Facts Not Fear: The Truth About Digital Media and Young People
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Parents who are scared, who set too many limits and are always negative can create issues for their children. Some studies indicate that these parents end up having the children with the most risky online behavior.” – Yalda Uhls

In a world in which the media is quick to stoke the fires of parental fears about technology and its potentially corrosive impact on their children, Yalda Uhls offers a refreshing – and reassuring – perspective. Her book, Media Moms & Digital Dads: A Fact-Not-Fear Approach to Parenting in the Digital Age, is notable in that it tackles the topics that are of concern to many parents and educators with research findings. The author brings an interesting perspective to her work: she is a mother, an educator, a media specialist, and a research scientist at UCLA.

Uhls’ work offers worthwhile insights that can help us all to navigate the sometimes challenging, digital landscape. As a school principal, I periodically hear about very genuine “tech fears” that are broadly expressed as follows: the internet is a dangerous place for young people that is damaging concentration, literacy, the quality of reading and note-taking, our memories and our relationships.

Those who express such concerns do so from a place of sincere care. Such questions need to be asked openly and addressed thoughtfully. Unfortunately, many of these fears are compounded by alarmist media reports. Quite often, this is why parents are scared. A typical example is a report by Sreedhar Potarazu published by CNN. Under the title, “Is Social Media Ruining Our Kids?”, the author cites a disturbing set of statistics in complete isolation from any related research on digital media, framing the disturbing title to establish an unfounded connection between cause and effect:
“The 2014 National College Health Assessment, a survey of nearly 80,000 college students throughout the United States, found that 54% of students reported experiencing overwhelming anxiety in the past 12 months and that 32.6% “felt so depressed that it was difficult to function” during the same period. The study also found that 6.4% had “intentionally, cut, burned, bruised or otherwise injured” themselves, that 8.1% had seriously considered suicide and that 1.3% had attempted suicide.”

There is no evident correlation between the selective, worrying findings of this survey as reported and the use of technology. This kind of reckless reporting and data manipulation contributes little of value to the necessary discourse around the use of technology among young people. The report also provides some very welcome findings that – if we are to follow the logic of the CNN report – we should also ascribe to the use of social media. These include:

• Only 0.4% of college students do not wear a seatbelt in a car
• Only 0.3% have had their studies impacted by a sexually transmitted disease
• More than 71% do not smoke
• 85% use a designated driver when drinking alcohol
• 78% engage in moderate cardio activity regularly

Of course, data can be manipulated to tell any story we want it to tell. Perhaps a more pertinent question to ask is, why does the narrative about digital media and young people tend to focus so much on panic and fear? When I started teaching in the early 90’s I occasionally encountered the passing of notes between students. On more than one occasion, the content of the note included something typically adolescent and potentially hurtful about another member of the class. At no point did I blame the existence of paper for this phenomenon and I didn’t frown on the presence of pencils and pens in the school. The reality is that what happens online is what is happening offline and we need to focus on the behaviours, not the medium. Our concerns should be all about people, not the digital device. Writer, Danah Boyd is clear about why social media use is highlighted as the culprit and how this leads to an obfuscation of core realities:

“It’s made more visible. There is some awful stuff out there, but it frustrates me when a panic distracts us from the reality of what’s going on. One of my frustrations is that there are some massive mental health issues, and we want to blame the technology [that brings them to light] instead of actually dealing with mental health issues.”

Uhls bases her perspectives on actual research and real findings. She notes that there are some young people who can become absolutely addicted to digital devices, but this is a tiny minority. While she advocates for device-free time, she also assures us that we should not be alarmed about teen tech habits. Uhls is pragmatic and honest about the realities of the digital landscape, too. Multi-tasking is not something humans are naturally good at, the research has shown. It is the processing that occurs when people physically write things down that accounts for any difference in retention, not the device itself, studies reveal. While parents, she contends, still need to act like parents – setting clear guidelines, expectations, and parameters – the available research informs us of a view that is strikingly at odds with the bleak portrait that is worrying parents.

So, what does the research actually say?

• “Our teens are not growing into brain-dead zombies or emotionally stunted sociopaths. After more than a decade of research by child psychologists… we have discovered that the kids are alright.”

• “The reality is that we have little hard proof that this generation is any more distracted than we were.”

• “The data indicates [that]. … In the digital age, we read more than ever before, and teens read more books than adults.”

• “It makes no difference in memory, comprehension, nor critical thinking whether you read materials on screen or paper.”

• “Researchers asked … students to watch TED Talks and take notes on either their laptops or paper. When quizzed after the class on the basic facts of the video, both groups performed equally well.”
  
