The Digitization of a Generation

Reprinted with permission

If you're a kid in Kevin and Lora Cooper's house, by now you know there are some buttons you don't push.

Past run-ins with mom and dad have taught you: Don't let them catch you playing a video game or watching TV before your homework is done. Dinner hour means “all screens off.” The Internet has a curfew. And don't try taking your cell phone to bed.

The Omaha family, like many in this media-drenched modern world, has struggled to balance the allure of technology with the nagging fear that too much of it — a new study underlines just how much — may stunt the growth of something fundamentally human.

Psychologists, social critics and some experts on the front lines, namely parents, worry that heavy media use by children will impair things as simple as school grades and as profound as the capacity for contentment.

Highlights of kids' media use

>> Kids average 7 hours, 38 minutes of media use per day. Five years ago it was 6 hours, 21 minutes.

>>In past years, multitasking was the novel feature of kids' media lives. Now it's mobility: 20 percent of their consumption is via mobile devices — phones, audio players or handheld games. Another new feature: increased consumption of “old” content — such as TV, music or print — delivered through “new” pathways on a computer, such as Hulu.

>>Three subgroups, regardless of other factors, report especially heavy media use: blacks, Hispanics and children ages 11 through 14.

>> Heavy media use correlates with low grades and less “contentment,” gauged by questions about kids' friends, how they get along, whether they are often bored or sad, and whether they are often in trouble.

>>Traditional printed-page media — books, newspapers, magazines — are less used than five years ago, but online versions partly offset the decline.

>>Readingfor pleasure is “the only media activity that decreases as children grow older.”

>>Traditional print is the least likely to be multitasked with other media. And print is the only medium in which heavy use corresponds with high grades.

SOURCE: Survey of 2,002 children, ages 8 to 18, during 2008-09 school year compared with similar surveys in 2004 and 1999

They worry that a generation growing up with cell phones, video games, iPods, laptops, TV, movies and more will be unable to form healthy relationships, function well in the workplace, think conceptually or find satisfaction in the real world. And that the real world, in turn, will suffer without them.

“It is something we've had to deal with,” Kevin Cooper, dad of the house, said of the way media have proliferated during the years he and his wife have been raising three children, now ages 24, 17 and 13. “We've seen it kind of accelerate.”

Accelerate, indeed.

A new study finds that kids ages 8 to 18 spend an average of seven hours and 38 minutes a day using some form of media for fun, whether yakking on a cell, texting, watching the tube — yes, even reading a newspaper. That's one hour and 17 minutes more than they did five years ago, said the sponsor of the study, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Moreover, the Kaiser report said, kids spend some of those hours with more than one medium at a time, multi- tasking with an MP3 player in their ears while they cruise Facebook and keep an eye on incoming texts, for instance. Only in two categories — traditional printed-page media and movies shown in a theater — did kids report no increase in use.

“The story of media in young people's lives today,” the report summed up, “is primarily a story of technology facilitating increased consumption.”

“This is a game changer,” a co- author of the report, Donald Roberts, said in describing the survey of 2,002 young people. “We're really close to kids being online 24/7.”

To be sure, the effects are disputed — especially by kids themselves, who say modern gizmos are the way they keep in touch. And to be sure, not all media are created equal. A texting phone doesn't have the same influence on a young mind as, say, a Harry Potter book.

That said, the sheer amount of leisure time kids spend with media raises concern. The Kaiser report is cautious in its conclusions, saying the evidence shows heavy media use accompanies, but does not necessarily cause, low grades and less contentment in kids.

Other experienced observers go further.

“Chronic use of media diminishes emotional intelligence,” or the know-how we need to relate to each other and to develop empathy and compassion, said Patrick Friman, a psychologist at Boys Town who also teaches at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

From a parent's-eye view, Cooper agrees. Handheld devices, especially texting cell phones, do not go hand in hand with social skills, he said.

But wait, says his daughter, Erin, 17. Right or wrong, this is how her friends communicate. Sometimes when her parents insist the phones go into their chargers at 10 p.m., “I'm having a conversation and get cut off. ... Sometimes it's just frustrating.”

And she texts more than talks “because it's more convenient” (although, BTW, she H8s those abbreviations).

Friman said kids too often don't realize the importance of tone, eye contact, facial expression and body language. “Only 10 percent is in the words.”

Emotional intelligence, he said, is the most critical skill in most jobs and probably always will be. Without it — “if we're raising a generation of kids who are deficient in that” — they may be relegated to a socioeconomic underclass.

On a broader scale, Friman said, he glimpses some of these consequences in the viral, moblike nature of Internet events, in a seemingly heightened tolerance for cruelty on sites such as Facebook and YouTube. In other words, in spite of their stated goal of facilitating sociability, such sites can do the opposite, buffering individuals from one another.

Again, Cooper concurs from the trenches.

“Facebook — that is not interaction,” he said, adding that he knows people whose only pals seem to be “Facebook friends,” as the site calls users who grant access to each other's pages.

Again, counters daughter Erin, this is a prime way her generation communicates. She said even her mom — after Erin showed her how to get set up on Facebook — found a lot of old friends. But Erin concedes, with a laugh, that the site can be a time sinkhole.

“Every time I get on Facebook, my grade average drops a point. ... You don't really realize how much time goes by,” the Omaha Burke High School junior said.

Communication is good, but it's not all the same, Friman tells the teens he counsels at Boys Town. He often appeals to their natural desire to have influence with peers, explaining that face-to-face communication carries the most weight, especially with the opposite sex.

Friman doesn't favor cutting back on all media. In fact, if a child too seldom reads for fun, he said, that's a red flag. Parents know this instinctively. When he asks whether their child reads, “they never say no with a smile on their face.”

His media advice for parents is predictable: “It's limits.” At a minimum, he tells them, take away the phone at bedtime, dinnertime and homework time.

The Kaiser report, in exploring such limit-setting, offered bad news, good news: Most parents don't impose media rules. On the other hand, for those who do, the rules seem to work, because kids living under them report spending less time consuming media.

Cooper, who worked in the media trenches himself, as a radio announcer, before his current sales job at a concrete chemicals company, agreed that limits are the key, although that's easier said than done.

He and wife Lora have continually evolved their rules — because technology shifts and kids are born loophole finders — and have tailored them to each child. For example, Stephen, 13, is drawn to video games. Erin is more of a TV nut, especially for crime shows such as “CSI.” And David — well, at 24, he is now beyond the parental statute of limitations.

In the early days, said dad, the troops resisted. The limits — such as allotted times, curfews, family hour, forbidden content — had to be enforced through repeated reminders and sometimes technology, such as AOL's parental controls or TV channel blocking. Eventually the kids grew accustomed, he said.

And he can now detect hopeful signs. He has seen the light dawn in his elder son, David, as the young man watches his brother:

“He'll see Stephen playing a video game and sigh. ... He now gets it.”

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