You Can't F*ck Up Your Kids by Lindsay Powers

Author:Lindsay Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2020-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

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In a world where headlines blare that screen time is “digital heroin” and ask if touch screens are “melting kids’ brains,” I think we need to stop and take a deep breath. Are we overreacting? Probably, science says. The brain science nonprofit the Dana Foundation has an excellent article chock full of academic experts explaining all the issues with studies of screen time.6 Namely: Most of the studies are self-reported surveys, as it would be unethical to split up a group of kids and see what happens to their brains if they watch fifteen hours a day of YouTube. And good luck finding a “control” group of kids who have never seen a screen in a world where even refrigerators are “smart.”

“The majority of studies looking at media effects are correlational. They look at the brain structure in kids who spend more time playing computer games than other kids,” MIT neuroscientist Robert Desimone says in the article. “Because of that, it’s always a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Is it that kids whose brains are a little bit different are more attracted to playing these games? Or are games causing these differences in the brain? There’s no equivalent of a controlled clinical trial, where you take a group of kids and randomly assign them to play computer games or not. I’m not sure you could even ethically do that. So, distinguishing cause and effect is extremely difficult.

“Parents are worried about how their kids spend time on entertainment. They have always been worried about this,” Desimone continues. “We know that music education and reading can be beneficial to general learning. So, parents are willing to let their kids be randomly assigned to a piano or a reading group. But chances are, they aren’t going to be so willing to allow their kids to be assigned to a Minecraft group. It’s a huge practical problem.”

“It’s important to remember that screens are a tool,” Abigail Baird, a Vassar neuroscientist, also tells the Dana Foundation. “Think of a hammer. Yes, you could murder someone with a hammer, but most people don’t. They use it to build and create and fix. There isn’t enough good science to tell us when, or even if, technology as a tool is going to be a problem yet.”

Then there’s that fear of our children getting addicted to screens. I’ve certainly seen my two-year-old stare like a zombie at YouTube before. But despite scary headlines, we don’t have much to be worried about, according to Iowa State University developmental psychologist Douglas Gentile. “Issues of addiction are potentially a very serious concern, but they aren’t all that common,” he says. “There are immense individual differences in how kids respond to different media.”

This is why, as I am writing this book, experts are emphasizing the importance of what kind of content kids consume versus the idea of staying away from screens altogether. After all, many apps are designed to suck us in (have you ever noticed how you can go

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