  
• “Texting will not hurt writing proficiency, and, in fact, may encourage literacy and creative writing.”

• “Memory itself does not appear to be declining; instead, we shift what we memorize to take advantage of the capabilities of computers.”
  
  
• “Data … demonstrates that children are adapting and sometimes thriving as they embrace 21st-century media.”

This good news needs to be tempered, of course, with common sense. Young people need to maintain a healthy balance between online interaction and face-to-face activities (even here the research shows that the former is driven by the healthy need for the latter). Parents are obligated to develop and maintain open dialogue with their child around trust and transparency. Fear should not govern our instincts or hinder the need to empower our young people with the appropriate uses of digital media.

The true power of digital media lies in its potential to connect, communicate, and, therefore, to amplify or extend the reach or impact of a given experience. There are, sadly, documented instances where technology is clearly exacerbating certain societal issues. Increasing childhood obesity is among these concerns. There are tales of toddlers being given iPads as child-minding devices. Literacy is on the decline among the socially disadvantaged. Issues that are sometimes blamed on technology are often deeply-rooted in poor parenting, issues of self-esteem, and educational institutions with narrow conceptions of learning caused by a lack of funding or inflexible, external constraints. In the right context and culture, however, the research makes clear that digital media can positively impact and profoundly transform learning.

There is no need to be scared. We must empower, not control. Young people are adapting positively to the digital age and we need to trust in their ability to do so.

​Blog Post: https://crowleym.com/2017/03/02/facts-not-fear-the-truth-about-digital-media-and-young-people/
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NOTES
Zuckerberg, Randi. “Yalda T. Uhls Wants You to Approach the Digital Age with Facts, Not Fear.” Professional Women, April 28, 2016.
Potarazu, Sreedhar. “Is Social Media Ruining Our Kids?”. CNN, October 22, 2015.
Bergstein, Brian. “Parents: Don’t Panic About Your Kids Social Media Habits.” MIT Technology Review, December 12, 2013.
Uhls, Yalda. Media Moms & Digital Dads: A Fact-Not-Fear Approach to Parenting in the Digital Age. 2015.
Image credit @bryanMMathers via Visual Thinkery.

How Parents Can Cultivate Empathy in Children
Richard Weissbourd and Stephanie Jones
Making Caring Common Project,
 Harvard Graduate School of Education

Empathy is at the heart of what it means to be human. It’s a foundation for acting ethically, for good relationships of many kinds, for loving well, and for professional success. And it’s key to preventing bullying and many other forms of cruelty.
Empathy begins with the capacity to take another perspective, to walk in another’s shoes. But it is not just that capacity. Salespeople, politicians, actors and marketers are often very skilled at taking other perspectives but they may not care about others. Con men and torturers take other perspectives so they can exploit people’s weaknesses. Empathy includes valuing other perspectives and people. It’s about perspective-taking and compassion.

How can parents’ cultivate empathy? The following are guideposts based on research and the wisdom of practitioners.
        1. Empathize with your child and model empathy for others

Children learn empathy both from watching us and from experiencing our empathy for them. When we empathize with our children they develop trusting, secure attachments with us. Those attachments are key to their wanting to adopt our values and to model our behavior, and therefore to building their empathy for others.

Empathizing with our children takes many forms, including tuning in to their physical and emotional needs, understanding and respecting their individual personalities, taking a genuine interest in their lives, and guiding them toward activities that create an understanding of the kind of people they are and the things they enjoy.

Children also learn empathy by watching those we notice and appreciate. They’ll notice if we treat a server in a restaurant or a mail carrier as if they’re invisible. On the positive side, they’ll notice if we welcome a new family in our child’s school or express concern about another child in our child’s class who is experiencing one challenge or another.

Finally, it’s important for us to recognize what might be getting in the way of our empathizing. Are we, for example, exhausted or stressed? Does our child push our buttons in a speci c way that makes caring for her or him hard at times?

Try this: 
      1. Knowing your child. Ask your child questions. For example, what did you learn today that was interesting? What was             the hardest part of your day? How would you most like to spend a day if you could do anything? Do you have a friend                that you especially respect? Why do your respect that person?

      2. Demonstrating empathy for others, including those different from you. Consider regularly engaging in community                   service or model other ways of contributing to a community. Even better, consider doing this with your child. Express               interest in those from various backgrounds facing many different types of challenges.
      3. Engaging in self-care and self-re ection. Try to nd time to regularly engage in an activity — whether it’s going for a                    walk, reading a book, meditating or praying — that can help you avoid being overwhelmed by stress. Re ect and consult          with people you trust when you’re having a hard time empathizing with your child.
        4.  Make caring for others a priority and set high ethical expectations

If children are to value others’ perspectives and show compassion for them, it’s very important that they hear from their parents that caring about others is a top priority, and that it is just as important as their own happiness. Even though most parents say that raising caring children is a top priority, often children aren’t hearing that message.

