The Tech Solution: Creating Healthy Habits for Kids Growing Up in a Digital World

INTRODUCTION

WHETHER I’M IN VANCOUVER, Shanghai, Auckland, or New York, I always hear the same questions: How much screen time is okay? How can I limit the amount of technology my son is consuming? Are video games good or bad for kids? Should I give my nine-year-old an iPhone?

In fact, I imagine that’s why you picked up this book: intuitively, you may feel that digital technology has an effect on your child’s behaviour and moods. Your gut is probably signalling that something isn’t right—and for good reason. The warning signs are loud and clear. The more your son plays video games, for example, the more distracted, withdrawn, and irritable he seems to become. The constant exposure to her friends’ portrayals of their lives on social media seems to be leaving your teenage daughter feeling down. Your fifteen-year-old’s phone is constantly vibrating from notifications and alerts, but he never seems to have any friends over to the house.

Despite that, you’ve seen headlines assuring you that there’s nothing to worry about: Screen Time May Be No Worse for Kids Than Eating Potatoes (Forbes), or Kids Whose Parents Limited Screen Time Do Worse in College (Inc.), or Children’s Social Media Use Has ‘Trivial’ Effect on Happiness (The Guardian).

These are just some of the conflicting messages about the impact of technology on our children. It turns out that some of the doubt and confusion is being sown by the same people selling our kids their gadgets and getting them hooked on their platforms and apps. Recently, a co-panellist speaking alongside me at a university conference argued that fears over tech’s negative impact on children were being massively overblown. Her research, it turned out, was funded in part by a global wireless giant. And when word leaked, a few years ago, that Facebook was considering allowing kids under thirteen onto the network, the directors of ConnectSafely praised the move. Later, it emerged that the group was funded by none other than, you guessed it, Facebook.

And then there are the fearmongering headlines that send a very different message: Screen Time Is Making Kids Moody, Crazy and Lazy (Psychology Today), A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley (The New York Times), Kid’s Eyesight Ruined After Parents Let Her Play on iPhone for a Year (New York Post). The contradictory—and often extreme—messaging out there is enough to make anyone’s head spin. No wonder parents are feeling confused!

But the effects of technology on childhood and adolescent development aren’t simply good or bad; the reality is more nuanced than that. Tech can be extremely harmful to children and teens when it’s used in the wrong ways, and incredibly useful if used in the right ways.

As a Harvard-trained psychiatrist with a specialty in youth addictions, I’ve spent the last twenty years poring over the research on health, happiness, and motivation in children. In the last decade I’ve added to that focus the impact of screens on the developing mind. And I can assure you that, on the one hand, the science couldn’t be clearer. The data on Generation Z—those born between 1995 and 2012—is chilling. They’re less confident. They’re less likely to take risks, to learn to drive, to stand up to a bully. Rates of depression and suicide among them have skyrocketed in the last decade, almost perfectly tracking the smartphone’s rise. Anxiety and loneliness have hit crisis levels. Indeed, the World Health Organization is predicting that the number one health epidemic facing this generation will be loneliness. Loneliness! And given the sharp declines in youth mental health, the American Academy of Pediatrics is now calling for universal mental health screening at the age of twelve. So my diagnosis is one of urgency: we’re raising a generation on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in recorded history.

Yet, if tech was all bad, you wouldn’t see a group of committed kids launch the biggest environmental protests in history, as they did in September 2019 with the global climate strikes. You wouldn’t see a group of Florida teens, survivors of a school shooting, organizing a national school walkout day to protest lax gun laws, as the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School did in 2018. Without social media it wouldn’t have been possible for podcaster Jay Shetty, comedian Lilly Singh, or artist Rupi Kaur to emerge, whole cloth, from social media. As your children begin to learn about podcasting, vlogging, and social media, they’re acquiring the skills and the motivation to find their true voice, refine it, and broadcast it to the world.

