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"Homework Hygiene is all about helping kids develop effective practices around homework such as writing to-do lists, developing the habit of prioritizing the list and checking things off."

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A major reason I started filming Screenagers in the first place was that I saw how homework was going to be more and more on computers. I was thinking, "wow, being a kid or teen trying to stay on task for homework when the tech world is so entertaining, how is that going to work?" I compared it to my trying to ignore a plate of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies while doing a writing assignment-and I can tell you how that went 9 out of 10 times.

As much as I feel for kids and teens, I also feel for us parents. It's really painful to think about how our teens are switching tabs when they should be on task. According to psychologist Larry Rosen's study, middle school, high school, and university students focus on average for six minutes before they switch off of homework to a technological distraction. For the study, students were in their home and instructed to study something important while a person observed their activities for 15 minutes.

I have some suggestions for improving study habits that I call Homework Hygiene. Sleep hygiene is something we talk a lot about in medicine because sleep problems, particularly insomnia, are so common. We help people set up practices and habits to increase a good night's sleep such as going to bed at the same time each night, setting an alarm for earlier wake-up times to reset their internal clock, and other techniques. Homework Hygiene is all about helping kids develop effective practices around homework such as writing to-do lists, developing the habit of prioritizing the list and checking things off.

It is a top priority to engage our kids in conversations in which they become aware of the challenges they face in having good homework habits.

Delaney's super-duper 3-part conversation tactic for helping kids gain insight and ideas for optimal homework hygiene:

1. Empathize
Start by saying you have empathy for all kids about homework-you understand that after a full school day how difficult it is to do repetitive or hard work. Validate that having to do homework can feel tortuous at times, and now with distractions at our fingertips, there is a new, unprecedented level of challenge.

2. Get curious
Have one good conversation about homework that is calm and curious, not personal and judgemental. Here are two good ones to consider:
Talk about the science of homework. For example, mention the study I described above and ask for their guess about the average time it took before people went off task.
Discuss the difference between external distractions vs. internal distractions. How often do they experience an external distraction, i.e. they have their phone near them and see that someone has pinged them and they feel the need to check the message? Internal distraction is a psychological pull towards doing something other than homework-like a sense of a need to check into social media or to switch to a favorite website.

3. Explore effective strategies
After the non-personal conversations, get your kid to talk about their current homework strategies and habits. Ask questions like, "Do you start by writing a list of what needs to get done?" Now is a good time to throw out ideas.

Examples of good Homework Hygiene:

1. Do homework after physical activity because the body is physiologically primed to learn more efficiently in this state.

2. Start with the task that they least want to do and set the alarm for 10 minutes. That helps get over the hurdle of doing it. Then, after the 10 minutes, coming back to it will be much easier.

3. Have a rule that all tech is off by a certain time so homework cannot be done late at night.

4. Put phones out of sight and decide when it is reasonable for a tech or phone break. My 10th grader takes a short phone break about every 30 minutes.

5. Put in place other breaks, not just checking phone, such as playing with a pet, or doing part of a crossword puzzle with them.

6. Get a system that monitors what the student does on the computer, i.e. how often they check other sites. If they know this is on the computer, it can help keep them stay on task until they get a break. Check out our website for computer monitoring systems. Another way to do this is to tell your child that the two of you will check their browsing history from time to time. It is vital to be upfront about this because kids can easily erase their history.

There are many other strategies that I will be sharing in upcoming TTTs. I hope you will tell your friends about TTTs so together we increase the number of calm conversations happening in our communities. Meanwhile, I always love hearing from you!

For this week's TTT try the 3-part conversation tactic I described above:

1. Express your empathy around why doing homework feels so hard

2. Talk about the science and internal vs. external distractions

3. Ask kids about their current homework strategies and brainstorm new ones

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A major reason I started filming Screenagers in the first place was that I saw how homework was going to be more and more on computers. I was thinking, "wow, being a kid or teen trying to stay on task for homework when the tech world is so entertaining, how is that going to work?"

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Celebrating 50 years of Kids Coding Doodle - Google Doodles

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Learn more about the creation of Celebrating 50 years of Kids Coding Doodle and discover the story behind the unique artwork.

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Jump to navigation Try these commonsense ideas, updated regularly by our experts. Sign up to get all the best resources delivered straight to your inbox. Put #DeviceFreeDinner into action with Evite! Make your next potluck or game night a success with these digital invitations and easy-to-use tools.

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YouTube cracks down on disturbing videos of children

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YouTube cracks down on disturbing videos of children

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SAN FRANCISCO -- Hundreds of thousands of disturbing videos of young children have been posted online, not in some dark corner of the internet, but on YouTube.

The website is finally cracking down. It was a bottom-line decision.

Under pressure from advertisers, YouTube -- owned by Google -- removed more than 150,000 videos with images of children apparently being assaulted.

"At the end of the day, large tech companies are run by the bottom line, and I think YouTube has been an incredibly successful platform for Google, and they have simply not paid enough attention to some of the bad stuff that happens on that platform," said James Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media.

