Zoom school may be over for most of us, but many of our children will continue to spend more time online each week than they do in physical schools.

Digital devices in the hands of today’s teens and tweens are here to stay. We need to start investing in the digital infrastructure that undergirds their development, in the same way we invest in our younger children’s daycares and playgrounds. I will explain why.

Adolescents are connecting more online

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

For close to a year, online schooling and increased screen time have become a staple in most American households. Adolescents are going online more to play, share, and create together. Even before the pandemic, many American adolescents spent more time online each week than they spent in schools. Youth-centered social and lighthearted creation and gaming platforms like TikTok and Roblox have exploded during the pandemic. The increased use has been alarming for parents who worry about too much time spent online. Still, for the most part, digital technology has been a lifeline to social connection and essential services.

Conversations about “screen time” before the pandemic were also driven by fears that too much time online was harmful. But, science suggests that this is the wrong conversation to be having—with no reliable links between screen time and many of the outcomes we fear. It is now time to stop screaming about screen time and ask how we can improve the spaces where our kids spend much of their day learning, entertaining, and socializing.

The first step in optimizing online spaces for children is acknowledging that they are present in the spaces that Big Tech companies have started to police. Despite many social media platforms requiring a user age of 13 or over, when we asked adolescents in our 2015 survey, half of the 11-year-olds reported having a social media account. This number snowballed to 85 percent by age 14. While some companies have more kid-friendly apps, such as YouTube Kids or Messenger Kids, we know that most young people have remained on the leading platforms. A “kiddie” version of the Internet is not what children under 13 want.

Whose responsibility is it to monitor children’s online content?

The most frequently proposed “fix” for the main platforms has been adding parental controls. Still, these controls often fail because parents are too often given the impossible task of monitoring multiple platforms, each with its own often confusing process and set of passwords. Even for parents with the time, expertise, and patience to extensively monitor their children’s platforms, undesirable content is still likely to slip through.

Many children, and especially those growing up in low-income households, are less likely to have their online environments tailored and protected by adults. In our recent report, we describe how children and adolescents growing up in lower-income households not only have less reliable devices and means of connecting to online spaces; they also tend to receive less supervision, support, and scaffolding in their online activities and report more spillover of negative online experiences. The lack of monitoring and support is important because we also find that these young people spend far more time online—ranging from 1.5 to 3 hours more per day than their peers across studies.

Parents shouldn’t (and in many cases cannot) shoulder the burden of ensuring digital spaces are healthy and safe for their kids on their own. Healthy online discourse and culture is a shared public responsibility – especially now when many children in the United States and elsewhere are spending as much, if not more, time online than in schools. While much of the conversation has been about restricting negative content – there are also opportunities to build digital spaces and platforms in ways that create learning opportunities.

What can be done?

As Big Tech faces the next round of scrutiny from Congress, the best interests and needs of children and adolescents – who represent 1 in 3 of internet users worldwide – need to be at the table.

Most online platforms are powered by algorithms optimized for profit, but it is time to ask ourselves: what would the online world look like if we factored children’s needs into these equations?

First, innovation is required to close widening gaps in education and learning. This will need to happen both in person when schools open, but the reality is that much of the “catch up” will happen online. Policy and platforms must be designed for kids and families who need it the most and who have paid the highest costs of this pandemic.

Second, social media companies need to stop pretending that their platforms do not reach children under 13. Most young adolescents are in these spaces, and the platforms are designed to be attractive to our children but are not yet designed in ways that optimize their development. The tech sector can and should play a role in providing services and a social safety net for our kids.

Third, youth may have the answers to how to best use social media and other digital spaces “for good,” in large part because they are already engaging in these practices. In our research as part of UC Irvine’s Connected Learning Lab, we found that many adolescents are using online spaces to seek help, offer support, and stay connected to friends. At a minimum, young people should be consulted and included in advisory board, consultant, and key stakeholders roles. Adults have been screaming about screen time for a long time, but it may be time to ask ourselves whether it is adults—and not kids—who struggle the most with social media.

