How much “screen time” is too much?

When I was pregnant with Fiona, my friends, all childless themselves, thought it would be funny to write an advice book for my husband and I. (No one knew that I would, ironically, go on to be someone who routinely gives parenting advice.) They each wrote entries about the things they thought their own parents did well. My buddy Scott—who happens to be smart, funny, AND kind—detailed all the ways that watching “too much TV” as a child has benefited him in later life. Though a knowledge of 1970’s popular culture will only take you so far, I made a mental note to let my kids watch as much as they wanted.

But then I found out that you the American Academy of Pediatrics adamantly recommends that parents not let their children watch any TV until they are at least two years old, not even if the tired mommy really wants to take a shower. Being something of a rule-follower, Fiona didn’t know the word for TV until her second birthday, when she promptly became a Sesame Street and Blues Clues junkie. I conveniently forgot about the AAP recommendation with Molly; it seemed too hard to cut TV out altogether.

Is that bad?

I certainly wasn’t alone in letting my baby watch TV. American children spend 2 to 5 hours a day watching television, on average. 59% of children younger than two—who aren’t supposed to be watching any—watch an average of 1.3 hours of television daily.

It turns out that a very large number of studies have reported harmful effects from children’s television viewing, including worse performance in school, obesity, attention-span problems, aggression, sleep deprivation, requests for advertised foods, and eating fewer fruits and vegetables and more pizza, snack food, soda, and high-fat foods.

Even videos that claim to be beneficial—like the Baby Einstein video series—aren’t good and may be bad. In one study, for example, for every hour per day spent watching such videos, children understood an average of six to eight fewer words than did those of the same age who did not watch them—a 17-percentile drop in vocabulary.

On the other hand, video games don’t necessarily deserve their bad rap. They can be a great way to socialize and connect with friends (especially for boys). And video games can actually facilitate, rather than discourage, physical play. Boys who play sports video games, for example, are actually much more likely to play those games in real life—they use the video games to master new moves, and then they go out and practice in real life.

7 Things to Keep in Mind When the Electronic Babysitter is Getting a Lot of Play

1. Television brings little or no benefits, but it replaces activities that do make kids happier, healthier, and smarter. The more kids watch TV, the less time they tend to spend with their parents and siblings, the less time they spend doing homework (for 7-12 year olds), and the less time they spend in creative play (especially in children younger than 5). For very young children (less than 3), time spent watching TV replaces activities children need for proper brain development, particularly interaction with their caregivers.

2. On the other hand, research has shown that playing video games doesn’t usually take time away from sports or other active pursuits, and that game-playing teens spend the same amount of time with family and friends as non-gamers.

3. Those pediatricians are right: infants and toddlers under 2 should not have any screen time. Early television exposure is associated with problems like ADD and ADHD, and decreased intelligence later in childhood.

4. Computer use by children under the age of three is also not recommended. However, some research shows that computer programs, when combined with activities that facilitate what the programs are trying to teach, can help 3- to 4-year-olds develop a range of skills, including long-term memory, manual dexterity and verbal skills.

5. Not all screen time is equal. In our homes we should ban the 20% of videogames that are rated as too violent or sexual for kids. Research shows a strong link between violent video game play and aggressive feelings and behaviors; violent video games trigger a part of the brain that drives people to act aggressively. And violent video game play measurably decreases helpful behaviors. Similarly, watching violent programming on TV is associated with a decrease in fantasy play among preschoolers and an increase in children’s aggressiveness.

6. Parents who watch television with their children and reinforce the educational aspects of shows can improve the quality of the learning experience for their children. Unfortunately, most kids usually don’t watch educational television with their parents – they watch general audience programs targeted to adults rather than children.

7. Although 68% of American kids do have televisions in their rooms, children with a TV in their bedroom are 1.3 times more likely to be overweight (even when they are physically active and/or participate in team sports).

Looks like my friend Scott, who watched TV every waking moment of his childhood but whose brain developed just fine, is an outlier. Our best bet is to turn off the boob tube and send the kids out to play.

Related posts:

• The Power of Play
• How to Get the Most Out of Family Dinners
• Back-to-School: Play and Academic Success

© 2008 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

References

E-mail this

RSS feed

Watch video

Subscribe to Half Full: Science for Raising Happy Kids by Email

7 Ways to Foster Creativity in Your Kids

Many people assume that creativity is an inborn talent that their kids either do or do not have: just as all children are not equally intelligent, all children are not equally creative. But actually, creativity is more skill than inborn talent, and it is a skill parents can help their kids develop.
Because it is a key to success in nearly everything we do, creativity is a key component of health and happiness and a core skill to practice with kids. Creativity is not limited to artistic and musical expression—it is also essential for science, math, and even social and emotional intelligence. Creative people are more flexible and better problem solvers, which makes them more able to adapt to technological advances and deal with change—as well as take advantage of new opportunities.

