essay on smart phones are making youngsters dull

Smartphones are making us stupid – and may be a 'gateway drug'

Recent mobile phone bans in Victorian state schools have had some parents and kids up in arms, despite a study showing that 80 per cent of Australians support the ban. Many private schools are now implementing phone and device bans in schools – but they too face fierce opposition.

School's out: Eighty per cent of Australians believe smartphones should be banned in classrooms.

Parents across Australia fork out hundreds of dollars to equip their kids with smartphones and iPads, often during primary school years. While peer group pressure and social expectations are behind most smartphone purchases, many parents also hope that these clever devices will encourage their child to learn to be tech-savvy, to develop their creative skills and to use these tiny computers to boost their learning.

But growing evidence shows that smartphones are doing the reverse: rather than making us smarter, mobile devices reduce our cognitive ability in measurable ways.

Macquarie neuroscientist Professor Mark Williams will present some of the latest research on the phenomenon in a special Sydney Science Week presentation on Monday 12 August at 7pm at Mosman Library titled: Are Smartphones Making us Dumb?

The school introduced a bring your own device (BYOD) policy so we had to buy them an iPad. I was just like: ‘ We shouldn't be doing this. It's not good for them.’ 

“There’s lots of evidence showing that the information you learn on a digital device, doesn’t get retained very well and isn’t transferred across to the real world,” he says. “You’re also quickly conditioned to attend to lots of attention-grabbing signals, beeps and buzzes, so you jump from one task to the other and you don’t concentrate.”

Not only do smartphones affect our memory and our concentration, research shows they are addictive – to the point where they could be a ‘gateway drug’ making users more vulnerable to other addictions.

Smartphones are also linked to reduced social interaction, inadequate sleep, poor real-world navigation, and depression.

“Given what we know about the effect that smartphones and digital devices have on our brains, it’s scary to see how prolific their use is with children from a very young age,” says Williams.

Williams, who spent 10 years studying the neuroscience around people’s perceptions of facial expressions and how these impact our social interactions, became interested in the impact of devices on our brains when his own children started school.

“All of a sudden they wanted to play video games, because that’s what their friends were doing – and the school introduced a bring your own device (BYOD) policy so we had to buy them an iPad,” he says. “I was just like: ‘ We shouldn't be doing this. It's not good for them.’ ”

Smartphones make us prone to addiction

Williams is currently contributing to a large study at Macquarie investigating the relationship between social media addiction, gaming addiction and porn addiction.

“All addiction is based on the same craving for a dopamine response, whether it's drug, gambling, alcohol or phone addiction,” he says. “As the dopamine response drops off, you need to increase the amount you need to get the same result, you want a little bit more next time. Neurologically, they all look the same.

“We know – there are lots of studies on this – that once we form an addiction to something, we become more vulnerable to other addictions. That’s why there’s concerns around heavy users of more benign, easily-accessed drugs like alcohol and marijuana as there’s some correlation with usage of more physically addictive drugs like heroin, and neurological responses are the same.”

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Could a child’s smartphone act like a ‘gateway drug’? Many of the apps that are hugely popular on smartphones and devices tap into decades of neuroscience and psychology research funded by the casino and gambling industries, which are designed to be addictive, Williams says.

“Casino-funded research is designed to keep people gambling, and app software developers use exactly the same techniques. They have lots of buzzes and icons so you attend to them, they have things that move and flash so you notice them and keep your attention on the device.”

The more time that kids spend on digital devices, the less empathetic they are, and the less they are able to process and recognise facial expressions.

Williams was a Research Fellow at MIT when the iPhone was first released in 2007, and says the impact worldwide has been astounding. “Undergraduates at MIT hacked into the first locked iPhones within a few hours of their release, and some months later, Apple opened up the App store to developers.”

From invention to having 3.3 billion smartphones operating worldwide in just over a decade, the smartphone revolution has been phenomenal, Williams says – but the profound effects on our brains and their function are already emerging.

“A colleague of mine did a great study two years ago into the ‘phantom vibration’ syndrome, where mobile phone users who are accustomed to having their phone on vibrate mode, will think the buzz is still occurring even when the phone is turned off,” he says.

Around 90 per cent of US university students are thought to experience ‘phantom vibrations', so the researcher took a group to a desert location with no cell reception – and found that even after four days, around half of the students still thought their pocket was buzzing with Facebook or text notifications.

“Tech leaders Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both admit to restricting their children and teens access to technology including smartphones and tablets,” Williams says. “Why would you give a kid something that's just as addictive as gambling?”

Smartphones make us antisocial 

Williams says that digital interactions differ markedly from in-person responses – and that’s a worry because children learn to interact and collaborate by observing and mimicking others’ expressions and reactions.

Family matters: Adults as much as children can fall victim to smartphones and their negative effects, including poor social interaction .

“Collaboration is a buzzword with software companies who are targeting schools to get kids to use these collaboration tools on their iPads – but collaboration decreases when you're using these devices,” he says. “The more time that kids spend on digital devices, the less empathetic they are, and the less they are able to process and recognise facial expressions, so their ability to actually communicate with each other is decreased.”

We understand how someone feels and how they react to us, by looking at their facial expressions and their body language – but when people focus on a screen, they lose those cues, he says.

“There’s usually increased arguments because kids ostensibly collaborating on a screen don’t pick up subtle messages from the other person on their needs or ideas.”

Poor social interaction isn’t restricted to children, he adds: parents can also fall victim to screens which distract from their child’s activities or conversations, and most adults will experience this with friends and family members too.

Smartphones make us forgetful

There’s about 30 years of research showing that people who read something on a screen will remember 10 to 30 per cent less of the material compared to reading the same material on paper.

“We also know that if you learn something on an iPad you are less likely to be able to transfer that to another device or to the real world,” Williams adds.

Our brains can’t actually multitask, we have to switch our attention from one thing to another, and each time you switch, there's a cost to your attentional resources.

He says a series of studies have tested this with children who learn to construct a project with ‘digital’ blocks and then try the project with real blocks. “They can’t do it - they start from zero again,” he says.

Smartphones also constantly interrupt our train of thought with notifications and buzzes designed to get people to ‘multitask', he says.

“Our brains can’t actually multitask, we have to switch our attention from one thing to another, and each time you switch, there's a cost to your attentional resources. After a few hours of this, we become very stressed.” That also causes us to forget things, he adds.

A study from Norway recently tested how well kids remembered what they learned on screens. One group of students received information on a screen and were asked to memorise it; the second group received the same information on paper. Both groups were tested on their recall.

Unsurprisingly, the children who received the paper version remembered more of the material. But the children with the electronic version were also found to be more stressed, Williams says.

Smartphones mess with our sense of direction

Google Maps was first developed in Australia and Apple now offer a competing version. But growing research shows that our sense of direction and ability to connect with place, along with our memory, is being negatively affected by our smartphone use.

“Navigation uses the hippocampus, which is the same part of the brain that we use for episodic memory which is our recall of what happened, when and importantly – where,” Williams says.  “We remember events in a serial way, based on what we were doing at the time.”

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The famous ‘London taxi driver experiments’ found that memorising large maps caused the hippocampus to expand in size. Williams says that the reverse is going to happen if we don’t use our brain and memory to navigate. “Our brains are just like our muscles. We ‘use it or lose it’ – in other words, if we use navigation devices for directions rather than our brains, we will lose that ability.”

One study tested two groups of university students on a campus tour, one group using a paper map and the other their smartphones. Not only did the students with paper maps have a better recall of place – they also felt more emotionally connected to the campus. “The other students weren't attending to what was around them and they weren't establishing that episodic memory about where things are and what's happened during those periods.”

Smartphones make us sleepless, friendless and depressed

The knocks just keep coming - numerous studies also link smartphone use with sleeplessness and anxiety. “Some other interesting research has shown that the more friends you have on social media, the less friends you are likely to have in real life, the less actual contacts you have and the greater likelihood you have of depression,” says Williams.

A new US study of more than 500,000 adolescents has shown a huge increase in depression over the past five years in adolescent girls. “There is also a direct correlation between suicide and amount of screen use.”

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Smartphones impact our empathy and social adeptness, too, he says, with scary data showing that 12-month-old children whose carers regularly use smartphones have poorer facial expression perception.

“That’s because we learn how to be empathetic and how other people think by observation and mirroring. When you are talking to someone and the muscles in their face contract slightly towards a smile, you will subconsciously reflect that, slightly smile so that you get the same emotional response. But to learn that – you have  to be watching and looking at other people.”

