10/04/2024
A really good read for parents, copied from Simplify Magazine.
The Art of Screen Time
by Anya Kamenetz
While researching my book on families and screens, I came across a video of a psychological experiment. You can find it on YouTube. [1] I challenge you to watch it without getting a lump in your throat.
An infant is strapped into a seat. His mother leans toward him, smiling, widening her eyes, playing peekaboo and this-little-piggy. He squeals, responding to her coos in the kind of baby “conversation” that is crucial to the development of speech and healthy attachment.
Then the mother turns away for a moment. When she turns back, her face is set in a blank expression.
The baby makes a series of bids for his mother’s attention. Smiling, giggling, squealing, arching his back, clapping his hands, reaching for her, pointing—pulling out his whole baby bag of tricks. No dice—her face is like stone. He looks confused, then starts biting his fist uncertainly, twists around to peek at the researcher. Stress hormones are skyrocketing in his little body, and his pulse is racing.
Finally he slumps in his seat and starts to wail, red-faced, and his mother breaks her expression and comforts him. It’s only been a few minutes, with no discomfort, no scolding.
A four-month-old baby seems to remember this brief experience up to two weeks later. If you recreate the situation, they will freak out much more quickly.
Edward Tronick, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, has been conducting these “still face” experiments since the 1970s. He uses them to model the effects of neglect and maternal depression, especially postpartum depression, which affects about one in ten women. He’s found that repeatedly denying children opportunities to connect can cause severe distress. [2]
These days, “still face” research is being used to ask what damage parents may be doing with phones constantly in their hands. When I saw the video, I flashed immediately on my own moments of gazing impassively into the black mirror of my smartphone while in my young daughters’ presence.
As a digital education correspondent for NPR, I am around screens a lot. I am also a mother of two. I wrote The Art of Screen Time to help me, and my readers, move past the anxiety about children and screens with useful, actionable knowledge. I’ve become increasingly convinced that there is little hope of healing our children’s relationships with media unless we address our own use of screens around our kids. And that means facing up to the impact of distraction, both physical and emotional.
Physical Risks of Screen Time
Most important, yet often overlooked, are the physical risks.
By far, the riskiest time that parents may be using smartphones is behind the wheel of a car. In the United States, car crashes are the leading cause of death for school-aged children, [3] and cell phones are currently estimated to be involved in one in four fatal crashes. [4] Traffic deaths have been trending upward since 2014, after declining for decades, and some identify handheld devices as the culprit. [5] Meanwhile, in a 2014 survey, 90 percent of parents said they were distracted by smartphones, CD players, or the onboard navigation system while driving with children in the car. [6] And those are just the ones who admitted it.
But that’s not all. Between 2007, when the iPhone was introduced, and 2010, nationwide in the United States, nonfatal injuries to children under age five rose 12%, after falling for much of the prior decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention magazine’s reading of emergency-room records.
In a paper published in 2014, Craig Palsson, an economist at Yale, took a look at hospital injury reports collected by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. [7] These reports described where children were, what they were doing at the time of the accident, and who they were with.
When the iPhone was first introduced, it could only be used on AT&T’s 3G network, which meant that it expanded unevenly into otherwise similar communities. This created a perfect natural experiment to investigate whether there is a causal relationship between the rise in injuries and the spread of smartphones. And that’s what Palsson did.
The results are dismaying. In counties that were included in the iPhone coverage area, the rise in serious injuries was larger the younger the children were. It topped out at a 10% increase for infants under age one, compared with areas that did not have iPhone access. Interestingly, and damningly, injuries increased only in cases where children were under parental supervision—coaches, teachers, and daycare workers, presumably, abstain or are restricted from thumbing away on their phones while watching children for pay.
Palsson suggests that smartphones “increase the opportunity cost of supervising children” by tempting parents to access either work or entertainment instead. Spoken like a true economist. Personally, a cost/benefit analysis is the opposite of what I’m doing when I pull out my phone at the playground. Instead, I’m too often responding to that “Ping!” with all the mindfulness of Pavlov’s dog.
Emotional Risks of Screen Time
The physical risks are straightforward. The emotional and developmental risks of digital distraction are more nebulous and harder to categorize.
One of the few experimental studies on this topic was carried out by eminent child development experts Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff, with Jessa Reed, and published in 2017. In the study, mothers were asked to teach their two-year-old toddlers a new word. In half of cases, the mothers were interrupted by a cell phone call. The interrupted children failed to learn the new word, even though the mothers repeated it just as often as they did in the non-interrupted condition. [8]
We are leading highly interrupted lives. Research suggests that adults check their phones many dozens of times per day. [9] While each individual interruption may be fleeting, our children’s critical early development is fleeting too.
I want to be clear: child development experts do not endorse the idea of hovering over your children 24/7. On the contrary. Children, even infants, need time to explore and play on their own. While they take those moments to themselves, it’s fine for us to have a moment to ourselves, to chat with a friend, to look at the news, to get something done, whether in the real world or on our phones. The key is balance, choosing when you are going to look at your phone and when you are going to be tuned in to your child, instead of letting Silicon Valley developers make that choice for you.
Lessons in the Art of Screen Time
I am not here to tell adults what to do about their own technology use in their own homes and lives. Everybody has a different set of conditions to deal with. And, just as with our kids, the leeway of healthy patterns of use is probably wide. There’s a lot more reason to be vigilant if you’re a working parent like me who sees your kids for four or five hours on a weekday, for example, versus a full-time caregiver who is eyeball to eyeball with them 14 hours a day.
But I have some suggestions if you worry about this the way I do.
For God’s sake, put your phone away when you’re driving. And at the swimming pool as well.
Don’t charge your phone in your bedroom at night.
Turn off screens for an hour before bed.
Don’t check it first thing in the morning.
Turn off notifications on your phone for all but the most essential apps. This has made a huge difference for me.
If you have an iPhone, the Do Not Disturb mode allows you to be contacted only by a few key emergency contacts, say, at the movies.
De-install Facebook or whatever applications you find most addictive.
Create a landing zone near the door of your home and plug in the phone there when you walk in. . .
Anya Kamenetz is the lead digital education correspondent for NPR and the author of The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life, published by PublicAffairs. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
