The Tech Solution: Creating Healthy Habits for Kids Growing Up in a Digital World - Hardcover

Kang, Dr. Shimi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0735239541 ISBN 13: 9780735239548

Verlag: Viking, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A Harvard-trained psychiatrist and mom of 3 gives parents and educators the tech habits children need to achieve their full potential--and a 6-step plan to put them into action.

You may have picked up on some warning signs: The more your 9-year-old son plays video games, the more distracted and irritable he becomes. Or maybe comparing her life to others on social media is leaving your teenaged daughter feeling down. Then there are the questions that are always looming: Should I limit screen time? Should I give my 11-year-old an iPhone?

The Tech Solution is a to-the-point resource for parents and educators who want the best approach for raising kids in our digital world. It outlines all you need to know about the short-term and potential long-term consequences of tech use. Dr. Kang simplifies cutting edge neuroscience to reveal a new understanding around how we metabolize experiences with technology that will lay the foundation for lasting success. On top of that, she offers practical advice for tackling specific concerns in the classroom or at home, whether it's possible tech addiction, anxiety, cyberbullying, or loneliness. With her 6-week 6-step plan for rebalancing your family's tech diet, Dr. Kang will help your child build healthy habits and make smart choices that will maximize the benefits of tech and minimize its risks.

Use The Tech Solution to help your child avoid the pitfalls of today's digital world and to offer them guidance that will boost their brains and bodies, create meaningful connections, explore creative pursuits, and foster a sense of contribution and empowerment for many years to come.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DR. G. SHIMI KANG is an award-winning, Harvard-trained psychiatrist, researcher, media expert, bestselling author, and speaker. She is the former Medical Director for Child and Youth Mental Health for Vancouver community, a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, and the founder of the Provincial Youth Concurrent Disorders Program at BC Children's Hospital. Over her years of work across North America, Europe, and Asia Dr. Kang has helped thousands of children, teens, and adults move towards lives of greater passion, purpose, and joy. She has received six international awards including the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry Research Award. Dr. Kang is most proud of receiving the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her years of outstanding community service and of being the mother of three awesome but exhausting children.

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INTRODUCTION
 
Whether I’m in Vancouver, Shanghai, Auckland, or New York, I always hear the same questions: How much screen time is okay? How can I limit the amount of technology my son is consuming? Are video games good or bad for kids? Should I give my nine-year-old an iPhone?
 
In fact, I imagine that’s why you picked up this book: intuitively, you may feel that digital technology has an effect on your child’s behaviour and moods. Your gut is probably signalling that something isn’t right—and for good reason. The warning signs are loud and clear. The more your son plays video games, for example, the more distracted, withdrawn, and irritable he seems to become. The constant exposure to her friends’ portrayals of their lives on social media seems to be leaving your teenage daughter feeling down. Your fifteen-year-old’s phone is constantly vibrating from notifications and alerts, but he never seems to have any friends over to the house.
 
Despite that, you’ve seen headlines assuring you that there’s nothing to worry about: “Screen Time May Be No Worse for Kids Than Eating Potatoes” (Forbes), or “Kids Whose Parents Limited Screen Time Do Worse in College” (Inc.), or “Children’s Social Media Use Has ‘Trivial’ Effect on Happiness” (The Guardian).
 
These are just some of the conflicting messages about the impact of technology on our children. It turns out that some of the doubt and confusion is being sown by the same people selling our kids their gadgets and getting them hooked on their platforms and apps. Recently, a co-panellist speaking alongside me at a university conference argued that fears over tech’s negative impact on children were being massively overblown. Her research, it turned out, was funded in part by a global wireless giant. And when word leaked, a few years ago, that Facebook was considering allowing kids under thirteen onto the network, the directors of ConnectSafely praised the move. Later, it emerged that the group was funded by none other than, you guessed it, Facebook.
 
And then there are the fearmongering headlines that send a very different message: “Screen Time Is Making Kids Moody, Crazy and Lazy” (Psychology Today), “A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley” (The New York Times), “Kid’s Eyesight Ruined After Parents Let Her Play on iPhone for a Year” (New York Post). The contradictory—and often extreme—messaging out there is enough to make anyone’s head spin. No wonder parents are feeling confused!
 
