‘Dr Lewis said the Church can model healthy and diverse communities, as they give us the opportunity to connect with people from all different perspectives and backgrounds, which we can then apply to our online conversations.
“I think one of the things that can happen with social media is you end up connecting with only the people who think like you and you have to make a real effort to do that differently. So actually, if you’re in a church with a wide range of ages, people who think differently politically, it can model a different way of doing this and having healthy debate.”‘
Early this morning (for me, 7.50am), I was on Inspirational Breakfast talking about the new Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health guidelines on screentime, which I’m largely happy about, as it echoes what I said in my 2014 book Raising Children in a Digital Age, that we need to not panic so much around children’s use of screens, and think about how it works individually, rather than having a set rate:
Press Release I was responding to:
Build screen time around family activities, not the other way round, parents told
In a UK first, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) publishes new guidance to help parents manage children’s screen time
There is not enough evidence to confirm that screen time is in itself harmful to child health at any age, making it impossible to recommend age appropriate time limits, says the first ever guidance on children’s screen time to be published in the UK.
The ‘Screen Time Guidance’ published today by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), instead suggests parents approach screen time based on the child’s developmental age, the individual need and value the family place on positive activities such as socialising, exercise and sleep – when screen time displaces these activities, the evidence suggests there is a risk to child wellbeing.
Dr Max Davie, Officer for Health Promotion for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) said we need to “let parents be parents” and adjust the amount of time spent on screens by all members of the family, depending on what’s important to them and their child.
Dr Davie said: “Technology is an integral part of children and young people’s everyday life. They use it for communication, entertainment, and increasingly in education.
“Studies in this area are limited but during our research analysis, we couldn’t find any consistent evidence for any specific health or wellbeing benefits of screen time, and although there are negative associations between screen time and poor mental health, sleep and fitness, we cannot be sure that these links are causal, or if other factors are causing both negative health outcomes and higher screen time. To help us develop a better understanding of this issue, I urge both more and better research, particularly on newer uses of digital media, such as social media.”
In the guidance, the RCPCH has published a series of questions which aim to help families make decisions about their screen time use. Questions include:
Is your family’s screen time under control?
Does screen use interfere with what your family want to do?
Does screen use interfere with sleep?
Are you able to control snacking during screen time use?
Dr Davie continues: “When it comes to screen time I think it is important to encourage parents to do what is right by their family. However, we know this is a grey area and parents want support and that’s why we have produced this guide. We suggest that age appropriate boundaries are established, negotiated by parent and child that everyone in the family understands. When these boundaries are not respected, actions need to be put in place with parents making consequences clear. It is also important that adults in the family reflect on their own level of screen time in order to have a positive influence on younger members.”
In addition to acting as a trusted reference point for healthcare professionals, the guidance also notes evidence to suggest that screen time can have a negative impact on a child’s diet which has the potential to lead to overweight or obesity.
“We know that watching screens can distract children from feeling full and they are also often exposed to advertising which leads to higher intake of unhealthy foods” says Dr Davie. “The Government is planning to consult on whether to ban the advertising of food and drink high in salt, sugar and fat as part of its Childhood Obesity Plan. We very much hope this proposal is implemented but push the Government to go one step further giving children the same protection online and when using on-demand services too.”
Notes to editor:
Once published, you can see a copy of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health’s Screen Time Guidance on our website.
The guide will also act as a reference point for health professionals who often find themselves asked about safe levels of screen time by patients and their families.
Children themselves have told us that screen time affects their play/fun (41%) and had a negative impact on their mood/ mental health (35%)
The RCPCH is the professional membership body for paediatricians and now with over 19,000 members across the world, it plays a major role in postgraduate medical education, professional standards and research. Using our members’ expertise, the College is also an organisation which activity lobbies government to influence policy change in all four nations. The College also works with children, young people and their families through RCPCH &Us, an engagement network created to actively seek and share their views to influence and shape policy and practice. Find out more at www.rcpch.ac.uk/aboutus
The New Normal: Parents, Teens, and Mobile Devices in the United Kingdom surveyed 1,200 U.K. parents and teens about their mobile device use and digital media habits. In addition to mobile devices being a daily source of distraction — and, at times, conflict — the results show the variety of ways that digital devices can affect the parent-teen dynamic. Despite reporting concerns about feelings of addiction, parents and teens in the U.K. are optimistic about the benefits of smartphones and other mobile devices.
