Digital Junkies: Main-lining Heroin

Opening Insights: Digital-ization

Our world has and is becoming increasingly digitized, with people become more and more reliant and in many cases dependent on technology.  As visionaries like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and many others warned us of the dangers of the encroaching digital age of Artificial Intelligence and digital power, many of us remain numb to the conveniences technology offers, the entertainment, the comfort and in many cases the ease of avoiding human contact for which many of us no longer understand.  We may look at our digitally enhanced lives and reveal in the style, innovation and sense of modernization and power, yet we have to ask:

• What and how is this digital age affecting us?
• Is it improving our lives or not?
• How is it affecting our children?
• How is it affecting society as a whole?
• How will it affect our future? 

Informational Insights: Are Parents Helping Their Kids?

Parents want to do what is best for their children. Send them to the best schools. Give them the best tools and resources to get a competitive advantage.

Many parents invest in state-of-the-art technology for their children because:

• They have been told that this is what is needed today to get and stay ahead of the game, in today’s digital age.
• They assume that companies that develop games and apps for kids have our best interests at heart – have done research, have a conscience and sense of social responsibility.
• They assume that educators who praise the wonders of technology (and advise its use and application), actually know what they are talking about and care about our children.

So parents assume that when they allow kids screen time, they are actually helping them.  But the reality is we have and are creating generations of Digital Junkies…

Here is a true story…

Susan bought her 6-year-old son John an iPad when he was in first grade. “I thought, ‘Why not let him get a jump on things?’ ” she told me during a therapy session. John’s school had begun using the devices with younger and younger grades — and his technology teacher had raved about their educational benefits — so Susan wanted to do what was best for her sandy-haired boy who loved reading and playing baseball.

She started letting John play different educational games on his iPad. Eventually, he discovered Minecraft, which the technology teacher assured her was “just like electronic Lego.” Remembering how much fun she had as a child building and playing with the interlocking plastic blocks, Susan let her son Minecraft his afternoons away.

At first, Susan was quite pleased. John seemed engaged in creative play as he explored the cube-world of the game. She did notice that the game wasn’t quite like the Legos that she remembered — after all, she didn’t have to kill animals and find rare minerals to survive and get to the next level with her beloved old game. But John did seem to really like playing and the school even had a Minecraft club, so how bad could it be?

Still, Susan couldn’t deny she was seeing changes in John. He started getting more and more focused on his game and losing interest in baseball and reading while refusing to do his chores. Some mornings he would wake up and tell her that he could see the cube shapes in his dreams.

Although that concerned her, she thought her son might just be exhibiting an active imagination. As his behavior continued to deteriorate, she tried to take the game away but John threw temper tantrums. His outbursts were so severe that she gave in, still rationalizing to herself over and over again that “it’s educational.”

Then, one night, she realized that something was seriously wrong.

“I walked into his room to check on him. He was supposed to be sleeping — and I was just so frightened…”

She found him sitting up in his bed staring wide-eyed, his bloodshot eyes looking into the distance as his glowing iPad lay next to him. He seemed to be in a trance. Beside herself with panic, Susan had to shake the boy repeatedly to snap him out of it. Distraught, she could not understand how her once-healthy and happy little boy had become so addicted to the game that he wound up in a catatonic stupor.

In the end, my client Susan removed John’s tablet, but recovery was an uphill battle with many bumps and setbacks along the way.

Four years later, after much support and reinforcement, John is doing much better today. He has learned to use a desktop computer in a healthier way, and has gotten some sense of balance back in his life: He’s playing on a baseball team and has several close friends in his middle school. But his mother is still vigilant and remains a positive and proactive force with his tech usage because, as with any addiction, relapse can sneak up in moments of weakness. Making sure that he has healthy outlets, no computer in his bedroom and a nightly tech-free dinner at the dinner table are all part of the solution.¹

*Patients’ names have been changed.

“The New Normal”

Susan’s story is not unique.  It is unfortunately “the new normal.”

Many parents intuitively understand that ubiquitous glowing screens are having a negative effect on kids. We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices. Worse, we see children who become bored, apathetic, uninteresting and uninterested when not plugged in.¹

But it gets worse, we hear stories like:

• 2009 a seventeen year old boy in Ohio shot his mother because his parent took away his video game Halo 3 [2]
• 2011 a young woman in New Mexico let her 3 year old daughter die of malnutrition while she played World of Warcraft for hours[2]

“The new normal” is prevalent with U.S. youth. In  a 2013 Policy Statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics they found that:

• • 8- to 10 year-olds spend 8 hours a day with various digital media
  • Teenagers spend 11 hours in front of screens
  • One in three kids are using tablets or smartphones before they can talk
  • 18 percent of college-age internet users in the US suffer from tech addiction (Handbook of “Internet Addiction” by Dr. Kimberly Young)

