Illustration by Jon Krause
Go on. Interrupt the computer game. Your kid will look at you like he’s an air-traffic controller trying to land a jet that’s on fire, and you’re a telemarketer who’s jamming his frequency.
What’s so addictive about electronic media? Movement. Lit-up graphics. Novelty. Coolness. Adrenaline. Speed. Instant feedback and infinite chances to win a game, fill a need, satisfy a craving.
Except the craving keeps coming back. The more hooked a kid gets, the more his moods seesaw. Soon he’s restless, terrified of being cut off, bored by the slowpoke “real” world, and impatient with the plodding pace of his teachers and parents.
The problem’s real: Microsoft just started an Internet addiction recovery program, aimed at families, on five woodsy acres near its Washington state campus. Video-game addiction has been proposed for inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. There are Computer Addiction Services at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts and a Center for Screen-Time Awareness in D.C. Kids are making news by sending 20,000 texts a month; generational exasperation now focuses not on lewd dancing or bared midriffs, but on the use of the thumbs.
Guess it beats drugs, parents say resignedly, throwing in the towel and reaching for their BlackBerrys.
Remember when time slowed down in summer? Kids explored the tangled banks of the nearest creek, sold lemonade at a neat profit, played ball till dark, read all of Nancy Drew…
Now, they’re not allowed outside unless their parents are home—and when they do go outside, they take their technology with them.
Casey Kiernan is 12, quick-witted and delightful, the daughter of two lawyers. This is her typical day when school’s not in session:
“I wake up around 10 or 11 and check my email first thing. I take my phone downstairs with me and text some friends during breakfast. Just like, ‘Hi, what’s up?’ Usually if I say hi or something, they say hi back. I’ll say, ‘How’s it going?’ or ‘What are you doing today?’ and they usually respond with ‘Nothing.’ After I’m done eating breakfast, I call my mom or dad to check in on my cellphone. Then I go back upstairs and check Facebook. There’s usually posts on my wall or quizzes, like ‘Which 2009 song are you?’ I do the chat thing with my friends for a few hours.”
After lunch: more computer, more texting. Before dinner: Mac slideshows. During dinner, she texts her friends.
“Then I can go outside, because my parents are home,” she says. “I might swing at the playground with neighborhood friends and text with some of my other friends while I’m there. Afterward, I watch TV with my parents, then go upstairs and shut my door and go on my computer for a really long time, till, like, 11, and once I start to get tired from looking at the screen, I tell my friends goodnight, and I go to bed and then wake up the next morning and do the same thing all over again.”
Alex (surname withheld, as he doesn’t want to be known as a video-game addict) is 10, polite and fun, and looks like he could model Polo. He loves computer games so passionately—and resists calls to dinner or chores so fiercely—that his parents recently hauled him off to a shrink. Diagnosis: normal. All too.
“I’ll say, ‘Turn it off,’” his dad says. “He’ll say, ‘OK—in a minute.’ And if you don’t pursue it, it never goes off.”
“It feels like I have to finish it,” Alex explains, one eye on Mario Super Sluggers. “I start to get angry.”
“And I’ll say, ‘But Alex, I told you 10 minutes ago, and you said OK,’ and what do you say then? ‘Two more minutes!’ Or ‘It hasn’t been 10 minutes. Only five.’ Or you’ll hurry up and start another game and say you have to finish it.” Reaching over, the dad flips off the TV screen for a real-life demo. The politeness shatters.
“Daaaadddeeeeeeeeee! Turn it back on, I’m not finished!”
“And I’ll say,” the father continues calmly, “‘It’s not that important, Alex, just do it another time.’ And you’ll say it’s the most important thing in the world.”
“Christopher probably plays his DS for three hours.”
“But don’t you see? We want you to be physically strong—not drenched in sweat because you’re jumping up and down with a remote in your hand!”
“Well, sometimes this helps you!” Alex says, swinging the Wii remote in a perfect arc.
“But we want you to be out doing stuff.”
“I play tennis…”
“And we want you to be social.”
“Karen asked if I could help with the little kids for an hour,” he says triumphantly, as though it’s a clincher. He looks longingly at the dark screen. “Can I go back on?”
His father hesitates, then nods.
Elated, Alex grabs the remote and shows off his favorite game, Mario Super Sluggers. “No, I don’t like baseball,” he says when I ask. “But this is a fun game. My favorite character is Blooper. He’s a squid.”
Alex starts shaking the remote like it’s a maraca. “If you want to go fast, you do this. I just used that item and made them all dizzy, did you see? Oh, now somebody electrocuted me. Ow! OW! Yea, now I’m big again so I can run over people.” He nudges a storage box with his toe: “About three of these boxes are full of computer games, but I go online when I can. My mom’s usually on the computer all day, and my sister has a laptop, but she uses it for Facebook. My brother usually watches TV.”
Alex says his parents limit his screen time “so my brain doesn’t get all mushy. But I
feel fine!”