Williams is a fan of removing smartphones from schools – and says that rising alarm over the side-effects of device use is a wake-up call for adult users too.

He says that turning off software alarms and notifications, putting strict time limits around screen use, keeping screens out of bedrooms, minimising social media and replacing screens with paper books, paper maps and other non-screen activities can all help minimise harm from digital devices including smartphones.

“We need to teach our kids to be innovative and creative, empathetic and curious. And being on a device is never going to teach you that.”

Professor Mark Williams is a neuroscientist in the Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Human Sciences.

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Are smartphones making teens dumb and dumber?

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by Kristen Blair, EducationNC May 1, 2017

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Smartphones are teenagers’ constant companions. The last thing teens check at night before drifting off to sleep, phones occupy pride of place in the morning routine, too. Even pillow talk — the digital kind — is common:  Many teens sleep with their phones, maintaining 24/7 accessibility for Snapchats, texts, and status updates. Electronic blue light is the 21 st century nightlight.

Media multitasking has thus become a near-universal part of adolescence. There’s much to be said for encouraging technological savvy and agility. Teens face a lifetime of digital skills acquisition. Workers know: It pays to be nimble. Literally.

Yet mounting evidence shows constant connection comes with a high cognitive cost. It isn’t making teens smarter, and it’s crowding out things that could.

A reality check on time costs alone: Teens now average nine hours daily with recreational media, according to Common Sense Media survey data. Most aren’t coding or blogging; “content creation” consumes just 3 percent of teens’ digital media time. The primary focus? Entertainment and connection.

Many teens don’t even disconnect for schoolwork. Half use social media and 60 percent text while doing homework, found Common Sense Media. A majority believe multitasking doesn’t compromise their work quality.

Oh, but they’re wrong. A 2016 study led by cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Cain, published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review , linked heavy media multitasking in adolescents with lower standardized test scores. Frequent multitaskers also demonstrated greater impulsivity and poorer working memory —showing less capacity to retrieve recently-viewed information.

A 2015 University of Connecticut study, published in Computers in Human Behavior , found in-class college multitaskers had lower GPAs; multitasking also increased homework time. Another study from Kent State University researchers found that college students with higher daily smartphone use had significantly lower GPAs — even compared to students of similar academic ability.

Such studies extend earlier findings from psychologist Larry Rosen of middle, high school, and college students. Texting was the top homework distractor; checking social media while studying was linked with a lower GPA, Rosen found.

“Multitasking is a cognitive impossibility,” says Melanie Hempe, nurse, mother of four, and founder of the Charlotte-based organization Families Managing Media. Hempe, who conducts workshops for schools featuring brain research on screens and learning, adds, “When a child has a phone on their desk, it puts them in a different mindset. It puts them one foot in and one foot out.”

Rote work, such as folding laundry, is ideal for multitasking. But complex tasks, such as learning the quadratic formula, require sustained attention. Attempting two complex tasks simultaneously results in “task-switching” not “multitasking,” research affirms.

This is a critical cognitive reality for informing learning, especially since classrooms often teem with distractions. Some school districts have implemented “bring-your-own-device programs,” but scant evidence supports using personal devices such as smartphones in classroom learning. A recent London School of Economics study found test performance in British schools actually rose following a ban on phones. Overall, evidence supports technology integration in classrooms — but with an emphasis on quality, not quantity.

At home, parents can create time and space for real learning. One simple strategy: Separate teens from their phones for homework. Younger teens completing homework on tablets and laptops may need regular monitoring to ensure they’re on task. Parents can also encourage timeless, brain-boosting pursuits such as recreational reading. And at bedtime? Phones and teens recharge best apart.

The mother of two teenagers, I can attest to the efficacy of these strategies for improving rest and learning. Outraged teens might claim you’re ruining their lives. Mine did. But their bodies and brains will tell you otherwise.

Kristen Blair is a communications consultant and Chapel Hill-based education writer. She serves as the communications director for the North Carolina Coalition for Charter Schools.

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by Kristen Blair | February 16, 2017

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Smartphone Addiction Among the Young

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To the Editor:

Re “ The Smartphone Trap ,” by Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge (Opinion guest essay, Sunday Review, Aug. 1):

The rise of smartphone addiction among teenagers is undeniably real. However, the proposed solution of locking students’ phones up cold turkey (during school hours) may not be ideal.

My high school participated in a program that involved completely locking up students’ phones throughout the entire school day (in 2019-20). Through many conversations with my peers, I noticed that this solution — with the goal of helping students “practice the lost art of paying full attention to the people around them,” as your essay put it — produced unintended repercussions.

In fact, increased anxiety as a result of smartphone restriction often hindered students’ ability to fully engage with other students and teachers throughout the school day. Perhaps a smarter solution may include gradually weaning students off their smartphones, and increased education regarding responsible smartphone use.

Rushaad Mistry Foster City, Calif. The writer is a high school student.

Yes, face-to-face conversation among college students has declined during the time of smartphones. Fifteen years ago, I would enter a noisy college classroom to teach a class and have to draw the attention of the students, who were gabbing away with classmates. “It’s 9 o’clock; time to begin class,” I would say in a loud voice to end the student buzz.

Now I enter quiet college classrooms. The students are not speaking to each other; they have their faces buried in their cellphones. I urge them to keep their cellphones under wraps from the time that they enter the classroom and to speak to the students sitting near them. “The student sitting next to you might become your best friend, your spouse. The person might donate a kidney to you if you are in need.”

I try, but the allure of the smartphone usually triumphs.

James Tackach Narragansett, R.I. The writer is a professor of English at Roger Williams University.

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It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber

Test scores have been falling for years—even before the pandemic.

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For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers’ phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it’s systematically reducing student achievement. I hadn’t quite believed that last argument—until now.

The Program for International Student Assessment, conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in almost 80 countries every three years, tests 15-year-olds in math, reading, and science. It is the world’s most famous measure of student ability. Most years, when the test makes contact with American news media, it provides instant ammunition for critics of America’s school system, who point to PISA scores and ask something like “Why are we getting crushed by Finland in reading?” or “Why are we getting smoked by Korea in math?”

The latest PISA report has a different message. Yes, Americans scored lower in math than in any other year in the history of the test, which began in 2003. (Once again, the test recorded America’s persistent inequalities; Black and Hispanic students, on average, scored below Asian and white students, who typically do about as well as their peers around the world.) But COVID learning loss was even worse elsewhere, creating what the authors of the PISA report called “an unprecedented drop in performance” globally that was “nearly three-times as large as any prior change.”

Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now

The deeper, most interesting story is that test scores have been falling for years—even before the pandemic. Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores peaked in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly” on average. “No single country showed an increasingly positive trend in any subject,” PISA reported, and “many countries showed increasingly poor performance in at least one subject.” Even in famously high-performing countries, such as Finland, Sweden, and South Korea, PISA grades in one or several subjects have been declining for a while.

So what’s driving down student scores around the world? The PISA report offers three reasons to suspect that phones are a major culprit.

First, PISA finds that students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screens more than five hours a day. This gap held even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors. For comparison, a 50-point decline in math scores is about four times larger than America’s pandemic-era learning loss in that subject.

Second, screens seem to create a general distraction throughout school, even for students who aren’t always looking at them. Andreas Schleicher, the director of the PISA survey, wrote that students who reported feeling distracted by their classmates’ digital habits scored lower in math. Finally, nearly half of students across the OECD said that they felt “nervous” or “anxious” when they didn’t have their digital devices near them. (On average, these students also said they were less satisfied with life.) This phone anxiety was negatively correlated with math scores.

In sum, students who spend more time staring at their phone do worse in school, distract other students around them, and feel worse about their life.

Hanging a big thesis like “phones are making kids dumber” on any particular survey is generally inadvisable. In fact, this would be a fair time to point out that PISA scores do not enjoy universal praise among education experts. As the saying goes, “Intelligence is whatever a test measures,” and a global standardized test of student competence across countries, cultures, learning styles, and languages will inevitably include questions that overrate some abilities and underrate others.

But the latest PISA survey isn’t the only evidence that phones in schools are weapons of mass distraction. Studies have shown that students on their phone take fewer notes and retain less information from class, that “task-switching” between social media and homework is correlated with lower GPAs, that students who text a lot in class do worse on tests, and that students whose cellphones are taken away in experimental settings do better on tests. As Haidt, a psychologist, has written in The Atlantic , the mere presence of a smartphone in our field of vision is a drain on our focus. Even a locked phone in our pocket or on the table in front of us screams silently for the shattered fragments of our divided attention.