In summary, as more physical spaces reopen, we want to ensure that our children’s virtual playgrounds and learning environments are supportive and safe. We currently – and should – invest an incredible amount of public time and money into the physical structures, programming,  and staff in schools. It is now time to invest in the digital spaces our children spend the bulk of their time growing up in as well.

Dr. Candice Odgers is a developmental psychologist who studies adolescent mental health and how digital technologies can be leveraged to understand and support wellbeing. She is the Co-Director of the Child and Brain Development Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a Professor of Psychological Science at University of California, Irvine, and a Visiting Professor at Duke University. 

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In the 1960s, Joan Ganz Cooney published The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education, a report that would revolutionize television for children. Where others saw a “vast wasteland,” Cooney saw possibility, and from it, educational programming for children, like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was born. Half a century later, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Corporation for Public Broadcasting seek to carry forward this vision of programming with the By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences project, which aims to foreground youth input into programming that serves them. The focus of this initiative is tweens and teens, identified as a “missing middle” audience for public media.

Today we are celebrating the launch of The Missing Middle: Reimagining a Future for Tweens, Teens, and Public Media. This report is the result of more than a year’s worth of research, interviews, and analysis. It is, to our knowledge, the first report of its kind to focus on asking American tweens and teens to reflect on their own media behaviors and preferences while also advising public media about what they would like to see in future programming and digital content. The purpose of the research is to help public media better serve and inspire today’s youth as they learn and grow in the context of a constantly expanding and fragmented media landscape. By amplifying the voices of 50 tweens and teens across the U.S. who discussed their media practices in focus groups last fall, our report also shines a light on how the role of technology in young people’s lives has changed during the pandemic.

When this initiative launched at the beginning of 2020, we could not have anticipated the dramatically different shape our research (and the world!) would take. Yet shifting from in-person focus groups, normally conducted at schools or after-school programs, to Zoom meetings conducted in kitchens, hallways, and bedrooms allowed an unprecedented snapshot of children’s lives amidst the ever-changing learning and living conditions of the pandemic.

The 10-17-year-olds we spoke with described spending their free time moving seamlessly across platforms and devices depending on their moods, their interests, and their access to certain kinds of connectivity. Many families loosened their screen time rules out of necessity, and teens and tweens largely used their free time online to socialize with friends. Video dominated their media experiences and was the lifeblood for social media and gaming. Youth increasingly sought out how-to videos to help answer questions, support interests they wished to explore, or simply solve a problem.

Yet while tweens and teens were grateful for digital media to help maintain connections with friends and family, many expressed eventually reaching a state of boredom with technology. As a 13-year-old in Brooklyn said:

“Now I’m on it [the computer] like six, seven, eight hours a day doing schoolwork, and then when I get off…  I feel like I can’t go outside or I can’t do all these things, ‘cause it’s completely different, the world.”

And a 14-year-old in San Antonio echoed this sentiment:

“I haven’t really liked it, ever since quarantine started, because I was always super busy-busy-busy on the go, always doing something, always involved in something, and then it just all stopped, out of nowhere…So I definitely adjusted to it, but I like how it was before, and I know that it’s never gonna go back to how it was.” 

Some youth we spoke with found the stress of hours spent in front of a screen managing a flood of new communications and deadlines overwhelming. Yet others, especially students with disabilities, expressed appreciation for learning from home and asynchronous assignments.

Some youth shared that the lost routines and support structures that school provides added to a sense of disconnectedness.

For others, remote learning both exacerbated existing economic and racial inequalities and made them more visible. We heard from tweens and teens who encountered challenges such as not having reliable access to high-speed connections or were trying to learn on a shared computer or mobile phone. Others reported living in households that lacked the advanced digital literacy skills necessary to access and use the many technologies necessary for learning from home.  