“So,” I ask out of curiosity, “are you as focused on our conversation right now as you are on that screen?”
“Fifty-fifty,” he replies, without even turning his head.
Alex has a female friend in Chicago, 10-year-old Saunders, who goes to a Waldorf school. It has a no-media policy, “because from 0 to 10, that’s when a child is developing imagination,” explains David Ervin, Saunders’ dad. “If you start putting a child in front of screens with the expectation that they are going to be entertained, they are just being fed stuff.”
Saunders’ mother, Jessica Donnelly, worked for years as a reading specialist, and she saw “an overwhelming decrease in imaginative engagement, attention span, interest, reading ability, and critical thinking. It’s ‘Entertain me.’”
Now Donnelly does development work in Africa, where she finds “the poorest of the poor have a lot more self-awareness and enjoy life in a way Western children don’t. They pick up a pan and make an all-day game out of it, and they love it. They don’t need to be corralled and cajoled.”
Saunders often travels with her mom, whose agency is based in the U.K.
“Everywhere she is, she just is,” Donnelly says. “She doesn’t need an iPod or a computer. She’s interested in the world around her and pays attention to it. She’s not locked to a screen.”
Jake Gruber’s 15, a good-natured, intelligent kid from tiny Valmeyer, Ill. He looks more like a forest ranger than a geek, but his bedroom’s constant twilight, his keyboard lit with a fluorescent tube he stripped from a flatbed scanner. He pulled off his computer tower’s door, illuminated the interior with blue lights, and put the fans on a dimmer switch.
“How’d you learn how to do all this?” I ask.
“Internet.”
He gives me a quick guide to digital communications: “IMing is just random thoughts. Texting is like spur-of-the-moment stuff, convenient and efficient—as long as the person replies right away. My iPod Touch is for music. I jailbroke mine—modified the firmware to use third-party apps. Like here’s a dead-pixel checker.”
On the computer, he shows me Project Torque, a racing game, letting his “car” drift around curves on a mountain road. (His mom keeps nervously reminding him he can’t drive like this when he gets his license.) Jake says what’s addictive for him is building skill, getting good at the game. Game violence doesn’t faze him: “I know all that crap’s fake. Woo, I just rolled a car and blew up a house. Like that’ll ever happen.” Adults get addicted to their “CrackBerrys,” he informs me, because “they’re too worried about stuff. They just can’t wait.”
Yet adults’ habits seem needlessly slow. “My dad, he experiments with stuff. If he’s trying to fix a car, it’s trial and error. I’d probably go straight online.” His typical Saturday? “Up at noon. Ish. Turn on the computer, power it on at least. Check email, help Dad outside, look on Newegg for the daily deal, get into games. Food. Then jump on a game, and that’s pretty much the rest of the night.”
When Pete Spanos founded Vetta Sports, a local network of recreational facilities, parents wanted their kids to learn specific skills at his clinics. Now, they just beg Spanos to get the child away from screens.
He worries about his own kids, too: His 8-year-old daughter asked him whether babies get assigned an email address when they’re born. She’s continually begging for stories about how her parents used to collect tadpoles in the creek; she says their childhoods seem “more real” than hers.
After watching their 13-year-old daughter text, Spanos and his wife started monitoring their own habits. “I would just look down at that little BlackBerry from time to time,” he says sheepishly. They also made firm rules: “In the car, all technology’s off. That forces conversation.” So does taking the cell away for a time; once the meltdown ends, he says, conversation improves dramatically.
It’s not that kids don’t want to talk anymore, or draw or play kickball or go on hikes. It’s just that screens are so easy. Conversing means choosing the right inflection, reading nonverbal cues, pacing yourself so the other person can speak, and listening patiently. If you text, you can be surfing or texting somebody else while you wait.
Of course, every new life-changing technology gets greeted with suspicion; Plato fought the use of writing, worried that it would weaken our memories and rhetorical skills. (It did.) But what’s unique about digital screens is their addictive power.
Experts make long lists of warning signs, but Casey offers her own criteria: “Maybe when you are a little too on top of everything,” she suggests, “or you are doing everything for no reason, like you are on chat, but no one’s on and you could be doing something else like going outside or [she sighs] helping your mom. Probably I’d take their computer away for a while or their phone or ground them.”
Easier said than done. Humans are hardwired to respond to feedback, and kids are hungry for it. Today’s technology provides feedback instantly, and it breaks games and messages down into tiny pieces you can absorb so fast, you keep wanting just one more.
What’s interesting is how powerfully screen time affects kids’ sense of well-being. Alex says games give him energy; on school days, he’s almost impossible to pry out of bed. Casey says, “After kickball I feel tired, like I don’t want to talk to anyone, but when I’m done texting, I still want to text more.” Why? “It’s talking to friends, finding out what’s going on with them, what the rumors are,” she explains. “It changes a lot every day.”