Haidt and Twenge have suggested banning phones in school entirely. The PISA analysis seems to offer a strong argument for this policy. However, in his PISA analysis, Schleicher offers one possible downside: In some countries, students in schools with phone bans were less likely to turn off their notifications when going to sleep. Maybe they were making up for lost time. Or maybe they just had less practice avoiding the siren call of a lock-screen notification. Or maybe it’s just a minor contrary signal, and phone bans are good for kids overall.

Mark Oppenheimer: The schools that ban smartphones

The way I see it, for the past decade, the internet-connected world has been running a global experiment on our minds—and, in particular, on the minds of young people. Teens are easily distracted and exquisitely sensitive to peer judgment. Results from a decade of observational research have now repeatedly shown a negative relationship between device use and life satisfaction, happiness, school attention, information retention, in-class note-taking, task-switching, and student achievement. These cognitive and emotional costs are highest for those with the most “device dependence.”

Banning phones in school would be a bold and novel experiment. It might not work. But the fallacy is believing that doing nothing is the harmless status quo. Time for a new intervention.

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Yes, Smartphones Are Destroying a Generation, But Not of Kids

Why parents need to embrace our role as digital mentors: offering kids and teens ongoing support and guidance in how to use the internet appropriately.

Quickly, now: Go rip a smartphone out of the hands of the nearest teen. If you have a teen child of your own, you can start there—or if you have kids under 13, you can take away whatever device they’re presently using. Feel free to just tear your TV off of the wall, if that’s all you’ve got to turn off. And if you don’t have kids, snatch a phone from any teenager who happens to walk by.

If that level of panic feels overblown, then perhaps you missed the latest story to spread a message of tech alarm to the world’s online parents. Writing in The Atlantic , Jean Twenge warns that “the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.”

Beginning with its provocative title, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”, the article sets us up to feel hopeless about the way mobile and social media has turned Kids These Days into lonely, depressed screen addicts who are failing to advance along the established path to adulthood.

It’s not that Twenge’s got her story wrong; on the contrary, it’s precisely because she’s onto something that we need to be so careful about drawing the right conclusions from the evidence she cites. Even more crucial—and missing not just from Twenge’s work, but so many of these alarmist pieces—is the so what : what, exactly, are parents supposed to do about the problem?

Don’t worry, I’ll get there.

How unhappy are teens, anyhow?

But first, let’s look at whether things are really as dire as Twenge would have us believe. Her argument hinges on an apparent discontinuity in the generational trends she has observed across decades. “The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives,” Twenge argues, “[f]rom the nature of their social interactions to their mental health.”

Twenge drives much of her argument with data from the Monitoring the Future survey series, even though she and a co-author argued in a 2010 paper that “the MTF dataset does not measure anxiety and depression, so it is not possible to test changes in mental health using these data.”  Her alarm about teens being “seriously unhappy” is even more recent: Just two years ago, she and her colleagues made headlines with an academic paper finding that “recent adolescents reported greater happiness and life satisfaction than their predecessors.”

I don’t have anything like her level of familiarity with that data, but I couldn’t resist taking a peek at the data that paints a picture of teens in a screen-generated crisis. And what I saw looks quite different from the depression-fest that Twenge describes: on the contrary, levels of happiness and unhappiness are largely constant, though we may be heading into a very modest (though not unprecedented) dip .

This hardly looks like the picture of adolescence in crisis: compared with the time series charts in Twenge’s piece (which do show some interesting discontinuities in adolescent lifestyles), there’s nothing here that screams “crisis.” I didn’t do as deep a dive into the data on teen loneliness, but a preliminary glance suggested a similar pattern (or rather, lack thereof).

But Twenge doesn’t just base her argument on happiness levels over time. She also argues that “[a]ll screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media.”

Yet look at the twelfth-grade data, and there’s no such effect. Teens report near identical levels of happiness regardless whether they’re on the higher or lower end of social media usage.

Take a more granular look at the full range of usage, and it looks like the biggest risk of unhappiness is among those poor twelfth graders who don’t use social media at all. Quick! Someone get those kids a smartphone!

If social media isn’t making kids depressed, then where’s the crisis? Twenge makes a lot of the declining independence of the American tween, which she backs up with data on how teens are having sex later and putting off getting their drivers’ licenses. Admittedly, I got neither licensed nor laid in high school, so maybe I’m missing something here, but…don’t we want kids to wait until they’re more mature before they risk pregnancy or collision? Neither of these seem like negative trends to me (and even Twenge concedes some are positive), so if you want to blame them on Steve Jobs, go ahead.

But let’s indulge this line of reasoning for a moment, and assume that it is a terrible injustice to America’s youth if their smartphones keep them so distracted that it’s not until grade 11 that they finally get around to giving up the sweet flower of their innocence. I’m still not convinced that smartphones are what’s driving the trends Twenge cites, and which she traces to the advent of the iPhone in 2007.

That was a bit of a head-scratcher for me, because I couldn’t imagine that too many parents rushed out to get their kids a first-generation iPhone, and the data backs me up. Teens didn’t get their hands on smart phones en masse until a few years after the iPhone was released. But that’s ok, because if you look at Twenge’s trendlines, it’s more like 2010 when all the delayed adulting starts to kick in.

So what happened between 2007 and 2010 to tee up a shift in teen lifestyles?

Social media happened. But it didn’t happen just—or even mainly—to teens. It happened to parents.

The fastest growth during that time was among young adults (18-29) and 30-to-49-year-olds. One year before the iPhone, only 6% of people aged 30-to-49 were on social networks. By 2009, that had leapt up to 44%: that’s absolutely explosive growth.

What does that have to do with teens? Well, let me give you another name for 18-to-49-year-olds: parents. While teens were old hands at social networking by that point, they were still stuck texting on their feature phones. Meanwhile, their parents started catching up on the social networking front—with the added opportunity of accessing LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter on their shiny new iPhones and Androids.

I’d love to tell you we used this shiny new tech to look up educational resources for our children, or play them classical music in utero. And sure, there was a bit of that. But you know what smartphones and social media are really great at? Tuning out your children.

I know, we all really enjoy reading articles about how it’s those evil smartphones that are destroying our children’s brains and souls. It lets us justify locking their devices up with parental monitoring tools, or cutting off their mobile plan when they fail to make the grade.

Fellow parents, it’s time for us to consider another possible explanation for why our kids are increasingly disengaged. It’s because we’ve disengaged ourselves; we’re too busy looking down at our screens to look up at our kids.

I know: it’s how I live myself. Children are super annoying—especially teenagers, I would say, now that I’ve got one. I would much rather spend half an hour playing Words with Friends on Facebook than spend it playing an inane board game with an 11-year-old who refuses to play by the rules. I would much rather spend an hour perusing Wonder Woman crafts on Pinterest than listening to my 13-year-old ramble on about anime. As a friend warned me when I first got pregnant, “children are simultaneously overwhelming and under-stimulating.” Why wouldn’t we want to be distracted from that?

All the way back in 1980—before Mark Zuckerberg was even a twinkle in his parents’ eyes— John Unger Zussman documented an experiment in parental distraction. In the mischievous way of psychological experiments, Zussman brought twenty sets of parents into his lab; each pair of parents had one toddler and one preschool-aged child. In a move that anticipated my obsession with Chicktionary during my own kids’ toddler years, Zussman and his colleagues asked the parents to spend ten minutes working on anagrams, so they could see what happened to their parenting style.

When parents were distracted, Zussman observed several changes in their parenting approach. First, parents shortened their interactions; with older children (though not toddlers), interaction time declined from 5.4 minutes (out of ten) to 3.8 minutes. Second, the quality of engagement declined: parents were more abrupt, more critical and less stimulating. “In general, positive behaviors such as interaction, responsiveness, support, and stimulation were reduced toward the older (preschool-age) children,” Unger notes, “[w]hile negative behaviors such as interference and criticism/pun- ishment were increased toward the younger children (toddlers).”

Zussman summarizes his findings with words that could just as easily apply to today’s smartphone-wielding parents:

Parents are, indeed, influenced by competing activity. They resort to a level of behavior that might be called “minimal parenting.” At this level of parenting, positive behaviors are regarded as expendable and are curtailed when parental load limits are reached. Although parents remain available to the children, they are slower to respond and interact with them for shorter periods, and their attention shifts rapidly among the two children and the task. They must continue to exert some control over the children, however, and negative behaviors may be increased in minimal parenting because they are seen as methods of obtaining rapid compliance.

