Recently, The Today Show had a segment which was focused on screen time and its effect on kids. I notice teen couples, on what I would assume was a date, locked on to their cell phones. They have so much potential, and I would love to hear what they have to say to each other, but they aren’t talking. They seem very interested in what their phones have to say. It’s a red flag for me – how can your phone be more interesting than a beautiful woman?
I’m a big fan of Kara Swisher, the well-respected Silicon Valley Journalist. She was asked on a podcast if she could go a whole weekend without her phone. After thinking about it she said, “No.” That is where all my friends are and all the knowledge that I don’t know.
“Houston, we have a problem.”
The Today Show had alarms and red lights going off everywhere. One in three children are online between midnight and 5AM and many are online for 8-10 hours a day. When are they doing their homework? My mother told me I needed at least eight hours of sleep a night, growing up.
The Surgeon General says that kids who are on social media more than three hours a day have double the probability of mental health issues like depression and anxiety. And this is just a few years after COVID-19 when they lost two years of in-class education. Then there are the 5,000 kids a year who are committing suicide.
I don’t want to be a scare monger on this subject. I see that the supercomputer in our pocket, the smart phone that came out in 2012, has many plusses and minuses like Artificial Intelligence (AI). We are learning how to extract the best as we go, and manage the worst.
What does the science say? Dr. Diane Putnick was a lead author on the NIH paper “Displacement of Peer Play by Screen Time.” The National Institute of Health agreed for me to interview her. She said that her research was focused on young kids 1-3 years old, which is probably not where tablets and smart phones are making the most difference. This study was done because young children’s digital media use may adversely affect child development, but the mechanisms of this association were unclear.
The findings of their research were that screen time didn’t significantly affect the time spent reading to the child, but it did affect the time the child spent playing with other kids, and that it increased the odds of developmental delay. 2–4-year-olds are averaging 2.5 hours a day on screens but 81% of that is watching TV. The study suggested that if we can increase the time kids play with peers, we may offset the negative associations between screen time and child development.
Children’s screen time habits start young, but they ramp up quickly. About 85% of all 15-year-olds have smart phones and on the whole, they are spending a lot of time on them. Dr. Putnick has two teenagers of her own, and they have to charge their phones outside their rooms at 9:30pm. She says that even she and her husband, who is in the Tech world, don’t always check. She found that really busy kids with friends, sports and a heavy high school work load don’t have that much time for their phone. Most of their phone time is spent actually talking to friends or texting them. A less driven student, especially boys, can spend a lot of time playing video games.
I talked to a Kennett Middle school teacher who is concerned about what their kids find online when they search the web. Kennett has a structured program to teach kids how to interpret information and to separate fact from fiction.
The truth is that the change in technology is accelerating, and I tend to believe that is a good thing. There are unintended consequences and the community, government and corporations who are developing the technology need to work together. We can make sure our cars drive safer than we do, and the computers learn the good stuff from human beings and minimize the bad. My insurance company has my phone tracked so I don’t text and drive. It reduces my premium up to 20%.
Our world’s inequality will increase as not only will our social skills take a hit from technology but there won’t be enough jobs to go around. We will have to reinforce the economic safety net as fewer of us will fit neatly into this new world. Technology can advance our best interests but not as a crutch for thinking, feeling and doing.
It is a little scary when you have so much data at your fingertips, that you rarely can say “I don’t know”.
Technology. We can do this.
“The Story of Kennett — Shaping the Future One Child at a Time” Bob George and Joan Holliday’s book on Kennett may be purchased on Amazon and at the Mushroom Cap. You can contact Bob at [email protected].