Earlier this term I attended a talk on Anxiety and the Digital Child given by Luke Lambrecht, a Child Protection and Development Specialist based in Johannesburg. I thoroughly enjoyed his no-nonsense approach, knowledge of the inner city, and the empathy he displayed for kids and parents alike in navigating the world of technology.
He made some helpful connections between some old psychological findings on attachment styles and the rise of both tech-exposure and anxiety in our kids. My take-away from the talk was that the centrality of technological devices, such as the phone, in our lives is eroding the development of self-efficacy in children.
Just recently I wrote a column about being “Flamboyantly analogue” where I argued that “holding a device blanks out the social cues that may have led to conversation”, like ‘oh, I’ve also read that book’, ‘ah, I also have that album’ etc. I lamented a time when “Our relationship to Things fostered a relationship to each other”. So, these questions about social relationships and objects were front of mind for me.
Luke started his talk introducing the audience to what is popularly known as “The Still-Face Experiment”. In 1975 a study was done with mothers and children; the idea was to evaluate the quality and type of attachment between mother and child.
“The baby is in a seat facing her mother and the mother is talking, smiling, and making eye contact and the infant responds by vocalizing, smiling back, and pointing at things in the room. At one point, the mother turns away and when she faces the baby, what the infant sees is a still, unsmiling face. The baby goes into overdrive to re-engage her or his mother - doing all the things that previously have garnered attention - but no go; the mother’s face remains still.
What you see on the video is heart-breaking: When the infant realizes that while Mommy is there, she is also somehow gone, the baby begins to meltdown. She looks away, she waves her arms in protest, slumps in the seat, and then begins to wail. It’s at that point that the mother relaxes her face and starts interacting with the infant again, re-establishing and repairing the connection. It’s worth noting that the baby is relatively wary and that it takes a bit of time for her to recover.”[1]
Now, what does this interaction remind you of?
How often has it happened to you that you are having a conversation with someone, and they glance down at their phone, for no real reason other than the fact that the phone is lying on the table. Their face changes, and the flow of conversation is interrupted. It is maddening. And if you are a secure person, you know it is not about you. But imagine you are a child, a toddler, a baby, who is still learning about norms of conversation and listening through imitating what they see around them. They are at the centre of their universe, so all changes that happen in their environment, they experience as happening to them, because of them. They are testing the efficacy of their actions all the time: if I drop this banana, what will happen? Will it make a weird sound? Will it make mom angry? Will it make her laugh? Will it make the dog come?
The absolute gorgeousness of kids is that they experience themselves as Lord-Wizards-of-The-Universe. It makes them curious and creative, but it also makes them vulnerable, because this is obviously not reality. The job of growing up is learning about one’s relationship to reality, which includes other people.
So back to the experiment. While the findings show,
“the importance of mother-child attachment*, it also reveals something else of vital importance… Is the baby experiencing a loss of attachment or a loss of agency?”
Agency refers to the subjective awareness that one is initiating, executing, and controlling one’s own actions in the world. When we ‘still face’ our children by ignoring their expressions of emotion, for example, they may experience a loss of agency.”[2]
I would argue that it is not only ignoring our children’s expressions of emotion which could lead to a loss of agency. (Truth be told I think it is sometimes helpful to ignore their expressions of emotion, because those emotions are often the incoherent ravings of a lunatic who believes they are Lord-Wizards-of-The-Universe. It is our job to teach them they are not.) But rather inappropriate or incoherent responses in run-of-the-mill interactions that would erode their sense of agency.
So back to the phone. When we glance-down mid-interaction our response is to what we’ve just seen on the screen, not what is happening right in front of us. Our face that may have been smiling at them a second ago, is now, all of sudden, blank, still. Or angry, or frowning, or laughing even. But whatever it is, it is an incoherent contextual response to our kids. By engaging in tech, without mediating what we are doing on the device for them, we interrupt a pattern they are trying to learn. Not only is this confusing but it also makes it hard for them to understand how to regulate themselves. Because our responses seem unrelated to reality, they will learn that their responses do not need to be related to reality either, or, they simply will not know how to respond. And how do you feel when you don’t know how to respond, or you don’t understand a response? Anxious. The mental health crisis of our age.
…
I cross-posted a letter from Peter Gray’s substack, “Play Makes Us Human” a while back. He looks at the decline of play and the rise of anxiety in children, among other fascinating things. In his letter he looks at how unsupervised, independent play for kids (which is on the decline for many reasons, including the rise of tech in our homes) is essential to them developing their own sense of responsibility. If a parent is always looking over your shoulder, you never need to learn what to do when someone gets hurt, or an argument erupts.
“Beyond promoting immediate mental well-being, play and other independent activities build mental capacities and attitudes that foster future well-being. Research shows that people of all ages who have a strong internal locus of control (internal LOC), that is, a strong sense of being able to solve their own problems and take charge of their own lives, are much less likely to suffer from anxiety and depression than those with a weaker internal LOC. Obviously, however, to develop a strong internal LOC a person needs considerable experience of actually being in control, which is not possible if you are continuously being monitored and controlled by others.”[3]
It is also not possible to develop a sense of being in control, if one’s caregivers consistently offer up incoherent responses because of the Third in the room, The Device.
The conclusion to Luke’s talk, like many of the articles I’ve been reading on tech, children and anxiety, is a simple call to action. Be intentional. Model good behaviour. Just because roads are dangerous, we don’t take away the roads; we teach our kids how to cross the road safely. The same for devices.
They are here, they are part of our way of being in the world. But please control them, do not let them control you. Simple things like banning phones at tables would repair so much. Conversations would flow, vocabs would grow, our kids and partners and friends would know, we are listening, we are trying to understand. And what makes you feel safe? When you feel your environment is predictable, and you feel understood.
Here Endeth the Lesson.
*Beware the ideology of mother-child centric language. All care-givers matter. All acts of love and care produce oxytocin, the love hormone. One becomes a care-giver through caring. It is not dependent on sex or gender. It is in the doing that we become.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/tech-support/202307/why-the-still-face-experiment-was-a-game-changer
[2] https://www.gottman.com/blog/research-still-face-experiment/