Looking Back and Moving Forward: Children’s Pandemic Experiences So Far and Where to Go From Here

[Dr. Pam Hurst-Della Pietra]: Thanks for being here today for our COVID special, which is especially timely considering the revelations and discourse surrounding Facebook’s Instagram research indicating the platform’s detrimental mental health impacts on young people, notably teen girls. A year and a half into the global pandemic, during which children turn to screens for everything from school to extracurricular activities to birthday parties to large family gatherings. We will be treated to a fascinating look back into what we’ve learned and a guided look forward toward how we can make the most of the transition to this pandemic. Today’s experts are an esteemed interdisciplinary group who have a myriad of insights to share. Children’s screens awarded three of today’s panelists with research grants to continue ongoing longitudinal studies during the pandemic to aid in our understanding of how screen time changed during COVID and what the increase in digital media use means for young people’s mental health, as well as their cognitive, physical and psychosocial emotional development. These three panelists will share some of what they learned as a result of those studies, and all the experts will discuss recommendations for how to move forward. The group has reviewed the questions you submitted and will answer as many as possible during and after their presentations. If you have additional questions during the workshop, please take them into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. When you do, please indicate whether or not you would like to ask your questions live on camera, if time permits, or if you would prefer that the moderator read your questions. We’re recording today’s workshop and we’ll upload a video to YouTube in the coming days. All registrants will receive a link to our YouTube channel, where you’ll find videos from our past 35 webinars, since the COVID began, which we hope you’ll watch as you wait for this video to be posted. It is now my great pleasure to introduce our moderator. Dr. Devorah Heitner is the author of Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World. A guide to mentoring digital kids and to share their expertise with a number of media outlets. Dr. Heitner has a PhD in media, technology and society from Northwestern University and has taught at DePaul University and Northwestern University. She is delighted to be raising her own digital native too, welcome Devorah.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here with all these smart folks to talk about these issues and just to kind of frame the conversation we’ll be having. We want to think about: what does this really look like in folks’ day to day lives? We see families transitioning in all different ways. And of course, the situation around the country and around the world is different from kids who are still quite locked down and limited from doing a lot of extracurricular activities to kids who are returning to school after potentially a year and a half outside of buildings doing various kinds of remote school. There are families like mine that ended up in remote school, and that didn’t work for us. So we ended up pandemic homeschooling for a year and a half, which was never something I thought we would do. And now my kid is in a new district, in a new school, doing middle school, having essentially missed the sixth grade transition year, right between fifth and seventh. A lot of kids missed the transition into kindergarten and a lot of kids missed the transition into high school. And so we’re really seeing families look at their experiences with remote school, good, bad and otherwise, and their experiences with their kids, recreational and personal time with tagon screens and try to figure out how do we rebalance now that some aspects of life maybe returning to, I don’t want to say normal, but we’ll say the new normal. Now that many more kids are in school buildings, kids are maybe having more face to face time with peers than they may have had. Other kids are dealing with a tremendous amount of disruption this year. There are states where schools have had to reopen and close. There are classes that have gone out and quarantined or kids who have long term subs because of quarantine. So there’s just a lot going on still. And our kids have been through it. Maybe you may have seen those memes on social media about what was the last normal year. And it’s kind of shocking to think that for my seventh grader, the last sort of quote unquote normal school year was fourth grade, for example. So we want to think about rebalancing. We want to think about what kids learned during this time that was useful and what families may have learned by this exposure to their kids’ tech time. In other words, families who are home and working from home may have learned more about their kids’ experience on social media, on video games and on other kinds of interactive tech. There may be some anxiety about returning, and for some kids, tech and screens are a way to escape from that anxiety. In some cases, there may be some proactive and fun things kids are doing that are helping with their anxieties that we really want to look at. All of this narrative around anxiety and thinking about what this means as curious researchers and are there unhealthy behaviors around tech that we want to support change? Are there healthy adaptations that kids have made that we can support continuing? We also want to look at children’s independent skills. Many of our kids were deprived of experiences like going out into the world. I recently was encouraging my son to ask a librarian for help in a situation where for a year and a half we’ve had our kids six feet away from everyone. How do we encourage our kids to know who the friendly strangers are at the library? And you can ask for help, you know, buying a slice of pizza, whatever independence is appropriate for their age, talking to other kids on the playground if their masks are on. Right, all of these things that parents are navigating. And finally, the confusing messages about screen time, including the last two weeks of revelations out of Facebook and the whistleblower testimony yesterday are causing parents to have guilt and recrimination around tech, because there’s always been this kind of sense that we’re measuring parents and the quality of parenting based on screen time. And it’s an inverse relationship, right? If your kid gets screen time, you must be parenting badly. And obviously, all of my work at my whole goal in life is to get to more nuance there and get people to think about the quality of kids’ experiences with tech and screens and not just the quantity. And really look closely at kids’ individual experiences versus generalizing. But nonetheless, these revelations should concern anyone who cares about kids’ welfare. The idea that a company as powerful as Facebook would sit on this research and not do as much as they can to prevent harm is obviously very concerning. So coming from that perspective of what can we do to understand more deeply, I will introduce the first researcher, and then we’re going to have a conversation again around all of your questions to really understand what can we do with this data? We want to understand what kids’ experiences in the pandemic really were with tech. What can parents do? What can educators do? And what can hopefully the companies that make the media that kids love also do to do better. So I want to welcome Dr. Stephanie Reich. She is a professor in the School of Education at the University of California at Irvine. Her research focuses on understanding and improving the social context of children’s lives. And she received one of the children and screens, children’s screens and COVID 19 research grants. Welcome, Stephanie. And I will allow her to take it from here.

