The Cyber Effect (15 page)

She proves the point that a digital native may excel in front of a screen but will be disadvantaged in the physical world and perhaps not even recognize it as her domain.

Technology will provide us, inadvertently, with more such experiments, I fear. But there is no reason to give up and always expect the worst. A positive use of technology to study child development occurred recently when MIT researcher Deb Roy, a professor of linguistics who studies how children learn language, recorded every moment
of his son's first three years with webcams placed around his home in order to study how he learned to speak.

Harkening back to the early days of conditioning experiments, Roy showed how tight feedback loops between the child and his father, mother, and nanny had effectively taught him to speak. (It wasn't from watching Baby Einstein videos.) Roy's popular TED Talk, “
The Birth of a Word,” shows in one minute how his child learned to speak one word, “water.” To do this, ninety thousand hours of video were aggregated and edited by algorithms into short video clips showing the evolution of the sound “ga-ga” to the word “water.” His work continues, and Roy has designed a device called Play Lamp, a less intrusive recording device currently being used in a pilot study of autism.

The art of falling asleep is a critical life skill. Pediatric sleep experts offer lots of indispensable advice for establishing good sleeping patterns in early life. (Some of these aren't so bad for adults, either.) Keep the lights down, play calm music, keep activity and excitement before bedtime to a minimum. There should be a bedtime routine of sorts, which will prepare the baby (or you) physically and by classic conditioning to fall asleep. These are cues, and they really work.

Watching television has been proven not to be a sleep inducer or a good pre-bedtime routine. Even worse is the exciting, interactive app. As much as tablets are given to children to pacify them, even the ones sold as “soothing” are still stimulating.

Screen use can cause sleep disturbances, in both children and adults. This seems to be
true of all “light-emitting devices.” The U.S. National Institutes of Health reports findings that watching a screen before bed—whether it is a computer, gaming console, tablet, mobile phone, or television—is associated with insomnia and subsequent daytime sleepiness. And computer use in teens and young adults—playing, surfing, or reading—causes sleeplessness, as does mobile phone use for the same purposes.

Why? The brightness of the screen can confuse the circadian rhythms.
It could be that people come to associate the screens with highly interactive pursuits and activities. If your child is used to playing exciting, superstimulating games on a tablet, then the child has an association with the device that it will be stimulating—and no amount of “soothing” apps may override that conditioning. Personally, I use an app on my devices that adjusts the color of my screen display for the time of day: warm at night, brighter, like sunlight, in the morning.

The fundamental problem is, once again, the modern perception that children need to be kept busy and occupied at all times. And then we have to find a technological answer for their overstimulation. Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and MIT professor of the social studies of science and technology and the author of
Alone Together
, a much-talked-about book that describes how technology is changing family life, explains this fear of having a “bored” child:

Pacifying or overstimulating? Sleepiness, like boredom, is a natural state and doesn't require special devices and interventions, except the simple solution: going to bed. But it's worth noting that children and adults sometimes behave differently as a result of sleepiness. Adults usually become foggy and listless when tired. Some children overcompensate and become more energetic and even hyper. A sleepy child can be moody, emotionally explosive, agitated, or aggressive.
In one study involving 2,463 children ages six to fifteen, children with sleep problems were more likely to be inattentive, hyperactive, and impulsive, and to display oppositional behaviors.

For this reason, sleep deprivation is sometimes confused with ADHD in children. According to the National Sleep Foundation, more than two-thirds of children in the United States experience one or more sleep problems at least a few nights a week. And children who have been diagnosed with ADHD have been shown to be more vulnerable to sleep deprivation, which can profoundly impact ADHD symptoms. One
study found that treating sleep problems alone may be enough to eliminate attention and hyperactivity issues for some children.

Some early-learning experts believe there is a
connection between the rise of ADHD and screen use in children. It is now the most prevalent psychiatric illness of children and teenagers in America.
Is it a coincidence that neuroscience research shows that just as the iPad, iPhone, and other digital screens began saturating households in America, the number of ADHD diagnoses in children increased? We cannot imply causation; a relationship between two variables does not mean one causes the other. But I don't believe in coincidence. In forensics we say, “There is no such thing as coincidence, only actionable intelligence.” This phenomenon requires urgent and informed investigation.

The number of young people being treated with medication for ADHD grows every year. And, quite shockingly, more than ten thousand toddlers, ages two and three years old, are among the children reportedly taking ADHD drugs, even though prescribing these falls outside any established pediatric guidelines.

Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a medical doctor and professor at the University of Washington, is a prominent voice in the conversation about the connection between attention disorders and interactive screen use. While looking after his own two-month-old son, Christakis realized that jumpy images on the screen were engaging the baby's natural reflex to react to a change in his environment. Subsequent research by Christakis and his colleagues found an association between children under three who watch more than two hours of television a day and a difficulty with attention. This doesn't necessarily mean that television causes the attention difficulties. As I have mentioned earlier, it can mean that children with behavioral problems may be put in front of a TV more often.

