Last week, we used Catherine Steiner-Adair's The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age to explore parents' roles regarding technology. This week, we're going to examine children's and adolescents' relationship with technology and its impact on their lives. As the parenting discussion indicated, Steiner-Adair maintains that technology is adversely affecting family life and children's development. It may seem surprising – even hypocritical -- for the head of a school that requires students as young as fifth graders to use digital devices to be presenting technology in such a negative light. I love technology; it's hard to imagine life before cell phones, computers, word processing, Excel, Google, Google maps, and online shopping. I also believe in technology's value as a pedagogical tool. However, technology has a dark side; we need to be aware of the damaging and hurtful elements and help our children deal with them. Steiner-Adair discusses six aspects of our children's technology/media use that merit our attention:
- The incivility, meanness, and cynicism that characterize so much media and online discourse;
- The degree to which girls and women are stereotyped and objectified with a corresponding idealization of a violent, angry masculinity;
- The prevalence and ease of access to pornography, an issue especially for boys;
- The seductiveness of digital activities which at worst can lead to addiction, and for many children precludes unstructured play that calls upon their imaginations; the corresponding lack of physical activity and little time spent outdoors;
- The ways in which digital communication, particularly texting, undermines the development of children's relational skills, including empathy.
- The ways in which young people use texting and social media to wreak social havoc, whose impact is all the greater because of the wide audiences so easily reached, the ubiquity of the digital world, and the nature of the communication.
We hardly need to read a book about technology and our family lives to know how ugly so much discourse is today. However, the American political landscape has featured ugly, vitriolic rhetoric since the 18th century. What is different now is that this lack of civility extends to more areas of the media and into more private realms, which are, in the age of social media, in turn more public. Steiner-Adair excoriates the "media-based adult culture" as one that "cultivates cynicism and cynical values, treats sex and violence as entertainment, routinely sexualized perceptions for girls and women, and encourages aggression in boys." While this is an adult culture, she believes that "Today's kids are growing up in this culture that normalizes lying, cheating, crass sexuality, and violence."(41-2) While she admits that such elements have always existed, she argues that today children and young people are exposed to them much younger and without any kind of parental mediation; we've "lost a protective barrier, individually as parents and collectively as a culture." Why? Because the internet makes all media, regardless of content, available to anyone, including children. Moreover, Steiner-Adair asserts that "The same cynicism, cruel humor, destructive gender stereotypes, and disrespect that distinguish so much of popular adult TV and online commentary is shrunk to fit for children's viewing in the likes of Bratz Dolls, Power Rangers, and Spongebob Squarepants." (42) For adolescents, especially girls, she points to "Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Vampire Diaries "and all the 'girls fighting' YouTube videos that echo similar themes: social climbing, girl fights, betraying your friends, breaking the rules or laws, hooking up, drinking or getting drunk, and knocking down others within a social hierarchy."(216) According to Steiner-Adair, in her experience, "Parents and teachers describe a disturbing new presence of sarcasm and meanness across age groups." This trend results from "growing up in a culture where it is cool to be cruel, where media influence encourages it, and social-networking facilitates it."(49) Not a very pretty picture and one that clearly demands attention and constant counterbalance by parents and school.
As several of these quotations suggest, harmful gender stereotypes characterize much of this media culture. The way media, TV, video games, and the pornography so many boys in particular view online, depict boys and girls, men and women leads girls to develop "a jaundiced view of themselves and what it means to be pretty, popular and powerful." Boys learn a "'boy code' of sarcastic, aggressive, humiliating one-upmanship of each other and of girls." (42). Steiner-Adair argues that "Long before they can read a chapter book, boys and girls are already well-versed in the gender code for popularity, sexuality, and the everyday ways in which boys and girls are supposed to differentiate themselves." They learn this code from song lyrics, from TV, and from other forms of digital media. It leads to concerns about body image among girls, with some research suggesting that girls as young as three have a negative attitude towards fatness. Moreover, so much of the entertainment that targets young elementary age children not to mention tweens and teens, focuses on appearance, clothes, make-up and hair, sending the message, as Steiner-Adair says, that "your body is your most important asset." (140-41) Media culture pushes boys into a similarly rigid identity, "the super-masculine ideal of the day," as Steiner-Adair calls it, an ideal that defines itself in opposition to anything feminine. Homophobia, always part of boy culture, now appears earlier "as does a derogatory view of all things female and an increasingly sexualized attitude toward girls." (142) In this world, there's little place for the tomboy or the boy who likes to draw or dance. This, I would argue, is a great reason to go to an all-girls school, where without boys as the counterpoint, girls assume a wider range of identities. Only girls can be the leaders, the athletes, the scientists, the computer geeks, the tuba players, the class clowns.
No aspect of media more insistently promotes objectified gender roles than pornography. I'm not going to spend a lot of time discussing pornography because it is primarily a boy issue. However, since many of us are the parents of sons as well as daughters, I feel obligated to at least mention some of the issues. As we've already established, the internet makes everything available without regard to the age of the viewer. This is very different from the days when boys schemed to get a copy of Playboy, which wasn't set out on the rack with Sports Illustrated, but kept behind a counter or in a back room. No such barriers exist today. Moreover, boys can easily access much more disturbing content than Playboy. And they're doing it younger. According to Steiner-Adair, "the average American child sees pornography now at eleven."(184) Jackson Katz, an author, speaker and activist on issues related to gender and violence, argues "that porn culture 'has shaped a whole generation of boys' understanding of their sexuality and the way they interact with girls' sexually'" and he characterizes what they're learning as "an incredibly brutal form of men's sexuality."(186) This isn't good for boys and or for girls.
I found Steiner-Adair's discussions about pornography the most disturbing aspect of her book, and I am convinced that we cannot ignore this issue, for both boys' and girls' sakes. Boys are going to find their pornographic discoveries exciting, but we mustn't blame them when we as parents fail to address sex directly with our children (boys and girls). We need to have conversations with our children about sex, we need to model healthy relationships, and we need to treat one another with respect. Steiner-Adair quotes psychologist Michael Thompson, long-time counselor at the Belmont Hill School, a boys school in Massachusetts, and a widely respected speaker and author, who says referring to pornography, "loved and well-raised boys who haven't seen women exploited [in real life] and who have seen their fathers and the other men in the life respect women – I think they have fantasies, but they understand it's a zinger, it's just a fantasy." Thompson "sees the power of the family culture and parents' – especially fathers' – influence for the good."(185) So Dads, and I know many fathers read this column, this one is on you: talk to your boys.
As I said last week, the no-holds barred digital world in which our children live puts added responsibility on us as parents to discuss tough and sensitive issues with our children, to develop their moral compasses, and to teach them that we treat others with respect and compassion both in person and online. If you would like a resource to help you manage media and your children, Common Sense Media, the authors of the study I discussed in December, offers excellent advice about media in general and also about specific shows, movies, games, apps, etc. If you want to stimulate some interesting conversation with your sons, you might want to watch Jackson Katz's TED talk "Violence Against Women – It's a Men's Issue." After Mosaic, I'll focus on the next three areas of concern listed above, the seductiveness of digital activities and the negative impacts of texting and social media.