 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: Great. Hi, everyone. So before I get started, I want to sort of orient. Why do we care about screen time and early childhood? And so kids learn by exploring. And so while we have some research on how screens affect children, like what they’re doing and physically holding it or light waves, what we’re really mostly interested in is what kids are not doing in early childhood when they’re using screens. And so this idea is known as displacement. So kids, if they’re out exploring the world, they’re crawling around, they’re walking, they’re talking to others, they’re hearing language, they’re being creative, they’re engaging with caregivers. And this concern is that when children are using screens, they’re not doing these other things. They’re displacing those opportunities. And so one of the few media that we study really well for displacement is television. And if you were part of the webinar last week, you saw a lot of this around sedentary behavior, weight gain, other stuff. So we know that when kids are sitting in front of a TV, it’s quite sedentary. But television, even when it’s in the background, like it’s just on and changes how everyone behaves in a household. So adults just talk less when a TV is on, but they direct less language towards children. And when the TV is on, even if it’s like an adult program, like The News or Larry King Live, they play less, they talk less. And so it does displace some of these other kinds of interactions. So when COVID hit, we sort of had to wonder what’s going to happen now when kids are home and screen time is likely going to increase. And so at the time, my colleagues and I were in the midst of a longitudinal parenting intervention called the Baby Books 2 Project. And this project was bilingual English, Spanish intervention for low income families, two-parent families that had a mother and a father and a baby at nine months that we were following till 30 months and now till forty eight months. And so we were able to get this grant from children and screens to others COVID-wave in the summer of 2020 to see sort of what was happening for these families during the pandemic. And it’s important to note that children who use more media as they got older. Right, like a nine month old baby, they’re kind of limited, usually like television. Right, but as they have more fine motor skills and more head control and body use, they can engage with more mobile devices and things. So if we just look at pre-post, we’re going to see more media because kids just use more media as they get older. Right. And the type of media is going to change because they can do more, physically, to do with that. So we really want to know what’s the change within those same families so we can look at kids who we had data from before COVID and then with our COVID wave, but also because we had a longitudinal study that recruited across different time frames. We have a chunk of kids who are the same age when it wasn’t COVID as it was during this COVID wave. So we can compare an 18 month old or a 24 month or a 30 month old sort of when it was COVID or when it wasn’t to see if there are some differences there. But I also want to point out that households were really different. It was a pandemic or it is a pandemic. Right. And so it’s not just like they’re at home and everything else was the same. And families were experiencing job loss and financial strain. There were bigger risks to their mental health of stress, anxiety, depression. Families might experience more couple conflict and parenting conflict, because now they’re parenting 24/7, because they’ve lost childcare and they’ve lost access to other caregivers. In our study, which is in the Washington, D.C. area and Southern California; housing costs, especially in southern California, are very high. And so our families are often doubled and tripled up. And so there’s just a lot more people at home when we had social distancing policies because not everyone was at work or able to go somewhere else. So we wanted to look then as sort of what were the changes in media use for these kids with the same kid and in an age matched. And so what we found is that that device use: TV, phones, tablets did increase. So in this age and our kids were 20 to 47 months in our data collection window, most of our families just use devices some of the days not everyday and that changed to everyday during the pandemic and the type of use across the board just changed. So kids are using it more alone. They’re also using it more with their parents, and it differed with moms and dads of how much they use that. Interestingly, there was less background television. We found, in general, television just being on in the background when no one’s watching, it decreases. When they’re babies, it’s really prevalent. And then it slowly decreases. But during COVID, it really dropped faster. And so that might be part of household crowding. There’s just more people and more noise in the home. But when we compare kids the same age, kids when it wasn’t COVID to those when it was COVID, and we asked parents how much they use devices to distract your child so you can get something done, put them in front of the TV or hand them your phone. It wasn’t that common, around 19%. And that went up to 65%. And the same for you trying to get children to stop crying or to calm them (13% to 42%). And then we have had about a third of our families that video chatted just across every way. It was just the same families. And now that has risen up to just under half during COVID. So then when we asked parents, like, what kind of changes do you see in your child’s behavior since before COVID began, what we found are that families that were experiencing more stress, they were more financially strained, more mental health or having more conflict parenting. They had children who used more media, but they also tended to change their schedules where they had fewer routines for going to bed, for waking up, for meal times, for bath times, for stories. There was less consistency in that routine. And those changes in parenting practices of less consistent environments predict more behavior problems for children. But media didn’t very much. With the exception of background television, we didn’t see a different language use, although our measurements changed because we can’t get in the homes to do assessments anymore. And families did talk about their kids displaying more helping and affectionate behaviors. So what kind of advice can I offer given those patterns? First off, just be thoughtful about your media use and especially background television. If nobody’s watching it, just turn it off. It’s not useful. Think about if the media you are using is displacing other opportunities. Right. So if you were going to, you need to put your kids somewhere safe and where you can see them while you go make dinner or do this work call you’re not going to have a high quality interaction with them at that moment anyway, and it’s unlikely it’s displacing something. Right. So just be thoughtful about what the tradeoff is and then you can use media in socially interactive ways.So if you’re playing together and talking and interacting, you’re not displacing those opportunities. You’re just using the media to be a tool for making those things happen. And the same with video chatting, because video chatting, lots of research shows, has a lot of the same features as a face to face interaction. And more importantly, just keep up those family routines, like have regular bedtimes, waking times, family meal times, and try to have high quality interactions when you’re doing that, because that’s going to be really important for their development. And perhaps the media doesn’t matter as much if those things are on board. And then I’m happy to answer questions.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: Yes. I so appreciate that you brought up the disruptions to schedules and the chaos that some of those families were experiencing, in addition to maybe the more open ended media use as a potential kind of cycle. Right. In relation to some of the stresses they’re experiencing. And I think it’s incredibly important that we’re not, you know, blaming screens for the stresses kids experienced when parents were potentially out of work, when they didn’t have access to so many other things. What can parents do to help establish new routines when kids are becoming so used to digital and maybe rules did get more relaxed and other things did get more chaotic and unbounded? What can parents do to help kids get accustomed maybe to new habits around screens and possibly around other things like bedtime?

 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]

Well, I think your mention that this is the new normal is really important, right? Like things are not as they were. Right. We haven’t gone back to pre pandemic times. Everything’s different. The world is opening at most. Kids are back in school now. There’s activities. You can go to the library, you write. There’s things that are changing. It’s the perfect time to reestablish all those routines because you’re not in that same habit of just being home all the time. And so having thoughtful media use, having boundaries around it, having negotiated discussions about what what’s appropriate use or not, or when you can use it, it’s the perfect time to reestablish that and not just drift that we always, when we’re home, turn on the TV or grab our phones at the dinner table. Things are changing. So take advantage of that to reestablish some norms.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: And how can parents model healthy media use? Is that maybe through, you know, reducing or being more intentional or on their own screen time or what? What else can parents do to model a healthy tech environment?

 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: So I think mindful media use is always important. And it’s a little bit hard with our phones and those of us who’ve been working from home, there’s really not a break from home work the same way as there used to be. But I think having media free zones, right. Like no devices at the table, places like that model it. I think that as a parent, if you need to use your device for something quick, I need to respond to this message. I have this work call. Oh grandma just asked me this. Whatever it is, if you vocalize that, that it’s purposeful and there’s and that’s what you’re doing, it’s not that you just opened up social media to scroll or to think through it. It’s going to trigger ways for your child to be mindful about those processes as well. And if you have a partner in your home or another adult you can partner with about like, “hey, we’ll nudge each other when we’re mindlessly doing things on devices so that we can model those kinds of behaviors for our children and for us to be more mindful now that we’re going to a new normal and don’t need to be tied to our devices as much as we were before.”

 

[Devorah Heitner]: One thing I like to ask kids, if I’m feeling brave or, you know, parents, depending on their parenting style, may well ask kids is what’s the least favorite tech habit that I have? And maybe, you know, if you tell me that I can work on it, and if you don’t mind, I might share one of your tech habits. But I also think it’s really important from the research on habits that we don’t try to change everything at once, like a family that’s let go of bedtime and any kinds of screen limits and a million other things might want to really just focus on breakfast, you know, right now, for example, and just really try to pick one thing where they’re like, I know my kid’s going to have a better school day if they get to bed by 9:30 or I know they’re going to have a better school day if they have breakfast and just really focus on that for a few weeks and then try to make another incremental change and include kids in the process of making those changes. Right. So if you see something happening like, oh, it seems like you’re gaming before you do homework and you’re not getting the homework, like really have that conversation with them and focus in again on one way to make it better, but not to make kids or parents feel bad, because when people feel bad, they feel hopeless and it’s harder to make changes. So anything we can do that uses that habit research, I think we have time to ask a question about critical thinking and social media. What can parents do to support young people’s critical thinking around social media and get them to be maybe a little bit more skeptical about some of those algorithms?

 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: More than anything, I think discussions are great. The more you talk about what you’re seeing and doing, the more you’re going to reflect and question that. Right. And it’s going to look different at different ages. I have a 10 year old and a 14 year old, and so with my 14 year old, we actually dissect like Instagram posts or things that friends are posting. And what does that mean with my 10 year old? Some of the gaming or violence or the flaming statements people say to each other, we just talk about it and then it just calls into question. And now they bring up more things like, “hey, when I was gaming, I saw this” or “you would have hated this part of this game or whatever” Right. And so as long as you start having these conversations, kids want to talk to their parents. I know you sometimes don’t feel that way. And having a teen, I sometimes feel that way. But actually, when you talk with them, they know you care. And it makes the space for those conversations to happen and for them to think about what they’re doing more thoughtfully.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: I agree with that, and I think also asking about the things they’ve seen other people do sometimes not just themselves, because they can feel very invaded if we go right into asking about their own social media, but say, have you ever seen a friend kind of post just for likes or if you ever seen someone post something where it really doesn’t seem like them can be really open the door. Yeah, and I agree. Kids do want to be heard and they may act like they don’t want to talk, but we just have to find those ways in. All right. Well, thank you so much. I am going to introduce now Dr. Sheri Madigan, who is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary. She holds a Canada research chair in determinants of child development. Dr. Madigan received one of the children and screens, children and screens in COVID 19 research grants as well. So welcome, Sheri.

