I love being able to come home from a conference feeling full from having learned so much! Sunday and Monday I was joined by Daniella Greenspan (President of the Board) and Orly Rachamim (VP and Director of Educational Technology) at the Tikvah Foundation’s Jewish Schools and Technology Summit. Over 50 schools and 200 lay and school leaders joined for two days of learning and discussion around technology in schools and the impact it’s having on our children. It was inspiring to have so many school leaders together all driven to talk about these important issues.
Each of the presenters were outstanding. Let me give you a few highlights that have stayed with me.
Zach Rausch, Jonathan’s Haidt research associate, presented on Dr. Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation. We already know about the horrible impact social media is having on our kids, especially girls, and they track this data carefully and thoughtfully. But that is only part of their hypothesis for why things have gone so badly for kids and their mental health. They also track a change in parenting over the last 40 years. Parents have increasingly insulated their children from harm, which in most ways sounds good. But a lack of moderate stressors leads to a lack of resilience; and too much adult structure leads to children not being able to negotiate and manage challenges on their own. This new parenting reality plus smartphones and social media have created a disaster of mental health and child development. One fascinating statistic that supports this new reality: 40 years ago the most common age group for broken bones were boys – which makes sense! Lots of sports, activity and risky behavior. Today? Men over 50. The life of boys has been de-risked, combined with an increased screen time (i.e. indoors and not social). The result – boys aren’t experimenting, learning, playing, and that means they are not growing the way we’d hope or expect.
This session was followed by Dr. Leonard Sax, a GP and parents expert (you can find one of his best-selling books here). He began by asking: What input is most highly correlated (according to a longitudinal study) with health, wealth and happiness? (Please answer the question yourself before reading on!) The answer: self control. How do you develop self control? You teach your kids to be responsible and delay gratification. But you can only do that if you own your authority as a parent, and we are in a generation of parents who have given up that authority, either because of fear, or some misplaced sense of values. He also shared an amazing study. Kids were asked how much they needed to be paid to stay off social media for a month. The average was $50. Then they were asked how much they’d need to be paid if all their friends were already off social media. The answer: they’d pay the researchers to have such a situation! Kids are desperate to find other ways to communicate, but absent the alternative, they have no choice but to text, Snap, or IM.
(I’m skipping over two sessions. One where I was on a panel with two other heads talking about our Wait Until 8 program, as it’s something I hope to come back to at an upcoming parent evening – more information to come! And I’m skipping over a shiur by Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik who is an exceptional speaker, and was very inspiring, and talked about the importance of memory in learning. This was a way of saying – be a little less reliant on technology to be your memory tool, because developing memories is a core part of learning.)
The third key session was led by Dr. Yoni Schwab, the Associate Head of the Shefa School in Manhattan. He talked about mental health (mostly ADHD and anxiety), and the challenges (and opportunities) technology presents to students with these diagnoses. As a CBT therapist he rightly talked about the need for parents to take the authority (that Dr. Sax discussed) to make our kids uncomfortable and by challenging them in healthy ways, thus leading to potential reductions in anxiety. What was really interesting to me, and which will not surprise you, was a study about the impact of talking and reading to one’s kids on language development. In this case, more really is better. So – make sure to read to your kids tonight before bed!
And finally, there was a good deal of time given to our school team to begin to think about and develop new approaches and policies to technology at school. For example – perhaps we should treat phone policies like bar mitzvah policies, even though they are out of the school building. Some examples that came up: no phones at bar/bat mitzvahs; have a bin at the front of everyone’s house where kids can leave a cell phone when coming for a playdate; don’t ask another parent for their internet password; and more.
And there was a lot more! I hope to share it at an upcoming parent evening, which we’ll announce shortly. What’s clear is that this is one of the most important topics we can address as a school and as parents, and, as Hillel said, if not now, when?