The problem is, we don’t have much time to figure out how our kids can safely interact with technology. Brain development suddenly accelerates during adolescence—at precisely the same time that screen immersion does. At that point, the frontal lobe, known as the brain’s control centre, hasn’t fully matured. It’s the part of the brain that asks us, Is this really a good idea? What are the long-term consequences? Meanwhile, young brains are wired and rewarded for risk taking, novelty seeking, peer admiration, and social connection. This intense developmental period of reward for risk, novelty, and admiration, combined with undeveloped neurologic programs for long-term planning and appreciation of consequences, can make for a recipe of confusion, hardship, and even devastation. In addition, the dizzying pace of new apps, platforms, and devices coming onto the market makes it difficult, if not impossible, to do the research and provide our teens with timely advice.

Part of our job as parents and educators is to prepare our kids for the world they’re about to enter. To set them up for a lifetime of healthy eating habits, for example, we monitor their diets and help them understand the difference between good and bad foods. It’s time to begin doing the same thing with tech—that is, start young, and help kids understand the link between the tech they’re consuming and how they think, feel, and behave. We need to teach them that brain-boosting tech, just like brain-boosting foods, will lead to greater health and happiness. That toxic tech, including certain video games and social media platforms, can make them feel sad and anxious. And that a little bit of junk tech, whether it’s a video game or a silly TV show, just like occasional junk food, won’t kill them!

To know how to guide your children towards healthy, balanced technology use, it’s essential to understand how kids metabolize tech—how different media and apps are getting their attention, how they’re making them feel, and how they’re changing their brains and behaviours. This is exactly what you’ll learn in this book. And I promise, it’s not as daunting as it sounds.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Whether you’re a parent, stepparent, grandparent, foster parent, teacher, therapist, coach, or any other significant person in a child’s life, this book is for you. For simplicity’s sake, I tend to rely on the word parent throughout, but make no mistake—I’m addressing any of you who are doing the hard, critical work of raising, supporting, and nurturing kids! Although the science of, and practices for, optimizing the human brain presented in this book are universal to any age group, I focus particularly on the period between birth and young adulthood up to age twenty-five. This is the scientifically identified period of peak brain development, with dramatic changes occurring during puberty. Sometimes, for example when I’m talking about video games or social media, you might find that my advice is tailored to children in their preteen and teen years. Other times you might find that some of the solutions are aimed at a younger age group. But that shouldn’t ever stop you from tailoring my suggestions to suit your child and the stage they’re in. You know best how to talk to your child, how to adjust the conversation as they grow and change. The suggestions in this book are meant to be building blocks, so you’ll get the best results if you continue to work with your child and build on these suggestions year after year.

In the following pages I’ll simplify the neuroscientific foundation for The Tech Solution and give you a variety of strategies to guide your child towards it. My goal is to equip you with the knowledge you can use to steer your child away from technology that leaves them feeling stressed, grumpy, addicted, anxious, and depressed and towards a healthier tech diet that will boost their creativity, health, happiness, and connection with others.

As I like to remind parents, we don’t need to fear technology’s potential to harm our children. Indeed, if you follow the solutions outlined in this book, your kids will learn to use tech in healthy, empowering ways that will help them adapt to whatever life throws their way. As we learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, healthy tech use can be a crucial part of thriving in our modern world.

Chapter 1 introduces the science of how technology is impacting the developing brain, with implications for children’s health, behaviours, and character traits. Chapter 2 explores how habits established in childhood lay the foundation for your children’s future behaviours. I explain how important it is to take advantage of their formative years to guide them towards establishing the healthiest habits you can.

Chapter 3 is where we start to unpack how, precisely, technology is affecting our children’s brains and how we can work to manage those effects. Here we’ll investigate the ways video games, social media, gadgets, and apps are engineered to keep young brains glued to their screens by finding ways to reward them with hits of dopamine. But in equipping you with an understanding of how addiction and reward cycles work, I can teach you to help protect your children from addictive tech. Chapter 4 delves into the dangers of screens on the developing brain. I expose the many ways technology is triggering toxic levels of stress and anxiety in children by prompting release of the hormone cortisol. You’ll understand the stress response and how to recognize it in your child, and learn ways to guide your child towards positive coping skills.

The effects of technology, however, aren’t all bad, and when used in the right ways, technology can be beneficial. In Chapter 5 we learn how to help our kids improve their mental, physical, and spiritual health. Fitness trackers, gratitude apps, and music playlists are part of the answer. But we also need to push them to make changes to their offline routines. Chapter 6 explores the fundamental human need to bond and the exciting ways tech can help kids connect and even reverse frightening new trends in teen loneliness and depression. In Chapter 7 we learn how tech can help kids feed their talents, foster creativity, and find their purpose through developing their identities and individual talents.