 

[Dr. Sheri Madigan]: Hi. Thanks so much for having me. So I have the pleasure of giving a really brief presentation on some of the research that we’ve been doing and that was supported by children’s and screens. And I want to just talk because I’m going to talk a little bit about mental health, and then I’m going to go into screen time when I’m talking about mental health. What do I mean? So one of the big things I study as a researcher and as a clinician is children’s mental health difficulties. And this is how they’ve been feeling essentially around depression and anxiety. Or have they been feeling sad, hopeless, really having a hard time motivating themselves or during a pandemic? You know, there’s a lot of anxiety because there’s this virus around. Have they had excessive worry, some hyper arousal around that in their body, feeling on edge all the time, looking around, nervous, apprehensive. So that’s sort of what we’re thinking about when we’re talking about depression and anxiety. And one of the things that we’ve studied during the pandemic is how prevalent is that? And so what we did is we actually pulled data from all around the world. And there’s about 80,000 children in this study. You can see the flags here just indicating where the studies came from around the world to see how hard has this been for youth in terms of their mental health. And what we found is that about 1 in 4 youth are telling us during the pandemic, they’ve experienced pretty elevated rates of depression and 1 in 5 are experiencing anxiety. So when we contrast that to what’s been going on before the pandemic, it was about 1 in 10 children were experiencing depression or anxiety that was significant enough that it was interfering with their daily functioning. So we know that kids have really struggled during the pandemic. And we can say that we’re seeing a doubling of rates of depression and anxiety. And I think, you know, part of this webinar is thinking about looking forward. One of the big questions is, will these be sustained? Will what we see children continue to struggle even as we emerge from these waves of the pandemic or learn how to sort of cope with the new normal? So I think that’s something that we need to look out for. We’ve seen that children’s mental health has sort of increased and decreased with restrictions. So we know that the more we keep schools open and the more that we keep them sort of functioning and doing routines as normal, the better off they’ll be. So I think that’s an important takeaway message that I’ll say over the course of this presentation. And just to say that we’re actually seeing this in research being reflected in emergency department visits. So we’re seeing that mental health is up and that there’s sort of an influx in kids going to the emergency department because they’re really struggling with their mental health. So I think that this is something we really need to pay attention to. One of the things that we wanted to learn about more with the support of children and screens is what were some of the factors that were predicting children having an increase in their mental health during the pandemic. So we know that their lives have been enormously disrupted. So one of the things we wanted to see was: How did their shifts and routines and how they were feeling before the pandemic play into that? So we were really looking at some of the predictors of mental distress in use during COVID 19 and one of the studies that we really want to emphasize is that we looked at how they were doing before the pandemic. So that’s really important in mental health research, say, you know, not just how they’re doing now, but how they were doing before the pandemic. So they’re pre COVID mental health. What were some other factors that were going on for them during the pandemic that were impacting their depression in this case, more than just how they were feeling before the pandemic? And I think there’s three important takeaways here. One is how connected they felt with their family really mattered. So when kids were feeling disconnected and these were tweens and that 9 to 11 year range their mental health was suffering. We also saw that children who were getting more screen time were telling us that they weren’t feeling great, that there they were feeling that their mental health was struggling. And we also saw that when kids were getting reduced sleep, they were also not doing well from a mental health perspective. So this really emphasizes the need for these routines that kids need to sort of keep them in a place where they’re feeling that their well-being is in check because they’ve got some more routine. So that’s going to be sort of some of you know, my sort of take home message is this is going to be how important it is to emphasize routines for kids. So you really want to prioritize what we’re saying or the three R’s. So keep these routines like their meals, their screen time, their sleep time and their school really balanced. So get kids to really think and talk about moderation and how they can structure their day. So they’re getting all of those pieces. And we know that when there is consistency and predictability in that day for them, they generally have better well-being. So get back to those routines to really emphasize relationships. So we want to ask them to make a commitment to making meaningful connections. And these can happen Face-To-Face, if possible, with parents, with peers, but they can also happen virtually so when they’re on screens, make that connection meaningful. So meet someone else online and, game together. Or if they’re going to use their screens, FaceTime with the cousin or a friend that they know is really supportive. So make that screen time really meaningful. And then it’s really important to keep things open for kids. We know that when kids are in school, they’re doing a lot better. So I think just making sure we’re prioritizing, keeping schools open and and and making that the last resort actually to curb spread of COVID 19 is so we want to keep schools open because we know that can really help kids with their mental health, especially because about 80% of kids are getting their mental health resources at school. And so when schools are open, those that have mental health resources are open for them as well. If schools have to move into an online program for some reason, we need to keep those mental health resources available to them by making them online as well. So the last thing I’ll say is I think that children are not the immediate face of COVID 19. They haven’t been our biggest medical concern, but I think they’re the face of our future. So we really need to advocate for them. And I think it’s our collective responsibility to try to really give them a voice by advocating to keep schools open and to really focus on getting a routine’s back for them so we can really work on their well-being and make sure that we can start to improve their mental health.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: So are we seeing differences between states in, where in terms of mental health, where we’re or states or cities, at least in Illinois, at city to city, where schools closed versus didn’t close, like what are we seeing?

 

[Dr. Sheri Madigan]: Yeah. So there’s some really good research that’s coming out to suggest that when kids have endured more school closures, their mental health has struggled more significantly than kids who have done some more online programming. And it’s not just it’s not just mental health. So kids’ grades are affected: the kids who have remained in school or done more in school programming versus online, we’re actually seeing a difference in some of the academic functioning for kids and so that some research that’s coming out. And I think that’s, you know, school is a place where lots happens for kids. Right. It’s not just an academic area for them. It’s a place where they get a lot of their fill of their cup with their social interactions. Some kids might get their nutrition from various school based programs. They might have relationships with teachers that are really buffering support for them. They might also get their mental health services at school. So I think we can’t just think of school as an academic area. It’s really a place where kids can get a lot of things, like filling up their wellbeing cup can come from being in school and being present and being interactive in that environment.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: It’s so concerning because we know there’s such an equity concern where, you know, kids who need the most are getting the least. And the kids who were the least positioned to thrive in remote schools with the least support at home, the least connectivity were the ones who were maybe already at schools that were struggling. And then just this is compounded things, whereas people were able to buy their way out of the pandemic, you know, by sending kids to independent schools, for example, even if their local public schools were closed. People who just had the funds to kind of be like, I will buy my kid out of this negative experience, you know, unintentionally and lovingly perpetuated that inequity. Right. And just the fact that at least in many places, independent schools were open while public schools were closed. And we already see such a difference in resources in terms of things like developmental issues or language delays. Are we seeing, you know, delays in picking those up because kids weren’t in buildings? I always get concerned about the kids who missed kindergarten, who had potentially missed early intervention and then also missed things getting picked up in that first year. What are you seeing with that?

 

