LIMITING TECHNOLOGY USE AMONGST CHILDREN
The current corona virus crisis has caused a significant spike in technology use amongst our children with some research estimating screen use more than doubling. Clearly this is something every parent should be concerned about, however what are the main areas that children are losing out in?
Decrease in Social Skills
Your child’s inter-personal skills are on the decline as they have less time for face-to-face interaction due to their rapid increase in the use of technology, according to a UCLA psychology study.
It is no exaggeration to say that interpersonal skills are the foundation for success in life. People with strong interpersonal skills tend to be able to work well with other people, including in teams or groups, formally and informally. They communicate effectively with others, whether family, friends, colleagues, customers or clients. They also have better relationships at home, school and later in life at work. So seeing them descrease ni our aouth is an alarming development.
UCLA scientists researched sixth-graders who spent five days at a technology free summer camp did substantially better at reading human emotions than sixth-graders from the same school who continued to spend hours each day looking at their electronic devices.
“You can’t learn nonverbal emotional cues from a screen in the way you can learn it from face-to-face communication,” said lead author Yalda Uhls, a senior researcher with the UCLA’s Children’s Digital Media Center, Los Angeles. “If you’re not practicing face-to-face communication, you are losing important social skills.”
Drop in Empathy
Empathy has become an defining characteristic amongst our youth who develop it via the interplay of multiple internal skills, and importantly, by observing and modeling the behavior of adults and older children.
Without empathy, people tend to go about life without considering how other people feel or what they may be thinking. Without taking a moment to assess another, it is easy to make assumptions and jump to conclusions. This often leads to misunderstandings, bad feelings, conflict, poor morale, and even divorce. People do not feel heard or understood.
Social psychologist Sherry Turkle, in Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), argues that technology use among children is hindering the development of empathy in school-age children. Put simply, our children have a distinct and growing lack of empathy for ours.
Further, the crucial role modeling of empathy is interrupted when adults are using devices and/or children are using devices and are distracted from observing the adult interactions occurring around them, a phenomenon early childhood educator Erika Christakis dubs “technoference” (Christakis, 2018).
This is a true double whammy — the development of interpersonal skills like empathy in children can be delayed by not only the child’s use of technology, but also by adult use of technology in the presence of children.
Rise in Disorders
While most studies show technological devices decrease empathy in young people, a 2017 article in the journal showed an increase in mental disorders. Radesky (2018) details a rigorous study that suggests additional impacts may be showing up, including an increase in new ADHD symptoms in high-frequency digital media users. It is disturbing to think of the scale of the natural experiment being conducted on entire generations of children, with no clear indication of what pro- or anti-social outcomes may result.
Today, by at least some estimates, five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for a diagnosis of major depression and/or anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. Children and young people aged between 11 and 19 were found to spend more time on social media, and one in five in the same age group said they had been cyberbullied in the last year.
The reality for all parents is that social interaction is needed to develop skills in understanding the emotions of other people. Emoticons are a poor substitute for face-to-face communication. We’re social creatures. We need device-free time. And summer camp is the perfect place for that!