Then, having covered how tech is impacting your child’s emotions and behaviour, I pull it all together in Chapter 8 to provide you with a practical six-step plan for tackling the most important parenting issue of our time. Finally, we look ahead in Chapter 9 and consider how to equip kids to thrive in an era of digital disruption. This means teaching them to think critically and to be conscious and adaptive.

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In this way, you will deepen your understanding of how the technology your children are consuming affects them and learn how to establish a healthy tech diet for your family. The key to thriving in a digital world is to know ourselves. And I mean really know ourselves—how our human bodies and minds actually work. What makes us happy, stressed, desperate, elated. That knowledge will help us take care of ourselves in a new, powerful way and teach our children to do the same. And from this place of knowing and loving we can unleash a new energy of creativity, joy, and fulfillment for our children and ourselves. The Tech Solution provides the framework, neuroscience, and guidance for this process. Just as a small seed grows into a giant oak tree, there is the potential in all of us to grow and flourish. And in this ever-changing modern world, our relationship with technology will be a key aspect of that growth.

1

DISRUPTION: How Technology Is Affecting Your Child’s Brain and Behaviour

God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.

—Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook

I WAS OUT FOR DINNER with my family when I noticed a familiar but unsettling scene. First it was the sweet young couple next to us who pulled out their smartphones before even scanning the menu. Throughout the meal they kept returning to their phones.

Still, they were far more engaged than a nearby family of three. Father and son seemed to spend more time on their digital devices than they did listening or talking, leaving Mom mostly alone with her thoughts. And a little way off, even a curly-haired toddler in overalls was hunched over a tablet—her parent’s, or perhaps even her own. A perfect coda to the evening came just before we left, when a teenager, walking with his eyes glued to his phone, crashed into a waiter.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no Luddite; I love tech. My phone is my research assistant, my camera, my meditation teacher. It gets me to meetings on time and reminds me to call the kids’ dentist. It even encourages me to take steps when I’ve been sitting for too long! But I also love powering it down and going for a walk with my husband, reading a good book, or having an uninterrupted night out with my family.

From restaurants to bedrooms to cars to classrooms, screens have become an ineluctable part of life for most people. Back in the halcyon days of our romance with screens, we thought our smartphones could do no wrong. We greeted each new app, whether it was Uber, Candy Crush, Tinder, or Instagram, with gushing excitement, dutifully downloading it to our phones. But we know better now. These new tools aren’t nearly as innocent as they once seemed. Not having read the fine print, we didn’t realize that most of them were hoovering up our data and following us all over the internet. We know now that technology is often manipulating our decisions, dictating how we behave and how we feel. We also know that scientists are recording measurable changes in the brains of babies exposed to excessive screen time.

According to the 2017 Stress in America survey, compiled by the American Psychological Association, 48 percent of parents say that regulating their child’s screen time is a constant battle. Fifty-eight percent say they worry about the influence of social media on their child’s physical and mental health. We’re concerned for our children, and we know that our own current relationship with tech is unsustainable. And yet, as we allow our smartphones to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we act, too many of us are letting our kids follow us down the same path.

Phone obsession is now so common that it’s acquired its own lexicon. All around us at the restaurant that night, people were phubbing (phone + snubbing) their loved ones. Technoference (technology + interference) was keeping the toddler—who was glued to her iPad—from hearing her mother until Mom lost her temper. And the teen who bowled over the server is what’s known as a smombie—a smartphone zombie. To the Chinese, he’s a member of the bowed head tribe—pedestrians who insist on texting and playing games while walking. To keep them safe, officials have even built separated lanes for them in the Chinese cities of Chongqing and Xian.

Before we left the restaurant, our server stopped us to say how nice it was to see our three kids actually talking to their parents throughout the meal. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen that. Normally, she said, kids and parents are focused on their screens. I felt a creeping worry come over me when I heard that. But I wasn’t surprised.

HOW IS TECHNOLOGY AFFECTING OUR KIDS?