[Dr. Sheri Madigan]: Yeah, so we are seeing that in the school environment, at least like math scores are down, spelling and reading scores are down. The hope is that with kids back in school, that we’ll see that they actually there’s a bit of a rebound effect there. So I think that’s the hope. But we are seeing that, you know, some kids are. There was definitely an impact of the pandemic on some of their learning. I think with the younger kids and the preschool kids, one of the things that we do see, at least when it comes to the research on screen time and language, is that when kids are in front of screens a lot, they’re spending a lot of time in front of screens. We’re actually seeing that there, that’s associated with poorer language development. And that’s going back to something Stephanie mentioned, which is really just this idea of displacement or missed opportunities. So when kids are on screens a lot, they’re really missing the opportunities for these rich exchanges and conversational turns with other people that we know are so critical to their language development. So kids need to hear language from adults in their environment to learn language. They won’t actually really learn it from the TV. There is a gap between learning that they don’t get from the TV that they get from actual human interaction. So we know that that’s the case. But kids do watch screens. So parents might be wondering, well, how can I make it so that they get the best exposure to language as possible. If you are going to want the kids to watch a bit of screen time, you know, make it educational programming, especially with those preschool kids, make something that has an, you know, Sesame Street where there’s this exchange. Often they get you to say a word, you know, repeat words. You know, it’s developed by educational programmers. So try to make it educational. And then as much as you can, sit down and watch it with them and bridge some of the learning that’s going on, on the screen. So, you know, Elmo is red, you can say, “hey, that’s Elmo and he’s red.” And then they get exposure to what’s on the TV, but they also get exposure to your rich language and that joint attention that you’re forming with them with what’s on the screen. And that can be really helpful for their language development. So, you know, as I think you’ll hear from a lot of us, make the screen time meaningful and as much as possible, make it about a connection point.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: Yeah, I think the challenge, though, obviously, is systemic with parents not having child care and not having access to other things and so the idea that you would watch screens with your kid, I mean, I think it’s a great idea. And we’ve had this research on joint detention for 30 years or more. But at the same time, parents are using tech time to fill their kids’ day, and especially for kids who are still out of daycare. I mean, we’re really talking about this sort of late stage pandemic, but it’s a later stage and kids who are vaccinated versus unvaccinated are in a really different situation. Kids in schools that have reopened are in a different situation. But as several media outlets have covered just this week, a bunch of childcare centers have closed. Some of them are having rolling closures. So you may have a three or four year old home while you’re trying to work. And a lot of workplaces are being even if they were flexible in the beginning, they’re not flexible now or people are trying to reenter the workforce to try to keep, you know, ahead of the ends of eviction, eviction rules changing. So there’s just a lot of reasons why. I think the reality is kids are going to be using both interactive tech and more like viewing tech like TV versus games independently. So another thing you can do is talk about an after. So if you know the formula of a show like Wild Kratts, even if you didn’t see the episode, I think you can afterwards be like, “oh, who is the bad guy or who is the good guy?” Or “tell me how they got away in this one,” because you kind of know. I mean, the good thing about kids TV especially is that it’s so formulaic that even if you missed the episode, you can engage with your kid later, maybe while you’re doing another shared activity. And I also think it’s important that parents know that play that’s based on TV is not bad. They shouldn’t look down on, you know, if they’re again, if they’re playing out the character or if they’re coming up with their own creative play, we can celebrate that and encourage that. Right, that’s part of their interpretation of what’s happening.

 

[Dr. Sheri Madigan]: Yeah, those are really good points. And I think that it’s you know, we have to survive during COVID. So if you need to put your children in front of screens to get through that part of the day, it’s totally understandable. And I’ll reiterate something Stephanie said, which was if you can if you’re not when you’re not working, if you can prioritize off screen time and, you know, have opportunities for those face to face interactions, get outside. We know that that’s so valuable for their development and might actually offset any of that screen time that they receive. So I think it’s about trying to create balance in that day. And when you have those opportunities for meaningful connection, that’s face to face, really trying to prioritize those.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: Thank you so much. This is incredibly helpful. All right. I’m going to introduce Dr. Susan Tapert. She is a professor and vice chair in the Department of Psychiatry and Academic Affairs at the University of California, San Diego. She’s also the associate director and Sipi for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. And she received one of the children and screens Covid 19 research grants. So welcome, Dr. Tapert.

 

[Dr. Susan Tapert]: Thanks so much, Devorah. Can you see my screen in the right way?

 

[Devorah Heitner]: Yes, it looks good.

 

[Dr. Susan Tapert]: Awesome. Thanks. Thanks so much for inviting me here today. I’m really pleased to share with you the results from our research that was supported by children and screens looking kind of at the pre teen age here. And we’re looking at data that comes from a large study called ABCD that I’ll briefly describe. I’ll tell you about how screen use changed in children during the pandemic in this pre-teen age range and how screen time may influence youth well-being. Briefly, ABCD is the adolescent brain cognitive development study. It’s one of the largest NIH funded studies of child development. We did school based recruitment a couple of years ago at 21 research sites around the United States recruiting almost 12,000 kids when they were 9 to 10 years of age. And we’ve now been following them for a couple of years. We will plan to follow them for a total of 10 years. And the study includes looking at screen time, but also looking at neuroimaging and all kinds of bio samples, cognitive testing and interviews about mental health and other things. And as with everywhere, the pandemic hit as we were doing our study. So it provided an opportunity to look at multiple features of pandemic related changes on youth development. Thanks to children and screens, we were able to add in to the study, a survey that we sent 7 times to the youth and the teens who are in the ABCD study. It’s about a 10 minute survey. Folks are compensated for filling it out. And we received surveys from over 9,500 youth who’ve completed at least one of these surveys, which included questions about their screen time and also the parents’ survey. We asked about their screen time, too. So here’s a snapshot of what we found. There’s a lot of data, but here’s sort of what we found. So looking at before the pandemic because fortunately we had data on these kids before then and then kind of at roughly every other month thereafter. We did see increases, as others have reported, in screen time. So we saw in particular a jump for both boys and girls in interactive screen time. So that’s kind of like video games. Social media use pretty stable rates actually in this sample of the less interactive screen time. So passively viewing shows and looking at YouTube videos and stuff like that. Even a slight decrease for boys and engaging in those kinds of activities and breaking down this interactive screen time a little bit more. We see in a way, boys and girls playing catch up with each other in increasing their time. So we saw that boys at this pre-teen age before the pandemic were a little less in their social media use, but it increased during this time on average and more time spent gaming, we saw girls kind of engaging in this more as the pandemic started. And that has been maintained. We also looked at the relationships between engagement in these activities and youth, subjective well-being. So we see that screen time increased during the pandemic, especially kind of interactive screen time use, which looks sort of like attempts to interact with your friends, with others. However, this does provide more communication with friends. However, there’s still kind of a subjective, worse sense of well-being linked to the extent to which a young person increased their screen time. And the flip side, the kids who didn’t increase their screen time all that much had a little bit of a better subjective sense of well-being, like feeling like, you know, I’m doing OK. So both before and during the pandemic, both active and passive screen time use was and continues to be linked to higher feelings of loneliness. So higher rates of responding to questions that say I feel lonely and raving, that it’s higher for kids who are using screens more. That’s just consistent and that’s independent of the pandemic. So as we pull together all these data and also we’re going to be able to look at how these experiences actually shape brain development over this time in life. But meanwhile, we have some tips for parents. So as Sheri and Stephanie have talked about, routines are really important. We saw that families who maintained regular routines and kids who were able to maintain a higher, even increased amount of sleep in the beginning, parts of pandemic tended to have fewer levels of stress, pandemic related stress and lower levels of depression and anxiety, too, in terms of the remote schooling, which I hope we won’t have to go back to very much. But when that was happening, when parents were able to help as needed. Kids’ emotions about school tended to be more positive. And the flipside is when kids are in remote school, parents can’t help that much. Kids tend to have really negative ratings about their school situation. We’ve also looked at substance use during this time as well. The more that parents kind of know where their kids are and that the teens feel like their parents know where they are, the less substance use for kids during this kind of pre-teen ages, again, sort of ages 11 to 14 is what we’re focusing on here. So maintaining a physical exercise, routines, interpersonal relationships, direct one on one contact and keeping a good sleep level seem to help promote resilience during the stressful times of the pandemic. And I just want to really thank again, children and screens for supporting this work and for the National Institutes of Health, for supporting in the ABCD study.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: So with sleep, I know we’ve seen some districts, including in the state of California, where you’ve got now a national statewide law. Right, on high schools moving the start time forward over the next couple of years. But do you think schools are responding to this data about kids and sleep, because this is one of the maybe positives or, you know, silver linings that we could look at as a policy directive?

 

[Dr. Susan Tapert]: That’s a great question, Devorah. I think, you know, there’s a long body of research that has shown how adolescents have this shift in sleep. And I think there has been a lot of response to that. It takes time. It’s kind of slow for policy changes to kick in. There’s a lot of different studies that we’re seeing that are suggesting the importance of sleep in the pandemic in particular and I don’t think there’s been an opportunity for policy changes there, but I’m really glad to see the later start times.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: Yeah, it’s exciting. And I think I do think that we can think about tech and interactive tech and especially personal phones and smartphones as being one of the things that’s keeping kids up in addition to that circadian change. And I wonder, what can families do? They’re like, what if your kid is up like gaming until 2:00 in the morning or, you know, checking social?

