The Cyber Effect (16 page)

Sherry Turkle describes a parent at a playground pushing a swing with one hand and using a mobile phone with the other. She has interviewed children who tell her that their parents read them a Harry Potter book in one hand while glancing at texts and email on a BlackBerry. And here's a telling story about school-age children—the subject of the next chapter—that Turkle gleaned from her fieldwork.

What memories are we building in our children?

What examples are we setting?

If we are cautious about what babies are exposed to, we won't be sorry down the road. There is no harm in waiting to find out.

And when it's time to introduce them to cyberspace, we should be looking for chances to share that environment with them rather than leaving them to navigate it alone. Put your four-year-olds on your laps and look at the screen together. If you are giving them a game to play, play it with them—and ask your children about it afterward, to see what they are learning. Clinicians should strongly emphasize the benefits of parents and children using interactive media together to enhance its educational value.

Monitoring is especially important once a decision has been reached to begin exposing an older child to screens. Whether this is television, computer games, a tablet app, or any other media, it is crucial for parents to question the appropriateness of the content. If your child is easily stimulated and often agitated, do not expose him or her to a highly stimulating show or app. All violence on digital media should be avoided, and when it is encountered, children should be helped to understand it. There are shows proven to calm and educate—or, at the very least, not overstimulate and cause insomnia, nightmares, or hyperactivity. I suggest the use of resources such as PBS Kids (
pbskids.​org
), Sesame Workshop (
sesame​workshop.​org
), and Common Sense Media (
common​sense​media.​org
) to guide media choices.

There are ethical questions to ask as well. Have tech companies and marketers of “educational” devices, apps, and games followed research-based child-development learning principles? Even if they have, many of these studies haven't been done with digital products and factored in developmental processes over time. I find it commendable that tech mogul Jeff Bezos has helped to establish a foundation that studies early child education, and recommends that more real books need to be purchased. A cynic might say that since he owns Amazon, and sells all those wonderful picture books that kids and parents love reading together, it's certainly in his interest to step out and say something. But the wisdom of this advice is irrefutable. When you are reading a book to your child, more than just an illustrated story is being expressed. It is about togetherness, affection, the creation of memories, bonding—and a thousand other small but profound
things that occur during a moment of physical closeness. It is about nurturing and love.

And questions must be asked of the media. Studies show that despite the AAP recommendations and advice from experts, including an awareness campaign about early screen use in children that was launched by First Lady Michelle Obama, many parents are still in the dark. Most children are planted in front of a screen of some kind for four to five times the recommended amount of time. The latest surveys show that two-thirds of American families allow children under two to watch television and use tablets and mobile phone apps. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than
half of all children under two in American households watch between one and two hours of television or shows on computer screens per day.

This amount of time is a big part of that child's waking life, and using it in this way is likely to have adverse effects on their health and development. What can we do? There are a number of good resources online, including a Google+ community group that I'm involved with,
Beyond the Screens, which gives news, articles, commentary, and up-to-date advice and recommendations by experts for parents.

In France, the government has led the way for the world, and in 2008 it banned programming aimed at infants in order to protect them from the negative effects of television. In fact, a warning now appears on foreign baby programs screened on French cable channels that (translated into English) reads,
Watching television can slow the development of children under three, even when it involves channels aimed specifically at them
. French schools offer awareness campaigns that discuss proper guidelines and suggested optimum ages for interacting with technology.

Taiwan has taken a giant and commendable step forward by recently introducing legislation to ban electronic devices for children under two and limit their use for those under eighteen—and hold parents responsible for any ill effects due to technological overexposure.
Canada and Australia have similar recommendations and guidelines, but no bans.

This brings me to the United States, the leader in the development of digital technologies and products. It is a country where alcohol and
tobacco consumption are monitored and limited, where asphyxiation warnings are written on plastic bags, and where warnings of choking hazards abound. It's good news that the AAP has announced that it is considering a revision of its recommendations on screen time for infants and young children, but so far, at the time of the publication of this book, no new recommendations have been made. In the meantime, babies turn into toddlers, who are quickly becoming young children….Where are the warning labels on the tablet apps?