YouTube began paying attention as advertisers pulled their ads, complaining about child-endangering videos.

In a statement Tuesday, YouTube said:

"Over the last few months we've taken deliberate steps to tackle many of the emerging challenges around family content on YouTube. In the past week, we've taken aggressive action, including removing over 150,000 videos from our platform that do not belong on YouTube, turning off inappropriate comments from over 625,000 videos, terminating hundreds of accounts and adding age-gates for videos that are clearly geared towards mature audiences. Beyond that, we have removed ads from over 2 M videos and over 50k channels that masquerade as family-friendly to reduce the incentive to produce this content."

"It's a new type of child abuse -- child sexual abuse exploitation," said Mary Pulido, executive director of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. "Children can't unsee something. Once they look at an image, it is there in their brains forever."

The problem on YouTube is that with some 300 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, identifying offensive material is a constant challenge. YouTube has largely depended on computers to determine what is appropriate.

"A machine, a computer, cannot do that as well as a human being," Steyer said.

"So do you have to hire hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people to look at everything?" CBS News asked.

"If you have to hire hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people to look at everything, they should, because Google is coining money," Steyer said.

While YouTube is taking steps to protect children, experts say the first line of defense is at home -- that parents have to be aware of what their children are watching and should limit the amount of time children spend watching online videos.

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YouTube cracks down on disturbing videos of children

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SAN FRANCISCO -- Hundreds of thousands of disturbing videos of young children have been posted online, not in some dark corner of the internet, but on YouTube. The website is finally cracking down. It was a bottom-line decision. Under pressure from advertisers, YouTube -- owned by Google -- removed more than 150,000 videos with images of children apparently being assaulted.

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On YouTube Kids, Startling Videos Slip Past Filters

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On YouTube Kids, Startling Videos Slip Past Filters

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Staci Burns, who lives near Fort Wayne, Ind., said her "initial response was anger" when she saw one of her sons watching a disturbing video on YouTube Kids. Credit... Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

It was a typical night in Staci Burns's house outside Fort Wayne, Ind. She was cooking dinner while her 3-year-old son, Isaac, watched videos on the YouTube Kids app on an iPad. Suddenly he cried out, "Mommy, the monster scares me!"

When Ms. Burns walked over, Isaac was watching a video featuring crude renderings of the characters from "PAW Patrol," a Nickelodeon show that is popular among preschoolers, screaming in a car. The vehicle hurtled into a light pole and burst into flames.

The 10-minute clip, "PAW Patrol Babies Pretend to Die Suicide by Annabelle Hypnotized," was a nightmarish imitation of an animated series in which a boy and a pack of rescue dogs protect their community from troubles like runaway kittens and rock slides. In the video Isaac watched, some characters died and one walked off a roof after being hypnotized by a likeness of a doll possessed by a demon.

"My initial response was anger," said Ms. Burns, a nurse, who credits the app with helping Isaac to learn colors and letters before other boys his age. "My poor little innocent boy, he's the sweetest thing, and then there are these horrible, horrible, evil people out there that just get their kicks off of making stuff like this to torment children."

Parents and children have flocked to Google-owned YouTube Kids since it was introduced in early 2015. The app's more than 11 million weekly viewers are drawn in by its seemingly infinite supply of clips, including those from popular shows by Disney and Nickelodeon, and the knowledge that the app is supposed to contain only child-friendly content that has been automatically filtered from the main YouTube site.

But the app contains dark corners, too, as videos that are disturbing for children slip past its filters, either by mistake or because bad actors have found ways to fool the YouTube Kids algorithms.

In recent months, parents like Ms. Burns have complained that their children have been shown videos with well-known characters in violent or lewd situations and other clips with disturbing imagery, sometimes set to nursery rhymes. Many have taken to Facebook to warn others, and share video screenshots showing moments ranging from a Claymation Spider-Man urinating on Elsa of "Frozen" to Nick Jr. characters in a strip club.

Malik Ducard, YouTube's global head of family and learning content, said that the inappropriate videos were "the extreme needle in the haystack," but that "making the app family friendly is of the utmost importance to us."

While the offending videos are a tiny fraction of YouTube Kids' universe, they are another example of the potential for abuse on digital media platforms that rely on computer algorithms, rather than humans, to police the content that appears in front of people - in this case, very young people.

And they show, at a time when Congress is closely scrutinizing technology giants, how rules that govern at least some of the content on children's television fail to extend to the digital world.

When videos are uploaded to YouTube, algorithms determine whether or not they are appropriate for YouTube Kids. The videos are continually monitored after that, Mr. Ducard said, a process that is "multilayered and uses a lot of machine learning." Several parents said they expected the app to be safer because it asked during setup whether their child was in preschool or older.

Mr. Ducard said that while YouTube Kids may highlight some content, like Halloween videos in October, "it isn't a curated experience." Instead, "parents are in the driver's seat," he said, pointing to the ability to block channels, set usage timers and disable search results.