The same impulse—to be sure you’re “in the loop”—used to keep kids hanging on the phone or clustered at a soda fountain. But never before have updates been possible 24/7, giving even the slightest development (“gotta brush my teeth”) a pulse of urgency. Immediate responses are deeply gratifying; you matter. But by the same logic, a delayed or forgotten response must mean you’re being ignored, rejected, excluded.
And kids think face-to-face conversation is stressful?
Randall Flanery is a psychologist who teaches at Saint Louis University—and has 10 kids. (“They put their resources together and bought a PlayStation years ago,” he sighs. “I wish I’d said no.”) During therapy sessions, he asks teenage patients to turn off their cellphones. “They see this as an unfair restriction,” he says dryly. “They might miss a text.
“Impatience is magnified,” Flanery observes. “And you have the appearance of connection without real human interaction.”
I ask Jake if he sees any downside to all the new technology, and he nods. “Viruses.” Later, though, he mentions a few social-skill concerns: “You see people dumping their girlfriends online ’cause it’s easier on them. If you really want to do that, do it in person.” He shakes his head. “If social networking and crap like that just keep growing, I think people will just stay at home, ’cause they have all the connections they need.”
While grown-ups worry about kids’ social skills, kids complain of neckaches, headaches, and backaches. Some stare at games so intently, they don’t blink, and their eyes dry out. Then come the repetitive stress injuries, from keying and rapid wrist movements. “Sleep deprivation is huge,” says Dr. Kimberly Sirl, a clinical psychologist at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “Interacting with an electronic screen keeps your brain awake—and kids are receiving texts in the middle of the night!”
Psychological effects vary with a kid’s temperament. If he’s pretty steady emotionally, he’ll fare much better than a kid who’s restless, needy, or self-medicating ADD with hypnotic, rapid-fire electronic stimuli. “Some of the kids almost go into a little trance,” Sirl says.
Psychologist Sherry Turkle, who directs the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes texting is shifting the very way teenagers develop. “Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she told The New York Times last May. Separating is tough when Mom’s always a speed-dial away, and if you’re constantly being texted, buzzed, and beeped at, it’s hard to get that sense of ease and freedom we used to call “space.”
“It’s hard to be happy if you can’t stand to be with yourself,” Flanery notes. “And this stuff gives you the illusion that you are never alone.” Patience doesn’t get learned, either; a project that has to develop over time, as you work on it in stages, seems so dragged-out, it’s hardly worth the effort.
Kids have always pronounced school “boring,” but these days there’s a real scorn: Just a teacher, lecturing? Are you kidding? Even when schools try for bells and whistles, they’re light-years behind the latest game or app. “I kind of look forward to getting home from school and getting on the computer,” Jake admits. “Honestly, I think I learn more on the Internet. You ask a question, and the answer’s there.”
Books are boring, too: Casey reads for about 20 minutes max, then reaches for her phone and texts for 20 minutes. “With a book, you are kind of on your own,” she explains. “You’re not really talking to anyone or doing anything.”
When she does text, her phone completes words for her—the predictive technology that drives old-fashioned English teachers crazy, because it rewards speed and impulsiveness and not those old résumé standbys, accuracy and attention to detail. “You hit send and think, ‘Ooh, I shouldn’t have said that,’” Sirl says, “and it’s hard to pull back. Rumors in text are totally different than whispers at a sleepover. They have larger consequences.”
The irony? Digital communication has become so informal that it requires far more caution, patience, and self-discipline to avoid dangerous slips. And caution, patience, and self-discipline are exactly what digital communication tends to erode.
“The biggest impact, I think, is on delay of gratification—the ability to wait, plan, consider options and consequences,” Flanery says. “And that’s a very powerful predictor of success later on.”
Ah, but the requirements for success are changing. Kids are functioning at the speed of light. Their brains are agile, their attitude resourceful; anything they need to know is out there somewhere.
“But they can’t think with any depth,” complains Spanos. “Neuroscience needs to catch up to what parents see every day. It’s definitely affecting kids’ brains.”
And their moods, too, although kids often don’t even realize that hours of screen time leave them cranky. “The initial effect is a little boost in your mood,” Flanery explains, “and then it goes down, and you need a little more Internet, and over time, it drifts lower and lower. Kids aren’t aware of it, but the research has shown that the more they’re on all these screens, the lower their mood is.”
Get them away from the screens, Donnelly urges, and their mood will improve.
“You mean get them involved in the real world?” I ask, and she hesitates.
“I’m afraid that in America, the technological world is now the real,” she says slowly. “Because it’s what defines your present reality.”
SLM staff writer Jeannette Cooperman loves the ease and magic of technology and fears malfunction the way the ancients feared plagues. But she is fairly certain that when E.M. Forster said, “Only connect,” he didn’t mean 24/7.
For a parents’ guide to monitoring screen time and to see whether you might be a computer addict, click here.
