Forty years ago, screen time wasn’t hard to define. Most families had one television with three channels, and if you were lucky enough to own an Atari, you couldn’t play it when the news was on.
In a world of mobile devices, immersive digital spaces, and interactive social media, Michigan Medicine’s Jenny Radesky, M.D., says it’s time to move the conversation beyond screen time.
“The nature of technology has changed. Now, you have devices that move from room to room, devices that themselves are pinging for kids’ attention, devices that are psychologically interacting with you based on your own mental shortcuts about what you’re attracted to and what makes you upset and what you’re likely to click on and pay attention to,” says Radesky, who is the David G. Dickinson Collegiate Professor of Pediatrics. “That’s a reason why the way we talk about it and parent around it hasn’t fully caught up.”
Radesky and her colleagues at Michigan Medicine and across the university study how technology use affects young children, teens, and their relationships with their parents and caregivers. As the digital world evolves faster and faster, caregivers feel faced with endless decisions to make and often a pile of judgment to go with them. Radesky advocates for a nuanced approach that reframes how Americans think about families’ choices, focuses on reforming underlying systems, and reimagines the way we talk about kids and technology —and what we expect the technology industry to do for kids.
Who should be responsible for kids’ media use?
Guilt is the elephant in the room when it comes to talking about families and tech, Radesky says. When caregivers hear about research linking tech use to negative outcomes for kids or see new media guidelines, they tend to put the burden of change on themselves.
But the goal of her research isn’t finding someone to blame: It’s understanding how technology affects children’s and parents’ minds and behaviors, giving everyone — not just parents — more tools to make decisions.
Radesky and Alison Miller, Ph.D., professor of health behavior and health education at the U-M School of Public Health, recently worked together on a National Institutes of Health–funded study that mapped young children’s media use and emotional regulation over six months. Any parent will tell you the two are interconnected, Miller says, but the study allowed researchers a unique opportunity to peel apart cause and effect.
Their results found that kids whose parents reported giving them mobile devices to soothe them more often had worse emotional regulation skills at later ages — suggesting the technology was replacing opportunities for kids to learn those critical skills. At the same time, kids with more emotional reactivity were more likely to be given mobile devices to calm down, which suggests a self-reinforcing cycle.
Radesky wants caregivers to feel empowered, not blamed, by results like these. As a pediatrician, she can encourage parents to use their knowledge of their child’s temperament to feel competent choosing when and where to use technology.
However, she and Miller emphasize that parental responsibility is far from the only factor influencing how kids use technology.
Miller also studies parent stress and the ways social determinants of health — such as poverty, racism, unemployment, and community violence — overlay individual family decisions.
“Big social, contextual factors, like poverty, really place a huge burden on parents who are trying to do their best,” Miller says. “And so what I don’t want to do is come along and say, ‘You should never give your child media.’”
Some families have less power to make choices about technology or have more pressing problems that shape their choices, Miller says.
“Caregivers living in historically disadvantaged or marginalized communities are often working inconsistent, late, unpredictable hours that are not optimal for child development. There is really poor child care availability. Media is one of the best options that a lot of families have,” she says. “Depending on what they’re doing online, I would argue it’s better to have your child watch media for eight hours than be outside in a dangerous neighborhood and face gun violence.”
The pandemic exacerbated such stressors for many families, while upending kids’ routines, limiting their social contact with peers, and intensifying their relationships with media. Yet overall, our culture tends to send the message that parents are solely responsible for kids’ media use, no matter what other situations they face, Radesky says.
“In the U.S. and other Western societies, we often have this individualistic culture that assumes that behaviors are primarily shaped by individual-level decision making, or autonomy, or responsibility,” Radesky says. “We don’t pay as much attention to the community-level and structural forces that line up whether we even have the opportunity to make a decision, or whether it’s easy to make that decision, or whether we’re even given a framework and a language to think in a logical way, rather than an emotional way, about making a decision.”
She believes a shift in culture is possible. For example, Americans now tend to think of smoking cigarettes as a structural issue, recognizing the addictive chemicals in tobacco and the tobacco industry’s role in making them even more addictive.
The first step to reframing the conversation around technology use is for caregivers and the people who give them advice to resist the individualistic view, Radesky says.
As co-medical director of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, Radesky is helping to develop a messaging framework to help pediatricians have productive and reflective conversations with parents and other caregivers about media use.
The framework that the Center of Excellence is currently using to train pediatric and mental health clinicians acknowledges how addressing media use is intertwined with addressing factors like child care access, parent mental health, and school resources.
The AAP’s 2020 Digital Advertising to Children policy statement seeks to encourage a similar change in how parents view their role in managing children’s digital literacy. Radesky, who is chair of the AAP Council on Communications and Media that writes those guidelines, says the group intentionally spread out the responsibility.
“We really shifted to saying, ‘Yes, there are some things we want parents to do. But the responsibility here is primarily in policymakers and tech companies, and industry changing the system so it works better,” she says.
6 tips for helping kids manage digital media
Parents, grandparents, teachers, pediatricians — any adult who cares for kids — can help guide their technology use. Here’s some expert advice:
- Have open, non-judgmental conversations about technology.
- Use language that acknowledges their perspective: Rather than, “You binge-watched that show,” try “You watched longer than you planned to.”
- Encourage them to recognize the ways technology is designed to suck them in.
- Recognize the positives of technology and social media, especially for kids who may not have safe spaces in the non-digital world to express themselves.
- Let kids know you are available to talk to them about negative experiences online, no matter how embarrassing or frustrating.
- When possible, co-view or preview media. Ask questions and check in when kids are using something new.
For full article viewing, please visit: www.michiganmedicine.org/medicine-michigan/weve-been-asking-wrong-questions-about-kids-and-screen-time
"Guilt is the elephant in the room when it comes to talking about families and tech."
“Yes, there are some things we want parents to do. But the responsibility here is primarily in policymakers and tech companies, and industry changing the system so it works better,”
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