Try this:

1. Keeping to a clear message. Consider the daily messages you send to children about the importance of caring. For example, instead of saying “The most important thing is that you’re happy,” you might say “The most important thing is that you’re kind and that you’re happy.”
2. Prioritizing caring when you talk with other important adults in your children’s lives. For example, ask teachers and coaches whether your children are caring community members in addition to asking about their academic skills, grades, or performance.
3. Helping your children understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them. It’s vital at times for parents to put children’s concern for others above their happiness, for example, insisting at times that children turn off the TV and help around the house, be polite even when they are in a bad mood, or not dominate the airwaves when they are talking to other children or adults.

        4. Provide opportunities for children to practice empathy

Children are born with the capacity for empathy, but it needs to be nurtured throughout their lives. Learning empathy is in certain respects like learning a language or a sport. It requires practice and guidance. Regularly considering other people’s perspectives and circumstances helps make empathy a natural re ex and, through trial and error, helps children get better at tuning into others’ feelings and perspectives.

Try this:

1. Having family meetings. Hold family meetings when there are family challenges or con icts, and in those meetings give children a voice and encourage them to take the perspective of other family members. Listen carefully to your children’s views and ask your children to listen carefully to the views of others.
2. Encouraging empathy for peers. Ask children about their classmates and other peers. Ask children when they’re in con icts with peers to consider their peers’ perspectives.
3. Re ecting on empathy and caring. Notice with your child when you’re together and someone exhibits strong empathy—or shows a lack of empathy—either in your daily life or in a book or on television. Discuss why acts of empathy are important and why lacking empathy can be harmful.
4. Discussing ethical dilemmas. Discuss with your child ethical dilemmas that help them appreciate various perspectives, e.g., “Should I invite a new neighbor to my birthday party when my best friend doesn’t like her?” “Should I tell my friend if I know her boyfriend, who is also my friend, cheated on her?”
5. Supporting doing with. Encourage children not just to do service, to “do for” others, but to “do with” others, working with diverse groups of students to respond to community problems.

        6.  Expand your child’s circle of concern

We often talk about empathy as a quantity. For example, we speak of children as having a lot of or a little empathy or as lacking empathy entirely. Yet the issue often isn’t whether children can empathize or how much empathy they have. It is who they have empathy for. For most of us, it’s not hard to have empathy for our family members and close friends. It’s also human nature to have empathy for people who are like us in some way. But the real issue is whether children (and adults) have empathy outside that circle.  As parents and caretakers, it’s not only important that we model appreciation for many types of people. It’s important that we guide children in understanding and caring for many kinds of people who are different from them and who may be facing challenges very different from their own challenges.

Try this:

1. Zooming in and out. Help children learn to zoom in, tuning in carefully to others, but also to zoom out, taking in multiple perspectives and people. Use newspaper or TV stories
   to start conversations with children about other people’s hardships and challenges, or simply the different experiences of children in another country or community.
2. Understanding those who are different or struggling: Emphasize with your child the importance of really listening to others, especially those people who may seem unfamiliar whom they don’t immediately understand. Encourage children to consider the feelings of those who may be vulnerable, such as a child experiencing some family trouble or an unpopular child. Give children some simple ideas for taking action, like comforting a classmate who was teased.

       3. Help children develop self-control and manage feelings effectively

Often when children don’t express empathy it’s not because they don’t have it. It’s because some feeling or image is blocking their empathy. Often the ability to care for others is overwhelmed, for example, by anger, shame, envy, or other negative feelings.

Helping children manage these negative feelings as well as stereotypes and prejudices about others is often what “releases” their empathy.

Try this:

1. Identifying feelings. Name for children their dif cult feelings such as frustration, sadness and anger and encourage them to talk to you about why they’re feeling that way.

2. 3 steps to self-control. A simple way to help children to manage their feelings is to practice three easy steps together: stop, take a deep breath through the nose and exhale through the mouth, and count to ve. Try it when your children are calm. Then, when you see them getting upset, remind them about the steps and do them together.

3. Resolving con icts. Practice with your child how to resolve con icts. Consider a con ict you or your child witnessed or experienced that turned out badly, and role play different ways of responding. Try to achieve mutual understanding—listening to and paraphrasing each other’s feelings until both persons feel understood. If your child observes you experiencing a dif cult feeling and is concerned, talk to your child about how you are handling it.