While we wait for more guidance and information or proper regulation, here are some ideas for parents:

And finally, how about doing a cyber-sweep of your baby's domain? Check the nursery, bedroom, and family room where they play—and banish anything with a digital chip or a blinking light. Resurrect the building blocks, the wooden trains and dolls. Go old-school! And when you play with your baby or toddler, get down on all fours (both of you), look into each other's eyes, and enjoy some unstructured quality time. Bond. Your baby will benefit enormously from this. And, believe me, so will you.

C
hildhood as a concept has evolved over time. When did society decide childhood was precious—or that children had natural rights? In the seventeenth century, the English philosopher John Locke made a case for the sanctity of childhood by arguing that babies were born with a
tabula rasa
, or blank slate, and that it was the duty of parents to train and instill correct values and notions in them. The idea of the “vulnerable” child gathered more momentum during the Enlightenment, one hundred years later, when French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau built on Locke's concept with added depth.

Childhood is an age of innocence, Rousseau argued, an important sanctuary in the life of all human beings before the harsh realities and perils of adulthood are encountered. He believed this time of innocence should be protected at all costs.

Not long ago, in terms of human history, most children left school once they were nine or ten years old. Boys were sent to work in coal mines and factories, or to apprentice in a trade like printing or blacksmithing. In 1818, nearly half the workers employed by cotton mills in the United States had started their jobs when they were under ten. To combat this practice, a succession of early child labor laws were introduced in America and Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century,
but even so, these just restricted the length of a workday for a child to sixteen hours. At the time, one-third of the labor force of America consisted of boys under fifteen years old.

How a child is treated—how tenderly, how carefully—has always greatly depended on his or her parents. What if parents, whether due to lack of resources, lack of information, lack of interest, or in some cases just pure neglect, don't protect their children from harm?

As a moral and social issue, this problem was addressed during industrialization when enormous numbers of poor children, as young as three to five years old, were sent by their parents to work in dangerous environments—crawling up chimneys and into mines—for brutally long hours. This gave rise to the first child labor movement, which gathered strength and a wide array of crusaders in the nineteenth century, from English novelist and social critic Charles Dickens, who wrote popular books such as
Oliver Twist
—depicting the life he had known himself as a twelve-year-old boy forced to work in a shoe-blacking factory to support his family—to German philosopher Karl Marx, who criticized the British and U.S. economies for surviving on the “
capitalised blood of children.”

Even with a movement afoot and outspoken advocates the likes of Dickens and Marx, social change happened slowly. It wasn't until more than sixty years after the publication of
Oliver Twist
that the National Child Labor Committee was established to begin advocating on behalf of children in the United States—followed eventually by the Child Labor Coalition, Campaign for Labor Rights, and
the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF).

For the most part, the fallout from the first two industrial revolutions has been dealt with. But we have now entered a third industrial revolution—the digital revolution—and we are charting new territory regarding the care and treatment of children, and once again we are struggling with how best to protect “the age of innocence.”

Will it take another hundred years to sort out? I hope not.

This chapter examines the online lives of children four to twelve years old. They are, in terms of harm and risk, the age group that is most vulnerable on the Internet. They are naturally curious and want to explore. They are old enough to be competent with technology, in
some cases extremely so. But they aren't old enough to be wary of the risks online—and, more important, they don't yet understand the consequences of their behavior there.

Cyberspace has some very dangerous neighborhoods, yet it is by and large unmonitored. As a playground for adults, it's been compared to the Wild West. As a playground for children, it is entirely unsuitable. Yet in the frantic rush toward new technology, children have been forgotten.

“You wouldn't take your children and leave them alone in the middle of New York City,” John Suler has said, “and that's effectively what you're doing when you allow them to go into cyberspace alone.”