Many researchers believe we have fundamentally changed the experience of childhood in such a way that impairs creative development. Toy and entertainment companies feed kids an endless stream of prefab characters, images, props and plot-lines that allow children to put their imaginations to rest. Children no longer need to imagine a stick is a sword in a game or story they’ve imagined: they can play Star Wars with a specific light-saber in costumes designed for the specific role they are playing.

Here are some ideas for fostering creativity in your kids:

1. Provide the resources they need for creative expression. The key resource here is time. Kids need a lot of time for unstructured, child-directed, imaginative play –unencumbered by adult direction, and that doesn’t depend on a lot of commercial stuff (see this post about unstructured play).

   Space is also a resource your kids need. Unless you don’t mind creative messes everywhere, give them a specific place where they can make a mess, like room in your attic for dress-up, a place in the garage for painting, or a corner in your family room for Legos.

   Next time someone asks for a gift suggestion for your kids, ask for things like art supplies, cheap cameras, costume components, building materials. Put these in easy-to-deal-with bins that your kids can manage.

2. Make your home a Petri dish for creativity. In addition to creative spaces, you need to foster a creative atmosphere.

   Solicit a high volume of different ideas, but resist the urge to evaluate the ideas your kids come up with. At dinnertime, for example, you could brainstorm activities for the upcoming weekend, encouraging the kids to come up with things they’ve never done before. Don’t point out which ideas aren’t possible, and don’t decide which ideas are best. The focus of creative activities should be on process: generating (vs. evaluating) new ideas.

   Encourage kids to make mistakes and fail. Yes, fail – kids who are afraid of failure and judgment will curb their own creative thought. Share the mistakes you’ve made recently, so they get the idea that it is okay to flub up. Laughing at yourself when you blow it is a happiness habit.

   Celebrate innovation and creativity. Cover your walls with art and other evidence of creative expression. Tell your kids all about your favorite artists, musicians, and scientists. Share your passion for architecture or photography or that new band you want to listen to all the time. Embrace new technologies like Twitter so your kids grow to find change exciting, not over-whelming or intimidating.

3. Allow kids the freedom and autonomy to explore their ideas and do what they want. Don’t be so bossy. (If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black, who knows what is.) Stop living in fear that they are going to be kidnapped or not get into a great college. Statistically, the odds are very low that they’ll be kidnapped, and I’m here to tell you that I’m not a happier person because I went to an Ivy League school.

   External constraints—making them color within the lines, so to speak—can reduce flexibility in thinking. In one study, just demonstrating how to put together a model reduced the creative ways that kids accomplished this task.

4. Encourage children to read for pleasure and participate in the arts. Limit TV and other screen time in order to make room for creative activities like rehearsing a play, learning to draw, reading every book written by a favorite author.

5. Give children the opportunity to express “divergent thought.” Let them disagree with you. Encourage them to find more than one route to a solution, and more than one solution to a problem. When they successfully solve a problem, ask them to solve it again but to find a new way to do it (same solution, different route). Then ask them to come up with more solutions to the same problem.

6. Don’t reward children for exhibiting creativity: incentives interfere with the creative process, reducing the quality of their responses and the flexibility of their thought.

   Allow children to develop mastery of creative activities that they are intrinsically motivated to do, rather than trying to motivate them with rewards and incentives. Instead of rewarding a child for practicing the piano, for example, allow her to do something she enjoys more – maybe sit at her desk and draw or take a science class.

7. Try to stop caring what your kids achieve. Emphasize process rather than product. One way you can do this is by asking questions about the process – Did you have fun? Are you finished? What did you like about that activity?

Related posts:

• The Power of Play
• Let Your Kids Fail
• Teaching the Growth Mindset

© 2008 Christine Carter, Ph.D.


References


E-mail this


RSS feed


Watch video

 

 





Subscribe to Half Full: Science for Raising Happy Kids by Email

How to Stop Being a Perfectionist

If you’ve been reading this series on perfection being a total drag on happiness, and you keep thinking to yourself, crap, I’ve created a perfectionist, and now you’re worried that your daughter is going to end up depressed and stifled or your son is going to turn out to be an anxious meth user, stop it. Everyone is going to be fine. You don’t need to be a perfect parent to raise happy kids. We have actual science to back this fact up.

To recap: Perfectionism is all about fear of failure. The worst case scenario for perfectionists, then, is that we make a mistake or fail—and someone finds out about it. Perfectionist logic:

I stop obsessing about being perfect → I won’t be perfect → I’ll feel terrible.

This is faulty logic, of course. The way to wean someone from perfectionism is to show them that when they make mistakes and fail, they actually don’t feel terrible. In fact, they might feel terribly FREE (at least that is what happened to me). Read the rest of this entry »

How To Make Your Kid into a Perfectionist

In my last post, I made the case for preventing perfectionism in children, and got a slew of emails from people asking how to prevent perfectionism.

