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Chapter 1

Lost in Connection

How the Tech Effect Puts Children’s Development at Risk

Stimulation has replaced connection, and I think that’s what you need to watch out for.

—Ned Hallowell, psychiatrist and author of

Driven to Distraction

Tom is one of the most thoughtful, attentive, engaged dads I know, and his sons—four, seven, twelve, and thirteen years old—are good kids. He takes his boys hiking, coaches their sports teams, helps them raise animals, and travels with them to study the world. He is not a man absorbed in tech and he has been mindful about the TV and electronic games he allows the boys to use. This is especially challenging because their range of ages and development means he has to set different limits for his two older boys (“the bigs”) from those he sets for their younger brothers (“the littles”). Some of the things he might permit the bigs to play—gory war games, for instance—he would never want the littles exposed to. And then there is Grand Theft Auto, a game so vile he never intended to let it in the door. In the game, the player is a sociopathic getaway driver who racks up points for running down pedestrians and other innocents, basically killing anyone who gets in his way just for sport. Between kills he is immersed in a criminal world—not as a cop or heroic good guy, but as a really, really bad guy. “The guy can go into a strip club. There’s pornography. There’s drugs. There’s shooting police. It’s horrendous,” Tom tells me. “So I kept saying, ‘No, we’re not going to get it. I put my foot down.’” And he stood firm. Then for eldest son Sam’s thirteenth birthday, one of his best friends gave him Grand Theft Auto. Tom was exasperated but wanted to be reasonable; rather than force Sam to surrender the gift, he modified his strategy. He banned all but Sam from playing it and only when the others were not around. That didn’t work. He made new rules; they got bent. He hid the game; it got found. Finally he thought he had it under control. The two bigs obeyed the limited-play rule and the game stayed out of sight and inaccessible to the littles—four- year- old Ben and seven-year- old Teddy. One day soon after, Tom was driving “blissfully along,” his younger boys quietly engaged in the back, when he discovered Teddy, the seven-year- old, was playing Grand Theft Auto on his iPhone. He had used the touch-screen web browser to access it. It had never occurred to Tom that the boys could do that—or would. The only reason Teddy even had a phone at his age was because his mother traveled extensively for work, and this allowed them to communicate with each other if need be. Tom had never thought of it as a potential security breach in his protective parental firewall. Tom could have thrown up his hands, given up, surrendered to tech’s incursion on his parental authority, but instead he immediately set about plotting his next strategic move: downsize the tech capabilities on the phones and update parental controls so he could more closely monitor the boys’ activity. He banned Grand Theft Auto in the house altogether, knowing that his oldest son could and would play it at his friend’s house, but at least his message was back on course and clear. It is an endless challenge, this role of IT parent in the digital age. Tom wants his children to have the benefits and enjoyment that tech offers, he wants them to be tech savvy and media literate, and his home is outfitted for work and fun on screens. What he does not want to do, he says, is leave his kids on their own with it to “roam and learn” and hope for the best. There is just too much at stake. About fifteen years ago I began getting calls to visit schools and talk with parent groups about raising children of character. Parents were deeply worried that a breakdown in cultural norms, growing consumerism, cynicism and crass entertainment, overscheduled lives, and an increasing pressure for competitive success in school were shortchanging their children’s moral development. Since screens, tech, and online access became commonplace in children’s lives, the calls now come from parents and teachers of children as young as preschool age, alarmed at the extent to which children’s screen play or online lives are affecting their learning, their social and emotional development, their family interactions,

and their school communities. Teachers share their concerns about the subtle but pervasive ways they see tech impinging on the school experience: four-year- olds who want to imitate computer games on the playground and hesitate to play with blocks or peruse books; elementary school children who struggle to problem-solve and who depend on adults to help them with the simplest tasks; high school students who struggle with any assignment requiring more than shallow attention and prefer a virtual tour of a museum to a field trip to see the real thing. Parents call in a panic. A child is showing signs of gaming addiction or has been caught watching porn on a pal’s laptop. A mom snooping on her fifteen-year- old daughter’s Facebook page has learned that she plans to sneak away to the movies to meet a forty-something man she friended there. Or a twelve-year- old has posted pictures of herself online at “Am I Ugly” inviting anonymous critics to rate her looks. I also hear much more anxiety from parents about sleepovers than ever before. One of the biggest concerns is that there will be older kids in the home who have been influenced by sexual content or YouTube videos and other sites and will put their children in harm’s way by exposing them to inappropriate content. Or that the sleepover kids will have unsupervised access to computers and go looking for trouble—or find it by accident. “I used to just assume these things couldn’t happen,” says one mother, “and now I have to assume that they can.” That is not only a safe assumption but a wise and durable one for the years ahead. Technological innovation by definition takes us into unknown territory and will continue to alter the landscape of everyday life in ways that hold us in thrall. Research into the effects of those practical innovations on human life, from brain synapses to sleepover experiences, will necessarily lag behind. Every new thing, every upgrade, takes us farther along the slippery slope of the cyber culture where we must expect to be continually challenged in new ways. The tech paradox we all confront as parents is that the very thing that can get our kids in deep trouble can also deepen and enrich their lives in unimaginable ways. Technology has transformed the ways we can connect with family and friends at a distance and manage the traffic flow of work and family commitments. Our children can access extraordinary resources to explore their healthy interests and connect with others who share those passions. Tech has transformed what it means to be a student, the opportunity for lifelong learning, and the very process of education itself. Tech has transformed what it means to be a global citizen and our capacity to empathize, understand, and truly see the world from the perspective of people we may never meet. The possibilities are nothing short of thrilling, often inspiring. Yet we know the darker side is there. Research already shows detrimental effects on the developing brain, early learning, and emotional development. We know that the entertainment and online culture is in many ways antisocial, crass, and demeaning and that kids have such easy access to it. In an era when children need adult supervision the most, parents say they feel more ineffectual than ever. They cannot control the landscape and they cannot control their children’s journey through it. They want to trust their children and believe that their children will know how to navigate, protect themselves, and respect others in the chaos and moral indifference of the cyber culture. But as much as parents want to trust their kids to make the right choices, it’s not a matter of trust but a question of whether they are prepared to make their way safely and wisely through what is for all of us new territory. As for trust, at best all you can trust is that they are good kids who will inevitably roam into bad tech terrain. But unlike grown-ups, whose fully matured brain should be able to tell right from wrong, a joke from bullying, and tasteful content from trash, and should be able to exercise impulse control and mature judgment in how we use tech, our children are not there yet. They are still children. Our species is notable for the amount of growth and length of time required for the brain to mature after birth. Too often, conversations about child development focus on what a child can do and how to make it happen faster, when instead we should be talking about how a child can think, how the developing young brain is prepared to process experience, and how we can support that growth in healthy ways. We know now that it takes twenty-five- plus years for the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that enables us to link consequences to behavior (called executive functioning) to fully develop. In the adolescent brain executive functioning is still a work in progress, neurologically not yet a fully functioning piece of a teen’s decision-making process. So it falls to us. Older and ostensibly