 

[Dr. Susan Tapert]: Great question. I think the most important thing is to keep screens out of the kid’s bedroom, even into the teenage years, and establishing that as a habit as much as you can. So a lot of times kids are going to have a computer in their room because that’s where maybe they’re doing their homework and stuff. But if you can have, you know, I don’t know, take the mouse and the keyboard out at night, it’ll reduce their temptation to get up and look at stuff when they wake up in the night. Like we all wake up in the night having the phone in a different location during the sleep time. And really, you know, no need for a TV in the kid’s bedroom, if possible.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: It’s even the school devices. And that’s a place where a lot of parents feel less empowered because it’s like, oh, but the school sent home this iPad. And kids are very smart about saying, oh, but I need the iPad for school. And I think that’s one place where the parents can push back and say, well, let me find out the grade level expectations, because I don’t actually think you do have seven hours of homework in fourth grade. And this iPad. So let me like. Fine, let me let me fact check that with your teacher or with the school, because schools usually do have a homework policy. And often, you know, if homework is taking that kind of time, there may be a distraction situation going on. What about adult anxiety? We had a question come in from one of our viewers about adult anxiety versus kids. Do we have data comparing changes in depression and anxiety in adults versus kids during the pandemic?

 

[Dr. Susan Tapert]: Yes, we do have a little bit of that. We saw quite a bit of increased stress for families, especially in the early months of the pandemic, as people were kind of figuring out what to do. A lot of stress regarding changes in school, going remote and going back and forth, or even if their own child was on a quarantine and going back and forth. Those transitions are extremely stressful. And then, of course, kind of economic hardship related stressors are huge for parents. We have seen that if parents. I mean, this is sort of a no brainer. But just to put it out there, if the parents were kind of reverting to using our. Hall to cope with those stressors that did seem to result in other downside events, so would want to discourage turning to the alcohol as a way to cope.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: And what about dopamine? So we hear so much about dopamine in terms of kids and screen time. How do we get them to turn away from these dopamine producing activities to, you know, chores, homework and all the sort of less exciting stuff we all have to do?

 

[Susan Tapert]: It’s such a great question. And I just want to say, we’re not measuring dopamine levels specifically in our study. So it’s sort of an inference, but it’s obviously really rewarding to be engaged with social media and bright, flashy things. So I think setting expectations and routines is kind of the best tool we have to revert to. It’s so hard. There’s no easy answer. I certainly struggle with this with my son extensively. But, you know, having kind of one on one conversations to point out to your child when they might notice that their screen use is interfering with some things and to kind of talk about that so you can establish some kind of household rules and guidelines collaboratively rather than forcing it on them, especially as the kids move more into the adolescent years.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: Yeah, I think kids can get very excited about brain science and understanding why, you know, certain why why certain things actually get less fun if you overdo them or even if we’re going to talk with kids about things like pornography. It is really interesting to see how responsive kids are to the brain science, actually, and thoughtful and interested in thinking about sleep is another area where sometimes as a parent, we may want to displace our authority to like a coach or a teacher, because our kids may be less, you know, developmentally wanting to just hear it all from us. But teenagers do want to, I mean, I once said in front of an audience of teenagers who were actually like my last speaking gig live before the pandemic. And I was with these teens in Oregon. And I said, if you had access to a free legal drug with no negative side effects and it made you smarter, better looking and more athletic, would you want it? And they were like, yeah. And I was like, “it’s sleep yall!”. And they were like, oh, and they’re all sitting there like holding their coffee cups, like, oh, you know? So I think that’s it is really important to, you know, sort of proselytize for sleep, but also let your kids coach or singing teacher or someone that they can listen to. That’s not you maybe proselytize for sleep to them in a different way, and that might get them. I was gotten as a teenager with the promise of maybe being taller. It’s like, oh, that sounds good. Thank you so much. This research is going to help a lot of people, and we really appreciate what you have shared. I am going to introduce Vicki Harrison. Vicki Harrison is a master’s in social work. She has over 20 years experience working within the field of public health, education and mental health sectors, developing and managing innovative, community based programs at the local, state and national levels. As the program director for Stanford’s Psychiatry Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing, she implements a broad portfolio of community based subjects promoting well-being, early intervention and increased access to mental health services, particularly for young people aged 12 to 25. Welcome, Vicki, and thank you so much for being here.

 

[Vicki Harrison]: Thank you so much, Devorah. Great. And I’m going to share a lot of the work that I do with young people in our center. I’m not a researcher. Unlike the other panelists. I do more work developing programs and implementing them with young people. And the first thing I just wanted to start with was just taking stock of everything that happened during the pandemic, which I’m calling kind of a cultural moment, because there really is a lot that happened in a very short amount of time, and a lot of it was very stressful and overwhelming and, you know, would be considered sort of traumatic for a lot of people. And so you kind of look at all of this on one slide. You can see how overwhelming this year, two years almost has been for all of us, not only just the health crisis itself, which has claimed over 700,000 lives just in America now. You know, there was the insecurity related to food insecurity, housing, economic loss of jobs, obviously the educational impacts and milestone impacts. We talked about the individual and collective trauma that we all went through this experience. But we also, depending on our own circumstances, had a compounding traumatic effect if we didn’t have the same sort of support or resources. There was a lot of racial violence and police brutality that was very heavily publicized, hate crimes within the Asian community. The whole presidential election. I mean, I’m just we’re all reliving this as I go down this list. But then the other things I added here were just some significant milestones in tech in general. So the Social Dilemmas for Premiere on Netflix, but all of us were trapped at home. So a lot of people watched it. And it was really a wake up call for a lot of people. And then you had a sitting U.S. president. Who is deplatformed by several major social media companies. So I think it’s just worth taking a minute to think about this, because all of this happened during this period. We really received most of this information and observed this and witnessed it through screens. And it was a lot that happened in a very short amount of time. So some of the things that I look back on is obviously we know that we rely very heavily on tech and we’re very grateful for it during this period. It literally kept many of us alive as we ordered our food and everything through it and kept our work and our livelihood going. But we also were kind of forced to slow down and take stock of our priorities. One of the other benefits that we were excited to see in the mental health space was just that telehealth was a huge increased access point. That was a problem before. So the barriers were released there that made that more or more of an access point so more young people could access mental health care. And the conversations about mental health were normalized out of necessity. People recognize that mental health is the thing. We’re all experiencing it and dealing with it. But I think also the flaws and concerns with our technology system also became more mainstream. So I say here that many of us spent nearly all waking hours on tech, that we really still wanted it to end. Right. So it really showed us how it has limits. It’s not that it doesn’t do everything for us in the way that makes us happy. So we really are our healthiest when we strike that balance with our media use. And we have an opportunity now to really reinvent how we live and flip the script on how busy and overscheduled we were and maybe our kids were before the pandemic. And you’ve heard all of us talking about structure and how important the structure is. And I think that’s something that we need to take with us. And there was the study by Rosen et. al that came out in August that showed that structure even going outside, having more sleep. Everything that we’re telling you that you’re hearing about from the other panelists. It really is associated with reduced psychopathology in children and adolescents. Media literacy and critical thinking are just essential skills now because we are so media saturated. And I’m going to let one of our young people make this point better than me. So I am going to switch to a video quickly. And this is from a panel that we did last week with a young high school student. And she was asked the question, how has your relationship changed with technology since the pandemic?

 

I think that over quarantine, I’ve learned to be more and mindful of how I use technology and also social media. For example, like on Instagram and Tik Tok, there’s a lot of posts that kind of bring me down a little bit or make me feel insecure. And they point out insecurities. And I think just over time I’ve realized, oh, that’s not okay. I should probably leave the app. And then there’s also this other, I guess, app. That’s called reddit. And there’s this whole kind of forum of people who are applying to college. And it gets just really toxic. And people brag about their achievements. And it’s just I realized, oh, that’s not OK for me either. Like I should just work on myself. There’s no reason for me to look at these other students who are doing these amazing things. You know, I just gotta keep on working on what I’m doing. So I think that that’s changed positively because I realize how to use social media and just like my phone in general in a new light and new way. And so I’m kind of thankful for that. I’m happy that I kind of realize the toxicity that’s going around. So, yeah.

