Is ‘Digital Addiction’ a Real Threat to Kids?

I agree that both very high exposure and very low exposure to the internet can negatively affect the health of teenagers, “the relationship between media exposure and health in adolescents may turn out to be an inverted U Pattern”. In one extreme you have a child that's almost completely closed off from social interaction and events while in the other you have a child with an unhealthy obsession. I believe that in moderation technology is a useful tool for us. It has become such a big necessity in the way we communicate and receive information, however I do think it can cause obsessive tendencies.

Just a suggestion as founder of this app. You can track your child on his/her tablet or phone by checking the "Digitox" App for Android. It is basically similar to Screen time app and has more details. This way you can aware of your child's digital habit. Wanna try -> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=phosphorus.app.usage.screen.time&hl=en

Thanks for sharing a balanced perspective on screen time. I know the distraction of tech devices provides frustrating challenges in today’s classrooms. But hearing teachers leap to cause and effect conclusions about decreases in attention spans linked to tech makes me sigh. Educators should lead the way in modeling and communicating sound reasoning. In a world where anybody can say anything and be believed without accurate and sound evidence, teachers need to think and speak like scientists. That is who we are. Maybe tech is responsible for decreasing attention spans. Teachers can devise well-designed action research to validate their daily observations or they can analyze the validity of studies that have already been done. In the meantime, speculation based on observations that just might suffer a wee bit from confirmation bias becomes repeated fact blogged out on the internet. And, it has a vaguely familiar ring to it. In 1975, as a first year teacher, I heard my older colleagues decrying the increase of disruptive behavior, attributing it to a decline in parental control and too much tv. I know my solutions to classroom management would be outdated today and I do not pretend to have the answers to teaching effectively in a high tech world. But I do know that language shapes the future and talking about cause and effect relationships based on what we think we see can keep us from identifying real solutions.

Phones are given to children by their parents, they cost $500 and a broken screen costs more than $100. Parents expect me as a high school teacher to stop phone use in my class. This is so different than illegal stuff like cigarettes or cheap stuff like gum. If I take your kids phone and he tells you I broke the screen and the phone has a broken screen I am out $150. A pack of gum is $2. The cigarettes were $6. God help me if I have 8 phones in my desk and they get stolen from me.

I recently met with a group of middle school teachers who described the impact screens are having on their kids. One said that she now must change the subject of her class every 10 to 20 minutes because the kids can't sustain focus any longer than that. Another indicated that her kids are constantly playing on-line games and many report interacting with people trying to arrange face to face meetings with them. Some of these even use voice changing technology so they sound like kids. All of the teachers indicated that kids now have shorter attention spans and skill deficits with social interaction. I was a scary picture. Yet, we see parents handing their cell phones to two year olds in restaurants so the kids wont bother them. I always remind parents that Steve Jobs didn't allow his young kids to have iphones. He knew it was dangerous,

I found so many good points in this article and as someone who treats problematic tech use I especially appreciate 1) Dr. Radesky’s point that the term addiction places the "problem within the individual, rather than the digital environment that is shaping the individual’s behavior.” 2) Dr. Christakis’s comments about the difficulty for academicians in gathering reliable data. 3) Dr. Selkie’s points about the inevitability of technology use given the way our society works as well as it being normative for teens to want to interact with peers more than family. Technology simply provides the tools.

Everyone talks about the use of screens by children, but not how they interact with them - physically. I believe there will be a "screen scoliosis" in the future. Surely people can see how their children's posture changes when using a screen, especially a tablet or a phone? Children's bodies grow at such a fast rate and when they sit in a position for hours, won't their bodies start to align towards that positioning? We should be concerned about the use of screens and the effects of it on their minds AND bodies.

Is it uncivil to point out that the NYTimes studiously avoids mention of the long-term biological concerns re children's use of cell phones and other wireless devices? A strong bias has been noted by many biology researchers and research watchers in what the NYTimes writes and doesn't write regarding this subject. In 2011 the World Health Organization convened a blue-ribbon panel of scientists (IARC) to look at the carcinogenicity of wireless radiation (specifically RF, but previously also ELF, another component). They found evidence in the higher quality tissue studies and the epidemiological studies, and pending more animal research classified it as a "possible carcinogen." Now we have two major animal studies that have corroborated each other and the existing epidemiological and tissue evidence--the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) study and the Ramazzini Institute study. Both found clear evidence of carcinogenicity and genetic damage. The WHO is planning to reconvene IARC to see if RF should be upgraded to "probable" or even certain carcinogen. This is in addition to multiple studies showing oxidative stress, DNA breaks (epigenetic), neurological effects, and damage to sperm. Should this not even be a whisper in an article on children's cell phone safety? Reliable information is available from the director of the prevention research center at UC Berkeley School of Public Health on his personal blog saferemr.com

"Think of something addictively unhealthy in our everyday lives." "Uh, sugar?" "No, no, hardly anyone eats sugar." "Carbs." "Come on, get serious." "Red meat?" "That's so yesterday." "Wait, wait---heroin! Why didn't I say that first? Everybody I know does it!" "Bingo! There's our subhead!"