But the effects of technology on childhood and adolescent development aren’t simply “good” or “bad”; the reality is more nuanced than that. Tech can be extremely harmful to children and teens when it’s used in the wrong ways, and incredibly useful if used in the right ways.
 
As a Harvard-trained psychiatrist with a specialty in youth addictions, I’ve spent the last twenty years poring over the research on health, happiness, and motivation in children. In the last decade I’ve added to that focus the impact of screens on the developing mind. And I can assure you that, on the one hand, the science couldn’t be clearer. The data on Generation Z—those born between 1995 and 2012—is chilling. They’re less confident. They’re less likely to take risks, to learn to drive, to stand up to a bully. Rates of depression and suicide among them have skyrocketed in the last decade, almost perfectly tracking the smartphone’s rise. Anxiety and loneliness have hit crisis levels. Indeed, the World Health Organization is predicting that the number one health epidemic facing this generation will be loneliness. Loneliness! And given the sharp declines in youth mental health, the American Academy of Pediatrics is now calling for universal mental health screening at the age of twelve. So my diagnosis is one of urgency: we’re raising a generation on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in recorded history.
 
Yet, if tech was all bad, you wouldn’t see a group of committed kids launch the biggest environmental protests in history, as they did in September 2019 with the global climate strikes. You wouldn’t see a group of Florida teens, survivors of a school shooting, organizing a national school walkout day to protest lax gun laws, as the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School did in 2018. Without social media it wouldn’t have been possible for podcaster Jay Shetty, comedian Lilly Singh, or artist Rupi Kaur to emerge, whole cloth, from social media. As your children begin to learn about podcasting, vlogging, and social media, they’re acquiring the skills and the motivation to find their true voice, refine it, and broadcast it to the world.
 
The problem is, we don’t have much time to figure out how our kids can safely interact with technology. Brain development suddenly accelerates during adolescence—at precisely the same time that screen immersion does. At that point, the frontal lobe, known as the brain’s “control centre,” hasn’t fully matured. It’s the part of the brain that asks us, Is this really a good idea? What are the long-term consequences? Meanwhile, young brains are wired and rewarded for risk taking, novelty seeking, peer admiration, and social connection. This intense developmental period of reward for risk, novelty, and admiration, combined with un-developed neurologic programs for long-term planning and appreciation of consequences, can make for a recipe of confusion, hardship, and even devastation. In addition, the dizzying pace of new apps, platforms, and devices coming onto the market makes it difficult, if not impossible, to do the research and provide our teens with timely advice.
 
Part of our job as parents and educators is to prepare our kids for the world they’re about to enter. To set them up for a lifetime of healthy eating habits, for example, we monitor their diets and help them understand the difference between good and bad foods. It’s time to begin doing the same thing with tech—that is, start young, and help kids understand the link between the tech they’re consuming and how they think, feel, and behave. We need to teach them that brain-boosting tech, just like brain-boosting foods, will lead to greater health and happiness. That toxic tech, including certain video games and social media platforms, can make them feel sad and anxious. And that a little bit of junk tech, whether it’s a video game or a silly TV show, just like occasional junk food, won’t kill them!
 
To know how to guide your children towards healthy, balanced technology use, it’s essential to understand how kids metabolize tech—how different media and apps are getting their attention, how they’re making them feel, and how they’re changing their brains and behaviours. This is exactly what you’ll learn in this book. And I promise, it’s not as daunting as it sounds.
 
 
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
 
Whether you’re a parent, stepparent, grandparent, foster parent, teacher, therapist, coach, or any other significant person in a child’s life, this book is for you. For simplicity’s sake, I tend to rely on the word “parent” throughout, but make no mistake—I’m addressing any of you who are doing the hard, critical work of raising, supporting, and nurturing kids! Although the science of, and practices for, optimizing the human...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Viking
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0735239541
• ISBN 13: 9780735239548
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: VIKING; https://www.penguin.com/overview-vikingbooks/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY; New York; NY; 10019; USA
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