A study  in the medical journal Pediatrics, by  Douglas A. Gentile, Ph.D., examined video game usage rates of 3,034 children and teenagers. The study revealed the following:

• • • The average length of time spent playing video games was 20 hours per week
    • An estimated 72 percent of American households play video games
    • An estimated nine percent of the 3,034 participants in the study showed signs of video game addiction
    • Four percent of percent of study participants were categorized as extreme users who played video games 50 hours per week on average [2]

Additionally video game addiction statistics show that:

• • • Forty-one percent of people who play online video games admitted that they played computer games as an escape from the real world. The researchers classified seven percent of these gamers as “dependent”. The authors claim that the addicted gamers used video games to modify their moods, demonstrated tolerance, and showed signs of relapse. (Hussain, 2009).
    • The likelihood of developing video game addiction depends on the curiosity of the player, the inclusion of a role-playing element, feeling obligated to the team members, a sense of belonging to an online gaming community, and rewards for playing. (Hsu, 2009).
    • Video game addiction is associated with a strong desire to seek new sensations and experiences, a favorable view of one’s intelligence, and a negative view of the gamer’s ability and competence in relationships. (Zheng, 2006).
    • Online role-playing games (especially multiplayer games or MMOs) are more likely to result in video game addiction than other computer game genres. (Van Rooij, 2010)
    • Students addicted to video games have lower academic grades than their non-addicted peers. (Chiu, 2004)
    • People who have higher levels of trait anxiety, aggressive behavior, and neuroticism are at a higher risk for video game addiction. (Mehroof, 2010)
    • The same regions of the brain that are activated when craving occur in alcohol and drug addicts are also activated in video game addicts when they see images of computer games. (Ko, 2009)
    • Video game addicts may play online role playing games to avoid or distract themselves from negative moods. (Hussain, 2009)
    • In a German sample, 1.5 – 3.5% of teens who use the internet were found to demonstrate symptoms of video game addiction. Video game addiction was also found to be correlated with a higher probability of depression, anxiety, and poorer school grades. (Peukert, 2010)
  • • Video game addiction may be the result of ineffective time management and a desire to avoid other difficulties (rather than theoretical “addictive” qualities of the game). (Wood, 2008)
    • Compared to females, males are more likely to play online video games. Male video game addicts are more likely to be older, have lower self-esteem, and be less satisfied with their lives compared to those who are not addicted. (Ko, 2005)
    • In a German study, just over six percent of teenagers were classified as addicted to video games. The majority of these addicted gamers were male, came from families with lower academic achievement, and tended to use video games as a way of coping with negative moods. (Klaus, 2008)
    • In a large study of seven thousand video gamers, close to twelve percent were classified as being addicted to video games. (Grusser, 2007)

Some technologies have “supporting data and research”… however, what we are discovering is that they lacked long-term research, reliable, viable and credible research.  The sad reality is that the bottom line often trumps ethics and social responsibility, but its time we face reality and become accountable before the next generation are literally brain fried from birth.

There’s a reason that the most tech-cautious parents are tech designers and engineers. Steve Jobs was a notoriously low-tech parent. Silicon Valley tech executives and engineers enroll their kids in no-tech Waldorf Schools. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page went to no-tech Montessori Schools, as did Amazon creator Jeff Bezos and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.¹

The realities are they know the dangers because some of them use them to sell more products:

Digital Junkies: The Mass Creation of ADDICTS

We now know that those iPads, smartphones and Xboxes are a form of digital drug. Recent brain imaging research is showing that they affect the brain’s frontal cortex — which controls executive functioning, including impulse control — in exactly the same way that cocaine does. Technology is so hyper-arousing that it raises dopamine levels — the feel-good neurotransmitter most involved in the addiction dynamic — as much as sex.

This addictive effect is why Dr. Peter Whybrow, director of neuroscience at UCLA, calls screens “electronic cocaine” and Chinese researchers call them “digital heroin.” In fact, Dr. Andrew Doan, the head of addiction research for the Pentagon and the US Navy — who has been researching video game addiction —
calls video games and screen technologies “digital pharmakeia” (Greek for drug). ¹

Technology addiction is like all other addictions.  It changes the brain and like the story of John above changes behavior, one ability to relate and communicate with others and the ability to deal with and regulate emotions effectively (emotional maturity).

No wonder we have a hard time peeling kids from their screens and find our little ones agitated when their screen time is interrupted. In addition, hundreds of clinical studies show that screens increase depression, anxiety and aggression and can even lead to psychotic-like features where the video gamer loses touch with reality.

In my clinical work with over 1,000 teens over the past 15 years, I have found the old axiom of “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” to be especially true when it comes to tech addiction. Once a kid has crossed the line into true tech addiction, treatment can be very difficult. Indeed, I have found it easier to treat heroin and crystal meth addicts than lost-in-the-matrix video gamers or Facebook-dependent social media addicts.