The days when we could talk about a singular “effect” of social media are long gone; its role is complex, nuanced, and varied. And, as any parent knows, social media is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to thinking about digital well-being.
Half of parents and teenagers admit they get distracted by their phones on a daily basis with similar proportions also saying they feel “addicted” to their devices. As a result, conversations and meal-times are regularly disrupted with both children and parents critical of each other’s usage.
I’ve talked about addiction several times in the past, with research demonstrating that people over-use the word ‘addicted’ (which is a medical condition), and that many people may have poor mobile phone habits that need addressing, but if the media is always telling us that we’re addicted, then it’s easy to say that we also are addicted. I spoke about this as part of a talk at Premier Digital Conference last year (come and join us this year on 3 November):
The Telegraph highlights this towards the end of their article:
Another 45 percent of parents and 31 percent of teens check their devices within 30 minutes of waking up. More than half of parents and teens admitted they checked their phones at least every hour. And more than half of parents and almost two thirds of teenagers always or very often felt the need to respond immediately to texts, social media messages and other notifications.
This says far more about our cultural expectations of the technology, than it does about the technology itself. Technology allows us to respond 24/7, it doesn’t mean that we have to. See p167 of my book Raising Children in a Digital Age :
Antony Mayfield, a digital consultant, notes that we like to pretend that we’re in thrall to our machines: “Oh, I must take this call”, but the machines don’t care what we do. As I outlined in “Meet @drbexl”, when we first got a TV I was rather obsessed with anything on it: Sometimes a mild obsession can be helpful while you become literate in a new medium, but then you need to be able to make it work in terms which fit in with whatever you want to do with your life.
The ever-sensible and insightful Professor Sonia Livingstone responded to this already via LSE ‘Parenting for a Digital Future’, saying ‘The problem with calling this ‘addiction’ is that it implies people can and should simply cut down or disengage – even that they are morally failing to cope’, and that media discourse contributes to this feeling. She also says:
So when I learn from Common Sense Media that if UK teens had to go without their mobile devices for a day, the most common emotion they’d feel would be boredom – 66% say this, followed by anxiety (44%) and loneliness (40%) – I don’t jump to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with today’s young generation. Rather I ask, first, what they are doing on their phones and what do they value about that and, second, what alternatives has society really provided for them, and are these both sufficient and available? And I would say the same in defence of parents’ mobile use.
She finishes with:
… the Parenting for a Digital Future project is finding that parents are often unsupported by others – society, community, family, tech companies – in facing the digital world. Maybe, then, it’s society’s responsibility to support families struggling with the ‘new normal’ that we should focus on.
Agree with Willow Bay, dean at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, commenting in the Telegraph:
“We have to find a way to integrate them into our lives and the lives of our children. This is the first generation of parents immersed in the technology but also helping their teenagers manage mobile devices and social media,” she said.
I grew up in a household without a television, about which similar complaints have been made (new technologies always bring moral panics), but I was (and am) an avid reading, and was always told to put my book down before coming to the dinner table:
Two-thirds of families said they set rules on the use of mobiles in the home such as a ban at meals or bedtime but 70 percent admitted they were broken, mostly by the teenagers but in up to 17 percent of cases by parents.
The report highlights (via the LSE article) something that’s not highlighted in media reports on this report:
Yet 86% of parents say their teen’s use of mobile devices has not harmed or has even helped their relationship; and 97% of teens say the same of their parents’ mobile use. Further, most UK families do not think mobile devices disrupt meal times, most parents allow their teens their privacy online, and most are optimistic about the benefits.
Premier Christian Radio asked me to think about ‘how can we as Christians think reasonably about our own phone usage and resolve disagreements well’. This question always returns me to the question of ‘grace’, and how we demonstrate the ‘fruits of the spirit’ in any part of our lives, including online. I’ve spoke about graceful social media usage at many events, including an event for the URC church in June 2017:
As Christians we are very much living in the world, but as the verse says ‘living in the world, but not of it’, so thinking about our media use as much as anything else, as I talked about at the Premier Digital Conference in 2014:
We need to look at our own behaviours, see how they are impacting us, how they are impacting others, calling for change on a wider basis (as Sonia says above) to help people who are struggling with their use. As families we should be talking about our digital/social media use (including conversations at the dinner table), not only about the time spent on it, but what we’re doing on it, what we find helpful, what we don’t find helpful, and considering ways that we can help each other use technology for good, rather than negatively. The more we talk, the less resentments are going to build up.