Further studies found that attention difficulties were more precisely linked to program content. While educational programs had no effect, both nonviolent and violent entertainment were associated with subsequent attention problems. Specific cartoons and fast-paced media were
linked to attention difficulties. This led Christakis to theorize that overstimulation of the brain of a child might be harmful to his or her development. The style of some programming available on
television, with quick editing cuts and quickly changing images, engage a baby's
orienting response
, the reflex that fixes attention to strange sights or sounds. According to Christakis, this reflex is what keeps a baby's attention focused on the screen, which can lead to an overstimulation of the developing brain.

These studies were only talking about TV, which is practically a media dinosaur when compared with the interactivity of digital devices, apps, and interactive games. Talk about hyperstimulation! As Christakis has said, one of the strengths of the iPad is that it is interactive, which allows a child to progress at his or her own pace and is therefore potentially better for educational purposes. But in fact, interactivity may be the problem.

The term
interactive
is a misnomer. As Dr. Leonard Oestreicher, a family physician and member of the Society for the Study of Autism Spectrum Disorder and Social-Communication, points out, there is no social activity possible while an infant or a young child is playing with an “interactive” device. “
There is no eye contact, turn taking, true voices, or opportunities for joint attention,” he writes. “These images cannot react to the child's social bids such as baby smiles, laughs, or babbling.”

Christakis and his researchers found that the more television a baby or toddler watches, the more likely they are to have attention problems by the time they reach age seven, which is the average age at which children with ADHD are diagnosed. Another group of researchers found that prolonged screen use—either television or video games—may be connected with a risk of developing attention and learning problems, and associated with negative educational outcomes in the long term. It was shown to negatively affect executive functioning and cause attention deficit, cognitive delays, impaired learning, increased impulsivity, and decreased ability to self-regulate (that is, to avoid having tantrums).

Of course, there are lots of explanations for a rise in the ADHD diagnosis. The theories about the cause of the escalation continue to
propagate. Could it be a diet of preservatives or too much refined sugar? Could it be too much homework? A lack of exercise? Or simply an increase in detection rates? But many experts believe that early screen exposure and the media-saturated home environment of today may be, if not the cause, a contributing factor in the rise of ADHD. To be sure, the pharmaceutical industry has taken full advantage and encouraged more diagnoses. Drugs are a mainstay of treatment. And are now, it turns out, handed out to toddlers.

Think about this for a moment:

Yes, these are big leaps. But they are plausible.

Good science often echoes good sense. And I think we all know what it's like to feel overstimulated—and be unable to concentrate. In one study of kindergarten children, two classrooms were used: one with plain, undecorated walls and another with highly engaging and colorfully decorated walls. Researchers found that students did better in the dull environment. The visually “busy” classroom impacted the students' ability to maintain focus on instruction and learn. “
The decorated classroom led to greater time off task than the sparse classroom, and greater time off task in turn led to reduced learning.”

Can the appetite for overstimulation be created in young children—similar to the way a consistent diet of sugary snacks has been shown to create a greater appetite for sweets? Whether or not the actual pathways of the brain are affected by exposure to the superexciting video games and entertainment available on screens, the mere difference between the slow pleasures of real life and the high-speed thrills of digital screens could cause an urge or taste for more excitement, a kind of
sensory-arousal addiction
.

As Dr. Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote in the
New York Times
in 2014:

So the real-world classroom has apparently become a boring environment compared with the stimulation and pacifying effects of popular devices. But the two are not mutually exclusive. There is a role for technology in the classroom. And the way to understand that role is to look at the role of cyber in the whole life of a child.

On the jostling train to Galway, while the baby fed and the mother's eyes continued to be locked on her phone screen, I thought about all the complex events and conditions that are required for a human being to develop in the best possible way—the milk and nutrients needed, the sunshine, the balance of rest and stimulation and movement and sleep, and the hours of real tactile human contact with a patient caregiver. Raising a child is a daunting job, and it's no wonder so many parents surrender some of their duties to technology. So many other aspects of their lives are helped by it, made easier and better.

A baby's needs are not high-tech, though. And in many ways, technology has been proven to be less than beneficial for their healthy development. So far, no electronic device or app can replace cuddling, talking, laughing, playing a silly game, holding hands, or reading a book with your child. I have no doubt that someday tech developers and designers
will create apps that can truly enhance learning for infants and toddlers, and then the educational value of screens will change. Until then, what we may need most is an app that reminds parents that they need to ditch their own screens at home and spend real face time with their kids.

Rather than developing swiping dexterity, which requires only a finger, babies need to do things with their entire bodies. They need to crawl, twist, and turn. They need to be bored! And they need to frown, grimace, and have a good, long, wallowing crying jag. They need to rise and fall. Achieve and stumble.

Embracing technology as an improvement over old-fashioned parenting will surely have an impact. Let's look at the chronological cyber effects of this over a child's lifetime. At birth, some babies are much less likely to experience face time and eye contact with their siblings, parents, and other adults. As they grow, they are commonly seeing adults around them reacting to their devices—and compulsively checking their mobile screens. Next, these children are being plopped in front of televisions and computer screens in their baby rockers, baby saucers, playpens, and Pack 'n Plays, or while suspended from ceilings on bungee cords. Anywhere but in their parents' arms.