How Can We Remain Connected to our Children in the Digital Age?

I began my radio show by playing Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle”, a song which my guest, Catherine Steiner-Adair, EdD, references in her book The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age. I asked Dr. Steiner-Adair – an internationally recognized clinical psychologist, school consultant and author – about the song, and she shared a story with me. A woman in one of her focus groups referenced the song while expressing her fear that her relationship to technology modeled unavailability to her children: she was always half-listening, always glued to a screen. She worried that when she and her husband aged, their children would, in turn, be unavailable to them.

This is one of the most important conundrums of our time. Technology has never before been such a presence in our daily lives, and we must think very carefully about how it affects our relationships. As Dr. Steiner-Adair so eloquently asks in her book, “The digital world is here to stay, but what are families losing with technology’s gain?”

Unfortunately, at this time, families are at risk for losing quite a lot. Many parents don’t understand how technology affects their daily interactions with their children. As Dr. Steiner-Adair noted, when we are interfacing with a screen, we are cognitively absorbed, and the part of our brain dedicated to empathy dims. If your child comes into the room and asks you something, you are much more likely to respond with a curt and agitated tone of voice if you are engaged with a screen because your brain is trying to accomplish something versus i.e. cooking or raking the yard. Dr. Steiner-Adair interviewed over 1,000 children, ages 4 – 18, about how this type of interaction with their parents makes them feel. She was shocked to discover that the reaction was very similar across the board, regardless of age – they even all used similar language: mad, sad, and lonely.

As Dr. Steiner-Adair pointed out, many of the behaviors we consider socially acceptable today—glancing at your phone at the dinner table, for example—would have been considered extremely rude ten years ago. But the world is now a different place. Technology is certainly not going away, so we have to make sure we use it to improve our relationships as opposed to depleting them. And right now, it looks like we as a society are falling victim to the “siren call” of technology; we are not mindful of how we engage with it or how this engagement affects us. Take early childhood development for example. One young child told Dr. Steiner-Adair that her favorite game was dress-up, then proceeded to describe an iPad game. The cognitive development of young children ages 0-5 absolutely relies on “deep play,” which is any play that engages a child’s imagination by prompting them to design their own rules. Deep play in groups is also extremely important: it teaches children how to interact with others in safe and rewarding ways. Children are spending less and less time engaged in deep-play, and their social-emotional development is suffering for it.

Luckily, at least three states have already included social-emotional intelligence in their core curriculums, and, in Dr. Steiner-Adair’s opinion, it is only a matter of time before social-emotional intelligence is recognized as a crucial skill that must be at the heart of our education system. Thanks to developments in the field of cognitive psychology, it is now undeniable that social-emotional intelligence is essential to success in a way that rivals math and literacy.

Technology, like any tool, can greatly help or hurt us: it all depends on how we use it. So let’s take a good look at how we operate as parents and as people, and decide if this is who we want to be.