This goes for work too – at work we discussed our e-mail responses as a team. There are already university policies requiring a 72 hour response in the working week (allowing space for research days, external meetings, etc.), and we would say good use of out-of-office for when we’re on leave, redirecting to others who can help. As a team, we agree that we don’t reply to emails in the evening (unless we’re working late), or at the weekend, and there’s certainly no expectation of response from anyone if sent. These expectations are made clear to students, and they are expected to work to this, making best use of online discussion spaces such as Moodle to ensure that any responses benefit the wider community. It’s a challenge within ‘consumerised higher education’, but it’s important for the mental wellbeing of staff.
You can listen to the whole programme here (I’m around 40ish minutes in), or just the extract here:
It’s their social portal, where their friends are (inc because we won’t let them out and about as much), they are often SOCIALISING – Marcus Leaning – the notion that computers are somehow ‘virtual’
There’s a consistent media narrative – negative, addictive, refuses to look at the possibilities – most pieces have one line that ‘of course there’s good stuff, but look at all this bad stuff’… so far as some people – and not just going to say young people are concerned – our phones are somewhat of a Swiss knife!
Extract from current journal article writing: Within the disciplinary society, power is dispersed and hidden in processes of conformity present in different places of society, functioning through different institutions. Whilst Foucault was talking about normalisation at a national level, as a response to rationalities of governance, when considering online spaces, we might consider normalcy and expected behaviours to differ with the differing identity of online spaces. Normation processes constitute what one has to conform and strive for, measured against a fictional norm: to be ‘normal’ is to be ‘invisible’ in terms of blending in, rather than ‘abnormal’ in a deficient way (Masa, Timan & Koops, 2017, 17). The pressure to conform comes from various institutions, and one of the most powerful institutions of a digital age is Google, which seeks to ‘organise all the world’s information’, shaping what is contemporary knowledge via algorithms. Google has become so naturalised ‘it no longer seems to have an origin. It’s as if it always was – and therefore always will be – a part of us’ (Hillis, Petit & Jarrett, 2012, 3). With over six billion search entries a day, Google is used as the default search engine by over 77% of internet users (Allen, 2017). Google’s knowledge is shaped via human-written algorithms: it shapes the world’s knowledge as its results define what is normal for users. As Graham and Sengupta highlight (2017), however, the content, and search algorithms, reflect a geographical and gendered bias more widely recognisable offline: reflecting rich, western and male privilege. Early optimism about the revolutionary potential of the internet may have been misplaced, as we brought many ‘habits, inclinations and prejudices… endemic to society as a whole’, and it is now ‘its very pervasive ordinariness that gives the internet its significance’ (Miller, 2011), as digital etiquette has emerged. Campbell (2012) establishes how academic interest in digital religion has also shifted from studying the internet as an isolated phenomenon, to understanding it as a ubiquitous part of everyday life, including the religious aspects of life.”
Try replacing phone with ‘book’, TV, or whatever else and see where you have the same angst about how much time – consider what is on a phone – social connections, books, catch-up TV & box sets, games *listen to Andy Robertson last week on what young people can learn from this, maps, diaries, banking, to-do lists…
Games developers should be looking at where they are building in addictive behaviours … but also we can learn from this – gamification in education, ‘learning streaks’ for e.g.. language learning, Pokemon has got me out and about in the midst of cancer treatment, reminded me to take my drugs – givens me hours of connection (and something to do in the waiting rooms – and don’t let’s pretend that we Brits want to talk to other strangers – well, I do, but not everyone does!)]
Seems to find it problematic less people are listening to the radio … but then says many more are listening to podcasts (certainly something I’ve got into more!)… there’s a certain amount about perception!
Struggle with the idea that so many people ‘perceive’ that they are addicted, etc. and that is given that these people are then addicted – many may have poor behavioural habits OR but that does mean they are!