According to the journal
Pediatrics
, an overwhelming majority
(84 percent) of U.S. children and teenagers have access to the Internet, on either a home computer, a tablet, or another mobile device.
And as a marketing study shows, more than half of U.S. children who are eight to twelve have a cellphone. In fact, a 2015 consumer report shows that
most American children get their first cellphone when they are six years old.

Six years old. This shocks me. This is before what in psychology we call the
age of reason
, when a child enters a new state of logic and begins to understand the surrounding world—learning the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, justice and injustice.

Now, with a cellphone in hand, these children are being catapulted into cyberspace before they are psychologically capable of making sense of it. And
we
can't even make sense of it yet. What this means in terms of their physical, cognitive, and emotional development remains largely unknown. It's still something we can only speculate about.

We do know, though, that technology has changed childhood in innumerable ways. Children are growing up with a digital foundation and framework for their lives. You might even call this new environment their true home. It is a place many of them have been visiting since they were very young and where, according to some studies, many spend an inordinate amount of their waking day. Cyberspace is where they are learning to read, doing their schoolwork, dressing up avatars, watching cartoons, and meeting friends both fictional and real.

Certainly there are vast and powerful educational aspects to this huge shift. This generation will build the technologies of tomorrow, so
the positive aspects of networking and honing IT skills are clear. One could argue that the more time these children spend online, the better. In fact, it's been shown that those who spend a lot of time at their computer keyboards have more
refined small-motor skills and enhanced hand-eye coordination. And a study conducted in 2009 by Beverly Plester and Clare Wood, both behavioral scientists in the U.K., demonstrated
a positive relation between texting and literacy. In other words, reading and writing skills can be improved by texting, rather than ruined, as was feared by some. My own thinking is that a text is a form of coded language. It is encrypted. And receiving and sending such a communication involves both decryption and encryption processes. Since cryptography demands the highest level of cognitive function—think of Alan Turing's cracking of the Enigma code in World War II—I think
if your children are texting a lot and they are really good at it, chances are they are pretty smart.

On the other hand, some developmental downsides of persistent and pervasive use of technology are already apparent, as noted in the previous chapter. Jo Heywood, a headmistress of a private primary school in Britain, has been outspoken about her observation—shared by other educators—that children are starting kindergarten at five and six years old with the communication skills of two- and three-year-olds, presumably because their parents or caregivers have been “pacifying” them with iPads rather than talking to them. This is seen in children from all backgrounds—disadvantaged and advantaged.

“
Some [children] cannot even talk, let alone be in a position to learn to read via a phonics system, many teachers have reported,” says Heywood. “This puts even more pressure on a primary system which is geared towards helping children read and write in the early years.”

A report from a professional on the front lines is a very useful early warning system. And we should pay attention, even if parents tend to be enormously sensitive to criticism about their parenting habits, something I know firsthand. When I argued in early 2015 that
mobile phones had become “virtual” babysitters (or “childminders,” as we say on the other side of the Atlantic), it struck a nerve—and landed me on the front page of the
Daily Mail
.

If you find yourself questioning the dangers of early digital activity
and insist on hard evidence backed by science, then you'll have to wait for another ten or twenty years, when comprehensive studies—the kind that track an individual's development over time—are completed.

Do parents really want to wait that long to find out?

Total abstinence from cyberspace is not the answer either. Years from now, it will be common cyberexperiences that this generation will bond over. Their fondest childhood memories could be made in a virtual playroom, completing a certain Mario game or their hours of exploring Club Penguin. But what other things did they experience in cyberspace? What other memories were made there, perhaps not-so-cheerful ones?