 

[Vicki Harrison]: She really summed it up pretty well. And I think that that’s one positive that came out for her and hopefully for a lot of others, is that they really did have to become more mindful of how they use tech. And they had an opportunity to just be on it all the time and saw that it was limited. And so I think that’s a real positive. I also just want to point out that, you know, we talk a lot about screen time and it’s something that we’ve tried to move away from, but it’s also not the extent of a parent’s role. And really our role as parents is to be involved in what a young person is doing with technology, just as you are with school or with their friends or what party they’re going to this weekend. It’s really something that you need to stay involved in, and it’s part of their overall diet and your role as a parent, and that there are ways that you can stay involved and still give them their own sense of privacy. And obviously that is going to change as they mature the level of your involvement. But they really do need your help making sense of what they’re encountering on an offline. And I just wanted to point out that there really was an increase in race and gender based hate and harassment online, especially during the pandemic period. This report from Vicki right out in comments in media showed that quite an astonishing number of young people are encountering body shaming, racist, sexist and homophobic comments on social media when they are engaging. And those are not small numbers. And so it’s really something that is part of the experience. And so, again, being aware of what your young person is being exposed to, helping that process, that is pretty important. And just recognizing that they are having access to this information regardless of their age, it’s pretty it’s pretty pervasive.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: So one question is, how can we recognize those special risks and what kinds of conversations and topics can we use to support students and young people through this transition? I think the old school kind of media literacy class or digital citizenship education doesn’t quite rise to the moment of what happens when your fourth grader is called a racial slur on Roblox.

 

[Vicki Harrison]: Yes, so I knew what parents can talk to their kids about is, I think, just being involved in what they’ve been experiencing, because some young people might not share that because they’re embarrassed. Maybe they weren’t supposed to be on social media when it happened. And so maintaining that open dialogue is hard, but it’s going to be what’s best for the young person because they don’t have anyone to process it with, potentially, other than their parents.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: And it sounds like there is something you were trying to say before I ask that question, so do you want to go back to your research presentation?

 

[Vicki Harrison]: Yes. Thank you. Yeah, I was just going to show this looking forward slide, which is just some takeaways of how we can support young people through the cultural moment. And, you know, we are on the tail end, hopefully, of this pandemic. But I think one thing that we still want to do is to allow space for the grief and the frustration that young people have been feeling. I think a lot of us wanted to jump in to fix it and make it better. But they really do need time to just express that this is hard. This is not what they wanted for their adolescence, and they need to have that time. Also, remembering how it felt to be so isolated and that we like face to face contact. And so we want that balance between real life and technology. And a lot of young people were very resourceful and found ways to express themselves, create meaning in their lives, and connect in new ways. So we want to hold on to that. Also, the mindfulness and reflection and self care that we all came up with, I hope will bring those with us. And obviously, we want to improve the technology space. And this is a chance to maybe demand some more accountability. I just wanted to quickly reference a resource for those that want to hear directly from some of the young people, the speed for media project that we have as a peer mentoring campaign where young people are posting their strategies for how they use social media in ways that protect their mental health. And there is a parent guide that they developed completely by themselves. So if you find it on the goodformedia website, it’s just something that might be a resource that’s in their own words and how parents can engage with their young people. That’s not in such a punitive or accusatory tone. So they have like instead of this, say, this section, that might be really helpful.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: Thank you. So I have other questions about just how we, again, can programmatically address this, like when I think about the classic computer lab class with the digital citizenship class. And partly the problem is we’re always like 10 years behind, you know, like these classes are designed for computer labs and kids have been carrying around their own devices for 10 years. And certainly if they didn’t have a device, they were sent one with remote school by their school and in many, many districts around the country. So how do we respond to kids experiencing these negative experiences, like, again, the racial slur or the homophobic slur or the gender based slur on, you know, roadblocks in fourth grade or on Instagram in eighth grade? Like, how can we equip them to deal with it in a moment? And how can we also make sure that it’s not our student who are who are enacting these harms as well? Because I think we both want to address the kids who experience these negative experiences and the kids who are, you know, doing some of this stuff.

 

[Vicki Harrison]: Yeah. I mean, it’s not an easy question. I think that, you know, first of all, you want to decide with your young person and ask them, like, are you getting more benefits than negativity on this site or with this video game? Right. So you need to make sure that there is a benefit to them to be on it, because otherwise it might just be a toxic space, because that’s what you hear from some of the older teens as they really recognize where they are feeling good and they’ve stopped using those are going to those spaces. So that is the first option. You can just remove yourself, which might be best in some of these spaces. But then if it is something that you’ve just had a one time encounter, I think it’s a learning opportunity, just as it would be if it was happening on a playground. Right, where you’re talking about how to advocate for yourself or, you know, how to report it if there’s a reporting mechanism. So I think it’s just going through that process with the unperson, depending on the circumstance.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: Yeah, I think the playground analogy is such a good one. And then there’s also some ways that it because I’ve made that analogy before, too, but then there are other ways where it doesn’t hold up, because if an adult was talking to your kid at the playground, you would know it was an adult because you had visually see like, oh, why is that adult talking to my little kid? But an adult could be talking to your kid, you know, in Fortnite or whatever, and you don’t know who they are. So it is really tricky or like even older kids versus younger kids. And so many parents have shared with me kids having these problematic and tricky encounters on the bus, for example, where it’s like, oh, somebody thought it would be fun to show your first grader some porn, you know, and they did, because they’re multiple ages of kids. And so how do you navigate that? I want to transition us, but actually, while everyone gets back on to answer larger questions, can you share some of the resources for parents that your young people develop, for that book? Because with the print, at least from my old eyes, it was way too small. I couldn’t read any of it. So if you can share some of that verbally, I would love to hear maybe the top couple of suggestions that are especially memorable related to this panel. And then everyone can come join us and we’ll answer a bunch more questions from our viewers.

 

[Vicki Harrison]: Sure. Yeah. So let’s see, one of them is instead of saying you’re addicted to your phone. I’m taking it away. You can try suggesting they use the time management apps, gently reminding them that it’s important to finish tasks and attend to their priorities first instead of saying you spend all of your time on your phone and never talk to your family. Make usage restrictions minimal, immediately taking away your child’s devices or access to social media can make healthy habits harder to sustain and makes them less eager to participate. So there’s some examples like that just sort of in youth language where the way that we typically might say it as a parent would be to shut down the communication.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: That’s really helpful, and I think I can open that question up to others as well. Are there other things that maybe have come from your research this year with young people, especially things that, you know, if parents are listening to this right now, I’m thinking, well, I wish I knew better what was going on with my tween my teen or my elementary school or what are some things that kids say that you wish you could just broadcast to all parents?

 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: We have a similar project where we’re working with youth to create a parenting guide. So it’s youth making suggestions on how to be parented around media. And there’s often this disconnect about how adults understand how youth use media. Right. And so oftentimes, like your phone is your social support. It’s the people you’re communicating with. And when you’re having a hard time, they take it away. They’ve just taken away your social support often. And it’s not this black and white kind of issue. And even if it’s going to be taken away, if you snatch it out of their hand and they’re in the middle of a text conversation, the other person doesn’t know what happened to them. Did they offend them? Did they get hit by a bus leg or what happened? It’s stressful for another person often, too, right? So there’s all these ways in which parents should just be more mindful about how they’re engaging of like, OK, I’m going to take your phone away. Finish that text or finish whatever. And we’re taking it away or I’m worried about your use. Why do you need to connect and having that discussion versus these very black and white and extreme responses? And so you talk a lot about it, they just don’t understand it. And so they’re just too harsh. That’s a common one.