Parents are also encouraged to report inappropriate videos, which someone at YouTube then manually reviews, he said. He noted that in the past 30 days, "less than .005 percent" of the millions of videos viewed in the app were removed for being inappropriate.

"We strive," he added, "to make that fraction even lower."

Holly Hart of Gray, Tenn., said she was recently reading while her 3-year-old daughter was in the room when she noticed that Disney Junior characters in the video her daughter was watching started "turning into monsters and trying to feed each other to alligators." An image previewing a recommended video showed the characters in a provocative pose.

"It was an eye-opener for me," said Ms. Hart, who had downloaded the app because it was being used at the local elementary school.

Not all of the inappropriate videos feature cartoons. Alisa Clark Wilcken of Vernal, Utah, said her 4-year-old son had recently seen a video of a family playing roughly with a young girl, including a scene in which her forehead is shaved, causing her to wail and appear to bleed.

Most of the videos flagged by parents were uploaded to YouTube in recent months by anonymous users with names like Kids Channel TV and Super Moon TV. The videos' titles and descriptions feature popular character names and terms like "education" and "learn colors."

They are independently animated, presumably to avoid copyright violations and detection. Some clips uploaded as recently as August have millions of views on the main YouTube site and run automatically placed ads, suggesting they are financially lucrative for the makers as well as YouTube, which shares in ad revenue. It is not clear how many of those views came on YouTube Kids.

One video on YouTube Kids from the account Subin TV shows the "PAW Patrol" characters in a strip club. One of them then visits a doctor and asks for her cartoon legs to be replaced with long, provocative human legs in stilettos. The account's description says, "Video created with the purpose of learning and development of children!"

The account that posted the video seen by Ms. Burns's son is named Super Ares TV and has a Facebook page called PAW Patrol Awesome TV. Questions sent there were mostly ignored, though the account did reply: "That's a Cute character and video is a funny story, take it easy, that's it."

The Super Ares TV account seems to be linked to a number of other channels targeting children with cartoon imitations, based on their similar channel fonts, animation style and Greek mythology-inspired names, from Super Hermes TV and Super Apollo TV to Super Hera TV.

A Super Zeus TV account included a link to a shopping site called SuperKidsShop.com, which is registered in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. A call to the phone number listed in that site's registration records was answered by a man who declined to identify himself. He said that his partners were responsible for the videos and that a team of about 100 people worked on them. He said he would forward email requests for comment to them. Those emails went unanswered.

Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center on Media and Child Health, said such videos brought up a host of issues for children. "It's just made that much more upsetting by the fact that characters they thought they knew and trusted are behaving in these ways," he said.

Ms. Burns said she still allowed her 3-year-old son, Isaac, to use YouTube Kids, though on a more limited, supervised basis. Credit... Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

Josh Golin, executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, argued that inappropriate videos on YouTube Kids showed hazards of today's media reality.

"Algorithms are not a substitute for human intervention, and when it comes to creating a safe environment for children, you need humans," Mr. Golin said. His group and the Center for Digital Democracy filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in 2015 accusing YouTube Kids of deceptive marketing to parents based on inappropriate videos.

Using automation for online advertising has turned Google into a behemoth worth more than half a trillion dollars. The company has faced a new wave of criticism in the past year for lacking human oversight after its systems inadvertently funded fake news sites and hateful YouTube videos and most likely sold election-related ads to accounts affiliated with the Russian government.

Google has largely defended its errors by pointing to the enormous amount of content it hosts, including more than 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Disney and Nickelodeon, mainstays of children's programming, work with YouTube Kids to introduce children to their characters. But they are also aware that their content can be mixed in with disturbing knockoffs.

"Nickelodeon creates its characters and shows to entertain kids, so we share the same concern as parents about the unsuitable nature of some of the videos being served to them," said David Bittler, a spokesman for the Viacom-owned network.

A Disney spokesman said YouTube Kids had assured the company that it was "working on ways to more effectively and proactively prevent this type of situation from occurring."

Some parents have taken to deleting the app. Others, like Ms. Burns, still allow its use, just on a more limited, supervised basis.

"This is a children's application - it's targeted to children," said Crissi Gilreath, a mother of two in Oklahoma, "and I just can't believe that with such a big company they don't have people whose job it is to filter and flag."

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On YouTube Kids, Startling Videos Slip Past Filters (Published 2017)

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It was a typical night in Staci Burns's house outside Fort Wayne, Ind. She was cooking dinner while her 3-year-old son, Isaac, watched videos on the YouTube Kids app on an iPad. Suddenly he cried out, "Mommy, the monster scares me!"

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News and Social Media Use among HTS Upper School Students

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News and Social Media Use among HTS Upper School Students

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In October, HTS librarians conducted a survey with 6th, 7th and 8th graders on their sources for news and use of social media. We also queried them on online bullying.