This observation offers a competing explanation for the recent declines in adolescent independence that Twenge observes. Fostering independence takes work: someone has to teach the kid to drive, show them how to get to the mall, maybe prod them to make some friends and get outside. We may parody the work of parenting as a set of rules and consequences, but the work of encouraging positive behavior is just as (if not more important) than sanctioning the negative.

Zussman’s experiment suggests that when parents are distracted—as today’s parents are, perpetually, by our online lives—it’s the encouragement that suffers, more than the control. The result? Kids who stay inside their semi-gilded cages, because they don’t get the support they need to spread their wings.

It’s a fate I worry about with my own kids, who barely know what I look like without a device in my hands. If social media had been invented before I had kids, maybe I’d have realized that parenting would seriously interfere with my Twitter time, and given more thought to that trade-off.

But my firstborn is older than Facebook—a fact that blew their mind— though only just. My entire experience of parenthood has been lived in the tug-of-war between child and screen; my kids can’t remember a time when they didn’t have to compete with my iPhone in order to get my attention. Like many people, my constant screen interactions are a matter of professional obligation as well as personal taste, so I live life as a constant juggling act between the needs of my children and the distractions of social media.

And that juggling act, actually, is where we find the juicy opportunity to change things up a bit, and rethink the role that social media and smartphones are playing not just in our kids’ lives, but in our own. No, I don’t believe that smartphones are “destroying” a generation, and I’m somewhat insulted at that suggestion on my kids’ behalf.

But I do think that the concerns Twenge raises are valid (if overblown), if only because I constantly hear from parents who are struggling with their own version of these problems: Teens who are too busy online to come out of their room. Kids who are social butterflies on the Internet, but socially awkward in meatspace. Young adults who may be remarkably adept in front of a computer, but lack some of the practical life skills they’ll need when they stop away from the keyboard.

So what’s a parent to do? Well, I think we can do better than Twenge’s suggestions of instilling “the importance of moderation,” or “mild boundary-setting.” The off switch has its place, but if that’s all we have to offer our kids, we aren’t helping prepare them for what it means to live in a digital world.

Nor, for that matter, are we preparing ourselves: if we’ve let smartphones run roughshod over our lives, it’s not just because they offer respite from our annoying kids, but because they offer respite from our annoying selves.

That’s why it’s so important for us to both discover and model ways of being online that help our kids embrace the potential of social media, smartphones and whatever the next thing is to come along. (Pro tip: It’s virtual reality, bots, and cryptocurrency.)

My own research suggests that the best way we can do that is by embracing our role as digital mentors: actively encouraging our kids to use technology, but offering ongoing support and guidance in how to use it appropriately. I shared some highlights from that research in The Atlantic , actually (#irony), showing how kids who’ve been actively mentored by their parents actually have healthier relationships to technology than kids who’ve been set free in the wilds of the Internet, or conversely, had their online access tightly limited.

Mentoring your kids means letting go of a one-size-fits-all approach to kids’ tech use, and thinking instead about which specific online activities are enriching (or impoverishing) for your specific child. Mentoring means talking regularly with your kids about how they can use the Internet responsibly and joyfully, instead of slamming on the brakes. Mentor parents recognize that their kids need digital skills if they’re going to thrive in a digital world, so they invest in tech classes and coding camps. And of course, mentor parents embrace technology in their own lives—but thoughtfully, so they can offer guidance on the human (if not the technical) aspects of life online.

But that kind of nuanced approach is hard to embrace if you’re reeling from the unceasing warnings about how smartphones are “destroying” your kids. That’s why it’s time for us to stop paying attention to alarmist attacks on kids’ screen time —and instead pay attention to our kids.

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How Smartphones Are Making Kids Unhappy

Audie Cornish

Psychologist Jean Twenge says smartphones have brought about dramatic shifts in behavior among the generation of children who grew up with the devices. Image Source/Getty Images hide caption

Psychologist Jean Twenge says smartphones have brought about dramatic shifts in behavior among the generation of children who grew up with the devices.

For the first time, a generation of children is going through adolescence with smartphones ever-present. Jean Twenge , a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has a name for these young people born between 1995 and 2012: "iGen."

She says members of this generation are physically safer than those who came before them. They drink less, they learn to drive later and they're holding off on having sex. But psychologically, she argues, they are far more vulnerable.

"It's not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades," she writes in a story in The Atlantic, adapted from her forthcoming book . And she says it's largely because of smartphones.

Twenge spoke to All Things Considered about her research and her conclusions. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How does teen behavior now differ from generations past?

Today's teens are just not spending as much time with their friends in person, face-to-face, where they can really read each others' emotions and get that social support. And we know from lots and lots of research that spending time with other people in person is one of the best predictors for psychological well-being and one of the best protections against having mental health issues.

Shots - Health News

Trying to get the kids to put down those phones here's help.

What is this generation facing that worries you so much?

iGen is showing mental health issues across a wide variety of indicators. They're more likely than young people just five or 10 years ago to say that they're anxious, that they have symptoms of depression, that they have thought about suicide or have even [attempted] suicide. So across the board, there's a really consistent trend with mental health issues increasing among teens.

Is it specifically the smartphone, or is it social media? Or is it the number of hours per day spent on these things?

So, you look at the pattern of loneliness. It suddenly begins to increase around 2012. And the majority of Americans had a cell phone by the end of 2012, according to the Pew Center .

Given that using social media for more hours is linked to more loneliness, and that smartphones were used by the majority of Americans around 2012, and that's the same time loneliness increases, that's very suspicious. You can't absolutely prove causation, but by a bunch of different studies, there's this connection between spending a lot of time on social media and feeling lonely.

For The Children's Sake, Put Down That Smartphone

How much of a factor is parenting?

So I was somewhat surprised when I interviewed iGen teens how many of them are deeply aware of the negative effects of smartphones. Parenting is playing a role. I think many parents are worried about their teens driving, and going out with their friends and drinking. Yet parents are often not worrying about their teen who stays at home but is on their phone all the time. But they should be worried about that. I think parents are worried about the wrong thing.

Can you propose solutions that might help people?

The first is just awareness that spending a lot of time on the phone is not harmless and that if you're spending a lot of time on the phone, then it may take away from activities that might be more beneficial for psychological well-being, like spending time with people in person.

Then for parents, I think it is [a] good idea to put off giving your child a smartphone as long as you can. If you feel they need a phone, say, for riding a bus, you can get them a flip phone. They still sell them. And then once your teen has a smartphone, there are apps that allow parents to restrict the number of hours a day that teens are on the smartphone, and also what time of day they use it.

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Are Smartphones Making Adolescents Less Happy?

New research explores recent trends in adolescent well-being..

Posted April 3, 2018

Let's face it: Smartphones, social media , digital devices, and the Internet have completely transformed the way most of us interact socially.

For young people especially, spending time online is practically a way of life and, not surprisingly, is shaping how they view the world and interact with other people. Not only are they more interconnected, but they have more access to information than any previous generation. All of this has resulted in a cultural shift that is still unfolding.

But does this translate into greater psychological well-being ? Though often defined in different ways, psychological well-being is usually measured by how satisfied people feel about their lives as well as the quality of the relationships they have with friends and family. Often viewed as synonymous with happiness or life satisfaction, research looking at psychological well-being has particularly focused on adolescents and how their sense of well-being has changed over the years.

With this in mind, a new research study published in the journal Emotion takes a comprehensive look at psychological well-being in adolescents over the past ten years and what this may mean for the future. In this study, Jean M. Twenge of San Diego State University and her co-authors used data data taken from Monitoring the Future (MtF), a comprehensive survey of American 8th, 10th, and 12th graders conducted annually since 1991.

Conducted by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Monitoring the Future surveys 50,000 8th, 10th and 12th grade students each year as well as administering follow-up questionnaires to former participants. All participants completed test items measuring self-esteem , different aspects of life satisfaction, self-satisfaction, and personal happiness. Along with demographic information, the survey data allows researchers to examine cultural changes in behaviors, attitudes, and values as they occur.

For the own research, Twenge and her colleagues focused on changes in psychological well-being as they related to the economic depression of 2007-2009 as well as the introduction of smartphones over the past twelve years. While previous research has shown that psychological well-being has risen in adolescents during the last four decades of the previous century, more recent research has suggested that this trend is reversing, possibly due to the influence of smartphones and other digital media. Given that media research has already shown that smartphones became widely available beginning in 2007 with most Americans owning one by the end of 2012, the researchers selected the year 2012 as the baseline for their research.