Young people who have access to digital devices and connectivity enjoy an abundance of options for watching, playing, and listening, but are often underserved in terms of quality content appropriate to their developmental stages and needs. Many of the participants mentioned a desire for media that portray more authentic representations of youth, and expressed interest in contributing their input to the development of future programming.

Many also expressed a need for sources of trustworthy information that could help them discern fact from fiction, especially about social issues that they feel are important, and signaled a need to make their voices heard about causes that matter to them. One 15-year-old in the Bronx shared:

“Greta Thunberg, she’s only 16 and she’s already fighting for and protesting about all this stuff.  I think that motivates and inspires me a lot because I love speaking up for things that are not right, and I also joined debate, which also inspired me to make my voice heard, and I think that is so important.”

When invited to share their advice for public media, youth often asked for media that addresses the everyday challenges that tweens and teens face, and stories that reflect the diversity they see in their generation. A 13-year-old in Arlington said:

“I think that our generation is a lot more about change, and I feel like sometimes some adults don’t really fully understand that.” 

Public media is already a space known and trusted for a diversity of voices in its programming. In 2020, it provided resources across its networks for discussions of race, inequality, and prejudice. There is an opportunity here to amplify how public media goes beyond binaries and into the nuance of issues, since this seems to be missing, but much desired, in youth media experiences.

Our method of talking to tweens and teens, asking for their opinions, and thinking about what is possible is a model moving forward for public media to consider. Kids are grateful for a chance to be heard, and they were surprised that we were taking their opinions seriously. One space where public media can differentiate from commercial platforms is adults taking seriously what kids have to say.

Similar to the “vast wasteland” moment Joan Ganz Cooney faced in the 1960s, the abundance of content and personalization of the current moment can seem more noise than promise. Public media has an opportunity to evolve Cooney’s blueprint of a kinder learning space for young children into one that also addresses the pressing needs of tweens and teens. Our discussion with tweens and teens indicate that this is a moment to be visionary, to leverage the trusted space of public media for learning and growing as youth transition from childhood to adulthood, and develop identities deeply intertwined with their media ecosystems.

Download the full report here.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Billions of people around the world play video games, making gaming one of the most popular forms of entertainment today. Yet while we know there are many positive aspects to video games for learning and play, many still worry that they could also be bad for us. Video games have been accused of making players violent, isolated, dumb, or addicted. But what does academic research actually say? This is what I discuss in my most recent book, The Psychology of Video Games.

What are the potential positive impacts of playing video games?

Let start by exploring what has been relatively much less studied about games: whether they can be beneficial to players. Beyond the fact that play is overall good for cognitive and social development, videogame play has been found to have several notable benefits. In particular, certain commercial action games have been found to enhance visual attention skills. Other games have been explored for their potential to foster prosocial behavior.

Video games have also been studied for their potential to engage players for educational purposes. The most notable impact here is admittedly made by teachers and educators who are using certain existing games for education in class (such as Minecraft or SimCity). Nonetheless, some scholars argue that video games can help players develop a “growth mindset” (Dweck, 2006). The hypothesis here is that video games can encourage perseverance, which is generally recognized as being important in learning.

One last main area of exploration is whether video games can positively impact health and wellbeing. While some games are explicitly designed to treat children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, some commercial games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons have been found to be positively associated with affective well-being. 

Overall, the research currently shows that in many cases video gameplay does yields benefit, although they haven’t been found to be quite as extraordinary as some video game enthusiasts might believe.

What are the potential negative impacts of playing video games?

The Psychology of Video Games by Celia Hodent

One of the oldest concerns regarding video games is whether they can cause aggressive behavior in real life. Decades of research studying this area have so far mostly yielded heavy debates, yet no consensus on the matter. Nonetheless, there is currently no clear evidence that attributes real-life violence to video games, as the American Psychological Association (APA) pointed out in a 2020 resolution: “Attributing violence to violent video gaming is not scientifically sound and draws attention away from other factors.” Moreover, their potential association with mild aggressive behavior is highly debated among scholars and the medical community.