Also from current journal article:“Much media discourse around digital and social media is negative, claiming that it is all a ‘waste of time’, and simply provides a space for poorly-managed conflict. Within society, especially religious cultures, the ‘protestant work ethic’ has infected the discourse (van Hoorn, A. & Maseland, R., 2013, 10). The notion that users may be wasting time, assumes that all users use it the same way, and use it negatively (Goldsmith, 2016). It signifies the moral panics that accompany every new technological development: ‘If modern people worry over whether digital electronics threaten to corrupt religious experience, their grandparents worried about the intrusion of electrical light into sacred spaces, and their great-grandparents debated the permissibility of musical instruments for worship’ (Adam, 2012, 5). Adam identifies that socially permissible uses of technology are for clothing, shelter, and food preparation, and that any use for entertainment, comfort and self-indulgence is deemed impermissible (2012, 7). There is no doubt that online content is full of triviality, but no more than in everyday conversation amidst stages of relationship formation, where surface conversation topics help establish trust, defined by McCormack (2018) as ‘weak ties’, leading to ‘strong ties’ amongst mountain biking communities.”
IS it time for a “digital detox”, (digital is now embedded in our lives – we are assuming all things digital are the same, and largely bad – we def need to think, but need more nuance about what we are doing and when)…
how and when should we be online, (when is it helpful, what do you need to learn/know, why might you be expected to interact with others just because you happen to be physically together, but if you are physically together then should be – that doesn’t mean don’t end up using phones – we often have a online/offline convo searching something together, etc. like that art picture … mobile devices fine, at least interactive – though of course brings other concerns – for children = conversation!
how can we protect ourselves from getting lonely using social media etc. (it’s all about how we use it – see the benefits e.g. for those who are disabled – lots of technology is enabling, for those on the autistic spectrum – use online/offline) … those who are using social media as some kind of barrier/mask, etc. are likely those already struggling – amplifies what is already happening. I find SocMed makes me less lonely – especially if my drugs are keeping me awake in the middle of the night and find someone else in my cnacer group who’s also up… also actively use it to arrange to meet up with people, include people in my life – including hospital, kitchen refit, etc
See as DIFFERENT aspects of one life – have been challenging people to move from virtual/real to online/offline, but even that is not necessarily a helpful distinction – in the past, kids talking about a parent who wrote a book said it was like talking about how to write with a pencil.
About behaviours, choices WE make (noting that ‘we’ is not just an individual choice, but a cultural choice, affected by those around us, those who create the platforms and algorithms that we engage we). We need to be critical users, but also campaigning to make the spaces more fit for positive purposes and not just letting e.g. Facebook say ‘well, you CAN do that, but it’s your choice’, if they’ve made that the easy default choice.
Always too easy to ‘blame the tech’, when we may need to look more deeply at the reasonings – if we assume it’s the tech, then we’re not looking at any other issues…
See Raising Children in a Digital Age – pp180-181: As technology has affected our leisure time, so it also makes it more difficult for teenagers and adults to break off from other aspects of life, including work. Professor Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, believes that digital media affect our ability to give full, undistracted attention to each other or to our thoughts. She claims that lack of disconnected downtime disrupts ties to other people and adds emotional stress. In conversation with eighteen-year-olds, she asked when they last were able to be free of interruptions, but they didn’t see digital media as interruptions but as the beginning of connections. Research indicates that a large number of teenagers would love to be able to unplug, especially as they feel that their online communications are being so heavily monitored. A significant number, however, said that this would make them feel more stressed, because they have invested so much time in their “digital space”, and even more because their parents fear letting them out of the door. Some have tested extreme detoxes. Susan Maushart, writing for the Daily Mail, undertook a six-month “technology blackout” for her entire family, which she viewed as a consciousnessraising exercise rather than a long-term strategy.7 Paul Millar, a technology journalist, disconnected from the internet for a year but found that, after the initial feeling of “freedom”, he picked up other bad habits. He ignored his post and his friends, allowed the dust to gather on his exercise equipment, failed to turn boredom into creativity, and sat and did nothing. On analysing this for an article for The Verge magazine, he was able to make more informed technology choices once he reconnected.