Looking at survey data from 1991 onward, reported levels of psychological well-being in adolescents either remained the same or rose over the 1991-2011 time period. Beginning in 2012 and continuing through to 2016 however, there was a significant drop in most aspects of life satisfaction. This includes overall life satisfaction, satisfaction with friends, satisfaction with the government, personal safety, level of fun experienced, and satisfaction with parents. Personal happiness and self-esteeem also declined significantly.

Twenge and her colleagues also carried out a second study to identify specific reasons for this decline. Since Monitoring the Future began collecting data on smartphone and digital media use beginning in 2006, the researchers focused on this later data to examine how screen time was related to psychological well-being. This also included looking at how often the participants engaged in face-to-face social activities, attended religious services, read print media, or engaged in sports or exercise. To rule out the influence of the recent economic recession, the researchers also looked at economic factors such as unemployment rate and median household income. Participants were also questioned about the amount of time spent on homework to investigate changes in academic pressures.

Results showed that adolescents who spent more time with electronic media (smartphones, electronic games, and the Internet) were generally less happy, less satisfied with their lives, and had lower self-esteem. On the other hand, adolescents who spent more time on non-screen activities, including sports and exercise, in-personal socializing, and print media had higher psychological well-being. This trend was especially apparent for 8th and 10th graders though the overall relationship between screen time and well-being was much weaker for 12th graders.

When looking at the possible role of academic pressures, including amount of time spent on homework, 8th and 10th graders who reported spending more time on homework actually reported higher self-esteem and well-being. As for economic factors, no clear link could be found between the Great Recession and psychological well-being in adolescents.

Though it isn't possible to determine whether there is an actual causal connection based on survey findings alone, Twenge and her co-researchers point out that statistical analysis of the survey results do appear to suggest a causal relationship. Across the years studied, increases in electronic communication use by adolescents generally preceded decreases in psychological well-being.

It is important to note the significant limitations of this study however. While the increase in electronic communications seems to be the most likely culprit for this drop in well-being, there may be other factors at work which weren't directly examined by the researchers. Potential factors include the general drop in face-to-face social interactions among adolescents seen in recent years, the loss in sleep time that is often related to excessive screen use, and the potential addiction issues that can arise from becoming too dependent on social media. There are also the mental health issues that can arise from cyberbullying or other forms on electronic harassment which can also influence self-esteem and psychological well-being.

So what can be learned from these results? While many parents may decide that the simplest solution is to ban all digit media use for their children, that isn't necessarily the answer. In looking at these results in greater detail, the researchers found that the highest levels of happiness and well-being were in adolescents who only spent a few hours a week online rather than those who avoided online use entirely. Conversely, adolescents spending more than forty hours a week (about six hours a day or more) were twice as likely to be unhappy than ones spending less than half that time online. This suggests that the best strategy to prevent mental health problems is to encourage adolescents to limit their online use and devote more time and energy towards in-person activities.

In recent years, social researchers have suggested that we are seeing the rise of a new generation growing up with smartphones and other forms of digital media. Tentatively dubbed the iGen generation by Twenge and her colleagues, young people born after the year 1995 or thereabouts appear to be far more affected by electronic communications than older generations and, as we are slowly coming to terms with how the world has changed as a result, may be showing problems that adults themselves may also experience in future.

Finding the right balance between online life and the real world will be an important challenge for the future.

Twenge, J. M., Martin, G. N., & Campbell, W. K. (2018, January 22). Decreases in Psychological WellBeing Among American Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Screen Time During the Rise of Smartphone Technology. Emotion. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000403

Romeo Vitelli, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice in Toronto, Canada.

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Could smart phones be making us dumber.

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State board of education, november 11, 2020.

Karen D'Souza

The Program for International Student Assessment, administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, tests 15-year-olds in math, reading, and science. It stands as one of the world’s most famous measures of academic achievement and its scores are definitely trending down. Indeed, the authors of the PISA report bemoaned “an unprecedented drop in performance” globally that was “nearly three-times as large as any prior change.”

 Certainly the pandemic played a role but some experts also blame the ubiquity of smartphones in adolescent life the Atlantic reporte d. Some researchers, such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, argue that student well-being began a steep decline around 2012, just as smartphones and social media became the beating heart of teen culture. Some have also suggested that smartphone use is so distracting in schools that it has markedly reduced student achievement.

Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly.” “No single country showed an increasingly positive trend in any subject,” PISA reported,  the Atlantic noted . 

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June 25, 2016

19 min read

Smartphones Won't Make Your Kids Dumb--We Think

Are screens a sinister trap or magical portal for children as young as 18 months? 

By Olivia Solon & Mosaic Science

Christina Kilgour/Getty Images

Jessica’s tiny fingers dart around the iPad, swiping through photos to get to a particularly entertaining video: a 12-second clip of her dancing clumsily to Beyoncé’s Single Ladies . The 18-month-old taps “play” and emits a squeal of delight.

After watching the video twice, she navigates back to the home screen and opens up the YouTube app to watch an episode of the colourful animation  Billy Bam Bam . Halfway through, she moves onto a  Yo Gabba Gabba!  game, which involves anthropomorphized fruits making their way into a character’s belly.

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When Jessica’s mom, Sandy, tries to take away the iPad, there’s a tantrum that threatens to go nuclear: wobbly lip, tears, hands balled into fists and a high-pitched wail. “She does this a lot,” says Sandy. “She seems to prefer the iPad to everything else. Sometimes it’s the only thing that will keep her quiet,” she adds, frantically waving a pink fluffy unicorn in an attempt to appease her daughter.

Like many parents, she’s worried about her child’s obsession with screens. She wants to know which activities are best, and how much time spent on screens is too much.

It’s six years  since the launch of the iPad  and, with it, the rebirth of tablet computers. The academic research simply hasn’t been able to catch up, which means it’s hard to know the long-term impact on young brains of being exposed to tablets and smartphones.

The concern among some experts is that these devices, if used in particular ways, could be changing children’s brains for the worse—potentially affecting their attention, motor control, language skills and eyesight, especially in under-fives, for whom so much brain development is taking place.

Technology companies and app developers are throwing their marketing prowess at the problem, slapping words like “educational” and “e-learning” on their products, often without any scientific basis. So what are parents to do?

Fear of the unknown

People have always feared new media. Almost 2,500 years ago Socrates was decrying the spread of written language, arguing that it would erode memory and knowledge. In the 15th century it was the printing press that brought about moral panic. Benedictine monks, who profited from hand-copying reading materials, petitioned against the mechanized printers, saying: “They shamelessly print, at negligible cost, material which may, alas, inflame impressionable youths.”

When radio arrived, it too was deemed a menace, blamed for distracting children from their homework. A 1936 article in  Gramophone  magazine reported that youngsters had “developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker”.

Few technologies, however, have invaded our lives—and those of our children—as stealthily as the mobile computer, most commonly the smartphone or tablet. These devices are the right size for little hands to handle them, and the touchscreens easy for tiny fingers to manipulate. Plus there’s so much you can do on these devices: watch videos, play games, draw pictures and talk to relatives thousands of miles away.

In 2011, a year after the iPad launched, just 10 percent of US children under the age of two were found to have used tablets or smartphones, but by 2013 that figure had nearly quadrupled. A 2015 study in France found that 58 percent of under-twos had used a tablet or mobile phone.

There’s little clarity around the consequences of long-term use of such devices. The American Academy of Pediatrics  (AAP) has erred on the side of caution, recommending absolutely no screen time for children under the age of two, and a two-hour daily limit for those older. These restrictions simply don’t tally with how many people are integrating these devices into their children’s lives, nor do they reflect the fact that some interactions with screens might actually be beneficial.

“If your child is under two and is exposed to a screen it’s not going to be toxic to their brain: they won’t be turned into idiots,” says Michael Rich, associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an AAP member. “But there are potential downsides…and parents need to make a series of risk–benefit analyses.” The AAP is now in the process of revising its guidelines, and they are due to be published in late 2016. 

More than one kind of screen time

So why don’t we know more about the risks of children using screens? There’s a fundamental problem at the basis of all the research in this area—what do we even mean by “screen time”?

Firstly, it’s important to distinguish between types of screen: Do we mean a television screen, a tablet, a smartphone or an e-reader? Secondly, the nature of the content matters: Is it an interactive drawing game, an e-book, a Skype call with Grandma or a stream of Netflix Kids videos? Thirdly, there’s the context: Is there a caregiver in the room talking to the child as they interact with the screen or are they left on their own?

