Regaining Focus by Enlarging Context – Part 3

How modern internet media has affected children, and what might be done about it.

Continuing our discussion of Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again, this essay focuses on how modern internet media has affected children, and what might be done about it.

Hari writes:

There are deeper forces than our phones and the web at work— and those forces led us, in turn, to develop a dysfunctional relationship with the web. I began to understand the first dimension of this when I spent time with the woman who later became the surgeon general of California, who has made a key breakthrough on these questions … When [Dr. Nadine Harris] arrived at the medical center in Bayview, she had noticed that the kids there were being diagnosed as having attention problems at a staggering rate—dramatically higher than in wealthier neighborhoods—and that the first and usually only response was to drug them with very powerful stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall. Nadine is a believer in the power of medication to solve all sorts of problems—it’s why she went into medicine—but she started to wonder: What if we are misdiagnosing the problem a lot of these kids are facing? Nadine knew that decades before, scientists had discovered something significant. When human beings are in a terrifying environment— like a war zone— we often flip into a different state. She gave me an example, one I briefly referred to a little earlier. Imagine that you are walking in the woods and you are confronted by a grizzly bear that looks like it’s angry and about to attack you. In that moment, your brain stops worrying about what you’re going to eat that night, or how you’re going to pay the rent. It becomes narrowly and entirely focused on one thing: danger. You track every movement of the bear, and your mind starts scanning for ways to get away from it. You become highly vigilant. Now imagine that these bear attacks happen a lot. Imagine if three times a week, an angry bear suddenly appeared on your street and swiped one of your neighbors. If this happened, you would likely develop a state known as “hypervigilance.” You would start to look out for danger all the time— whether there’s a bear right in front of you or not. Nadine explained to me: “Hypervigilance is essentially when you’re looking out for the bear around every corner. Your attention is focused on cues for potential danger, as opposed to being focused on being present with what’s going on, or the lesson you’re supposed to be learning, or doing the work you were supposed to be doing. It’s not that [people in this state are] not paying attention. It’s that they’re paying attention to any cues or signs of threat or danger in their environment. That is where their focus is.”

The question becomes, does the way things are designed to be presented on social media give children today an inaccurate perception of risk?  Exaggerated claims of climate change, for example, or the politicized assessment of risk, as explored in previous essays, are heightened through the distorted lens of social media.  Are exaggerated fears of risk regarding children causing parents to shelter their children in ways that encourage, rather than dispel, false fears about the world around them, such as by shunting children into activities supervised by adults rather than allowing them ample time for playing freely with their peers?  As Hari writes:

Lenore [Skenazy] … started to seek out the leading scientists who have studied these questions—including professor of psychology Peter Gray, evolutionary primatologist Dr. Isabel Behncke, and social psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt. They taught her that in fact it is when children play that they learn their most important skills—the ones they need for their whole lives. To understand this second component of the change that has taken place—the deprivation of play—picture again that scene on Lenore’s street when she was a child back in that Chicago suburb, or the scene I saw in Colombia. What skills are the kids learning there, as they play freely with each other? For starters, if you’re a kid and you’re on your own with other kids, “you figure out how to make something happen,” Lenore says. You have to use your creativity to come up with a game. You then have to persuade the other kids that your game is the best one they could play. Then “you figure out how to read people enough so that the game keeps going.” You have to learn how to negotiate when it’s your turn and when it’s their turn—so you have to learn about other people’s needs and desires, and how to meet them. You learn how to cope with being disappointed, or frustrated. You learn all this “through being excluded, through coming up with a new game, through getting lost, through climbing the tree and [then] somebody says, ‘Climb higher!’ and you can’t decide if you will or you won’t. Then you do, and it’s exhilarating, and then you climb a little higher the next time—or you climb a little higher and it’s so scary that you’re crying…. And yet—now you’re on top.” These are all crucial forms of attention … Today, even when children do finally get to play, it’s mainly supervised by adults, who set the rules and tell them what to do. On Lenore’s street when she was a kid, everyone played softball and policed the rules themselves. Today, they go to organized activities where the adults intervene all the time to tell them what the rules are. Free play has been turned into supervised play, and so—like processed food—it has been drained of most of its value. This means that now, as a kid, Lenore said, “you’re not getting that [chance to develop these skills]—because you’re in a car being driven to a game where somebody tells you what position you’re playing, and when to catch the ball, and when it’s your time to hit, and who’s bringing the snack, and you can’t bring grapes because they have to be cut into quarters and it’s your mom’s job to do that…. That’s a very different childhood, because you haven’t experienced the give-and-take of life that’s going to prepare you for adulthood.” As a result, kids are “not having the problems and the exhilaration of getting there on their own.” One day, Barbara Sarnecka, an associate professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine, told Lenore that today “adults are saying: ‘Here’s the environment. I’ve already mapped it. Stop exploring.’ But that’s the opposite of what childhood is.”