If someone invents a mystery device that can help do a huge proportion of the daily activities we all do, the mystery device will be widely used, and the fact that it replaces other activities will be diagnosed as pathology. But it isn't pathology, just a kind of evolution that will always happen.

My mother did a complete number on me concerning phones when I was a kid. It worked. When we got our first private phone line she told me that if I was not willing to go to the end of the street and shout at the top of my voice what I was about to say on the phone, don't. Why? Because she had been a telephone operator in the Marine Corps and told me that the government listened to all of our phone calls. She told me there was no such thing as a private phone line. I still don't trust them:)

The problem is not screen time per se, but, rather, how do you go about limiting it to “healthy” amounts? Children—in case you hadn’t noticed—are autonomius beings. Some children are obedient, and will out down the Xbox or the iPad when you tell them to. Others are not In my experience, the easiest way to gain compliance is just to ban screen time altogether. Not because I think any amount is bad, but, rather, because that the only practical way I can limit access to any degree.

Sure--obsessively imbibing digital garbage is analogous to eating food. "Experts" can rationalize anything.

“When your child sees something creepy, weird or persuasive, or won’t answer when you’ve called their name five million times, talk about it with them, demystify why it’s happening (and if you don’t know, try to look it up), and make them more digitally literate.” NO, FOOL! We don't need to make them more digitally literate." We need to make them more emotionally and inter-relationally literate. Yes, of course, technology has an indispensable place in our lives. That it's here to stay is a given. The young 'uns need look no further than Mom and Dad to get their cues and "got to school." Lesson learned? Face-to-face human contact, human touch, body language, facial expression, inflection, intonation DON'T REALLY EXIST IN THE WORLD OF TODAY'S TECH. That M&P are unable to put their devices down for more than a minute or two, is all the learning kids need to grow up without a sense of self (outside their crafted on-line communities) or personal commitment to a values-based philosophic underpinning outside of those taught by our revered tech wizard entrepreneurs. Sorry, but, having seen way too many infants being pushed in strollers with moms a million virtual miles away in the coccoons of self-absorption, the outcome is not even close. It's the bottom of the 9th, Kids, and the home team is losing. Badly.

This article focuses a lot on the emotional connectedness (addiction) that digital technology provides. I deal with a lot of kids through sports. More and more I notice how challenged many kids are with negotiating 3 dimensional space. Despite most graphics are 3 dimensional, our interaction with them is 2 dimensional. Add to this the absolute social norms that are created through social media (what is "good", what is "cool", what is "true") and I am left to believe that digital interactions with media and peers are to their detriment more than to their benefit.

I have never before had such a love/hate relationship as I do with digital technology. The love is for the world it provides us. All the planet’s museums, art galleries, libraries, atlases, histories, theaters, computations, markets, politics, and news, held in one hand. With a phone and texting device too. The hate is for the obsession, the isolation, and the rudeness it encourages.

As I enjoy my daily walk along the beautiful beach where I live, an uncomfortable amount of young Mexicans (mainly girls) sit entranced with their phones. I even see some texting as they wade in the gentle surf. Why even go to the beach?

Phew, not as bad as giving heroin to children. What a relief.

Then too, kids who are visual thinkers are often drawn to screens because they feel comfortable communicating and interacting within a video game. As parents, we can look at what their strengths are and what attracts them to the type of screen use they engage in--and remember that TV was going to rot our brains, and before that, comic books were going to rot them.

My DD was conservative where phones and iPads were concerned. But yet her sons cannot carry on a 1 minutes conversation with me without constantly glancing at the phone. Yesterday, DGS1 came over to help me with a few things. He was just home from his first year at university - an Ivy where he has now made the Dean's List both semesters. Clearly, they are not interfering with his schoolwork! But conversation? I finally just told him to put his phone on the hall chest and he could pick it up on the way out. Unless he was expecting a phone call from the White House asking his advice on Iran, I thought this was doable! He complied with a smile - he knows he's addicted to that danged thing. On campus, all the students walk to the next class with their eyes glued to the smart phone. It's a wonder they don't get run over by a campus bus! No talking with friends walking to the next glass - just the danged phone. I saw this as a NON-Ludditte - I love technology and what it can do for me. But I prefer talking to people than texting. I like interacting in person. For me, technology is a TOOL, not my drug-of-choice.

err... screens are not like food, because we do not actually need them to live. There is no lower limit of screen consumption at which you will die. Maybe modern society requires them in a certain way, but often only in the most basic way. I think computer literacy should be taught in schools. Just like financial literacy should be taught in schools. But there is no absolute human need for screens - any need that exists has been artificially created by humans. For kids younger than teens, screens are not good. We have all seen it. We know what it looks like. You'd have to be deliberately looking the other way (which many people do) to pretend it's not a problem. Parents are using what they know is a faulty logic: but everyone else is doing it... For teens, it's more complicated. But it'd probably be less complicated if their use of screens started in the teenage years, and not earlier, which it often does.