 

[Dr. Sheri Madigan]: I can also sort of bring up something that happened at home to where I learned a lot from it. But my son was saying I had downloaded a new app . Of course, what we do is we go and we read about the app and we learn together about what the functioning of the app or what the age range recommendations are for it. And then we decided to download it together. And he came back to me the other day after he played on it and said, can I log on to that app because I want to get my gifts. You know, realizing that every day there’s like a little gift. And I thought, well, what a great teachable moment, you know? So we sat down and we talked about, like, well, why is that gift there? You know, where they press it and they get coins or whatever it is. So I think, you know, using rather than saying like, you don’t get that app anymore, say, well, why do you think that’s there? You know, what would be the purpose of giving you a gift every day? And then, you know, and he’s 10. So for him, like he wouldn’t know. He just wants to press the button. So he gets the coins. So I think you can also take what’s going on with some of these devices, know that they’re going to use these apps, but try to make them teachable moments and enhance that communication around screens so that they can make, you know, really good choices moving forward to. And the earlier you start those conversations, I think the better because it teaches them how to be digitally smart. And I think that we need to kind of prioritize that, given that we know that they’re going to be using these and that the older they get as adolescents, the more they use without being in our immediate environment might be in their room or somewhere else. So we need to kind of equip them with as many digitally good habits as we can. And that was just sort of a learning opportunity and an experience that I had recently.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: I think it’s really important not to like harsh on their taste culture and say like what you care about is stupid. Right. But and obviously we wouldn’t maybe see that directly, but by snatching it out of their hand or, you know, rolling our eyes at the content they watch and instead try to understand, like what’s drawing you to that YouTube channel or that Tik Tok or whatever, it’s that’s their jam. And also, I strongly advise parents to not pick your battles. Like if something is hateful, that’s completely off limits in my home and probably in yours as well. But if something is just dumb, I’m going to pick my battles, you know, like maybe I think squirrel falling off of stuff is less hilarious than my 12 year old thinks. But I don’t find that to be harmful content. I’m not worried what’s going to happen to him if he engages in a community around squirrels falling off of stuff like I don’t feel like that’s where he’s going to get recruited to something bad. So I really have to pick my battles. And for me, that would be like pornography, anything hateful, anything trying to polarize. Right. And those are really it. Anything else is like, well, if that’s how you want to spend your time, but also you want to also remember to, you know, do the things that other things that you care about. And it’s about that balanced conversation. I have had that conversation similar to Sheri about the streak’s, because a lot of kids don’t want to unplug from their 24 hour volleys of communication on Snapchat and they get very stressed about the streets. And I’m like, why do you think the app wants you checking in with 100 people every 24 hours? Like who is that really good for? And getting them to engage that skepticism about maybe why that particular affordance was developed. We have a question from a listener. Barbara Weir has asked the question. I’ve heard the term and read articles on the trend. Americans are languishing. How can we get out of this trend? And I think for us, especially at answering that question in relation to parenting or families like our families languishing, what does that mean and how can we maybe move forward?

 

[Dr. Susan Tapert]: That is such an interesting question, and I suppose the same could be said, another country is too potentially. I think here, you know, we’ve been hit by divisiveness pretty heavily. And I really like the idea of kind of helping walk your kind of pre teenage kid through thinking about what the media companies are up to, what their motives are, and the impact that certain kind of things they see or having critical thinking.

 

[Vicki Harrison]: I can just add to that, I mean, I think often we think of the opposite of languishing as flourishing, and I know there’s been some work done in the past few years around adolescent flourishing. What that what that is how you define that. And I think that that’s something especially as related to this topic of coming out of COVID, that, you know, we really want to try to give young people some agency back because they had a lot taken away from them and they didn’t have control over their lives for a long period. And so if there are one or two things that really give them a lot of joy or they feel really excited about learning. I think trying to focus on those and nurture those and let them explore those interests is really going to help them feel connected, feel empowered. And that would be what I would consider flourishing to explore more of that and not have it fit into this, you know, pre-COVID norms of what you need to do and check off to get into your college of choice. It’s really what brings you joy in what makes you flourish.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: And we have a really interesting question, and this is something probably we’ve all wondered about and considered in our practices. Is screen use really the driver and the cause of some of the increased anxiety that we’re seeing, or are there other causes, global pandemic, economic and environmental instability, some of the political issues that Vicki mentioned, lots of lots of things going on, incredible violence and polarization. Are those maybe the drivers? And then screens are the coping mechanism.

 

[Dr. Sheri Madigan]: I mean, I think that’s a really good question. It’s like a cause, you know, in our studies, correlational or causational, and we often don’t have the answer to that. But what I think is really important in the literature is to know that screens is one factor among many that has been shown to predict some of children’s outcome. It can be used for good when it’s meaningful. We know that kids actually it can be helpful for their well-being. But when it’s these long durations of abuse, we generally see that that hasn’t been as great for kids. But, you know, I study screen time, but I also study parenting. I study neighborhood influences. I study teaching influence. Like, you know, kids are situated in an ecology of a variety of different nested layers of influence that I think we need to remember. That screentime is one piece of that. But it’s a piece of a big puzzle. And in some ways, maybe that’s good for kids because, you know, they can be influenced and they can flourish in a lot of other different environments. And one predictor isn’t the be all and end all. They can actually be influenced for good and sometimes more negatively by a variety of different influences. So I think it’s important to talk about screen time in the context that there is a lot of other predictors. But what I will say is I think screentime is a very modifiable predictor. So we can talk to kids about their screen use, we can talk about the meaningfulness around it, just like we can talk to them about sleep. So sleep is, as you mentioned earlier, a great modifiable factor. We can get kids back into a routine where sleep is a priority, where physical activity is a priority, and where screens can be modified. It’s a lot harder to modify them in the neighborhood that they live in. But. So I think I guess thinking about it, that it’s these nested layers of influence, but that there are some more immediate ones around kids like sleep, screen time and physical activity that we can intervene on more rapidly and hopefully make a change for them.

 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: And to add to that, I would say that it’s important to think that it’s not a ubiquitous influence on people either, and increasingly our methods are getting more sophisticated to try to figure out for whom under which conditions media and screens are good or bad. And, you know, you get a lot of press like it, it causes eating disorders or is it cause or whatever. And it’s really clear for studies that have really gone in depth in our temples that it’s a really small strata of children that are most at risk for these more extreme outcomes. And other ones are just fine, and some actually are doing really well. And I think our next step as researchers really is to better understand under what conditions for whom within this ecology and other factors, how screens fit in and not be so black and white about our thinking.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: Absolutely. I mean, I think the question of screen time is like, you know, is this a kid who’s reading to their cousins on Zoome? Are they interacting with their strong interests, like their anime discord? And they’re like really jamming out some fanfiction, you know, on Tumblr. Are they creating versus consuming? I think there’s so many questions about, you know, are they strengthening relationships that are also IRL relationships? Are they learning something in a strong interest area? Are they having negative experiences with social comparison? Are they being influenced negatively around eating or body image, around racism, around other kinds of, you know, negative messages? And so it really depends like what screen time? Is it predominantly consuming or is it more interactive or is it creative? And also, what do they have anyone in their lives to bounce those ideas off of to reality check what they’re seeing. To make sure that, you know, if they’re getting misleading information or news that’s, you know, not very accurate, that they can fact check that and they have the skills to do it. And this is where we see, you know, the continuum of institutions. Libraries are working really hard on this. I was part of a research study last year that showed that parents aren’t looking to libraries to support their kids on media literacy because they don’t know that that’s possible. So, you know, libraries have a lot of work to do to brand themselves in that way. So people know to go to their library for information on things like what’s a good app versus a mediocre app or how do I help my kid know about these news stories? Schools are doing it. Parents are doing it. What can we do with these viral negative trends? Like what do we do with this Tic-Tac challenge to like go hit a teacher or steal stuff at school? Like how do we counter? How do we get it?

 

[Dr. Susan Tapert]: I would go to the kind of questioning kids about it and having those one on one conversations when, you know, to the extent that you can be up on what’s happening in the social media stuff your kids are looking at so you can have a discussion about it and kind of bring it outside of that box.

 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: We had a fun experience recently because we’re in a beach town that is on the beach. You often see young girls posting really provocative kind of photos with the waves. And increasingly, during summer vacation, we see parents taking pictures of their child provocatively, which sends a totally different message about what’s appropriate or not. And so we’re at the beach of my 14 year old and we start talking about it. And then I said, well, let’s do the same thing. And she posed her dad in all the same poses. So we like replicate it. And then we did Side-By-Side screen captures of that influencer pose and her dad’s pose, which was pretty awesome. But it generated this really deep conversation. And then when she shared it with her friends and they talked about it and it was sort of unpacking these norms. 

