Silicon Valley parents take their kids offline

A new digital divide is looming in the US. Children from poorer families often spend the whole day behind a screen, while wealthy parents are trying to get their children off their smartphones.

You can already see it happening. In wealthy neighbourhoods, old-fashioned preschools focused on physical play are in vogue. Meanwhile, the state of Utah has funded an online education programme for preschoolers that reaches around ten thousand children. The organisation has already announced that this digital preschool will be rolled out with federal money to Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho and Montana in 2019.

According to research by Common Sense Media, an independent media watchdog, teenagers from lower-income families spend an average of 8 hours and 7 minutes a day on screen entertainment, compared with 5 hours and 42 minutes for peers from higher-income families. (In this study, each screen was counted separately: one hour of texting while watching TV counted as two hours of screen time.) Two studies that also looked at ethnic background found that white children use screens considerably less than children from African American and Latino families. And parents themselves notice a growing divide between public and private schools in the same neighbourhood. At the private Waldorf School of the Peninsula, very popular with Silicon Valley executives, screens are avoided. A little further on, the public Hillview Middle School advertises its iPad-based education.

Psychologist Richard Freed wrote a book about the risks of screen use for children and how to reconnect them with the real world. He divides his time between talks to packed halls in Silicon Valley and his practice with less well-off families in the San Francisco area. For those families, he is often the first person to tell parents that limiting screen use can help reduce their child’s concentration and behavioural problems. ‘I go from giving talks in Palo Alto [the very wealthy heart of Silicon Valley] to consultations in Antioch [a poorer town hit hard by the housing crisis], where I’m the first to point out these dangers to them,’ says Freed. What worries him most is the work of fellow psychologists who help tech companies make their apps so incredibly addictive. They are well versed in the techniques of ‘persuasive design’, in other words manipulating screen users. A few examples: YouTube’s autoplay feature, the counter of ‘likes’ on Instagram that ticks up like a slot machine, and the ‘streak’ icon on Snapchat.

Smartphones banned

‘At first the digital divide was about lack of access to technology. Now that everyone has access, the digital divide is more about limiting its use,’ says Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired magazine. Across the country, parents, doctors and teachers are campaigning for this. ‘The companies lied to the schools and they are lying to the parents,’ says Natasha Burgert, a paediatrician in Kansas City. ‘We are all being fooled,’ she believes. ‘We are subjecting our children, mine included, to one of the biggest social experiments we have seen in a long time. What will become of my daughter if she can’t have a normal conversation over dinner? How will she find a partner? How will she go to a job interview?’

‘I now have families who want to get rid of it completely,’ says Burgert. ‘They say: enough is enough, we’re done.’ Like the Brownsberger household. Smartphones had been banned there for a long time, but now the internet-connected TV has gone too. ‘We took the TV off the wall and I cancelled the cable subscription,’ says Rachael Brownsberger (34), mother of two sons aged 11 and 8. ‘As crazy as that sounds!’ She and her husband, who owns a decorative concrete business, had never given their children a smartphone. But they noticed that even the slightest exposure to screens had a bad influence on their behaviour. Her eldest son, who has ADHD, often got angry when the TV had to be switched off, she says. She found that worrying. And his Christmas wish list consisted of a Wii, a PlayStation, a Nintendo, a MacBook Pro and an iPhone. ‘I said: you’re not getting those, buddy,’ says Brownsberger. ‘So yes, I’m the bad guy.’

But one thing makes it easier: other parents in their area are doing the same. ‘You have to do this as a whole community,’ says Brownsberger. ‘I was talking about it with my neighbour just last night: am I such a bad mother?’ In Overland Park, Krista Boan runs three pilot projects, each with about forty parents who are looking together for good ways to get their children off phones and other screens. The Chamber of Commerce supports the project, and the city wants to include a section on ‘digital wellbeing’ in its next policy plan. ‘The city and the Chamber of Commerce said: we see the consequences for our city,’ says Boan. ‘We want our young people to grow up to be independent citizens who use their devices wisely, but we have to enable them to do that.’

In Silicon Valley, too, some people are worried about the growing divide in screen time. Kirstin Stecher and her husband, who works at Facebook, are raising their children almost entirely screen-free. ‘Is that because we are well informed and know a lot about the technology?’ she says. ‘Or is it because we are privileged and can more easily do without screens?’

‘There is an idea that your child will fall behind and grow up in a different dimension if they don’t get screen time,’ says Pierre Laurent, a former manager at Microsoft and Intel and now chairman of the board of Silicon Valley’s Waldorf School. ‘But that idea doesn’t really catch on around here anymore,’ he believes. ‘People here understand that these companies are mainly about big data and AI, and that is not something you get very good at just because you have had a phone since you were ten.’

Even though people working in this sector are having more and more doubts, the market for screen applications for children is booming. Apple and Google are competing fiercely to sell their products to schools and to win students over as young as possible, when they start to develop brand loyalty. Google has published research results from its project in the Hoover City school district in Alabama, where, in its own words, Google wants to teach students ‘skills for the future’. According to the company, Chromebooks and Google tools have changed lives: ‘The district’s leadership wants to prepare students for success by giving them the skills, knowledge and behaviours they need to become responsible citizens of the global community.’

But according to Richard Freed, these technological tools are reached for too quickly with children from poorer backgrounds. He sees that divide every day in his work with technology-addicted children of parents on middle and lower incomes. ‘Many children in Antioch go to schools that have no money for after-school activities,’ he says, ‘and their parents can’t afford a babysitter.’ According to him, the knowledge gap about the dangers of new technology is enormous. Together with two hundred other psychologists, he signed an open letter calling on their professional association to condemn psychologists’ involvement in ‘persuasive design’ in apps aimed at children. ‘Once that technology has a grip on a child, it becomes very difficult to free them from it,’ says Freed.

Source: Financieel Dagblad