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Do you have a long car ride ahead for Thanksgiving or just looking for activities to do with your kids off screens? How about a podcast? I love podcasts and listen to them with my kids often because, as I've written about before, we have a rule in our family about not using cellphones in the car. Every time we hear a new one we learn something, and it sparks conversation and debate. Furthermore, as Stephanie Hayes writes in the Atlantic:

"The absence of images in podcasts seems to be a source of their creative potential. Without visuals, listeners are required to fill the gaps-and when these listeners are children, the results can be powerful. Numerous studies have found that children between the ages of seven and 13 respond more creatively to radio stories than to stories shown on television. Audio stories prompt kids to draw more novel pictures, think up more unique questions, and solve problems in a more imaginative way than TV tales."

Here are my top 3 favorite podcasts to listen to with my family-along with a few titles of recent shows:

Freakonomics
How Can I Do the Most Social Good With $100?
Thinking Is Expensive. Who's Supposed to Pay for It?

Ted Radio
Sam Kass: Can Free Breakfast Improve Learning?
Wendy Troxel: Does High School Start Too Early?

Planet Money
Episode 804: Your Cell Phone's A Snitch
Episode 369: If Teens Ran the Fed

Some other great ones are This American Life, Radiolab, and StoryCorps. A couple that I've heard are good for younger kids are Tumble and Brains On.

For this week's Tech Talk Tuesday let's talk about podcasts. Here are some conversation starters:

Do you ever listen to podcasts at school? If so, are there any you like?

What do you think of listening to something other than music in the car?

If you were to do a podcast, what would it be about?

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My 3 favorite podcasts and why listening to them is good for your kids

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Tech Talk Tuesday #94: My 3 favorite podcasts and why listening to them is good for your kids Do you have a long car ride ahead for Thanksgiving or just looking for activities to do with your kids off screens? How about a podcast?

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It's 10 P.M. Do You Know What Apps Your Children Are Using?

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It's 10 P.M. Do You Know What Apps Your Children Are Using?

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"If for some reason someone was bullying someone," said Vlada Bortnik, the creator of Marco Polo, "we would take the steps to make sure our platform stays safe and probably remove them from the platform." (Blocking someone is also an option.)

Yellow

Yellow, which has been called "Tinder for teens" (swipe right if you want to become friends with someone; swipe left if you don't), opens with a geo-locator. There is a 13-year-old age minimum, which there's no way of verifying.

Flipping through Yellow is like watching an MTV beach party from the 1990s, with countless photos of shirtless teenagers looking to "make new friends."

It's not hard to wreak havoc with a false profile using a real schoolmate's name.

In an email, Marc-Antoine Durand, the head of community and safety at Yellow, wrote that the company is addressing parents' concerns by prioritizing emails that are sent through the settings feature of the app. Yellow also has a team of "human moderators" who look at potentially fake content and impostor accounts. "Users who do create fake profiles or share inappropriate content are blocked and removed from Yellow," Mr. Durand wrote.

Anonymous Apps

Anonymous apps have been developed for people interested in a faceless and nameless documentation of their lives (as opposed to a selfie), drawing in children who learned from earlier generations about the consequences of an offensive online footprint. (For example, Harvard University withdrew admission offers to 10 incoming freshmen in June because of obscene Facebook posts.)

There are a number of anonymous apps on the market - After School, Sarahah, SayAt.Me, Monkey and Ask.Fm are some of the most popular - all of them promising the same feature: Spill intimate feelings about yourself or, on the flip side, spread rumors and attack friends, without any trace of who said what.

SayAt.Me has been under scrutiny since the death of George Hessay, 15, from East Yorkshire, England, who committed suicide in May after reportedly receiving bullying messages on the app.

The company deletes abusive content if reported, Hanna Talving, its chief executive, wrote in an email. "We also protect our site users from negative content by flagging it to them before they see it."

Ephemeral Apps

Many adults have heard of Snapchat and Instagram Stories, but what about Live.ly, a rising live-streaming app with a large teenage audience? All three work like a disappearing magic act. You send photos, texts and videos, and poof.

Chances are, your teenager is using Snapchat: 75 percent of teens use the app, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey in April. In late June, Snapchat introduced Snap Map, a mapping feature that will share your location with a charming "Actionmoji" every single time you open the app. (Set it to Ghost Mode to turn this function off.)

Instagram Impostor Accounts

In early May, Dawn Dunscombe, who lives in a small New Jersey suburb, learned that an Instagram account with the handle "I Have A Crush.1" was devised to impersonate her 10-year-old daughter.

Ms. Dunscombe's daughter does not have an Instagram account. Yet the fake account was filled with posts, including claims that her daughter had a crush on a boy in her class. It wasn't the outed crush that upset Ms. Dunscombe - the tormenting song that someone is "Sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g," is playground standard - it was that the fake account was created in her daughter's name so easily and with the purpose of damaging her young daughter's reputation.

Profanities and rudeness littered the account, which is what gave it away. "A classmate told my daughter, 'I knew it couldn't be you because you don't curse and you don't talk rude like that to people,'" Ms. Dunscombe said.