Smombie lanes may seem a bit extreme, but at this point most teenagers are checking their phones 150 times per day—that is, once every six minutes. Add it all up and they’re spending more than seven hours a day looking at their smartphones—and that’s outside of school or homework! As New York University marketing professor Adam Alter points out, this means that over the course of their lives our kids are going to spend at least seven years immersed in their phones. Let that sink in for a minute: Seven. Freaking. Years. And given the increasing pace of use, I think it will probably end up being a lot more than that.

The way our kids are using tech, and indeed being encouraged to use it—mindlessly scrolling through bottomless feeds while cycling through four or five open apps, the basketball game on in the background—is clearly not healthy for their developing minds. It means their brains are always on the go, which in turn makes them reactive and jumpy and leads to feelings of being unsettled and anxious. And with a smartphone at the tips of their fingers, many of them have never had to remember anything, or come up with a new idea, or figure out how to stave off boredom, or learn to sit and relax and just be.

New research is even showing that smartphones and screens could be changing the structure and function of children’s brains. In one particularly alarming 2019 study, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, brain scans revealed that toddlers who spent more time in front of screens had lower myelination, or white matter integrity, in their brains. Further testing showed they had lower literacy and language skills.

Myelin (often called white matter because of its whitish colour) is an insulating layer of fat that forms around the nerves. Like the insulation surrounding electrical wiring, it protects the neuron and helps nerve signals (electrical impulses) fire faster and more accurately. At around eighteen months, the neural pathway connecting Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area—two key cortical areas known for the production and comprehension of human language, respectively—becomes fully myelinated. That’s what allows toddlers to go from being able to understand words to being able to say them, and explains the results of the 2019 study.

The importance of myelin in language development is just one example among many. The reality is that a child’s entire cognitive function depends on the integrity of the myelin structure in their brains. By that I mean that their ability to store, retrieve, and process information into thinking, feeling, and behaving depends on how well organized their nerves are and how thick the myelin sheath surrounding them is. When the myelin sheath gets too thin or is damaged, nerves will not fire normally. The impulses can slow down and even stop, causing mental health, behavioural, and neurological problems.

Technology use carries with it myriad other potential consequences—among them cyberbullying, sleep deprivation, poor posture, back and neck pain, sedentary behaviours, obesity, loneliness, diminished eyesight, anxiety, depression, body image disturbance, and addiction. All of these are changing children in elemental ways, interrupting rudimental biological drives to connect, to become independent, even to procreate.

DO THEY KNOW SOMETHING WE DON’T?

Tech executives were the first to recognize the problem more than a decade ago. Shortly after the iPad’s 2010 release, Apple founder Steve Jobs was asked by The New York Times what his children thought of the new device. Jobs told reporter Nick Bilton that they hadn’t used it, that he and his wife limit how much technology the kids use at home. Bilton was so astonished that he went on to interview a series of Silicon Valley executives—most of whom, he discovered, either barred or strictly limited their kids’ access to tech. Tech CEOs, Bilton concluded, seem to know something that the rest of us don’t. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said that he banned his nephew from social media. Microsoft founder Bill Gates refused to let his kids have smartphones until they were fourteen. His wife, Melinda, now says that she wishes they’d waited longer.

Just how did our children become slaves to the devices that were supposed to free us, to connect us, to give us more time to experience life and the people we love? As it turns out, by design. At some point the goal of a lot of technology companies seemed to stop being about connecting people. It became a race for who could come up with the most enticing notification, the most ingenious way of getting us to check our phones again and again.

This is the driving force behind technology’s attention economy: that free app or social network or search engine that appears to have been created to help you is actually meant to capture your data, which can then be packaged and sold to somebody else. This is now a trillion-dollar-a-year industry. The data it gleans recently surpassed oil in value, becoming the most valuable asset on earth.

The human cost of all this is enormous. Your kids’ devices are stealing their time, devouring years of their lives in little parcels. Every hour they spend in front of a screen is an hour they could have spent running about and interacting with kids their age or observing and learning from what exists around them—real-world interactions that are critical to healthy physical and social development.

Perhaps more worryingly, they’re not necessarily living their lives the way they want to. For if they’re not aware of how tech is influencing them, they risk allowing tech to manage