Another concern has been whether video games could negatively affect school performance (e.g. lack of attention at school). Here again, the results are highly debated among scholars. Some researchers found an association between video game play and poor grades, but others did not. It’s important to note here that when such association is found, it doesn’t say anything about a causal relationship. Correlation is not causation. It could very well be that children that have poor performance at school are more likely to play video games instead of doing their homework if they don’t feel competent at school. That being said, it’s obvious that if a child (or an adult) spends too much time playing games to the point that other activities are neglected (such as sleeping, doing school work, having a social life, etc.), it’s never good. Doing a variety of activities (including physical activity) and sleeping are very important for the brain, and even more so for brains in development. This leads us to another major concern about video games: can video games be “addictive”?

An increasing number of parents are worried about their children being “addicted” to certain video games. Addiction is a delicate and complex topic. It’s a pathology. While there isn’t a straightforward definition of what an addiction is, it’s generally considered as the encounter between a person, a context, and an object (product) that is causing significant distress to the person who feels a compulsion to consume the product despite harmful consequences. The object is usually a substance, such as heroin, alcohol, or tobacco, but sometimes it can be a behavior, such as gambling. Gambling disorder is currently the only behavioral addiction that is recognized by the DSM-5 (the manual used to diagnose mental disorders). But what about the other addictions that people talk about, such as sports addiction, shopping addiction, or video game addiction? It is true that some people in a certain context can develop a pathological relationship with a pleasurable habit, such as playing video games (its prevalence varies between studies, for example between 0.1% to 1% in one study, or 3.1% in another). In this sense, some people do have a pathological relationship with video games, and they need help. Nobody is disputing this fact. However, when the World Health Organization (WHO) announced in 2017 the introduction of a “gaming disorder” in the next International Classification of Disease, it has stirred a lot of debate and controversy among scholars who disagree with the creation of a new disorder related to playing video games. The media psychology divisions of the APA and Psychological Society of Ireland jointly released a statement disagreeing with the WHO diagnosis, pointing out that “the current research base is not sufficient for this disorder and that this disorder may be more a product of moral panic than good science”. On a side note, the same controversy applies to social media and the moral panic associated with it.

To clarify, scholars who disagree with the creation of a new “gaming disorder” claim that when a pathological relationship between a player and a video game emerges, it should be best viewed as a coping mechanism for stress and anxiety (the specific context in which the player is currently evolving), or as a way to satisfy basic psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness when these are not felt in real life. Finally, scholars also debate the proposed “gaming disorder” diagnosis criteria, because being engaged with a game and playing long hours is not enough for someone to be considered a pathological gamer. Clearly distinguishing between passionate gaming and pathological gaming is critical to avoid stigmas, and to avoid downplaying true addiction suffering.

Overall, the worries around video games seem greatly exaggerated. Video games, as a medium, are neither good nor bad by themselves. It greatly depends on the specific game, how it is consumed by the player, and why. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that social relationships are very important to teenagers, and in today’s world (especially during a pandemic), video games are where a lot of social connections happen. 

The Bottom Line 

Over 2.8 billion people, including myself, have fun playing video games and the large majority of game creators are passionate about their work (I’ve been working in the video game industry for the past 13 years). Video games are an art form. They are a rich medium that offers a very diverse pool of experiences, some of which you play alone, others collaboratively, and others in competition with many other people. While the current moral panic around video games is greatly exaggerated, it remains important to point out the flaws of the game industry (most notably in monetization techniques) and to push for better ethical practices overall. The benefits of games are also exaggerated, yet certain games have added value in health and education. More funding to explore the positive impact of games could greatly help increase our understanding of them. But above all else, video games are just supposed to be fun.

Celia Hodent is an expert in the application of cognitive science and psychology to improve products, systems, services, and video games. She currently leads an independent UX consultancy, working with a wide range of international media and enterprise companies. Celia is the author of The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX can Impact Video Game Design and The Psychology of Video Games. 