That’s right — your kid’s brain on Minecraft looks like a brain on drugs. ¹

 

What’s the problem?

If the goal of parents is to help their children grown up to become responsible and accountable adults: the addicted brain will prevent this from happening.  Instead parents will raise children who will never grow up and whose immaturity will be masked with lies, selfishness, manipulation and illusions of control all to maintain their addiction and “keep their best friend.”

Would you help your kids buy and mainline
Cocaine, Heroin or other Drugs?

Is it time to LEARN HOW TO SAY NO?  WHILE PROVIDING YOUR CHILD THE TOOLS NEEDED TO MAKE UP THEIR OWN MIND?

Remember that with like any addiction there are degrees of severity.  The problem is that any form of dependency on the cognitive development of a growing brain can be devastating.   The brain of an adult who becomes a drug user changes, however during their childhood their brains would have developed relatively normally so they have other experiences and neural pathways to fall back on during their addiction recovery.  When the brain of a child becomes addictive, they become reclusive and isolated – the neural pathway of addiction / dependency becomes all they know, experience and accept, hence recovery becomes that much harder (but not impossible with the right tools that communicate clearly, provide the experience of choice and freedom that the addiction strips from their frame of reference).

The affects of television screens and computer screens on the eyes, cognition and development of children have long been know to educators and healthcare workers.  Many have chosen to ignore it, out of convenience.  Yet we cannot continue to pull the wool over our eyes.  Emerging research is showing the destructive and disabling effects of technology on our children’s brains.  CHANGING AND TRAINING children’s developing brains not into little Einstein’s but little junkies: full blown addictive brains: impulsive, reactive, immature and pain-pleasure driven.

Once a person crosses over the line into full-blown addiction — drug, digital or otherwise — they need to detox before any other kind of therapy can have any chance of being effective. With tech, that means a full digital detox — no computers, no smartphones, no tablets. The extreme digital detox even eliminates television. The prescribed amount of time is four to six weeks; that’s the amount of time that is usually required for a hyper-aroused nervous system to reset itself. But that’s no easy task in our current tech-filled society where screens are ubiquitous. A person can live without drugs or alcohol; with tech addiction, digital temptations are everywhere.

So how do we keep our children from crossing this line? It’s not easy.

The key is to prevent your 4-, 5- or 8-year-old from getting hooked on screens to begin with. That means Lego instead of Minecraft; books instead of iPads; nature and sports instead of TV. If you have to, demand that your child’s school not give them a tablet or Chromebook until they are at least 10 years old (others recommend 12).

Have honest discussions with your child about why you are limiting their screen access. Eat dinner with your children without any electronic devices at the table — just as Steve Jobs used to have tech-free dinners with his kids. Don’t fall victim to “Distracted Parent Syndrome” — as we know from Social Learning Theory, “Monkey see, monkey do.”

Developmental psychologists understand that children’s healthy development involves social interaction, creative imaginative play and an engagement with the real, natural world. Unfortunately, the immersive and addictive world of screens dampens and stunts those developmental processes.

We also know that kids are more prone to addictive escape if they feel alone, alienated, purposeless and bored. Thus the solution is often to help kids to connect to meaningful real-life experiences and flesh-and-blood relationships. The engaged child tethered to creative activities and connected to his or her family is less likely to escape into the digital fantasy world. Yet even if a child has the best and most loving support, he or she could fall into the Matrix once they engage with hypnotic screens and experience their addicting effect. After all, about one in 10 people are predisposed towards addictive tendencies.¹

Solving the Problem

Many kids, teens, young adults and ADULTS are addicted there is no question.  We see this trend within the Millennials who while digitally savvy are lacking in maturity, human understanding and communication skills needed to drive the workplace and economies of tomorrow.  But there is hope… if we attack the problem from a social and cultural level and support not just individuals in overcoming their addiction challenges but cultures of children, families, community groups, schools, universities, organizations and businesses.  We need a transformational approach that provides choice, freedom and the tools to develop critical thinking, higher order thinking and mature thinking.

Imagine what the would could be like if children and people once again communicated and collaborated…  ?

Sources:
^[1] //nypost.com/2016/08/27/its-digital-heroin-how-screens-turn-kids-into-psychotic-junkies (Dr. Nicholas Kardaras)
^[2] //www.addictions.com/video-games/video-game-addiction/

Possibilities for Consideration: Addicted to What?

Take a moment and examine…

• As you reviewed the material above, what stood out to you?
• What is the potential impact, economically and/or socially?
• What action is needed to stop or support this idea?
• You may want to consider whether you:
  • want to be aware of,
  • should become supportive of,
  • would want to be active in this topic?

Add Your Insight: No Laughing Matter

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Being willing is not enough; we must do.
LEONARDO DA VINCI