By the time Ms. Dunscombe tracked down the account, it had been shut down. The school investigated. No one confessed. Ms. Dunscombe contacted Instagram multiple times and got a generic message. The situation was handled. Account closed.

Management Strategies

Getting rid of an app is like playing whack-a-mole - particularly because many young people maintain multiple accounts with varying levels of secrecy.

"This arena in social media that we're working in changes so quickly," said Robert Appleton, the New York State Internet Crimes Against Children task force commander. "The kids don't want the parents to discover what they're using, so every time a new app comes out, they're switching."

And behavior, not apps that enable it, is the problem, said Elizabeth Englander a psychology professor at Bridgewater State University and director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center.

"I could give you a list of things that kids tell us they do to each other," Ms. Englander said. "But the more interesting question is: 'Why are we seeing misuse of apps and technology perhaps among teenagers who wouldn't engage in those behaviors in person?'"

Common Sense Media recommends Bark, Limitly and Track Kidz to monitor your children's activity. But Anne Collier, the founder of iCanHelpLine.org, a social media intervention service for schools, said a trust relationship is even more essential.

"Monitoring and surveillance control aren't always the most effective way," she said. "It's really best to have a human way of monitoring the situation."

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video recordings  downloads and streaming

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It's 10 P.M. Do You Know What Apps Your Children Are Using?

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"If for some reason someone was bullying someone," said Vlada Bortnik, the creator of Marco Polo, "we would take the steps to make sure our platform stays safe and probably remove them from the platform." (Blocking someone is also an option.)

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The Sneaky Science Behind Your Kids Tech Obsessions

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The Sneaky Science Behind Your Kids Tech Obsessions

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Son won't turn off his video game? Daughter obsessed with "likes" on Instagram? It may not be entirely their fault. Like the high-octane sugar in a pint of Ben & Jerry's and that irresistible chemical spice in Flamin' Hot Cheetos, the ingredients in social media, video games, apps, and other digital products are carefully engineered to keep you coming back for more. While researchers are still trying to discover whether kids (and parents) can be addicted to technology, some computer scientists are revealing their secrets for keeping us hooked.

Resisting the urge to check your phone or shut down Netflix after another cliffhanger Stranger Things episode should be a simple matter of self-control. But according to so-called whistleblowers such as Tristan Harris, a computer scientist who founded the Time Well Spent movement, and Adam Alter, author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, we humans are totally overpowered. Features such as app notifications, autoplay -- even "likes" and messages that self-destruct -- are scientifically proven to compel us to watch/check in/respond right now or feel that we're missing something really important.

Behind the apps, games, and social media is a whole crew of folks whose job is to make their products feel essential. Many of the techniques they use are ones outlined by experts in human behavior, including Nir Eyal author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and BJ Fogg of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab. Harris argues that these methods "hijack" our own good judgment. Most teens care deeply about peer validation, for example. So it makes sense that friends' feedback on social media -- both the positive and the negative -- would tug at you until you satisfy your curiosity. You have a phone in your pocket, so why not check now? And now. And now?

What do the big tech companies say to the criticism that they're designing addictive products? They typically give the business argument, that they're creating products people love to use and are constantly trying to improve people's experience ( Facebook says it polls users daily to gauge success). But soon it may be hard for the tech giants to say that they're blameless. More and more industry insiders -- including some who designed these attention-claiming features -- are coming forward to cry foul on digital manipulation and even to suggest ways companies can limit it. In fact, it's not just people who are going public. In 2017, a leaked Facebook internal memo showed how the social network can identify when teens feel "insecure," "worthless," and "need a confidence boost." That's not a problem "likes" can fix.

There is a way to fight back. Thanks to the folks who are calling out these methods, you can spot specific tricks and reflect on how they affect your thoughts and behavior. Remember: The other side wants to reduce the time between your thoughts and actions. Putting that pause in will help you resist your urges. Below are some of the key features designed to keep their grips on you. Also check out some ideas you and your kids can use to resist temptation.

Autoplay. Most notable on Netflix and Facebook, autoplay is the feature that makes videos continue to stream even after they're over. Tristan Harris calls this the "bottomless bowl" phenomenon. With a refilling bowl, people eat 73 percent more calories. Or they binge-watch way too many movies.
What to do. Autoplay is typically on by default, so you have to turn it off. The feature can usually be found in the app's account Settings. Here's how to turn it off in Netflix.

Notifications. Studies show that push notifications -- those little pings and prods you get to check your apps -- are habit-forming. They align an external trigger (the ping) with an internal trigger (a feeling of boredom, uncertainty, insecurity, etc.). Every app uses them, but some, such as Musical.ly and YouTube, have discovered that when notifications tells us to do something, such as "Watch Sally's new video!" or "See who liked your post!" we respond immediately. These calls to action not only interrupt us, they cause stress.
What to do. Turn them off. Most devices have a Settings section where you can turn off notifications. You should also be able to turn off notifications in the app's settings.

