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- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape.
Bipedal, naked, large-brained.
Long the master of fire, tools and language.
But still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable.
Yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly, we hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future
from our shared understanding of the past.
Carta brings together experts from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who we are
and how we got here.
An exploration made possible by the generosity
of humans like you.
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- So I'd like you to raise your hand
if someone in your life, a young person in your life
often looks like this.
So maybe it's a child, a grandchild,
the person in the line for coffee in font of you.
Okay, you're not alone.
Meet this generation of digital natives, right?
So we've heard that term.
Generation of young people that were born, you know,
without knowing a time before the internet.
So I'm a digital immigrant, I won't ask you to identify
if you are not, but I remember a world without the internet.
And having to learn how to integrate the digital world
into how I work, how I communicate
and that's a very different space
that our kids are growing up in now.
So in the digital age the one thing we do know
is that the young people among us are early adopters,
they're enthusiastic adopters of new technologies.
Here's some data just from 2004.
We started following kids around on their mobile devices
around 2007 and this just shows you some of the changes
we saw during that time.
2018 is the last time for which we have
a representative sample and 95% of adolescents
now how access to a mobile device.
They're on them quite a lot and so a recent survey showed us
that tweens, those are eight to 12 year olds,
they're on 4.36 hours and this is just for media screen time
so this doesn't count screen time for homework
or other activities, right?
And teens, at 6.4 hours a day,
so almost 6.5 hours a day and I want you to hold the number
in your mind, that's the three hours more
per day that children from low income households
are on the screen.
So there's a huge difference
in screen time based on the income level of your family.
So we have a sample of about 2,000 young adolescents
we've been following and these are some data on them.
This is just them across age.
So on the bottom of the screen you'll see age here,
from 11 to 15 and you'll see if the young people
in your life are around 11 years old,
about 48% of their peers own a mobile device, right?
As we get older in our sample,
we get up here to almost full saturation.
This line up here is access to the internet at home.
So something we used to worry a lot about in education
was a digital divide.
So some kids not having access to the internet,
that's no longer true.
And smartphone use is actually higher
among children from lower income families.
So we don't see that traditional digital divide.
We see few differences in mobile device ownership
by socio-economic status but as I'm gonna show you,
we see differences in experiences it may be affects.
So what is this all mean?
You probably, if you pick up a paper,
probably today or tomorrow, you'll read some story
about how digital devices are ruining our children, right?
Smartphones are destroying a generation.
Recently we had a number of psychologists sign a letter,
an open letter to Apple, demanding that tech companies
end their addictive practices toward our children
based on evidence, they said,
that smartphones are making our children lonely,
depressed, suicidal, right?
Stealing things from them, these are big claims.
These are big claims.
So is this constant connection, is it harmful to our kids?
And I'm gonna show you two pieces of evidence.
The first one is from a team in Britain.
Now they've assembled large amasses of data,
on hundreds of thousands of adolescents.
Now these are surveys, so just correlational research
asking kids to report on the amount
of time they're on their devices
and their mental health problems, right?
And I'll show you a graph here
but the thing to focus on is just this pattern,
a Goldilocks effect, right?
So here are the kids that are not on screen time at all
in the day, here are the kids in those one or two hours
and then here's kind of a deterioration
of wellbeing across time, right?
So described as the Goldilocks effects,
the kids that are on not at all
don't look so great on mental health.
The kids in the one to two hour range,
you know, look good and then out on the lower ends
of the tail, or the higher ends of the tail,
those kids are experiencing some problems.
Now remember, this is correlational.
The other thing to remember is that,
these data and all the data that are presented,
including the data where people argue
that smartphones are causing mental health problems,
these actually explain less than 1% of the differences
between kids and their mental health.
So said in other way, 99.5% of the reasons
that kids are different than each other
on their mental health problems
is due to something other than screen time, right?
These same authors took other variables they measured
in the data chips, or chips, in the data,
including potato chips, eating potato chips,
higher correlation than screen time, right?
Eating breakfast, 14 times higher than scree time, right?
So just a word of caution.
Now we took a different approach.
We've been following kids and their phones.
So we had the advantage of not necessarily comparing kids
to each other, so the kid who's on zero hours a day
and a kid who's on five hours a day.
They look very different on things
other than screen time, right?
Their parents probably have them
in a very different structured environment,
lots of things are different.
So we looked and followed the same kids overtime
and asked the question,
on days when Sally is using screens a lot,
what does her cognition look like?
What does her mental health look like?
What does her sleep look like?
And days when she's using less.
So we used her as her own control.
This is a study done by Mikey Jensen, one of my post-docs
and this is in North Carolina,
this is a state of North Carolina.
Each one of those red dots
is where a family in our study lives
of the 2,000 kids and 400 of those kids
we've followed intensively on their phones.
So every day they're reporting to us
on how much they're using their devices,
their mental health, et cetera.
And we find very few associations
between how much they're using, their mental health, right?
And where we do find signal,
is actually in the opposite direction.