To date, we have comprehensive research about children and television exposure, but we don’t yet know how much of it applies to interactive screens like tablets and smartphones.

There are a few things we do know. Most child development experts agree that while passive screen time—such as putting your child in front of a device for a  Peppa Pig marathon—might be entertaining, it isn’t going to provide a rich learning experience. In this case, it doesn’t make a difference whether they’re watching on TV or a tablet: The experience is broadly the same.

Having a video or TV on when a child is doing something else can distract them from play and learning, negatively affecting their development. Hours of background TV has also been found to reduce child–parent interaction, which has an adverse impact on language development. This displacement is a big concern: If kids are left with screen-based babysitters then they are not interacting with caregivers and the physical world. There are only so many hours in a day, and the time spent with screens comes at the expense of other, potentially better, activities.

Under-threes, in particular, need a balance of activities, including instructed play, exploring the natural environment, manipulating physical toys and socializing with other children and grown-ups. The rise in screen use means less of all of these things. “Parents need to think strategically,” says pediatrician  Dimitri Christakis , Director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute. “If your child has 12 hours awake and two of those are spent eating, how will you allocate the rest of the time?”

The problem is that tablets are extremely appealing to children and adults alike. Thanks to their design, versatility and intuitive interfaces, tablets are a perfect way for children to draw, solve puzzles and be entertained on the move. Combine that with marketing efforts of digital media companies and app developers—whose measure of success tends to be the amount of time people are glued to their creation—and you have a toy that’s difficult to prise out of tiny hands.

Many apps are designed to be stimulus-driven, with exciting audiovisual rewards for completing tasks. Christakis refers to this as the “I did it!” response, which triggers the reward pathway in the brain. “The delight a child gets from touching a screen and making something happen is both edifying and potentially addictive,” he says.

Because of this, tablets and smartphones make for excellent pacifiers, particularly on long plane journeys and in restaurants. “The device itself is seen as a pleasurable source of comfort and parents play into that,” says Christakis.

“It’s pretty common,” says  Jenny Radesky , assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan. “It becomes the go-to, easiest tool the parent is using.” Although helpful in the short term, it’s important for young children to be able to develop internal mechanisms of self-regulation, whether that’s learning without constant rewards or being able to sit patiently without constant digital stimulation.

Christakis says that, anecdotally, he and others are starting to see younger and younger patients using these devices compulsively. “We know there’s such a thing as problematic Internet use in older children and adolescents, and it stands to reason that the same would happen with infants,” he says. And he’s doing research to find out more about this.

Primed for Hyperactivity

In  Seattle’s Center for Integrative Brain Research , a cluster of tiny pink mouse pups wriggle in a mass behind their mother. The rodent family home is a sawdust-filled clear plastic container, one of hundreds stacked up in a rotating system of shelves. These are the “control” mice used by Christakis and neuroscientist Nino Ramirez, and their team, trying to understand the impact on young brains of being exposed to fast-paced media.

Across the corridor an experiment is underway. One of the mouse containers is surrounded by bright lights and speakers. For 42 days, six hours every day, baby mice are exposed to the high-octane soundtrack of Cartoon Network shows accompanied by synchronised flashing lights in red, blue and green. The apparatus has been designed to find out what happens to the rodents’ brains when they are overstimulated by media during a critical window for their development.

The results are startling. “Overstimulating them as babies primes [them] to become hyperactive for the rest of their life,” says Ramirez. The overstimulated mice take more risks and find it harder to learn and stay attentive. They get confused by objects they’ve seen before, for example, and find it more difficult to navigate through a maze. When given the option to dose themselves with cocaine, the overstimulated mice were much more prone to addiction than the control group. These behavioral changes are matched by changes in the mice’s brains.

The theory is that the same applies to children: Overstimulating them with media—particularly in an age of tablets with endlessly streaming, hard-to-ration videos and flashy interactive games—may cause an imbalance in part of the cerebral cortex called the basal ganglia. It’s this part of the brain that allows us to pay attention to critical tasks and ignore distractions. Such overstimulation could lead to problems in later life, particularly with focus, memory and impulsivity.

“It seems that you can overstimulate young brains to the point that day-to-day life won’t excite to the same extent,” says Ramirez.

Before we trigger mass panic about a generation of hyperactive, inattentive, cocaine-using post-millennials, it’s important to note that these experiments have attracted criticism for a number of reasons. Six hours of any activity per day is a huge amount of time, particularly when it involves nocturnal mammals like mice (although the researchers say the mice show no signs of stress). Furthermore, Christakis, Ramirez and colleagues don’t actually show the mice a real screen with any meaningful content—it is just a flashing proxy for a screen.

The rodent research being carried out in Seattle is unique in its scope and approach, which explains why it’s frequently used as evidence of the evils of screen time. While mouse models are by no means perfect, they are useful for studying the underlying mechanisms relating to basic cognitive processes, which are fairly constant throughout mammals. As mice have relatively short lifespans, it’s possible to examine developmental trajectories over much shorter timeframes and get real insight into what’s going on inside their brains. All of this can be done in a controlled environment that simply would not be possible with human subjects.

If, as suggested, cognitive development is affected by exposure to media, then this kind of research could inform the types of screen-based interactions we allow young children to have. Should parents be concerned? “They should be vigilant and careful about the amount of time and the content their children have access to,” says Christakis.

Although it’s a challenge to conduct controlled experiments with babies, it is possible to observe what happens with children "in the wild”. From this, we can draw possible links to their habits with mobile devices.

In California,  Maria Liu  heads up the Myopia Control Clinic at UC Berkeley’s School of Optometry. She’s seen a sharp increase in young children with myopia (shortsightedness). “It’s increasing at an alarming rate worldwide and a well-accepted contributing factor is the early introduction of handheld devices to kids.”

In our early years, our eyeballs are very adaptive and plastic, so spending lots of time focusing on objects close-up will make the eyes more likely to be nearsighted. “The eyeball will grow longer to compensate for the prolonged near stress,” Liu says. She doesn’t have any evidence-based recommendations for a time limit on use of devices, but says “frequent breaks from near work” are very important.

Tablets and smartphones are typically viewed much closer to the face than things like televisions or desktop computers. Although books are also read up close, studies have shown that children tend to hold them further away than they do screens.

The other problematic aspect of screens is that they have been shown to disrupt sleep. The blue light emitted by the super-sharp displays can interfere with our natural bodily rhythms, preventing melatonin, an important sleep hormone, from being released. This in turn can lead to sleep impairments in adults and children alike. Sandy says that if Jessica uses the tablet before bed she gets “noticeably riled up”. So, she says, they try to use books instead. This issue is why the latest version of Apple’s software for iPads and iPhones comes with “ Night Shift ”, which automatically swaps the blueish light for a warmer hue before bedtime. 

The brain’s air traffic control

In London, Max, who is 12 months old, is sitting on his mother Helen’s lap in a small, darkened room. On his head is a rubbery cap covered in electrodes. They are measuring the electrical activity in his brain as he looks at physical objects and at digital representations of those objects on an iPad screen. On each of Max’s ankles is a smartwatch of sorts, one measuring his movements and the other his heart rate. The cap uses electroencephalography (EEG) to record his brain’s electrical activity, to understand whether real and virtual objects trigger different brain responses and how that relates to subsequent learning.

The experiment is part of the  TABLET  project in the Babylab at Birkbeck, University of London. It’s the first-ever scientific study investigating how children aged six months to three years are using touch screen devices and how this influences their cognitive, brain and social development.

In a second experiment, Max sits in a curtained-off booth facing a screen that displays a 15-minute loop of video that includes trippy abstract animations and sounds, as well as still pictures and videos starring PhD students as stand-in children’s TV presenters. He’s completely mesmerized, and his eyes dart from object to object on the screen. Eye-tracking cameras capture the dance of his gaze, and outside the booth research fellow Celeste Chung keeps track of how his eye movements match up with the items on screen.

“All the child is doing is looking at the screen, but their gaze behavior tells us about their learning and anticipations,” says Tim Smith, a cognitive scientist who heads up the Babylab.

The team is trying to understand how easily Max, and dozens of other babies like him, can focus attention and block out distractions when working on a particular task. In one of the tests, an object appears at the center of the screen and then a second object appears, near the edge of the screen, shortly after. In order to look at the second object, the child needs to disengage from the central one, which requires self-control. This is a very important measure of executive function, the brain’s “air traffic control system”, which helps a child analyze tasks, break them into steps and focus on them until they are done—a key predictor of success in later life.