Can the Times please stop trying to assure upper-middle-class parents that being glued to devices is fine? This is at least the second article (the first, ROUNDLY disputed by teachers around the country, was Jennifer Senior's take on her son's relationship with Fortnite) in what seems a desperate attempt to deny that kids are escaping into their screens. We need to address whatever it is they're running from instead of trying to make ourselves feel better about it.

Technology is more like a car than food. Children need to learn to navigate their physical world before certain forms of transportation become appropriate. So too with digital technology. The child needs to learn how to operate the digital space as much as the technology. The slowly expanding mental map of the digital world is analogous to finding your way home from school safely. Think of it this way: Once you've mastered walking, most people move on to a bike. Once the bike is too limiting, a car is the next goal. Even when the child is legally and technically capable of driving a car, the smart parent isn't going to put them in a BMW. You get a hooptie that's relatively safe to drive and cheap to insure. The kids are probably going to destroy it anyway. Hopefully not themselves in the process. Technology works the same way. Too many parents buy the slickest newest technology out there not realizing there's too much horsepower under the hood. A really smart smart-phone is like putting a 10 year old in a Lamborghini. You need to learn how to walk before you can run. I'd probably start with an old beater. Probably a rebuilt laptop too heavy to bring anywhere and too limited to do anything interesting. Install a few basic games and some dumbed down internet capabilities. Maybe no internet at all. When the kid grows out of it, you ditch the trike and move on to a bike. Possible on the same hardware.

A a teacher, I see this addiction at it's worst in the classroom. Kids today cannot be bothered to participate in class activities due to their affinity for their handheld devices. It's absurd. Asking kids 17 times, during a 48 minute class, to put away, get off, or put down your phone is exhausting. These days, Snapchat and Instagram are more important than preparing for their futures. Sad reality of the times...

My grade school friends whose parents wouldn’t let them read comic books or adult books generally didn’t do well in school and many were forced to “retire”years ago. So much for strict mumbo jumbo.

In every classroom of 25 American adolescents, there are five or so who are ONLY asked to separate from their device during the class. All the other waking minutes of the day are a aggression-tempering, defiance-tempering scroll. And this is only in the handful of classrooms where the teacher takes the no-phones battle on, a minority of classrooms. When you require no phones, these students cannot.focus.on.anything. Eight min of concentration on a printed page is painful. They listlessly sit and attempt to sneak a peek at the phone. And parents are nearly universally unwilling to take the phone away. Parents—if you Child is having academic problems, take the phone until the grades rise. Take the phone at 9 pm every night. and no video games in the bedroom. Please help make real teaching possible in America again. Be a parent!

This SO reminds me of the debates in the fifties and early sixties..of children watching television. You would have thought the boob tube was the source of all evil. As a child of that era, I’m sure the same was said about the advent of radio before that. Television opened the world to us. It also taught us about commercials, slanted views, exclusionary shows. These kids today- will learn. They are smarter than you think they are.

Remember stopping and asking directions? You had to engage with someone, they enjoyed sharing what they knew and you had to remember what they said, what a concept.

Digital “addiction” is the same as any other. You play into it at the expense of your health, responsibilities, personal growth, family, friends and life.

Keep them busy. If they're in school from 8:30-3:30 (where they can't use phones - ours does not allow them), followed by after school activities that doesn't get them home till 6, followed by dinner and homework, then when the heck do they even have time for screens? As for summer - like commenter Luddite said, we do 7-week sleepaway camp with no screens allowed at all (and they have to write snail mail letters to mom and dad) .

As with any bad habit, like eating junk food, sitting around all the time, watching tv, or staring at your "smart" phone, if you do it, your kids will do it. If you keep junk food out of the house, turn off the tv and the "smart" phone and get up and get out and find other things to do, so will your kids. Parents: stop staring at your phones while with your kids and do anything else: talk to them, even just sit quietly with your thoughts. Have designated times for tv and phone turn on.