Snapchat's Snapstreaks. A Snapstreak begins after two users send snaps (pictures) to each other for three days straight. You might think competition is the motivation behind Snapstreaks, but it's more likely due to a psychological theory called the rule of reciprocation. Humans have a need to respond to a positive action with another positive action. Voilà, a Snapstreak is born. Kids can become so obsessed with sustaining a streak that they give their friends access to their accounts when they're unable to maintain their own streaks (which is actually a privacy risk). The rule is also at play with "like backs" -- when you like someone's post and ask them to like yours back to bolster your total number of likes. Of course, companies exploit the rule of reciprocation because more data points for them means more opportunities to understand their users and try to sell them stuff.
What to do. Help kids understand how companies like Snapchat are using their (positive) desire to be nice to their friends to get them to use their product more. If your kid's streaks are getting out of control, try allowing one time per day that your kid can send snaps, for example, after they take out the garbage, clean their room, and finish their homework. Finally, if your kids' streaks are merely annoying and not harmful, you may need to ride out this phase until your kids go on to something new.

Randomness. If you knew that Instagram updated your feed at precisely 3 p.m. every day, that's when you'd check in, right? But that won't keep you glued to your phone. Instead, social media companies use what's called "variable rewards." This technique keeps us searching endlessly for our "prize," such as who friended us, who liked our posts, and who updated their status. (Not coincidentally, it's also the method slot machines use to keep people pulling the lever.) Since you never know what's going to come up, you keep coming back for more.
What to do. Turn off app notifications (usually found in your phone's Settings but also in the apps' settings themselves). Schedule a timer to go off at a certain time every day and check your feeds then.

In-app purchases. Free games such as Clash of Clans and Candy Crush lure you in by promising cheap thrills, then offering in-app purchases that let you level up, buy currency to use in the game, and more. But the real sneaky stuff is how companies keep you playing -- and buying. The more you use the game and the more in-app purchases you make, the more companies learn about you. Thanks to games that connect to Facebook, they also know who your friends are. That lets them tailor specific products to you at the precise times you're most likely to buy.
What to do. Spring for the full, paid version of games. They're cheaper -- and safer -- in the long run.

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The Sneaky Science Behind Your Kid's Tech Obsessions

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Son won't turn off his video game? Daughter obsessed with "likes" on Instagram? It may not be entirely their fault. Like the high-octane sugar in a pint of Ben & Jerry's and that irresistible chemical spice in Flamin' Hot Cheetos, the ingredients in social media, video games, apps, and other digital products are carefully engineered to keep you coming back for more.

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Now that screen-time recommendations are more flexible, it’s time for new rules. Advice from Common Sense Media editors.

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Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?  

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Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?  

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Important read for parents looking to assess how much their children use cell phones and other technology

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More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they're on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone-she's had an iPhone since she was 11-sounding as if she'd just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. "We go to the mall," she said. "Do your parents drop you off?," I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I'd enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. "No-I go with my family," she replied. "We'll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we're going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes."

Those mall trips are infrequent-about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. "It's good blackmail," Athena said. (Because she's a minor, I'm not using her real name.) She told me she'd spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That's just the way her generation is, she said. "We didn't have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people."

I've been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena's generation.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data-some reaching back to the 1930s-I had never seen anything like it.
The allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today's teens.
At first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren't just in degree, but in kind. The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.

What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.

The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn't ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen's oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.

The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by hand-wringing about the deleterious effects of "screen time." But the impact of these devices has not been fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual concerns about curtailed attention spans. The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers' lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.

To those of us who fondly recall a more analog adolescence, this may seem foreign and troubling. The aim of generational study, however, is not to succumb to nostalgia for the way things used to be; it's to understand how they are now. Some generational changes are positive, some are negative, and many are both. More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today's teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They're markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking's attendant ills.

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It's not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.

Even when a seismic event-a war, a technological leap, a free concert in the mud-plays an outsize role in shaping a group of young people, no single factor ever defines a generation. Parenting styles continue to change, as do school curricula and culture, and these things matter. But the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we've not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we've placed in young people's hands are having profound effects on their lives-and making them seriously unhappy.

In the early 1970s, the photographer Bill Yates shot a series of portraits at the Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink in Tampa, Florida. In one, a shirtless teen stands with a large bottle of peppermint schnapps stuck in the waistband of his jeans. In another, a boy who looks no older than 12 poses with a cigarette in his mouth. The rink was a place where kids could get away from their parents and inhabit a world of their own, a world where they could drink, smoke, and make out in the backs of their cars. In stark black-and-white, the adolescent Boomers gaze at Yates's camera with the self-confidence born of making your own choices-even if, perhaps especially if, your parents wouldn't think they were the right ones.