Photo by Gabe Pierce on Unsplash

In the spring of 2020, schools across the country abruptly shut their doors, sending more than 50 million students home until further notice. Amidst the initial chaos and fear of the COVID-19 pandemic’s early days, caregivers were thrust into new roles as co-teachers as children struggled to adapt to the remote learning arrangements hurriedly set up by school districts in order to finish the academic year. How were families coping? 

Researchers across a variety of disciplines recognized the urgent need for understanding how the effects of this global rush towards remote school could be affecting students’ physical and emotional health, family dynamics, and teacher preparation and support. Several large-scale surveys documented that students from low-income and marginalized populations were particularly strained by online learning. However, finer-grained, qualitative approaches are often needed for interpreting broad trends revealed through survey research and are critical for illuminating the innovative ways that families and communities are supporting learning and wellbeing during these uncertain times. With traditional methods of in-depth family research, such as home visits, no longer possible, how were researchers carrying out rich qualitative investigations remotely? 

In March 2020, NSF invited researchers to apply through its Rapid Response Research (RAPID)  program for funding to “encourage the development of processes and actions to address” challenges raised by COVID-19. Several of the projects awarded funding used qualitative remote data collection methods to study learning as it naturally unfolded during the pandemic. In July 2020, Dr. Brigid Barron and her team at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education in collaboration with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center convened a virtual workshop to mobilize this community of researchers exploring innovative methods for studying how children were learning at home during the pandemic. The resulting work highlights researchers and families learning together, as families adapted their practices and researchers adjusted their methods in response to the pandemic-driven reality. 

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Featuring case studies of research projects from Stanford University, University of Michigan, and University of Washington, Learning Together details the methods that these teams used to recruit, communicate, and collaborate with parents and caregivers during the course of their studies. It also foregrounds the perspectives of unique families and communities from a range of cultural and geographical backgrounds and environments.

• The Stanford team used an existing research platform to rapidly recruit 109 families learning at home and asked caregivers to use the app to document daily learning moments and reflections about how things were going through text, video, photographs, and comments.
• The University of Washington team engaged 30 families in discussion and codesign on Slack. Researchers posted a weekly activity prompt and families jumped in on their own time, posting, reviewing, and building off of each others’ work.
• The University of Michigan team utilized long-term research-practice partnerships to learn from and with 60 community partners (including educators, parents, and young people). Together, researchers and participants developed data collection strategies, including remote participatory interviews and experience sampling, and analyzed results.

Several salient opportunities and challenges specific to employing online tools for conducting remote qualitative research were apparent across the studies. Remote approaches offered greater and more convenient access to families and their lived environments, as well as the ability to collect a large qualitative multimedia dataset in a relatively short time frame. At the same time, new challenges emerged that must be considered for future remote research, such as data ownership, amount and quality of data collected, and access to participants with little to no internet connectivity. 

In this report, we summarize the strategies and insights generated at this workshop so that we may share them among a wider network of researchers, practitioners, funders, and policymakers concerned with achieving more equitable educational outcomes during and beyond the pandemic lockdowns.  Specifically, our report aims to: 

• Provide examples of how researchers are repurposing and reinventing qualitative methods for remote contexts with the aim of expanding and improving these methods for future studies;
• Highlight how families and communities are innovating and adjusting to the pandemic and how these adjustments are shaping learning and wellbeing in unexpected ways;
• Convey on-the-ground perspectives from caregivers and learners about the challenges of remote learning and inspire solutions to solve them; and
• Mobilize collaborative efforts for future research and design.

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Caitlin K. Martin is a senior researcher with Barron’s lab at Stanford University and is an independent research and evaluation consultant focusing on out-of-school learning and data visualization. 

Rose K. Pozos is a PhD candidate at Stanford University in the Learning Sciences and Technology Design program, where she studies everyday family learning.