Like Christakis, Smith is interested in finding out whether there really is a link between the reward learning found in many apps and a child’s ability to focus. “We might find that if tablets are being used for a lot of reward learning and the child becomes driven by an external stimulus then they might develop an impairment in executive function because they aren’t used to controlling their own attention,” he says.

Smith isn’t entirely convinced by the mouse model used by Christakis and Ramirez in Seattle, although he agrees that their six hours of media stimulation a day could be reflective of a small number of children’s home environments where there are multiple devices and televisions that can contribute to sensory overload. “Some of the parents in our study are reporting three hours of tablet use a day [for their children],” says Smith. “That is a large proportion of their waking hours using a screen that doesn’t conform to the laws of physical reality.”

As for the effects on language and motor development, he hypothesizes that there could be displacement going on. “The technology may be used as a nanny in place of face-to-face learning. Babies always learn better from people, but we don’t always have time.” Devices like iPads may give lots of stimulation but lack the nuanced real-time social feedback that helps develop language, says Smith. Similarly, tablets and phones may make children dexterous at fine motor control with all the tapping and swiping, but they may have less motivation to get up and explore the world around them.

After around an hour of assessment, Max’s patience for screen-touching, eye-tracking, brain-monitoring and other distractions from his busy schedule of rampaging around and eating bread sticks wanes. He starts to grizzle and wriggle and claw at the EEG cap. These movements corrupt the brain activity data. “That’s the interesting challenge with infants,” says Smith. “They’re completely noncompliant to instructions.”

Babysitter or teacher?

What about the educational potential of devices? There are thousands of apps, e-books and videos purporting to have educational value for children, yet very few have been able to support this claim with solid research.

“The app marketplace is a digital Wild West,” says  Mike Levine , Chief Executive of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center in New York, which has analyzed hundreds of children’s literacy apps in a series of reports. “Most of the apps labelled as educational provide no research-based advice or guidance…Less than 10 percent of the apps we looked at had any stated evidence of efficacy [in the descriptions in the app store].”

Unintentionally, some interactive “enhancements” to stories (such as animations, sounds and features that let kids tap and swipe) might actually be decreasing the overall educational value. While enhancements might be appear to be engaging children, they could, in fact, be distracting them from the educational content.

This idea was put to the test by  Adriana Bus  and colleagues, at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who tracked children’s eyes while they read interactive e-books. They found that when there were animated parts of the picture not directly relevant to the narrative—for example, trees moving in the wind in the background—the children’s eyes were diverted to those points of motion rather than taking in the story. Relevant animations, on the other hand, can be beneficial, particularly for children who struggle with language and reading comprehension.

Even if apps are found to have educational value, toddlers still learn better from experiences in the real world than they do from equivalent two-dimensional representations on screen. Studies in the U.S. have shown that when dealing with visual–spatial problems, such as finding hidden objects or solving puzzles, toddlers (under around 30 months) perform much better when the problem is presented in real life rather than onscreen.

“It is thought that the cognitive load of transferring information from two dimensions…to three dimensions…is too great for children prior to age 30 months,” write Jenny Radesky and her colleague Barry Zuckerman in their study of digital play. Children this young are still developing the ability to choose what to pay attention to and what to ignore, and they have trouble generalizing from symbolic representations to the real world.

Preschool-aged children need to interact with actual physical objects in order to develop their parietal cortex, which controls visual–spatial processing and helps develop math and science skills in later life. To address this, some app developers are introducing companion toys that can be manipulated by little hands alongside the apps.

What we don’t yet fully understand is how much value there is to the tactile element of touching interactive screens, something that requires a connection between the eyes, fingers and brain, and that passive viewing lacks. Does manipulating a digital object on screen enhance the learning process and make it easier to transfer knowledge into the physical world? And can understanding this mechanism help us develop better digital learning tools? Regardless of our feelings toward tablets and smartphones, these devices are here to stay. So how do we get the most out of them? Thanks to some 100 years of research into how children learn, we can make educated guesses about what sort of interactions, in what sort of circumstances, are best.

Devices such as tablets and smartphones can make the most impact in lower-income households. In these households, people tend to have less access to developmental resources—such as music lessons, extra tuition or just extra hours of social interaction—and so spend more time with digital media. Provided the content is high-quality, tablets and smartphones can have a big impact.

For example, a study from Stanford University in the U.S. found that, by 18 months, toddlers from disadvantaged families are already several months behind their more advantaged peers on language proficiency. With the right content and context, digital devices can help bridge the divide.

“It’s a bit privileged and unrealistic to say no to technology,” says Levine. “I worry that we are seeing people wagging their fingers at others because they do not have the privileges of time and resources that other families might have. There’s no way we’re going to improve the educational performance of young children without using technologies.”

Instead of banning devices, we should be demanding better apps built on solid research. For children aged between three and five, it’s entirely possible that a well-designed app can help improve vocabulary and basic math skills. “My youngest is speech-delayed, and the videos he watches have definitely helped him learn new words,” says Lisa, a mother of four- and six-year-old sons who have been using mobile technology since they were 18 months old.

All of the pediatricians, child development and education specialists I spoke to agreed that, for children under 30 months, there is no substitute for human interaction. So why not develop apps that act as mediators between infant and caregiver?  BedTime Math  is one example. The app delivers engaging math story problems for parents and their children. It is one of the few tools that have been shown to make kids smarter; children who used the app even just once a week for a year improved their math by more than a control group did. The impact was particularly strong for children whose parents were anxious about math. 

Fear of blank faces

With so much focus on what children are doing, it’s easy for parents to forget about their own screen use. “Tech is designed to really suck you in,” says Radesky, “and digital products are there to promote maximal engagement. It makes it hard to disengage, and leads to a lot of bleed-over into the family routine.”

One approach that has been shown to help under-threes learn better is to build tools that use “nudge technologies” geared at the parents. This could be text messages or emails that remind parents to sing or talk with their baby, to help both parents and child disengage from technology and apply learnings to the real world. Children’s tablet maker LeapFrog does something similar with its LeapPad devices. Parents receive emails about what their child has learned from the touch screen, along with ideas of how they could apply this new knowledge away from the screen.

“The extent to which parents are tied up with these devices in ways that disrupt the interactions with the child has potential for a far bigger impact,” says  Heather Kirkorian , who heads up the Cognitive Development & Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If I’m on the floor with a child but checking my phone every five minutes, what message does that send?” How much parents play with and talk to their kids is a very powerful predictor of how the kids will develop, she adds.

Radesky has studied the use of mobile phones and tablets at mealtimes by giving mother–child pairs a food-testing exercise. She found that mothers who used devices during the exercise started 20 percent fewer verbal and 39 percent fewer nonverbal interactions with their children. During a separate observation of 55 caregivers eating with one child or more, she saw that phones became a source of tension in the family. Parents would be looking at their emails while the children would be making excited bids for their attention.

“You would see parents losing it and raising their voices because it’s extremely irritating to be focusing on something and have a child escalate their requests for attention,” she explains, adding that some parents would do things like shove their child’s hand away. Restricting the use of devices at critical family moments such as mealtimes and before bed can help reduce these frictions and encourage more face-to-face conversations. 

Infants are wired to look at parents’ faces to try to understand their world, and if those faces are blank and unresponsive—as they often are when absorbed in a device—it can be extremely disconcerting for the children. Radesky cites the “still face experiment”, which was devised by developmental psychologist Ed Tronick in the 1970s. In it, a mother is asked to interact with her child in a normal way before putting on a blank expression and not giving them any visual social feedback. As the  video shows , the child becomes increasingly distressed as she tries to capture her mother’s attention.

“Parents don’t have to be exquisitely present at all times, but there needs to a balance and parents need to be responsive and sensitive to a child’s verbal or nonverbal expressions of an emotional need,” says Radesky.

Oppressive ideology

Although we are still in the early days of understanding the impact that mobile computers are having on young children, the key piece of advice from the child experts I spoke to was to make sure that device use is just one part of a rich diet of activities, particularly for under-threes, who seem to struggle to learn from screens. Interactive, creative touchscreen experiences should be preferred over passive TV-like viewing. Parents should take educational claims from app developers with a hefty pinch of salt.

Where possible, a device should be used as a tool to enhance interactions with the child, whether that’s as a launchpad for discussion (“What’s the cow doing over there?” “What sound does the duck make?”) or as a way to inspire educational conversations that spill into the rest of the day, as appears to happen with BedTime Math.