Besides making things more boring for kids, adults are tending to deny kids a sense of mastery that makes things exciting for them.  As Hari writes:

Lenore believes there is also [another] factor at work. To understand it, you have to grasp a discovery that was made by the scientist Ed Deci, a professor of psychology who I interviewed in Rochester in upstate New York, and his colleague Richard Ryan, who I also spoke with. Their research uncovered that all human beings have within us two different kinds of motivation for why we do anything. Imagine you are a runner. If you go running in the morning because you love how it feels—the wind in your hair, the sense that your body is powerful and it’s carrying you forward—that’s an “intrinsic” motive. You’re not doing it to get some other reward farther down the line; you’re doing it because you love it. Now imagine you go running not because you love it, but because you have a drill-sergeant dad who forces you to get up and run with him. Or imagine you go running in order to post the videos of you shirtless on Instagram and you’re hooked on getting the hearts and “yum, you’re so hot” comments you receive. That would be an “extrinsic” motive to run. You’re not doing it because the act itself gives you a sense of pleasure or fulfillment—you are doing it because you have been forced to, or to get something out of it at a later point. Richard and Ed discovered that it’s easier to focus on something, and stick with it, if your motives are intrinsic—if you are doing something because it’s meaningful to you—than if your motives are extrinsic, and you’re doing it because you are forced to, or to get something out of it afterward. The more intrinsic your motivation, the easier it will be to sustain your attention. Lenore came to suspect that children—in this new and radically different model of childhood—are being deprived of the chance to develop intrinsic motives. Most people, she said, “learn focus by doing something that is either very important or very interesting to them.” You “learn the habit of focus by being interested in something enough that you notice what’s going on, and you process it…. The way you learn to focus is automatic if there’s something that interests you…or absorbs you, or thrills you.” But if you are a kid today, you live almost all of your life according to what adults tell you to do. She asked me: “How do you find meaning when your day is filled, from seven in the morning to nine at night when you go to bed, with somebody else’s idea of what is important? …If you don’t have any free time to figure out what [emotionally] turns you on, I’m not sure you’re going to find meaning. You’re not given any time to find meaning.” … [Lenore] asked me: If your attention is constantly managed by other people, how can it develop? How do you learn what fascinates you? How do you find your intrinsic motives, the ones that are so important to developing attention? After learning all this, Lenore was so worried about what we are doing to our kids that she started to tour the country, urging parents to let their children play in a free, unstructured, unsupervised way some of the time. She set up a group named Let Grow, designed to promote free play and freedom to explore for kids. She would say to the parents: “I want everybody to think back to your own childhood” and to describe “something that you loved—absolutely loved—to do, that you don’t let your own children do.” Their eyes would light up with memories. They would tell her: “We built forts. We played manhunt.” Lenore added: “I met a guy the other day who played marbles. I said, ‘What was your favorite marble?’ He said, ‘Oh, it was burgundy, and it was a swirl.’ You could just see this love of something from so long ago. It infused him with joy.” The parents admitted that “they all rode their bikes. They all climbed trees. They all went to town and got candy.” But then they said it was much too dangerous today to allow their kids to do the same. Lenore would explain how absolutely minuscule the risk of kidnapping is—and that violence is lower now than when they were young. This is not, she added, because we hide our kids away—we know that because violence against adults has also massively fallen, and they still move around freely. Parents would nod, and keep their kids indoors nonetheless. She would explain the clear benefits of free play. Parents would nod, and still they wouldn’t let their kids out. Nothing seemed to work. She became more and more frustrated. She began to conclude that “even the people who are on our side, or who wonder what happened…they can’t let go.” She realized “you can’t be the only people [doing it]—because then you’re the crazy person sending your kid” out alone. So she asked herself: What if we did this differently? What if we stopped trying to change parents’ minds, and started trying to change their behavior instead—and what if we tried to change them not as isolated individuals, but as a group? With those thoughts, Lenore became a part of a crucial experiment. One day, Roanoke Avenue Elementary, a school on Long Island, decided to take part in something called Global Play Day, where for one day a year, kids are allowed to play freely and create their own fun. The teachers filled four of their classrooms with empty boxes and Lego and some old toys, and they said, Go play. You get to choose what you do. Donna Verbeck, who had been a teacher at the school for more than twenty years, watched the kids, expecting to see glee and laughter—but she quickly realized something was wrong. Some of the kids plunged in and started playing right away, as she’d expected—but a large number of the children just stood there. They stared at the boxes and the Lego and the handful of children who were starting to improvise games, but they didn’t move. They watched, inert, for a long time. Finally one of the kids, puzzled by the experience and unsure what to do, lay down in a corner and went to sleep. Suddenly Donna realized, as she explained to me later: “They don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to get involved when somebody else is playing, or how to just start free play by themselves. They just did not know how to do it.” Thomas Payton, who was the principal, added: “And we’re not talking one or two kids. There were a lot of kids like that.” Donna felt shaken, and sad. She realized that these kids had never been set free to play before. Their attention had been constantly managed for them by adults for their whole lives. So Roanoke Avenue Elementary decided to become one of the first schools to sign up for the program that Lenore leads. Let Grow is based on the idea that if children are going to become adults who can make their own decisions and pay attention, they need to experience increasing levels of freedom and independence throughout their childhood. When a school signs up, they commit that one day a week, or once a month, a child’s “homework” will be to go home and do something new, independently, without adult supervision, and then report back on it. They choose their own mission. Every child, when they go out into the world, is given a card to show to any adult who stops them to ask where their parents are. It says: “I’m not lost or neglected. If you think it’s wrong for me to be on my own, please read Huckleberry Finn and visit letgrow.org. Remember your own childhood. Was your parent with you every second? And with today’s crime rate back to what it was in 1963, it is safer to play outside now than when you were at my age. Let me grow.” A little girl told me that, before this project: “Well, I’d literally sit in front of a TV all day. It doesn’t really pop into your head to do stuff.” But for Let Grow, the first thing she did was cook something for her mother on her own. She waved her hands excitedly as she described it. It seemed to have blown her mind—to discover that she could do something.

