The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (25 page)

BATHTUBS AND TELETUBBIES

If you want to know why early TV watching might be so damaging to growing brains, consider Archimedes. Legend has it that the Greek polymath, born in 287
BCE
, discovered the laws of displacement while sitting in the bath. He had been trying to solve a problem handed to him by the reigning tyrant of the time, Hiero, who was concerned that someone was trying to pull a fast one by sneaking some silver into a gold crown he had ordered. Hiero asked the local mathematician and engineer, Archimedes, whether he was being cheated. The answer, Archimedes discovered—after letting his mind wander while he soaked in the bath—was related to the volume of water that overflowed when he sank down in the tub. If his body weight matched the weight of the water he had displaced, he could find out if the gold crown was mixed with dross by dunking it in water. As silver weighs less than gold, a crown made with silver would have to be bulkier and would therefore displace more water than a solid gold crown. “Eureka!” Archimedes supposedly shouted as he ran naked and dripping into the street.
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This story may be bunk, the first-ever urban legend. But I mention it here because the link between kids’ psychological development and screen time may be as simple as displacement. If
Teletubbies
is on the tube for three hours every afternoon,
face-to-face interaction takes a three-hour hit. This is serious, because social interaction is a requirement of early language development. As my brother Steve notes in
The Language Instinct
, there has never been a feral child—a child raised without human interaction—who has learned to speak. Even if a wild child living alone in the forest did produce language independently, who would she talk to? The motivation to connect with another human being is the prime driver of language learning. “Though speech input is necessary for speech development, a mere soundtrack is not sufficient. Deaf parents of hearing children were once advised to have the children watch a lot of television. In no case did the children learn English.”
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In fact, the reverse is true. The more television sounds a baby hears, the less language she hears from a parent, the fewer words she subsequently uses, and the less likely that child is to take “conversational turns,” according to a clever study by Dimitri Christakis and his colleagues. The team discovered this tradeoff by attaching digital recorders to preschoolers. Crunching the content of their digital soundscapes, the researchers discovered that television noise displaced social interaction much the way Archimedes’ heft displaced the bathwater. It didn’t matter whether the child was left alone in front of a screen or whether adults were there in the room, distracted by the show. For every hour of media entertainment, five hundred to a thousand fewer adult words were directed to the child. And for every hour of screen time, the child said less, too.
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Perhaps that’s why several other studies have found a link between early television watching and lower scores on tests of language and cognitive development as the child gets older. When the TV is on, there isn’t that much time for talking, for social interaction, or for much creative play.
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Research led by UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield revealed that after watching toy-based cartoons, kids were much more likely to use the branded action figures to ape what they saw on the show
and less likely to make up their own scenarios.
³⁵
And while imitation is part of learning—as anyone who has ever watched a cooking show knows—for very young children, new language skills are absorbed only if the screen time is combined with face-to-face activities. Vulnerable preschoolers from Mississippi to Tanzania have had their language skills boosted by watching
Sesame Street–
style educational TV, as long as their viewing is supplemented by reading aloud and other hands-on literacy activities.
³⁶

Studies have shown that watching “educational” programming either has no impact on toddlers’ language skills or it has a negative effect, a phenomenon researchers call the “video deficit.” Still, not all media are created equal, nor are all kids. Some children need more engaged parenting and stimulation than others, and the amount and kind of screen media they’re watching can be a proxy for the type of parenting they actually get. If we follow the data trail, the rule of thumb seems to be that the younger the child, the less he or she gets out of screen time; currently the language heard in baby TV and DVDs is less complex than what toddlers would hear from their parents, the pacing is out of sync with their developing brains, and there is a surprising lack of social interaction written into most scripts directed at the under-three set.
³⁷
Without real practice with real people, that’s not real language learning. That’s entertainment.

THE ANTI-TV EVANGELISTS

So much for baby-oriented DVDs turning small fry into little Einsteins. The branding of many of these digital products suggests that they prompt baby smarts. Nothing could be further from the truth. and facing accusations of false advertising, a number of companies have been forced by the courts to offer refunds and to strike the word
educational
from their packaging and websites.
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In the meantime, apps and global 24/7 kiddy cable channels have emerged to expand that niche. There are now millions of adherents to the notion that adults must throw every technological trick in the book
at young children in order to stimulate their developing brains—and relatively few detractors.

And yet. Though adults love to watch TV and play video games, conflating entertainment with learning is not a mistake most adults make for themselves. That mental sleight of hand happens mostly with their kids. In one British survey of 345 families, many parents taught their preschoolers to surf the web and use the television remote so that the small fry could become “independent technology users” (the remote was described by one parent as “mum and dad’s best friend”), while an American report found that many parents of babies and toddlers “can’t imagine how they’d get through the day” without TV.
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Among people who have choices, the rationale goes something like this: Technology prowess is necessary to succeed at school and work. One day my baby will go to school and work. Better give her a head start now—besides, if she’s occupied, I can watch my own shows in peace.