neurologically wiser, we are the ones equipped to think of consequences. At times, though, our own love affair with tech clouds our view of the serious consequences the same habits hold for our children. We all work so hard, juggling life’s big worries and ordinary demands, trying to stay afloat and feel we are competent, doing no harm, being our

almost

best selves as much as possible despite the one hundred interruptions that splinter our attention and ability to accomplish something. It is easy to slip into denial about the downside, reassuring ourselves:

It’s got to be fine, everyone else is doing it

.

It’s not really that

bad—I

know other parents are letting their kids do much worse

.

They’re

going to see it sooner or later anyway, there’s nothing I can do.

We delete from memory the steady flow of news stories about the known dangers of texting and driving, or research showing likely links between children’s media habits and health concerns like anxiety, aggression, addiction, attention deficit and hyperactive disorder (ADHD), developmental delays, obesity, and eating disorders. Or the stories that end tragically. If it hasn’t happened to us yet—the crash or the crisis, the diagnosis, or the call from the school or whatever worrisome thing is next—it doesn’t seem likely it will happen at all. But it is happening. Research and behavioral trends already show that when tech becomes an early and continuing presence in children’s lives, it can undermine family and child development. In the struggle to preserve our families and protect our children we are losing ground on some critical fronts. Psychologically, these losses in fundamental aspects of child development and well-being can set our children up for trouble in school and in life.

Tech Replaces Family Primacy: What’s @ Stake as Peers and Pop Culture Delete Parents

What is family? When I ask children that question, their responses reflect the very different things that family represents for children at different ages and stages of development. Four-year- old Amber describes family as “my mommy and my daddy and my sister and . . . what makes me happy.” “Your family is who loves you,” says Max, five. “They’re the people who matter most,” says Emory, eight. Naomi, ten, describes family as “where you learn about your values and love.” Andrew, thirteen, concludes: “Sometimes they can be pretty annoying but you know, they’re always there for you. Yeah. Good stuff.” However we describe family in everyday terms, the primacy of family has special meaning from a developmental perspective. The infant’s experience of itself and its environment (everyone and everything included) is undifferentiated; there is no

me

, only a

we

. “Family creates our first experience of ourselves in the world, and it becomes the foundation of our view of the world,” writes the psychoanalyst Harvey Rich in his book

In the Moment: Celebrating the Everyday

. “Family is the organizing theme around which our consciousness grows. . . . It is where we begin to define ourselves relative to others, and as part of the larger story of family, community, history, and humankind. At the deepest level, it is where we first discover ourselves.” A couple’s relationship and expectations, the constellation of personalities and circumstances into which a child is born, all of that constitutes the so-called nurturing surround that shapes the way a child thinks, grows, and engages the world from birth. In child development, when we talk about “the primacy of family” we are not simply suggesting that family is very important to a child as a home base. We are referring to the family’s role as the deepest, most profoundly defining influence in a child’s formation of self—her neurological, psychological, and physiological growth and development. The psychologist Selma Fraiberg, in her classic book

The Magic Years

, wrote that family is “how a child becomes humanized.” Ultimately,

she was referring to the way in which family serves as our first and most significant teacher in what it means to be fully human in the best way, from cognitive capacities to qualities of character. We have reason to be concerned, then, when the intimate nurturing surround of family is breached, and media and tech displace family as the context for defining values, modeling relationship, mentoring, and meaning making for our children. We might think that the transient, insubstantial content of so much of the media and tech culture would be relatively harmless against the deep, primal influence of family. The opposite is true. The