So days that they're more closely connected
to their friends on family online
are days that they're less lonely and depressed.
But again, really small effects.
We've been interested in this,
we've been using digital technology
and mobile phones as a tool
to study adolescents' mental health
and we first started in this area,
parents were asking for us advice, right?
It's scary, right?
It's scary to have an adolescent period, right?
It's scary to have them glued to their phone all the time.
And so what we wanted to dig a little deeper in was,
what are the fears, right?
That parents have and what's the science,
what do we really know, right?
And then what's the narrative.
So we went through and we identified these seven fears
that parents and adults have when they see young people
walking around on their devices
and then we went to the scientific literature
and we started to examine, what do we actually know
about the effects.
And here, I won't have time to go into them all today
but I'll just summarize with a couple of messages.
In most cases we found mixed results, we need more data.
But in the majority of cases we actually found evidence
for positive effects, right?
So kids that were most connected online
were also most connected offline.
If there were signs of vulnerability,
bullying et cetera offline,
those kids were also experiencing problems online.
So it was a bit of a mirror between online and offline life.
Parent time.
So it was displacing time you'd spend with parents.
But it wasn't impacting the relationship, right?
Where we do find some negative effects,
is in multitasking, right?
So Paula mentioned that before,
we need to keep your eye on that.
And sleep is critically important, right?
So there is no question that being on your phone
late at night, which many kids are
is impairing sleep in important ways.
But when we published these results
people were angry, right?
Parents were angry at us.
We were saying that, you know,
there are these things that are happening with our kids
are they the things we'd be worried about?
But we don't think the phone is the problem, right?
And this wasn't a popular message
and in the discussion section you guys can yell at me then,
I'm used to it now.
I wasn't ready for it here but I'm ready now.
And so what we asked is, what are the risks?
What are the risks of assuming that phones are to blame
for these really important problems facing our kids
versus taking a more holistic view.
Now, Paula did a wonderful job of asking this question of,
rewiring the brain?
And Lea showed us signs of developmental plasticity
in the brain and this has been the focus
of extreme attention right now, right?
So headlines, are smartphones rewiring the brain?
And again, this isn't a new concern, right?
Whether tools are impacting the brain in some way?
This is from The New York Times in the 1904 right?
Concern that these race car drivers
might have a different brain, right?
We've seen concern, we see fears of new technologies.
We saw this with writing, people starting to write,
this is going to impair our ability to remember things.
With kids, we've seen this with numerous things.
We've seen it with the introduction of romance novels,
the introduction of public libraries,
rock 'n' roll, things that kids are doing we don't like.
My husband started to complain about this and I said,
stop complaining because I think this means
that we're not kids anymore.
(audience laughing)
Kids these days.
So this is Scientific American.
Are smartphones really destroying the adolescent brain?
And I think that this is an important question
of how the brain has become rewired,
how we're learning language differently, et cetera.
There's a recent article that showed,
in fact digital technology use and thumb movement
can we trace differences in this on a day to day level
to cortical activity based on the EEG
and those are important questions
but I think maybe they're the wrong ones right now
if we're thinking about out kids' wellbeing.
I think the questions that we need to be asking
are how are these tools used,
how are we scaffolding and how are we engaging
with these new technologies with our kids
and optimizing them for their potential and their future.
So we wrote recently that smart phones,
they might be bad for some teens, right?
But not for all and if we take you back to that initial data
that I've showed you, children in low income households
spending on average three more hours a day
on their phone than kids in more affluent households,
it's not just a time different,
it's what you're doing online, right?
So higher income households, more likely to be using
digital technologies for educational purposes,
looking up information, right?
Lower income households, less parental involvement,
less adult involvement, on average
in scaffolding those behaviors and building digital literacy
and the other things we know our kids are gonna need
if the future is in fact digital.
In our study we found that children
in disadvantaged households, they actually experience
more spillover from social media.
So something that happens on social media,
actually they report results in an offline problem,
a fight, an argument, trouble at school, right?
So it may not just be different experiences,
it might be different effects
for kids that are the most vulnerable.
So as we look into the future,
it's really not so much about the effect of the tool, right?
The access to these tools is equaling out, right?
Kids have access to computers,
kids have access to smartphones across socio-economic status
but the types of experiences they're having online,
the type of help that they're getting
to ensure that they build the skills
in an online world, for an online future
are very different and it's possible
that there might be more negative effects
for certain populations of children.
So I'd encourage us as we kind of look
towards supporting children in the digital world,
that we look past some of the headlines,
some of the fears that we have.
Some of the reasons that we don't like the technology itself
and for parents who report the biggest sources
of conflict in their home is fights over
how long their kid is on the device.
And I screamed at my child yesterday
for this and caught myself.
So instead of focusing on the time limits
focus on what they're doing.
Take some time, spend some time with them there.
And we're entering to a whole new world
as our homes get smarter, right?
So here's a little boy talking to his Alexa, right?
And I'm sure we'll have a lively discussion
of what it means to have Alexa rising our children soon.
So thank you for your attention.
And for the opportunity.
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