Fifteen years later, during my own teenage years as a member of Generation X, smoking had lost some of its romance, but independence was definitely still in. My friends and I plotted to get our driver's license as soon as we could, making DMV appointments for the day we turned 16 and using our newfound freedom to escape the confines of our suburban neighborhood. Asked by our parents, "When will you be home?," we replied, "When do I have to be?"

But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today's teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.

Today's teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called "liking" (as in "Ooh, he likes you!"), kids now call "talking"-an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have "talked" for a while, they might start dating. But only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.

The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer. Fewer teens having sex has contributed to what many see as one of the most positive youth trends in recent years: The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991.

Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller's Day Off, has lost its appeal for today's teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver's license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school. For some, Mom and Dad are such good chauffeurs that there's no urgent need to drive. "My parents drove me everywhere and never complained, so I always had rides," a 21-year-old student in San Diego told me. "I didn't get my license until my mom told me I had to because she could not keep driving me to school." She finally got her license six months after her 18th birthday. In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents-a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.

Independence isn't free-you need some money in your pocket to pay for gas, or for that bottle of schnapps. In earlier eras, kids worked in great numbers, eager to finance their freedom or prodded by their parents to learn the value of a dollar. But iGen teens aren't working (or managing their own money) as much. In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half. These declines accelerated during the Great Recession, but teen employment has not bounced back, even though job availability has.

Of course, putting off the responsibilities of adulthood is not an iGen innovation. Gen Xers, in the 1990s, were the first to postpone the traditional markers of adulthood. Young Gen Xers were just about as likely to drive, drink alcohol, and date as young Boomers had been, and more likely to have sex and get pregnant as teens. But as they left their teenage years behind, Gen Xers married and started careers later than their Boomer predecessors had.

Gen X managed to stretch adolescence beyond all previous limits: Its members started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later. Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again-but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors-drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised- 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.

Why are today's teens waiting longer to take on both the responsibilities and the pleasures of adulthood? Shifts in the economy, and parenting, certainly play a role. In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement-not because they're so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don't need to leave home to spend time with their friends.

If today's teens were a generation of grinds, we'd see that in the data. But eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s. (High-school seniors headed for four-year colleges spend about the same amount of time on homework as their predecessors did.) The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.

So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.

One of the ironies of iGen life is that despite spending far more time under the same roof as their parents, today's teens can hardly be said to be closer to their mothers and fathers than their predecessors were. "I've seen my friends with their families-they don't talk to them," Athena told me. "They just say 'Okay, okay, whatever' while they're on their phones. They don't pay attention to their family." Like her peers, Athena is an expert at tuning out her parents so she can focus on her phone. She spent much of her summer keeping up with friends, but nearly all of it was over text or Snapchat. "I've been on my phone more than I've been with actual people," she said. "My bed has, like, an imprint of my body."

In this, too, she is typical. The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It's not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. That's something most teens used to do: nerds and jocks, poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students. The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot-they've all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.

You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not. The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social media, texting, and browsing the web. The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

There's not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they're unhappy than those who devote less time to social media. Admittedly, 10 hours a week is a lot. But those who spend six to nine hours a week on social media are still 47 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than those who use social media even less. The opposite is true of in-person interactions. Those who spend an above-average amount of time with their friends in person are 20 percent less likely to say they're unhappy than those who hang out for a below-average amount of time.
The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.
If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something-anything-that does not involve a screen. Of course, these analyses don't unequivocally prove that screen time causes unhappiness; it's possible that unhappy teens spend more time online. But recent research suggests that screen time, in particular social-media use, does indeed cause unhappiness. One study asked college students with a Facebook page to complete short surveys on their phone over the course of two weeks. They'd get a text message with a link five times a day, and report on their mood and how much they'd used Facebook. The more they'd used Facebook, the unhappier they felt, but feeling unhappy did not subsequently lead to more Facebook use.

Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements "A lot of times I feel lonely," "I often feel left out of things," and "I often wish I had more good friends." Teens' feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.

This doesn't always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online. Teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person, on average-highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less so. But at the generational level, when teens spend more time on smartphones and less time on in-person social interactions, loneliness is more common.

So is depression. Once again, the effect of screen activities is unmistakable: The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.

Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That's much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.) One piece of data that indirectly but stunningly captures kids' growing isolation, for good and for bad: Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.

Depression and suicide have many causes; too much technology is clearly not the only one. And the teen suicide rate was even higher in the 1990s, long before smartphones existed. Then again, about four times as many Americans now take antidepressants, which are often effective in treating severe depression, the type most strongly linked to suicide.

What's the connection between smartphones and the apparent psychological distress this generation is experiencing? For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out. Today's teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly-on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups. Like the increase in loneliness, the upswing in feeling left out has been swift and significant.

This trend has been especially steep among girls. Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, "I'm nervous about what people think and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don't get a certain amount of likes on a picture."

Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today's teens. Boys' depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls' increased by 50 percent-more than twice as much. The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys. The suicide rate is still higher for boys, in part because they use more-lethal methods, but girls are beginning to close the gap.