O.K., it's better to talk about 'addicting' technology rather than 'addicted' human beings...but the end result is the same. People withdrawing from their immediate surroundings to 'live' with their faces in their phones. Expecting manufacturers and software designers to develop technology diminishing the use of their products is, um...unrealistic. Beyond the issue of what this is doing to people's brains and social skills...just take a look at the photo accompanying this article. See how young these people are ? And most of them are using their thumbs at high speeds...risking repetitive strain injury. Twenty years down the road, they'll be dealing with life minus normally-functioning opposable thumbs. When did we last read an article about that ?

I live a few blocks from a community college. Recently I was at its main bus stop waiting for a bus. There were maybe 30 young people there. Was there laughing, talking, joking around, music playing? Not a sound. Those students were totally engrossed in their devices, heads bent, fingers and thumbs flying. When the bus pulled up, they could barely pull their eyes away to board. The total submission of the young to social media delivered on appealing, upgradeable devices ironically makes life easier for their parents but at what cost? I feel for the parents. The first kid that gets a phone, for example, is the gate opening which won’t be shut. If many children had to choose between the phone in their hands and their parents, which would they choose? Take a look the next time you go out to an eating establishment that caters to families and see if any are actually having conversations. A lost generation or two? The future of the world?

"... experts say." As they look at their screens! I say the experts are wrong. The detachment created by the multitude of screens is creating social problems, creating political chaos, and raising a generation who will only find that this was wrong for them late in their adulthood. The fabric of society is unraveling, the language is totally unmoderated because it is hidden behind a screen, this addiction is creating long term undesirable effects we don't yet see. But, the experts say it is OK in moderation knowing full well that nobody is doing it in moderation let alone the young ones.

A teacher of 25 years now in middle school, I've watched a demographic for that time, and with advent of chromebooks issued to every kid, and now a generation born into screen world, I have watched a precipitous drop in most all students' ability to concentrate, and especially, have an actual class discussion. Teaching listening skills is pulling teeth, as their brains lack the hard wiring, having been formed and shaped in a fleeting, fast paced, non human environment (screen world). there is plenty of research to back my observations. It is distressing to say the least and does not bode well for a human mind to "grow" in a computer environment. Yes, huge moderation, or schools that do not use tech till high school.

After 15 years old, after you have spent tons of time with your child, after you have taught him or her how to read, comprehend, take apart sentences, master fractions, enjoy the simple beauty of nature, control impulses, THEN you can expect them to healthfully manage screen time. This article is so overly simplistic I can't believe that someone got paid to write it....

How many times can a columnist repeat the same questions with the same misleading headline? Depending on the flexible definition of "addiction," your child may or may not have an actual, terrifying disorder. By focusing on whether or not all screens are terrible all the time, researchers completely avoid the most obvious point: any parent or person who works with kids knows that they are consumed with their screens in a way which is at best distracting, at worst, really destructive.

I love these 'put the phone down during family time or dinner'. Has anyone with a teenager done this and noticed the fall out? The constant anxiety to just get through the meal. The lack of engagement because the anxiety to return to the phone is so great. I wish these articles would include what we know about this technology. That companies found it wasn't enough to create something useful - there HAD to be an addictive component to create life long customers.

I am pretty thankful that my son, now 25, just missed the trend of VCRs in cars. Now with phones, I suppose that's gone. What we did instead were books on tape. I faithfully went to the local library and checked out books on tape, dubbing tapes to take with us on vacation so that I didn't risk damaging the library's. If you have a child who is a reader, books on tape are amazing. They let your child imagine an entire scene in their head, rather than on a screen.

Observation of my grandchildren - ages 4 and 8yo: TV is bad enough, but the hand held devices are like the addiction of heroin/smoking. The crying and gnashing of teeth of withdrawal is horrible to watch.

Here are the rules we adhere to. It is tough but it is the right thing to do. 1. No screen time until a basic level reader (between 6-8 yrs old). Exceptions for FaceTime for relatives or watching something during long travel legs. 2. No mobile smart phone until sometime between 8-10th grades, later the better. Kids pay for a portion of the phone with money they earn and if they don’t have a job then pay them for home assigned book reports. Limit screen time and monitor social media accounts. 3. Get kids magazine subscriptions and take them to a library at least once a month. Ensure your home isn’t lacking for paper reading material. Set the example and always bring paper reading material when you leave the home. 4. Before kids get a smart phone, have them do research (through articles you give them and through research on desk top computer) about the documented risks of heightened anxiety due to social media. Give them ‘’the talk” about cyber bullying, porn, etc early. 5. No use of phones in cars. Get separate GPS devices if necessary. Set the example. Hands free Bluetooth connection acceptable but limited to important logistics. Kids will eventually drive so they need to pay attention even when are passengers. Put some restrictions in play for them as well. 6. No phones at meals, play dates, sleepovers. Bring deck of cards/uno to restaurants. Observe some version of a weekly screen time sabbath. 7. Send your child to a screen free summer camp.