Social media scholar danah boyd (she uses all lowercase letters) has made an argument for not overprotecting children on the Internet, saying that they benefit from exposure the way they benefit from learning to roller-skate on the sidewalk despite the bruises and skinned knees. This thinking aligns with the child-rearing philosophy that teaching “resilience” of any kind is useful. I'll address the subject of resilience later in this chapter, but for now I'll say that bumps and bruises heal, but psychological and emotional wounds of childhood are more complicated and heal less easily. Do we know enough about cyberspace to declare it a safe place for exploring kids?

So what's the solution?

This is what caring parents often ask me while looking a bit afraid to hear my response. I appreciate how difficult this subject is for today's parents, who weren't raised with mobile phones and tablets and Wii remotes in their hands at the age of four or five. They can only make assumptions based on common sense, assisted occasionally by media reports or suggestions made by a pediatrician, schoolteacher, or therapist. But when it comes to technology, the experts are often frantically playing catch-up themselves. Believe me, they don't know the answers either.

Behavioral scientists aren't supposed to make assumptions. We rely on studies. So let's start there.

Human psychology is the study of human behavior. That means psychologists look at how people behave and what motivates them—and
how people spend their time. So as we begin a discussion of four- to twelve-year-olds, it's important to first see how they are spending time in the cyber environment and what they are actually doing there.

Two recent studies, one of U.S. kids and another of European, tell us a lot about this. Between 2011 and 2014, a group called
EU Kids Online conducted comprehensive studies, looking at children in twenty-two European countries and across many cultures. A strong majority of children used the Internet to visit social-networking sites like Facebook and to watch video clips on sites like YouTube. About half used the Internet for instant messaging and to do schoolwork. About one-third used it for Internet gaming, slightly less to download movies or music, and less again to read the news.

A similarly comprehensive study was done in the
United States in 2014 by four academic researchers from the fields of education and psychology. A national sample of 442 children between the ages of eight and twelve, or what is called “middle childhood,” were asked how they spent their time online. Younger children (eight to ten years) spent an average of forty-six minutes per day on a computer, compared with older ones (eleven to twelve years), who spent one hour and forty-six minutes per day on a computer.

When asked what kinds of sites they visited, YouTube dominated significantly, followed by Facebook, and game and virtual-world play sites—Disney, Club Penguin, Webkinz, Nick, Pogo, Poptropica, PBS Kids—all designed for this age group—and Google. Children with mobile phones (14 percent of eight- to twelve-year-olds in the study) played a lot of
Angry Birds
, a game that started as a phone app and is still primarily accessed that way.

Angry Birds
, Club Penguin…that sounds fine, doesn't it?

But wait a second. What about Facebook? Don't you have to be thirteen years old to activate an account? Yes, but guess what? One quarter of the children in the U.S. study reported using Facebook even though it is a social network meant for teenagers and adults. These are the hidden users of social networks, the ones who aren't supposed to be there—but are. I think of them as “the Invisibles.” It wasn't just eleven- to twelve-year-olds who were going there: 34 percent of the Facebook users in the study were eight- to ten-year-olds. In the EU study, one-quarter
of the nine- to ten-year-olds and one-half of the eleven- to twelve-year-olds were using the site as well:
Four out of ten gave a false age.

Twenty million minors use Facebook, according to
Consumer Reports;
7.5 million of these are under thirteen. (But this 2011 study is already out-of-date. I wonder what the figures are now.) These underage users access the site by creating a fake profile, often with the awareness and approval of their parents. The technology editor of the
Consumer Reports
survey was troubled by the fact that “a
majority of parents of kids 10 and under seemed largely unconcerned by their children's use of the site.” Instagram has similar issues. The vast majority of the site's reported 400 million users are a young demographic, between eighteen and twenty-nine years old, but studies report that it is the most-used photography site for twelve- to seventeen-year-olds.

Identity and age verification online are complex issues. One of the popular jokes about this comes from a
New Yorker
cartoon that ran in 1993. The cartoon shows a dog sitting in front of a computer, and underneath the drawing, it says: “On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog.” It would appear that nobody knows if you're a puppy either.