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 The more your son plays video games, for example, the more distracted, withdrawn, and irritable he seems to become.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 brain presented in this book are universal to any age group, I focus particularly on the period between birth and young adulthood up to age twenty-five. This is the scientifically identified period of peak brain development, with dramatic changes occurring during puberty. Sometimes, for example when I’m talking about video games or social media, you might find that my advice is tailored to children in their preteen and teen years. Other times you might find that some of the solutions are aimed at a younger age group. But that shouldn’t ever stop you from tailoring my suggestions to suit your child and the stage they’re in. You know best how to talk to your child, how to adjust the conversation as they grow and change. The suggestions in this book are meant to be building blocks, so you’ll get the best results if you continue to work with your child and build on these suggestions year after year.

In the following pages I’ll simplify the neuroscientific foundation for The Tech Solution and give you a variety of strategies to guide your child towards it. My goal is to equip you with the knowledge you can use to steer your child away from technology that leaves them feeling stressed, grumpy, addicted, anxious, and depressed and towards a healthier tech diet that will boost their creativity, health, happiness, and connection with others.

As I like to remind parents, we don’t need to fear technology’s potential to harm our children. Indeed, if you follow the solutions outlined in this book, your kids will learn to use tech in healthy, empowering ways that will help them adapt to whatever life throws their way. As we learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, healthy tech use can be a crucial part of thriving in our modern world.

Chapter 1 introduces the science of how technology is impacting the developing brain, with implications for children’s health, behaviours, and character traits. Chapter 2 explores how habits established in childhood lay the foundation for your children’s future behaviours. I explain how important it is to take advantage of their formative years to guide them towards establishing the healthiest habits you can.

Chapter 3 is where we start to unpack how, precisely, technology is affecting our children’s brains and how we can work to manage those effects. Here we’ll investigate the ways video games, social media, gadgets, and apps are engineered to keep young brains glued to their screens by finding ways to reward them with hits of dopamine. But in equipping you with an understanding of how addiction and reward cycles work, I can teach you to help protect your children from addictive tech. Chapter 4 delves into the dangers of screens on the developing brain. I expose the many ways technology is triggering toxic levels of stress and anxiety in children by prompting release of the hormone cortisol. You’ll understand the stress response and how to recognize it in your child, and learn ways to guide your child towards positive coping skills.

The effects of technology, however, aren’t all bad, and when used in the right ways, technology can be beneficial. In Chapter 5 we learn how to help our kids improve their mental, physical, and spiritual health. Fitness trackers, gratitude apps, and music playlists are part of the answer. But we also need to push them to make changes to their off line routines. Chapter 6 explores the fundamental human need to bond and the exciting ways tech can help kids connect and even reverse frightening new trends in teen loneliness and depression. In Chapter 7 we learn how tech can help kids feed their talents, foster creativity, and find their purpose through developing their identities and individual talents.

Then, having covered how tech is impacting your child’s emotions and behaviour, I pull it all together in Chapter 8 to provide you with a practical six-step plan for tackling the most important parenting issue of our time. Finally, we look ahead in Chapter 9 and consider how to equip kids to thrive in an era of digital disruption. This means teaching them to think critically and to be conscious and adaptive.

In this way, you will deepen your understanding of how the technology your children are consuming affects them and learn how to establish a healthy tech diet for your family. The key to thriving in a digital world is to know ourselves. And I mean really know ourselves—how our human bodies and minds actually work. What makes us happy, stressed, desperate, elated. That knowledge will help us take care of ourselves in a new, powerful way and teach our children to do the same. And from this place of knowing and loving we can unleash a new energy of creativity, joy, and fulfillment for our children and ourselves. The Tech Solution provides the framework, neuroscience, and guidance for this process. Just as a small seed grows into a giant oak tree, there is the potential in all of us to grow and flourish. And in this ever-changing modern world, our relationship with technology will be a key aspect of that growth.