Chapter 1: What are the implications of increased screentime for kids during holidays?
I'm Myesha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. So, the holidays are upon us, and I know in my house right now, I am co-parenting five children. And if your house is anything like mine, there are a lot of screens. Everybody in the house, all the kids, they're either having a tablet or a phone or a video game.
Sometimes they have multiple and they're going a lot of the time, especially during the holidays because they're not in school. So there's a lot of Roblox and Tokaboka and Minecraft and Fortnite and everybody's playing something on something. And with all those screens and all of these online games, I do kind of worry, what are the implications of this? What is the safety of this?
In real life, IRL, my kids are never out of my sight.
Chapter 2: How has childhood supervision changed over the decades?
Even in the backyard, it's totally fenced in. We can see what they're doing. It's not a lot of unsupervised time in the physical space, but in the digital space, it's different. So you wonder, is it bad that kids are online a lot or just like on screens doing games? To help me understand the consequences of all this, I recently sat down with Eli Stark Elster. He's kind of an expert on this.
He studies the evolution of human society at UC Davis. My conversation with Eli Stark Elster after the break. We'll be right back.
There's a lot going on right now.
Chapter 3: What factors contributed to the decline of kids' independence in play?
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We're back with the Sunday story.
Chapter 4: Why is digital space different from physical space for children?
I'm here with researcher Eli Stark Elster. Eli, welcome to the show.
Happy to be here.
All right, so for years, kids played unsupervised outdoors and spent a lot of time together without adults. What changed?
Well, to your point, I think many people remember that prior to the 1970s or so, there was much less supervision of childhood in physical space than there is now. But I think an important point to keep in mind is that that difference is not just between the early part of the 20th century and now, but between now and, as far as we can tell, pretty much the whole course of history.
human history, when you look at the record of childhood across human societies, you find that kids are generally afforded a really high degree of independence and autonomy. One of my colleagues, Dorsa Amir, has a good term for this. They spend much of their time in independent peer cultures.
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Chapter 5: What role do online games like Roblox and Minecraft play in children's lives?
So with other kids forming their own separate little groups away from the adults. And in the early 1970s or so, the ability for kids to developed these kinds of independent peer cultures drops really precipitously, and that has not changed to the present day.
So yeah, why did it change?
Yeah, I think one big factor underlying this shift is the urbanization of the United States. More and more people have moved into cities, become increasingly dependent on cars, and so you now have physical environments where, one, it is arguably just a little less safe for kids to roam around due to traffic concerns, but parents also have a lot more fear of their kids being
unsafe for that reason. And even if parents didn't feel those concerns, often kids are just not all that close to other kids physically. If they want to hang out with their friends, their parents need to drive them somewhere. So that's a crucial factor.
Chapter 6: How do different video games impact children's autonomy and socialization?
Another, I think, underlying concern here is just the fear of not just, you know, traffic, but stranger danger.
So it's changed in the physical space. There's a lot more supervision, but that hasn't translated to a lot of supervision in the digital space.
Yes, yeah, that's correct.
Why do you think that's the case? Is it because it's new or because the safeguards don't exist?
Well, on one hand, the safeguards don't exist. The author, Jonathan Haidt, has a good analogy that, in some sense, putting kids in social media platforms is a little bit like sending them to Mars. You know, this is a very recent innovation, and so we understand very little about how these kinds of environments actually work and how they're affecting our children.
But something I would emphasize is maybe a sort of counterpoint to that.
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Chapter 7: Is it harmful for kids to spend a lot of time online?
I think we often emphasize what technology is doing to our children. And this move into digital space, the fact that kids spend all this time on their phones and playing video games and so on, is often framed as something that they're being sort of tricked into doing by tech companies or what have you. But I think when you look at the trend in human evolution and this desire kids clearly have to
build their sort of secret worlds away from us, I think a different picture kind of arises. And I think the picture that arises is kids are using digital space as sort of the last frontier to get away from us.
Is that the evolution of how children play? They seek out these spaces because they are less supervised by adults?
Exactly. Yeah. They, from what we can tell, are driven to find spaces away from adults where they can spend time unsupervised with their peers doing what they want to do.
Chapter 8: What can parents do to ensure their children are safe while playing online?
And in particular, playing in different ways in physical space that is now just far too difficult for a variety of reasons. In digital space, though, adults really have no idea what's going on. We have very little control. And so they found this glass domain where they can do the same thing, but in digital space instead of physical space.
Well, how important is it for kids to have those almost adult free zones?
I think immensely important. There's a lot of good data on trends in mental health, starting from when childhood autonomy begins to kind of decline. And we see a very stark trend that different measures of mental health among children begin to decline at around the same time their autonomy becomes more and more restricted.
There's a study conducted by UNICEF every few years called the Innocenti study, where they track independent mobility in different countries, the amount of freedom kids have to move from place to place by themselves against measures of well-being. And you see a very clear trend that greater mobility leads to greater well-being and vice versa.
So we have a lot of data suggesting that it's extremely important for kids to have these independent spaces away from us.
Well, talk to me about some of the online games that kids are using to create their own spaces. Because the kids in my house, my kids, are constantly like online playing Roblox with each other, playing Minecraft and other games. But they're playing together.
Definitely. I think one contrast that is maybe useful is between two games, both of which kids love. One is Minecraft, and the other is Fortnite. Minecraft, I think, is the best-selling game in history, something like 350 million purchases. Fortnite's also immensely popular, and kids spend a huge amount of time on both of these games.
And understandably, parents, I think, sometimes have concerns about this because it strikes them as strange that kids would be spending so much time in these virtual worlds. But when you look at the way that these games are built, I think there are very different reasons that kids are drawn to them. One of those reasons is good, and the other one is probably bad.
In the case of Fortnite, the company that designs the game has essentially built it like a casino. It is designed to draw kids in, hook their attention, and keep them in these places.
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