Dimitri Christakis doesn’t buy it. A vocal anti-TV evangelist, physician, and child development researcher (he’s also the brother of scientist Nicholas Christakis), he ascribes to the displacement theory: that screens suck time away from children’s engagement with people at a time when their developing brains most need social contact. That’s one reason why there’s such a tight relationship between screen time and lackluster language skills, he thinks. But the other reason has to do with what children watch and how old they are when they watch it. If there’s a mismatch between the maturity of a child’s brain and the fast-paced media she watches, real life will strike her as a bore. Reality’s slow scene-changes, Christakis says, will be “underwhelming in comparison.”
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It’s all about timing. In a study of how much television 2,600 American babies watched (which controlled for other culprits that might cause inattention), Christakis and his research team found that for each additional hour of TV toddlers watched before age three, there was a 9 percent increased risk of attention problems at age seven—a finding that suggests (but doesn’t prove) that a lot of early TV watching engenders problems with self-control later.
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“She thinks it’s a touchscreen.”
(Image and Figure Credits
6.1
)

But one study of preschoolers does show a causal link, at least in terms of television’s immediate effects. In 2011, two researchers from the University of Virginia randomly assigned four-year-olds to one of three activities: a fast-paced TV show for preschoolers (
SpongeBob SquarePants
, with frenetic pacing and a scene change approximately every eleven seconds); a slower, educational program (
Caillou
, with scene changes on average every thirty-four seconds); or a control group (they drew pictures for the duration of the shows). Afterwards, the kids were given memory games, spatial and fine motor puzzles, and delayed gratification tests (they were offered a choice between two marshmallows that they could eat right away or ten marshmallows if they waited). The results? Though the kids in all three groups were equally attentive before the experiment began, those who had just watched
SpongeBob
fared significantly worse on the tests of planning and self-control than those in the drawing group, and somewhat worse than those in the educational TV group.
⁴²

These are immediate, not long-term effects. Still, it’s discouraging if you’re a parent whose child is restless, demanding, tired, hungry, and whiny—and you feel the same way. That’s when a half-hour of TV may seem like a panacea. Dr. Christakis, who works as a pediatrician as well as a researcher, finds TV viewing less objectionable as a stopgap than as a habit. “If parents need a break for twenty minutes I tell them it’s fine,” he says. “I also suggest alternative ways of getting a break. But most parents think screen time is good for the child. They need to think again because there’s no evidence of that.”

DOES TECHNOLOGY AFFECT KIDS’ HAPPINESS?

We now know that toddlers and preschoolers exposed to a heavy diet of television, videos, and computer games have exaggerated odds of growing up to be fat, fidgety underachievers who are bullied by their classmates. The thirty-odd international studies that suggest as much should be enough to persuade parents to hide the remote. But if that isn’t sufficient, over the past decade several studies have suggested that screen time erodes a child’s happiness. Well, it’s either that, or unhappy children are especially drawn to screens.

Heavy media use in young children is linked to “appearing more sad or unhappy than their second-grade classmates,” as Linda Pagani puts it. Those who spend the lion’s share of their afterschool hours watching TV, playing computer games, or on social networks “consistently reported being less happy and competent than their peers,” according to a different study, this one of 1,266 middle-school kids in British Columbia. This was especially the case for the boys. Meanwhile, those kids who felt closely connected to parents, friends, and teachers and who spent time with them face-to-face felt most competent and happy.
⁴³

The late Clifford Nass discovered the same phenomenon when his Stanford University research team surveyed 3,461 Canadian and American girls between the ages of eight and twelve. Nass
wanted to get a clear picture of the time preteen girls spent on media multitasking—watching videos, playing computer games, emailing, posting Facebook updates, texting, instant messaging, cellphone and video chatting—compared to how much time they spent interacting with people in person. Nass is the researcher who published a well-known study showing that adult multitaskers—people who work while dealing with several streams of electronic information at once—don’t solve problems or remember facts very well. “They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” Nass said of media multitaskers. His colleague and co-author Eyal Ophir added, “We kept looking for what they’re better at and we didn’t find it.”
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Segue now to the 3,400 girls. Their media multitasking was associated with another set of disadvantages, this time in the social sphere. Girls between eight and twelve who are media multitaskers felt less happy and socially included than other girls, according to Nass’s study. Even media meant to foster interaction, such as online social networks, evoked this paradox. Heavy users were more likely to feel abnormal.

The irony is that parents who spend their hard-earned cash on gadgets so their children will have immediate access to communication networks may also be facilitating their girls’ feelings of social exclusion. Girls with televisions, computers, and cellphones in their rooms, for example, sleep less, have more undesirable friends (according to their parents), and are the least likely to get together with their real buddies face-to-face. Yet, according to this study too, it is exactly these face-to-face interactions that are most tightly linked to feeling happy and socially at ease. If North American girls spend an average of almost seven hours a day using various media and their face-to-face social interactions average about two hours a day—less than half that time—then many girls are spending most of their spare time on activities that make them feel excluded and unhappy.
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YouTube, Tumblr, and Facebook make girls feel abnormal and excluded? Yup, and the reasons are not that hard to fathom. Online
networks are social la-la lands. They’re where people post idealized digital personae they’ve crafted for public consumption. Smiling broadly, with several friends’ arms draped around their shoulders, group shots and status updates are uploaded to express—what, exactly? That the social lives of teenage girls are rife with conflict, social exclusion, and shifting allegiances? Yes, actually. The person who isn’t in the Facebook photo now knows that not only was she excluded from the get-together, everyone in her circle knows it too.