
technology is our single most consistent domain. It is our digital backdrop and
theme music. In any given moment, with a buzz or a ping, our devices summon
us and we are likely to respond, allowing ourselves to be pulled away from our
immediate surroundings and anyone in them, into the waiting world of elsewhere
and others. Whether we use it for work, shopping, or socializing, for
communicating with our children or their teachers, for wonderful reasons or
sometimes for meaningless and addictive stuff, the effect is the same: We turn
our attention away from those present.
We use the language of addiction to joke about our texting and online habits.
We compulsively check our “crackberry,” lament not-really-joking that we’re
“addicted” to e-mail, or complain that we need our YouTube or Facebook “fix.”
We mean to step away from the screen and call it quits for the day, but we sit
down for one last check of one last thing—and then one more. We take our
phones to bed. We take them to the bathroom. We don’t leave home without
them. “I thought when my kids got to be a certain age I’d stop feeling like I had
to have it with me, but now I keep it with me anyway,” says the mother of three
children in their twenties. She has become a little self-conscious about her habit,
she says, “but when I start to leave it behind, it’s like a little voice inside says,
better to keep it handy just in case—you never know.”
Pregnant women who regularly use cell phones may be more likely to have
children with behavioral problems, “particularly if those children start using
mobile phones early themselves,” according to a study that appeared in The
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in 2010. Another study
suggests that the quality of sperm may be compromised in men who carry a cell
phone in their pants pocket. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has
called on the federal government for a review of cell-phone-radiation-emission
standards out of concern for children’s health. Have these risks been enough to
motivate us to change our tech habit?
We know that some aspects of tech are addictive and that different types of
brains are more vulnerable than others. We joke, but the truth is that research
shows we are in fact enjoying neurochemical hits and fixes—the
neurotransmitter dopamine most notably—in the brain’s pleasure centers when
we’re “on” our devices. Talk of addiction is not hyperbole; it is a clinical reality
in some users’ lives today. As adults we may choose to mess with our minds and
gamble with our own neurology, but I have never met a caring parent who would
knowingly risk his or her child’s future this way. And yet, we are handing these
devices—that we use the language of addiction to describe—over to our
children, who are even more vulnerable to problems of use and abuse and the
impact of everyday use on their developing brains. Are we blindly cultivating a
generation of “crackberry” kids? In our enthusiasm to be early adapters, and to
give our kids every advantage, are we putting our children in harm’s way?
It appears that our distraction with tech is in fact putting our children in
harm’s way quite literally—physically. Doctors and researchers, from local
emergency rooms to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), link the growing
use of handheld electronic devices to an alarming increase in injuries to children,
especially when parents or caregivers are distracted and fail to properly
supervise young children in the moment. The Wall Street Journal, in a roundup
of research and interviews with experts on the subject, noted that injuries to
children under age five rose 12 percent between 2007 and 2010, after falling for
much of the prior decade, according to the most recent data from the CDC. That
14 percent of adults—and 22 percent of adults who send text messages—
reported being so distracted by their devices that they have physically bumped