Lost behind the screen
Big Tech wants to make your child their consumer, even if it harms them
THERE’S a scourge on our children and it’s called “kid tech.” These two words describe how companies freely market directly to young ones in our homes and schools with addictive games and videos designed to keep kids hooked. The numbers are staggering: Children ages 5 to 8 spent an average of three hours a day in front of digital devices, while teenagers logged nearly a third of their day in front of screens. This was before the pandemic upped these numbers.
In the past two years, anxiety and depression have skyrocketed. Measures of self-confidence are in the toilet. A new paper presented at European Society for Pediatric Endocrinology meeting last month suggests that excessive blue light from our devices may be contributing to early onset of puberty in girls. As The Post’s Karol Markowicz writes, “They’re on a drug, and everyone seems OK with it.”
And Big Tech knows that screens and social media are making our kids sick.
Angry yet? Just wait. There’s so much more.
Psychologist and child advocate Susan Linn’s new book, “Who’s Raising the Kids?” offers an impassioned indictment of tech companies making big money off exploiting the minds of our children.
Linn, who has fought against direct-to-children marketing since the 1990s, provides an unvarnished look at our dystopian world where children sit slack-jawed in restaurants watching unboxing videos. Digital technology is “more pervasive, more invasive, more sophisticated, more manipulative, and more devious than ever,” she says.
Take Aristotle, billed in 2017 as toy company Mattel’s “all-in-one nursery necessity” that would coo at a crying baby, sing songs with a toddler, and help a kindergartener do homework.
It would act as a “surrogate parent” — one that collects children’s data from birth to adolescence. Thanks to advocacy groups, the toy never hit shelves. But this story teaches us one important lesson: Big Tech has no boundaries.
There’s been a shift in American family dynamics — and advertisers are fully willing to exploit it. Millennial parents are less inclined to think of families as hierarchies.
A majority of millennial parents consider their children to be among their closest friends and 74% include their children in decision-making, according to ad-agency research. “Families are more like teams,” one ad executive said, according to Linn.
A marketer’s goal, with the help of child psychologists catering the message, is to push children’s “choice as consumers” and increase “child-to-parent communication” (i.e., increase nagging for games, toys, or more screen time).
There are no safe places. Even if you’re not one of the 53% of 11-yearolds with a smartphone (19% of 8-year-olds also have them), a child is deluged with marketing from companies like Amazon, Google and Disney at school thanks to “ed tech” games and apps.
Researchers at the University of Michigan found that 95% of the 135 most downloaded apps — even the apps marked “educational” in the Google Play store for children under five — contained ads.
Meanwhile the market is exploding. The K-12 ed tech market is expected to double to a $42.5 billion market in 2025. Nine out of 10 kids from third to twelfth grade already use ed tech products at least a few days a week.
The research is stark on this, too — computers in the classroom do not improve outcomes. Schools that rely heavily on computers “do a lot worse in most learning outcomes, even after accounting for social background and student demographics,” writes Linn. In some cases, those that use tables in “all or most” of their classes have reading scores a full grade lower than those who don’t.
There are ways to fight back from the big creep of Big Tech.
In addition to various changes at the legislative level — from a ban on the hiring of child psychologists to greater restraints on marketing to children and age limits on social media — there are things we can do at home.
Practice what you preach, put down your phone and reduce your own screen time. Create screen-free zones.
Linn also suggests joining groups like Screenfree.org, the Log Off Movement, and Fair Play.
Her goal is to help people “recognize the need to stand up to the corporate interests that hijack children’s lives — and help ensure that kids have the childhood they need to thrive.”