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  • Stanford University.

  • Back in 2010, we decided to study what would happen

  • when kids were chronically multi-tasking.

  • Using email while on Facebook, while trying to do their homework,

  • while listening to music, texting, etc., etc.

  • Would it change the way their brains work when they weren't multi-tasking?

  • [music playing]

  • The very powerful and surprising result of that 2010 study

  • was high multi-taskers - kids who multi-task all the time -

  • even when they were asked not to multi-task, when they were only doing one thing,

  • showed less ability to filter out irrelevancy,

  • much more difficulty managing their working memory

  • and ironically even the ability to multi-task.

  • We then decided to look at a different domain

  • namely emotional development. We focused on 8 to 12 year old girls

  • because that is the most important age for social development in girls.

  • So we created this study, a survey of 3400 girls and looked at

  • how much they used media. We also asked about multi-tasking.

  • And then we asked a bunch of questions about their social and emotional development.

  • How likely were they to succumb to peer pressure?

  • How good did they feel about themselves?

  • How much they slept? How many kids their parents thought were bad influences?

  • And the results were incredibly upsetting.

  • Kids who were heavy media users, heavy multi-taskers, showed much worse social and emotional development.

  • So what's happening is, kids are not practicing basic emotional skills.

  • There seems to be a pretty powerful curative,

  • a pretty powerful inoculant to this. And that is face-to-face communication.

  • As your kid grows up, that old-fashioned saying of "Look at me when I speak to you"

  • should come back. Yes, it was annoying for me as a kid, yes it is annoying, but it is annoying for an important reason.

  • It's hard work. But it's a hard work that leads to incredibly positive outcomes.

  • For more, please visit us at stanford.edu

Stanford University.

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