Support from and input from Ashoka: Innovators for the Public was helpful in producing this work. Special thanks to SUNY Cortland’s Tom Lickona for his contributions to this document.

For more information about strategies for promoting empathy and for research indicating that empathy is important for school, professional and life success, please visit the Making Caring Common website at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

For more information, please visit makingcaringcommon.org
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Making Caring Common
Harvard Graduate School of Education 14 Appian Way
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617-385-95444 

Should Emotions Be Taught in Schools?  

By Grace Rubenstein on February 24, 2017 in Interviews

Who taught you how to identify and manage your emotions, how to recognize them when they arose, and how to navigate your way through them? For many adults, the answer is: No one. You hacked your way through those confusing thickets on your own. Although navigating our inner landscape was not something that was taught to us in school, it should be, contend a number of researchers. They believe emotional skills should rank as high in importance in children’s educations as math, reading, history and science.

Why do emotions matter? Research has found that people who are emotionally skilled perform better in school, have better relationships, and engage less frequently in unhealthy behaviors. Plus, as more and more jobs are becoming mechanized, so-called soft skills — which include persistence, stress management and communication — are seen as a way to make humans irreplaceable by machine. There has been a growing effort in American schools to teach social and emotional learning (SEL), but these tend to emphasize interpersonal skills like cooperation and communication.

Kids are often taught to ignore or cover over their emotions. Many Western societies view emotions as an indulgence or distraction, says University of California-Santa Barbara sociologist Thomas Scheff, a proponent of emotional education. Our emotions can give us valuable information about the world, but we’re often taught or socialized not to listen to them. Just as dangerous, Scheff says, is the practice of hiding one emotion behind another. He has found that men, in particular, tend to hide feelings of shame under anger, aggression and, far too often, violence.

How does one go about teaching emotions? One of the most prominent school programs for teaching about emotions is RULER, developed in 2005 by Marc Brackett, David Caruso and Robin Stern of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. The multiyear program is used in more than 1,000 schools, in the US and abroad, across grades K-8. The name, RULER, is an acronym for its five goals: recognizing emotions in oneself and others; understanding the causes and consequences of emotions; labeling emotional experiences with an accurate and diverse vocabulary; and expressing and regulating emotions in ways that promote growth.

As a strategy, children are taught to focus on the underlying theme of an emotion rather than getting lost in trying to define it. When an emotion grips you, explains Stern, understanding its thematic contours can help “name it to tame it.” Even though anger is experienced differently by different people, she explains, “the theme underlying anger is the same. It’s injustice or unfairness. The theme that underlies disappointment is an unmet expectation. The theme that underlies frustration is feeling blocked on your way to a goal. Pinning down the theme can “help a person be seen and understood and met where she is,” says Stern.

RULER’s lessons are woven into all classes and subjects. So, for example, if “elated’ is the emotional vocabulary word under discussion, a teacher would ask students in an American history class to link “elated” to the voyage of Lewis and Clark. Instruction reaches beyond the classroom, too; kids are prompted to talk with their parents or caregivers about when they last felt elated. Researchers at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence has found RULER schools tend to see less-frequent bullying, lower anxiety and depression, more student leadership and higher grades. So why isn’t emotional education the norm rather than the exception?

Surprising fact: While scientists and educators agree on the need to teach emotions, they don’t agree on how many there are and what they are. RULER’s curriculum consists of hundreds of “feeling words,” including curious, ecstatic, hopeless, frustrated, jealous, relieved and embarrassed. Other scholars’ lists of emotions have ranged in number from two to eleven. Scheff suggests starting students out with six: grief, fear, anger, pride, shame and excessive fatigue.
While psychology began to be studied as a science more than a century ago, up to now it has focused more on identifying and treating disorders. Scheff, who has spent years studying one taboo emotion — shame — and its destructive impact on human actions, admits, “We don’t know much about emotions, even though we think we do, and that goes for the public and for researchers.” Or, as Virginia Woolf so beautifully put it, “The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted.”

Parents can start to encourage their kids’ emotional awareness with a simple prompt “Tell me about some of your best moments,” a phrase Scheff has used to initiate discussions with his university students. But he and Stern agree that schools can’t wait until academics have sorted out the name and number of emotions before they act. “We know we have emotions all day long, whether we’re aware of them or not,” Stern points out. Let’s teach kids how to ride those moment-by-moment waves, instead of getting tossed around.

Art credit: TED-Ed. Author bio: Grace Rubenstein is a journalist, editor and multimedia producer in California. Note: The article above has been adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas.ted.com article.