These more dire consequences for teenage girls could also be rooted in the fact that they're more likely to experience cyberbullying. Boys tend to bully one another physically, while girls are more likely to do so by undermining a victim's social status or relationships. Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.

Social-media companies are of course aware of these problems, and to one degree or another have endeavored to prevent cyberbullying. But their various motivations are, to say the least, complex. A recently leaked Facebook document indicated that the company had been touting to advertisers its ability to determine teens' emotional state based on their on-site behavior, and even to pinpoint "moments when young people need a confidence boost." Facebook acknowledged that the document was real, but denied that it offers "tools to target people based on their emotional state."

In July 2014, a 13-year-old girl in North Texas woke to the smell of something burning. Her phone had overheated and melted into the sheets. National news outlets picked up the story, stoking readers' fears that their cellphone might spontaneously combust. To me, however, the flaming cellphone wasn't the only surprising aspect of the story. Why, I wondered, would anyone sleep with her phone beside her in bed? It's not as though you can surf the web while you're sleeping. And who could slumber deeply inches from a buzzing phone?

Curious, I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm's reach of the bed. They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the morning (they had to-all of them used it as their alarm clock). Their phone was the last thing they saw before they went to sleep and the first thing they saw when they woke up. If they woke in the middle of the night, they often ended up looking at their phone. Some used the language of addiction. "I know I shouldn't, but I just can't help it," one said about looking at her phone while in bed. Others saw their phone as an extension of their body-or even like a lover: "Having my phone closer to me while I'm sleeping is a comfort."

It may be a comfort, but the smartphone is cutting into teens' sleep: Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived. Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.

The increase is suspiciously timed, once again starting around when most teens got a smartphone. Two national surveys show that teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 28 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those who spend fewer than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are 19 percent more likely to be sleep deprived. A meta-analysis of studies on electronic-device use among children found similar results: Children who use a media device right before bed are more likely to sleep less than they should, more likely to sleep poorly, and more than twice as likely to be sleepy during the day.
I've observed my toddler, barely old enough to walk, confidently swiping her way through an iPad.
Electronic devices and social media seem to have an especially strong ability to disrupt sleep. Teens who read books and magazines more often than the average are actually slightly less likely to be sleep deprived-either reading lulls them to sleep, or they can put the book down at bedtime. Watching TV for several hours a day is only weakly linked to sleeping less. But the allure of the smartphone is often too much to resist.

Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues, including compromised thinking and reasoning, susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who don't sleep enough are prone to depression and anxiety. Again, it's difficult to trace the precise paths of causation. Smartphones could be causing lack of sleep, which leads to depression, or the phones could be causing depression, which leads to lack of sleep. Or some other factor could be causing both depression and sleep deprivation to rise. But the smartphone, its blue light glowing in the dark, is likely playing a nefarious role.

The correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone. As the technology writer Nick Bilton has reported, it's a policy some Silicon Valley executives follow. Even Steve Jobs limited his kids' use of the devices he brought into the world.

What's at stake isn't just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them. In the next decade, we may see more adults who know just the right emoji for a situation, but not the right facial expression.

I realize that restricting technology might be an unrealistic demand to impose on a generation of kids so accustomed to being wired at all times. My three daughters were born in 2006, 2009, and 2012. They're not yet old enough to display the traits of iGen teens, but I have already witnessed firsthand just how ingrained new media are in their young lives. I've observed my toddler, barely old enough to walk, confidently swiping her way through an iPad. I've experienced my 6-year-old asking for her own cellphone. I've overheard my 9-year-old discussing the latest app to sweep the fourth grade. Prying the phone out of our kids' hands will be difficult, even more so than the quixotic efforts of my parents' generation to get their kids to turn off MTV and get some fresh air. But more seems to be at stake in urging teens to use their phone responsibly, and there are benefits to be gained even if all we instill in our children is the importance of moderation. Significant effects on both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.

In my conversations with teens, I saw hopeful signs that kids themselves are beginning to link some of their troubles to their ever-present phone. Athena told me that when she does spend time with her friends in person, they are often looking at their device instead of at her. "I'm trying to talk to them about something, and they don't actually look at my face," she said. "They're looking at their phone, or they're looking at their Apple Watch." "What does that feel like, when you're trying to talk to somebody face-to-face and they're not looking at you?," I asked. "It kind of hurts," she said. "It hurts. I know my parents' generation didn't do that. I could be talking about something super important to me, and they wouldn't even be listening."

Once, she told me, she was hanging out with a friend who was texting her boyfriend. "I was trying to talk to her about my family, and what was going on, and she was like, 'Uh-huh, yeah, whatever.' So I took her phone out of her hands and I threw it at my wall."

I couldn't help laughing. "You play volleyball," I said. "Do you have a pretty good arm?" "Yep," she replied.
This article has been adapted from Jean M. Twenge's forthcoming book, iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy-and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood-and What That Means for the Rest of Us.

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Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

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More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they're on the brink of a mental-health crisis.