And I think we need to think out of the box about how we help children develop these critical thinking skills about what’s around them and what’s being passed on.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: Vicki, what do you think, I mean, as someone who’s working sometimes to support institutions in making decisions like how could a school leader or someone, you know, respond to that, especially if they’re actually seeing the results? Like I sometimes I think school leaders pass on these viral trends and nobody in that community actually heard of the trend. And I’m like, oh, great. You just, you know, unleashed this trend on your town in Ohio where no one heard of it. But maybe if it’s if it’s happening, like if you’re seeing destruction, what can they do?

 

[Vicki Harrison]: Now, I mean, I think you raise part of the challenge, which is a lot of times, these viral hoaxes or challenges. There’s a whole range of different things that happen on social media. A lot of times they’re not as big as they become because the media amplifies them, and then this moral panic sort of sets in. So I think there’s a push to work with media a little bit to not publicize some of this, because it really isn’t. I think the goal I think they see is to warn people about it, but it ends up having the opposite effect, which is like, you know, spreading farther. So I and I think like an educator, it’s an opportunity for a teachable moment about your choices and your actions. And I mean, these behaviors could originate in an offline discussion with friends who just think it’s fun to do a prank. So it’s just social media just allows it to spread faster, farther and quicker. So it’s just more dangerous in that way. But it’s really a behavior that a young person is engaging in that has nothing to do with social media other than they might have gotten the idea there.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: And can we ask our kids for the ways that they want to be intentional about their device use? I mean, I’ve actually seen teenagers challenge one another, even within a peer group to sort of do better. But what’s a good way for parents who may be listening to this, to open up that conversation with their kids, to get their kids on board with setting some intentions?

 

[Dr. Susan Tapert]: Adolescents, sometimes it’s interesting to ask a teen to reflect back on how their screen time has changed and how they have come to be more aware of what they’re doing and its impact on them, and maybe even that they have made some changes on their own. I’ve certainly done this with my son quite a few times, and it’s been very beneficial for him to think through. Well, I really I’m not a sucker for these buying stuff within the app and things like that anymore.

 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: I think we only–

 

[Dr. Sheri Madigan]: oh, go ahead, Stephanie. Yeah. Want me to go? OK, OK. The only thing I was going to say is just taking on something Stephanie said and like building on Susan’s comment. It’s just, you know, you might have five different conversations with each child. So. Because I think if. Every kid presents a little bit differently in terms of how they use screens, so I have one child who can pop off, no problem. I’ll say screen John’s got to go off, coses it. The other one, it’s usually there’s a bit of an uproar that happens when I asked to close it. So you might have to tailor your conversations to kind of meet the individual needs of each kid and your family, and they’re going to change a little bit. So for the kid that can pop it off really quickly, you can say what makes it so easy for you to turn that off, because that’s great. What’s that coping strategy for you? What’s working for you? Where’s the other child? You might actually have to make some different strategies where you have a timer and you say when the timer goes off, I really want you to learn to close that. And you’re going to have to be more mindful about your approaches in communicating and trying to get them to monitor screen use, because it’s really hard for them to close it up when it’s time. So just to note that we have to like when we’re thinking about for whom and under which conditions, that’s sort of how we would tailor some of our messaging for kids, because every kid gives us a little bit of something different in the house. So try some strategies with one kid that might be in your home. It might not work for all your children. You might have to actually be flexible in your approach.

 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: And I would add to that, as someone who studies near from diaper’s through college media, that parents, you know, you hear us all the time, parents are your first and most important teacher. That is true for media. And I think as adults, we often don’t think what we’re modeling and what the messages we’re conveying all the time. And it can start at very young ages, but it’s never too late. We recently published a study in which for middle schoolers, when your parents or other adults ask your permission before they post about you or they show you that image before they post those teens, when they are tweens, when they start posting, do the same rates and they have more privacy and protecting and respectful behaviors. And so the more you do these things that are mindful, purposeful with discussion, that model, the kind of behaviors you want your children to have, they’re going to do that more, too. And so it’s not all about changing them. We should really think about what we’re doing too.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: That modeling is so important. I’ve been suggesting that two parents for years and I’ve had parents who didn’t even realize how stressed their children were about the paparazzi, adults they were living with until they stopped doing it or started asking permission, and their kids were visibly relieved. So they didn’t even know it was a problem until they stopped, which is, I think, really powerful. We need to transition to kind of some final thoughts. And I’m wondering about this opportunity that we all have with this conversation that’s going on with the whistleblower and mental health, you know, and kids. So anything that you would like to share as a final thought, whether it’s how to kind of capitalize in some ways on this moment in time where there’s this incredible conversation going on around kids and mental health and social media, or any final thoughts from your research and the ways parents can put some of the things that you’ve learned from your research into practice? That would be really helpful.

 

[Dr. Sheri Madigan]: So I’m happy to go first. I think one of the things I would just emphasizes is to make screens as meaningful as possible and as points of connection with others when you can and to really prioritize connection. So even though there’s a lot of stress around us to try to kind of separate ourselves from that a little bit and make sure we’re getting one on one with kids and prioritizing offline activities as much as possible with the younger kids, because those are the guys I study, you know, make sure they’re rich and sort of dyadic exchanges and play and make offline activities as fun as possible.

 

[Dr. Susan Tapert]: I would say talking to your teen about what they’re looking at, what they’re seeing, being as involved as you can be in the content of what they’re interacting with in their screen time.

 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: I have to agree, being involved, being mindful about what you’re doing as a model, and then also having open communication and what that looks like is going to change with different ages when they’re really little. You said like, look at the screen and what they’re doing. You should check and they should do it in the same room as you. As much as possible, those kinds of things. And as they get older, they have to develop more autonomy. And you want them to be very functional in a digital world when they leave home. So you don’t want to read every text and hover over their shoulders, but you can have meaningful conversations about what they’re doing. You can see if you’re allowed to follow them on social media or talk about things in more open ways. And so it’s going to tailor as you get older that don’t give up as a parent, your role involves all contexts, including the digital ones.

 

[Vicki Harrison]: I would just add to that, I mean, as we’ve seen from this week in the testimony, I mean, this is a long way to go to really make these spaces fully supported for our young people. So they do need the support of their parents to help them use them in positive ways. But that said, also, they have a lot of wisdom themselves. And I think that there’s some really key questions that we’ve talked about. But also, what would you want to tell these politicians about how to improve this platform? What would you tell your younger sister before they get their first advice? Because you might be surprised at just how insightful they are. And it’ll also help them do some critical thinking about it.

 

[Devorah Heitner]: I think that’s a wonderful transition to bringing our fearless leader, Pam, back to convene us and close out this webinar, and I really appreciate everyone’s insights and definitely, you know, kids do have tremendous wisdom on this front, even young children, but certainly adolescents have real insights to share. And so those conversations are very important.

 

[Dr. Pam Hurst-Della Pietra]: Well, thank you, Devorah, Stephanie, Sherri, Susan and Vicki for being with us today and for sharing all of your valuable lessons that you’ve learned and your wonderful insights about the future. And thanks to all of you as participants for joining us as well. When you leave the webinar, you’ll be asked to complete a short survey. Please take a moment to let us know what you thought of the webinar and your ideas for future webinars to continue learning about this topic. Be sure to visit our website at www.childrenandscreens.com and read our tips for parents and other resources. We’ll post a video of today’s webinar on our YouTube channel to which we encourage you again to subscribe. And we hope you will share resources with your fellow parents, teachers, clinicians, researchers, as well as your friends. For more about children and screens, please follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. The account shown on your screen. Our Ask the Experts webinar series continues on Wednesday, October 20th, when we explore the relatively uncharted world of social media influencers and kid influencers. We hope to see you there. Thanks again for being here today. Everyone stay safe and well.