Parents, Look Up!
Modeling media habits for kids who (literally) look up to you
The onslaught of new devices being developed and brought to market are altering the human mind on an unprecedented scale. While the jury is still out on what the long-term effects of their use will be, what we do know about child development should encourage parents to be hyper-vigilant about the example they set with their media use — for their kids’ sake.
Eye contact is a crucial part of communication, and eye gaze has been established as an integral part of parent-child interaction in early development. Numerous developmental psychologists have found that an infant’s sensitivity to eye gaze has long-ranging consequences for their emotional development, language acquisition and learning outcomes.
Researchers have found that infants are less responsive to caregivers who make even small deviations in eye gaze, which demonstrates how perceptive & reliant they are on eye gaze for gathering social cues about their environment.
This becomes a concern when considering the current trend of mobile media use in our culture, where the average American aged 25–44 checks their phone between 35–50 times a day. From the time kids are born, as danah boyd asserts “people are shoving phones in their face to take pictures, turning to their phones to escape and obsessively talking on their phones while ignoring them.” When we normalize looking at our phones at any spare moment — during meals, at a stop light, on the toilet; we normalize these behaviors for children.
This normalization also raises questions about the consequences for these children, who are also being denied crucial experiences of eye contact needed for their social and cognitive development.
As much as we may want to shy away from the uncomfortable truth of it, this parental media absorption can also present challenges in terms of how their attention is allocated to children. As Dr. Jenny Radesky at University of Michigan found when observing 55 caregivers eating meals with their children at a fast food restaurant, the parents that were most highly absorbed in their phones exhibited the harshest treatment for their children’s misbehavior. Even out of the context of punishment, MIT’s Sherry Turkle interviews a father who acknowledges the differences in the way he’s raised his children as a result of his increasing use of his phone, revealing the admitted guilt he feels about it:
“When he gives his two-year-old daughter a bath, he finds it boring. And he’s feeling guilty. Just a few nights earlier, instead of sitting patiently with her, talking and singing to her, as he did with his older children, he began to check his email on his phone. And it wasn't the first time. “I know I shouldn’t but I do,” he says. “ That bath time should be a time for relaxing with my daughter. But I cant do it. I’m on and off my phone the whole time. I find the downtime of her bath boring.”
Reading this passage, I am drawn to my own research of freshman college students — those who would be considered members of Gen Z — recognizing a connection between the father above talks of downtime and the way it is articulated by my students. A prominent category to emerge when I developed a coding scheme to analyze students’ written reflections of their 8-hour digital detox assignment was an ambivalence about being free from responsibilities of checking in to their devices coupled with sentiments of discomfort about the prospect of downtime or relaxation. As one student explained:
“Relaxing always bears a subtle element of stress. There is always something to work toward and taking a break can feel like procrastination.”
Many described the feeling of freedom or escape as simultaneously stoking feelings of anxiety as if their was something they should be doing — even if that something was scrolling their phone to give the appearance of doing something. Another student described how it felt awkward to be in public with a friend when neither of them had a smartphone:
“Not utilizing a smartphone was not only a liability in this tach-savvy society, but also an embarrassment.”
It is not only what behavior parents are modeling, but also what behavior is being encouraged through design and tech releases that should be critically assessed. For instance, in December 2017, Facebook released a Messenger Kids apps that was designed to “connect children to relatives and friends through text, photos and video chat while making parents the gatekeepers”. In this way, kids communicate just like their parents or perhaps older siblings. While Facebook’s intentions are partially aligned with efforts bolster online privacy, the concern — which led to more than 110 child health advocates signing a letter urging the company to pull the app — lies in the message it sends about communication and connection. As Turkle explains, children shouldn’t be further motivated to move friendships online because as they “spend more and more time on digital devices, they lose the healthy capacities to cultivate moments of quiet and solitude that are so crucial for developing empathy and healthy relationships.”
These instance all circle back to the importance of the behavior that is modeled to children early in their development, particularly in terms of where attentional resources (i.e. eye gaze) are allocated. With regard to attention, it is not only important to consider the behavior being modeled with regard to media but also the stimuli they consume through media, which again reveals long-term cognitive effects.
Dr. Dimitri Christakis, researcher at Washington University School of Public Health, explores the impact media stimulation on the brain, and explains that research can barely keep up with the rate that technology is evolving and being delivered to children. His results reveal that exposing young children to “frenetic animation or fast-moving video conditions the mind to a reality that doesn’t exist.” This primes young children for a kind of hyper-attention that presents difficulties by school age — increasing attentional problems by 60% in the case of Powerpuff girls.
So…. WHAT DO WE DO?
The most basic answer is to figure out what your priorities and values are, and then figure out how to align your media use with them.
Sounds great… so how do you actually do that?
Rather than offer my own, I feel it is most apropos to direct to the succinct suggestions of danah boyd, which for convenience sake I have included and elaborated on below:
1. Verbalize what you are doing on your phone
This is great for a number of reasons, beyond what she has described. She explains that when you begin to verbalize what you do on your phone to your kids, you‘ll become more aware of how much you’re using it and what you're normalizing for your kids. An added bonus of this is that the greater amount of words kids hear, the greater their language processing efficiency, enhancing their language acquisition, vocabulary, and learning outcomes later in life. By verbalizing your daily mobile activities that would otherwise be silent, you are opening up new avenues to connect with your kids, demystify tech use, and increased their daily “heard word” count!
2. Household Contracts
boyd suggests setting a contract that applies to everyone in the house, rather than just children restrictions to avoid parental hypocrisy. Sherry Turkle’s great suggestions are to reclaim the sacred spaces of conversation like the car and the dinner table. (The car may seem like a sketch at first — but I can attest as the oldest of 6 siblings none more than 2 years apart, despite all of the chaos, so much familial bonding happened in the minivan that I would feel robbed of had we all had tablets in our laps).
The AAP offers a fantastic resource to help families craft a personalized media plan that can be found here.
3. Parenting past addiction
This one requires parents to go a little deeper but is no less necessary. By the very nature of the way much of the tech & media we engage with is designed, it is highly likely that we are moving into parenthood with bad habits, ones that can present us as hypocrites to children. As boyd suggests, its important to intervene when parents recognize psychologically unhealthy habits emerging with their kids, which she suggests is best establish through helping and supporting children while enabling them to understand why boundaries are put in place — rather than have technology put the boundaries in place for them.
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