Kids today, especially upper-middle class kids, are under a lot of pressure to achieve. Kids who feel pressure to be perfect are prone to depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. As parents we have a choice: pile on the pressure, or help them see that there is more to life—and to them—than their achievements. Here’s how parents create perfectionist children:

1. This isn’t rocket science: parents mold their children into perfectionists by wanting and expecting their children to be perfect. Since no child actually is perfect, when parents push for perfection, kids feel criticized.

2. Parents who are perfectionists themselves teach their children to be perfectionists indirectly. Are you overly concerned about making mistakes? Chances are your children will be, too. Wean yourself from perfectionism if you think you might be part of the problem (I’ll post more about how later this week).

3. They make their approval contingent on achievement and performance. This is easy to do accidentally – it is classic fixed-mindset thinking. Parents who value their children’s achievements more than their character tend to create perfectionists.

4. Even when children are doing very well, perfectionism-creators find faults: they raise an eyebrow at the one B on a report card full of A’s, they point out the bad pitch in a game well-played. Praise kids for a job well done without pointing out what they could have done better. Even better, use only growth-mindset praise.

5. Perfectionism-creators are unable to see the positive aspects of mistakes, failures, and jobs left undone, feeling that their children’s poor performance will reflect badly on them. If you find yourself doing everything within your power to prevent your children’s failures—bringing forgotten homework to school, staying up late to “help” rewrite a paper, manipulating the system to your child’s advantage—take a step back and ponder whether you really want to prevent your children from learning to deal with challenges and mistakes themselves.

Sometimes parents do everything right and their kids turn out to be perfectionists anyway. Aside from being a perfectionist herself, my mother did very few of the things on that first list, but because she loved us so much and was so dedicated to our success, she protected us from making mistakes in every way she possibly could. Though I did unequivocally become a perfectionist over-achiever, my brother escaped this fate (he’s merely very successful, fulfilled, and happy). The good news is that I seem to have kicked the habit – evidence that people are resilient, adaptable, and able to change.

The next couple of posts will give you even more tips for paving the way for both success AND happiness this school year. Next week I’ll discuss how you can discourage “maximizing,” which is a form of perfectionism, and teach “satisficing,” — a goofy word for meeting expectations and feeling good about it.

My friend Kelly Corrigan—a New York Times best-selling author—is happy and successful, but not a perfectionist. She writes here about the things her parents did that made her at ease with making mistakes and accepting good enough as truly good enough. What did your parents do that discouraged perfectionism? What do you do with your children?

Step 2 for fostering success and happiness, but not perfectionism:
Accept that Achievement Doesn’t Matter. Seriously.

Related posts:

• Teaching the Growth Mindset
• Achievement Doesn’t Matter
• The Right Way to Praise Kids
• Let Your Kids Fail

© 2008 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

References

E-mail this

RSS feed

Watch video

Subscribe to Half Full: Science for Raising Happy Kids by Email

Perfectionism is a Disease

Although in my last post I heartily extolled the importance of hard work, I'd like to clarify that I'm not advocating that you push your children to become perfectionists. Perfectionism is not a happiness habit. Maybe it isn't technically a disease (I am trying to be science-based here) but as a recovering perfectionist I can testify that perfectionism is the absolute bane of happiness. Perfectionists are prone to depression and severe anxiety, and they are more likely to commit suicide when things go really wrong.

A lot of people incorrectly assume that perfectionism propels kids to the top of their class, their teams, and eventually their fields. But it isn't the perfectionism that is doing it, it is the hard work. To the contrary, perfectionism tends to detract from success:

1. Perfectionism creates a steady state of discontent fueled by a stream of negative emotions like fear, frustration, and disappointment.
2. When you are a perfectionist, you can’t enjoy even your successes—there is always something you could have done better.
3. Because failure is not an option for perfectionists, fear of failure becomes a driving force. All that fear diverts energy from more constructive things, making perfectionists less able to learn and be creative. Perfectionists expend a lot of energy on the things they are desperately trying to avoid: failure and the criticism they imagine it will create. Ironically, this preoccupation has been shown to undermine performance in sports, in academics, and in social situations.
4. Perfectionism—like all fixed-mindset thinking—keeps kids from taking risks and embracing challenge. Rising to a challenge is one of the best ways to go from being good at something to being great.
5. Perfectionism leads kids to conceal their mistakes and avoid getting constructive feedback. In nearly every field—writing groups are the most obvious example here—group critique is a rapid way to get better at something.

Perfectionism is NOT about setting high expectations or being successful in your endeavors. It is about being concerned about making mistakes and about worrying about what others think.
We also know that for the most part, kids aren't born perfectionists—their environment creates them. As parents put more and more pressure on their children to achieve, more and more children are becoming perfectionists.

What do you do as a parent to foster perfectionism in your child? Do you have ideas about ways you’ll discourage it in the future? Have a story about the perils of perfectionism? Please share it by leaving a comment!

© 2008 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

References

E-mail this

RSS feed

Watch video

Step 1 for fostering success and happiness, but not perfectionism:
Teach a Growth Mindset

Read the rest of this entry »