Tronick’s still face experiment did not involve screens, but a number of researchers have cited it as evidence that parents shouldn’t be distracted by their smartphones when they are around their babies. This is true to an extent, but Tronick himself underplays its significance. “It’s all a bit exaggerated,” he says, adding that most children do plenty of activities every day that don’t involve screens. He is concerned that the worries about kids’ use of screens is born out of an “oppressive ideology that demands that parents should always be interacting with their child”.

“It’s based on a somewhat fantasised, very white, very upper-middle-class ideology—tiger moms and helicopter parents—that says if you’re failing to expose your child to 30,000 words you are neglecting them.” Tronick believes that just because a child isn’t learning from the screen doesn’t mean there’s no value to it—particularly if it gives parents time to have a shower, do some housework or simply have a break from their child. “Many parents, particularly low-income parents, are horrifically stressed and concerned they don’t get the support they need and find parenting really lonely. Those are the big problems,” he says.

Parents can get a lot out of using their devices to speak to a friend or get some work out of the way. This can make them feel happier, which lets them be more available to their child the rest of the time. For Sandy, this is a relief to hear. “Sometimes I’m at the end of my tether,” she says, adding that she shouldn’t have to feel guilty about giving her child the iPad so she can have some “me time”. With some parents, there’s a lot of snobbery about screen use, she says.

“As a mum, I put my 18-month-old in front of an HBO baby poetry video,” says Radesky. “It’s cute and calm and I can wash the dishes or do something that’s a reset for me. That’s a benefit, but it’s something parents need to be very honest about. The video is not educating my 18-month-old. It’s a break for me as a parent.”

This piece was co-commissioned by Mosaic and Digg. With thanks to Joy Victory for the initial story idea.

This is article was first published on mosaicscience.com and digg.com . It is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Smartphones and Dumb Behavior Essay

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The development of technology has been regarded as something really positive. However, many researchers claim that people often become technology addicts. The use of smartphones has become one of the most burning issues. Notably, researchers agree that smartphones have made people’s lives a bit easier as they enable people to stay in touch irrespective of distance. Some people praise smartphones for making their lives easier and more informative.

Many people think that such gadgets as smartphones fit the contemporary world which suggests enormous amount of information every minute. However, it is necessary to understand whether people need all that amount of information available. Thus, researchers argue that excessive use of smartphones can make people less productive, more stressed and even dumber.

For instance, Mithas (2012) claims that lots of people have become addicts as they cannot imagine their lives without these gadgets checking their messages and email all the time. This may seem quite a harmless addiction. However, it is far from being so. Hoppel (2012) notes that this addiction negatively affects health care professionals.

The author provides results of a survey which confirm that perfusionists used smartphones during cardiopulmonary bypass procedures: 49.2% sent messages, 21% checked their email, 15.1% surfed the Internet, 3.1% posted on social networking sites (Hoppel, 2012). Of course, this kind of distraction often leads to negative outcomes.

In the first place, the health care professionals may make mistakes as they miss details while using their smartphones. Secondly, these people do not develop their professional skills as they are distracted by gadgets instead of being focused on procedures and treating patients.

Apart from this, surveys held at the University of California (San Francisco) suggest that excessive use of smartphones negatively affects people’s cognitive abilities (Richtel, 2010, B1). On the one hand, the use of smartphones negatively affects development of short-term memory in people.

Admittedly, people do not try to memorize any information (dates, arrangements, names, etc.) as they can simply use their smartphones to develop their schedules. On the other hand, it is also found that the abundance of information negatively affects people. Thus, an individual perceives certain amount of information, and some time is needed to create “a persistent memory” (Richtel, 2010, B1).

However, now people do not have any breaks and the cognitive process is distorted. More so, Clifford Nass argues that people “are not built to do a multitude of tasks at one time” (Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2011, n.p.). However, smartphones overload people with various tasks like speaking, watching, texting, etc. All this leads to a great deal of fatigue. People get stressed. Fatigue, in its turn, results in low productivity.

Therefore, it is obvious that smartphones can be regarded as false friends. It is quite easy to become a smartphone addict and this can bring various problems to the fore. People should be aware of the dark side of the use of these ‘smart’ gadgets. Some people are still asking whether smartphones make people smarter.

However, the question is already answered and the answer is negative. Smartphones can make people’s life easier. Nonetheless, this simplification leads to reverse effects as people become unable to use their own brain to the fullest. Therefore, it is important to be careful with the gadget that promises to do any work for you.

Reference List

Hoppel, A.M. (2012). Smartphones and dumb behavior .

Mithas, S. (2012). Digital intelligence. North Potomac, MD: Finerplanet.

Richtel, M. (2010, August 25). Digital devices deprive brain of needed downtime. New York Times , B1.

Stanford Graduate School of Business. (2011). Why your smartphone makes you dumb .

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Smartphones are making kids dumber

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Mobile phones in the classroom are the only factor that can explain a global decline in school maths, science and reading since 2000, according to a leading international educator.

Professor of educational policy at the Gonski Institute for Education, Pasi Sahlberg, said that since 2000, Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores for 15-year-olds have been falling in every OECD country , intensifying after 2007 when the first smartphones went on the market.

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Are phones making youngsters depressed?

What effect does growing up in the age of smartphones have on kids' mental health it's not so easy to measure..

What effect does growing up in the age of smartphones and social media have on kids' mental health ? Turns out, it's not so easy to measure. It's something we might feel we know intuitively: excessive smartphone scrolling is bad for mental health, especially among developing teenagers . Each year, we hear reports of a youth mental health crisis. We may even notice the effects of it in our own lives. And kids are spending more time on their phones than than ever before. That's something anyone who spends an extended amount of time with teenagers can agree on.

As it turns out, the link between mental health and overuse of mobile technology is harder to prove than you might think. (Also read: Is your teenager dealing with deeper emotional or psychological issues? Watch out for these signs and red flags )

What screen time does to teenagers

A new study conducted in South Korea attempts to measure this link using self-reported screen time, a methodology that, despite being very common in this line of research, has come under criticism by tech researchers in recent years. The study, published in the journal PLoS One on December 6, looked to examine what increased screen time means for teenagers' mental health.

This is not a new question — for years, researchers have been trying to quantify the degree to which mobile technology — and social media in particular — is bad for youngsters. But it marks the first time researchers have tried to track this potential relationship at a national scale.

The researchers used two surveys conducted by Korea's health department in 2017 and 2020, respectively, asking over 40,000 teenagers how many hours per day they spend on their phones on average. The teens were also asked about mental health, substance use and obesity.

As expected, they found that their screen time increased significantly between 2017 and 2020, from 30% reporting screen times over 4 hours per day in 2017 to over 55% in 2020. They also found that all three categories tested — negative mental health outcomes, substance use and obesity — increased the more time the children spent on their phones.

The study's results are consistent with what we already know about the subject. The corelation is uncontestable between mental health and increased use of mobile technology. But the paper's shortcomings— outlined by the researchers themselves — are significant. "The reported usage time may not be an estimate of the actual usage time and could be underestimated due to the tendency to provide socially desirable and acceptable answers," they wrote.

Additionally, the researchers didn't track what exactly these youngsters were doing on their phones in the first place. Were they looking at TikToks? Having long video calls with friends? Playing games? They addressed that too: "We could not specify the smartphone usage time according to the purpose (e.g., social media use, text messaging, education, online shopping), which could have affected the health outcomes," they wrote.

'Meaningless'

Peter Etchells, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University in the UK, said that measuring screen time as a concept is “pretty meaningless.” "It covers literally anything and everything, and for many years now, researchers have been calling for a more nuanced approach that more fully considers the specific content and context of use," he told DW in an email.

Being a simple number, screen time is easy to measure in research papers, he said. "But if you imagine two people reporting three hours of screen time per day, those three hours can cover such a varied range of activities, it's nonsensical to try and correlate that simple number with something else, like well-being," he said.

Etchells, who is working on a book on the science of screen time next year, said the question researchers should be asking isn't what the relationship between increased screen time and mental health may be, but rather: "Why is it the case that some people encounter difficulties when they use digital technology, and other people appear to thrive?"

He is basically saying that when it comes to measuring phones' impact on mental health, the important metric to use isn't time spent using the technology, but rather what we are doing when we are using it, and how those activities may or may not impact mental health.

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Are smartphones making us dull?

IELTS essay Are smartphones making us dull?

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