Hari describes more personal stories that probably resonate especially with people who grew up before the age of cell phones:

I also wanted to talk with the kids who didn’t immediately volunteer their stories, so I spoke with a pale, rather serious-faced boy. He told me quietly: “We have a rope [in our backyard] that’s connected to a tree.” It had never crossed his mind to try to climb it. “But I finally said, well, I could at least try to do it.” He managed to get a little way up. He offered a sly little beam of a smile as he described how it felt to be climbing for the first time. Some of the kids discovered new ambitions. In Donna’s class, there was a boy I’ll call L.B., who wasn’t particularly academic, and had often been distracted or bored in lessons. There was a constant struggle between him and his mom to get him to read or do his homework. He chose as his Let Grow project to build a replica of a boat. He assembled a piece of wood, a foam core, a hot-glue gun, and toothpicks and thread, and he sat night after night, intensely working on it. He tried one set of techniques, and the boat fell apart—so he tried again, and again. Once he had successfully built this small boat and showed it to his friends, he decided he was going to build something bigger—a life-size wagon that he could sleep in, in his yard. He took an old door that was in his garage, and his dad’s wrenches and screwdrivers, and he started to read about how to put all this together. He persuaded his neighbors to give him some old bamboo they had lying around in their garden, to use for the frame. Before long, L.B. had a wagon. Then he decided he wanted to do something even more ambitious—to build an amphibious wagon, one he could push out onto the ocean. So he started to read about how to build things that float. When I talked with L.B., he described the process of building it in detail. He told me he was going to build another wagon next: “I have to figure out how I’m going to cut the hula hoops to go on it, and then I got to lay shrink-wrap over it.” I asked him how this project made him feel. “It’s different because I’m actually using my hands on materials…. I think it’s cool to just have your hands on something instead of seeing it on a screen, not really being able to touch it.” I went to meet his mother, who worked in medical billing, and she told me: “I don’t think, as a parent, I realized how much he could do on his own.” She saw him change: “I could see the confidence—and him wanting to do more and more and figure it out his way.” She glowed with pride. Her struggles to get him to read had ended, because now he was reading all the time about how to build stuff. It struck me: When L.B. was being told what to do constantly—when he was being forced to act on extrinsic motivations—he couldn’t focus, and he was bored all the time. But when he was given the chance, through play, to find out what interested him—to develop an intrinsic motivation—his ability to focus flourished, and he worked for hours and hours without a break, building his boats and wagons. His teacher, Donna, told me L.B. changed in class after that. His reading hugely improved, and “he didn’t consider it to be ‘reading,’ because it was his hobby. It was something he really, really liked.” He started to gain status among the other kids—whenever they wanted to build anything, the cry would go up to find L.B., because he knew how to do it. She told me that—like with all the deepest learning—“nobody taught him. His mom and dad just let him do it…. He just used his own head and really taught himself.” Gary Karlson, another teacher there, told me: “That learning is going to do more for that kid than anything academic that we could’ve brought to him through his time here.” As I talked with L.B., I thought about another aspect of attention that I had been taught about by scientists—one that is, I think, [another] way in which we are currently hobbling our children’s attention. In Aarhus in Denmark, Jan Tonnesvang, a professor of psychology there, had told me that we all need to have a sense of what he called “mastery”—that we are good at something. It’s a basic human psychological need. When you feel you are good at something, you will find it much easier to focus on it, and if you feel incompetent, your attention will shrivel like a salted snail. When I listened to L.B., I realized that we have a school system right now that is so narrow that it makes a lot of kids (especially boys, I think) feel that they aren’t good at anything. Their experience of school is constantly being made to feel incompetent. But once L.B. started to feel that he could master something—that he could become good at it—his focus began to form. Lenore met this boy with me, and afterward she said: “Think of history, and prehuman history. We have to chase things to eat. We have to hide from things that want to eat us, and [we have to] seek. We need to build shelter. Everybody does that for a million years, and just this generation, we’ve taken it all away. Kids don’t get to build their shelter, or hide, or seek with a bunch of other kids on their own…. And that boy, given the chance, went into the woods and built a shelter.”

Too often, impediments to kids’ sense of mastery are adults who coddle them in ways intended to protect them, but which end up hurting kids’ longer-term life prospects.  But adults can come around.  As Hari writes:

At first, a lot of parents were very nervous about letting their kids take part in the Let Grow experiment [which allows kids to freely play and explore without adult supervision]. But, Lenore said, “when the kid comes through the door proud, and happy, and excited, and maybe a little sweaty or hungry, and they met a squirrel, or they ran into a friend, or they found a quarter,” the parents see that “their kid rose to the occasion.” Once this happens, “they are so proud that the parents are rewired. The parents are like—‘That’s my boy. Look at him.’ That’s what changes them. Not me telling them this is what is going to be good for your kid…. The only thing that actually changes the parents is seeing their own kids do something without them watching or helping…. People have to see it to believe it. See their kid blossom. And afterward they can’t understand why they didn’t trust their kids sooner. You have to change the picture in people’s heads.”

Now that we’ve explored how our range of decisions has been limited by social media, and over-protective parents, in the next essay series we’ll explore the evolution of human agency to help us better appreciate the very thing many people may be needlessly squandering.