How Tech is Harming its Most Vulnerable Users

to be there. That's completely for Michael Rich is a pediatrician who specializes in the way as online media can affect kids, and he's been seeing Jared because of his relationship with video games, especially multiplayer games like Minecraft and Mortal Kombat. Where do you feel your gaming is getting in the way now? Is it getting in the way or do you think you've got it balanced and managed? I feel like I got it balanced, but not completely.

There's define only still improvement, Like if it's staying up until a certain hour still playing games, it's definitely something to work upon. For a while, Jared was playing video games NonStop, but he was also suffering from anxiety and depression. When I was so addicted to the media, I had a hard time coming out of my room communicating with people. I would get consumed into the game and I wouldn't really have a sense of time, and I would sometimes

be playing for hours without noticing it. Gaming started to eat up a bigger and bigger part of Jared's life, until it eventually threatened to spin out of control. That's when his family decided to get help. Hi. I'm brad Stone and I'm Pagatari, and this week on Decrypted, we're taking a look at a phenomenon widely called addiction to technology. But some kids, the Internet is a new kind of sanctuary, a place where they know their parents can't track them.

But for others, screen time can become compulsive, even harmful, particularly if they're already prone to anxiety or mood disorders. Now some people are raising the alarm with the tech companies themselves, saying the industry needs to make sure it's most successful products aren't harming its most vulnerable users, and some companies might finally be paying attention to stay with us. I met Jen in the lobby of my hotel the day before Jared's appointment with Michael rich. Jen is lively,

cracking jokes and laughing a lot. But I could feel the emotion as she started talking about her son. He's a great kid and he's loving. He's so sweet. He is very friendly. He shy. Jared is on the spectrum. He has Asperger's um. He's brillant. He's very smart, she said. Jared always loved playing with computers, and from a very

young age he was really good at using them. You know, as he got older, if you didn't know how to do something, you would ask your four or five and six year old, you know, excuse me, can you show me how to fix this on the computer, And he'd come over and just, you know, tap away, and he'd fix it. Jared got his first tablet when he was ten years old, and a cell phone about two years later.

He'd spend a lot of time playing video games like Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog with his little brother on the family we But in his preteen years, Jared's taste in games that started to change and he would spend more time playing on his own. I started getting more into fighting games, like certain games where there would be like you could play as a character and you would fight against a bunch of other people, not around the world, but you would fight against computers like um

Mortal Kombat. I started getting into that when I was somewhere around seventh grade. Jared would spend more and more time gaming, and his parents started to notice changes in Jared's behavior. If I would tell him to shut it off, he would become so angry, and that's not the kid he is. He would tantrum um and just get very

bitter and very angry and lash out. The games were becoming all consuming, many of them, like a multiplayer game called Minecraft, a social there are other players all joining remotely from their own computers, and this became a way for Jared to connect with other people. And I think

that's why Jared liked it so much. Because Jared has Asperger's and he has a UM he has social anxiety, but he also has a social deficit, so he felt more comfortable talking and communicating if the people weren't right there in front of him. And that's how he met a lot of the people that he would talk to and you know, would call his friends because they'd get on the computer every afternoon and night and morning and play and talk and talk and play and play and

play and talk. But Jared's moods got worse as he went through middle school and he started spending even more time online. I noticed he would start staying in his room longer. Um. You know, if I would walk into his room, he shut the computer down, or UM he would switch screens. UM became very secretive. His parents didn't know it at the time, but Jared had started visiting porn sites, all easily available to him online. One night,

things came to a head. So one night I went to check on the kids before I went to bed and make sure the TVs wore off whatever UM, and I noticed UM like a light underneath Jared's door, So I turned. I opened the door and Jared was not asleep and his tablet was on the bed. So I went over to grab the tablet and turn it off, and there was a porn video playing. So I grabbed the tablet and Jared immediately jumped up, and I grabbed the tablet and immediately ran into the kitchen and grabbed

a hammer and shattered it. At first Jared, he immediately said that he has a problem, he can't help it. And my response to that was your problem is is that you got caught and that's the only problem you have. But that didn't solve Jared's problem. Even after the tablet was gone, he kept plowing hours into video games. He was still depressed, and one day Jen found a note Jared had scribbled on a napkin that revealed Jared was

thinking about hurting himself. And then Jen got a call from Jared's school Jared had harmed himself in the school bathrooms. Jen started looking for help for Jared. He'd been seeing a therapist, but that therapist had told Jen the constant gaming was just a phase and hadn't taken it seriously. I didn't want my child to end up being, you know, um on a wall in a police department or a post office when he grew up. I didn't want him

to be a statistic like that. She pulled him out of school and enrolled him in a day program for three weeks. It helped, but Jared's self esteem was still low. He was still grappling with his depression and still spent most of his time online. That's when a recommendation from a coworker put Jen in touch with a new doctor, Michael Rich. Dr Rich is energetic, with silver hair and

a quick smile. He's a professa at Harvard Medical School and specializes in something he calls PAIEMU, problematic interactive media use. Fifteen years ago he found at the Center on Media and Child Health to study it, so he prefers not to describe it as an addiction. Dr Rich said, it's medically inaccurate, and more importantly for me as a pediatrician, is the stigma we attached to the word addict or addiction. We think of bums on skid row or junkies in

a shooting gallery. We don't think about our ten year old who's flipping out because he has to stop playing Fortnite and go to bed. Dr Rich says he sees four main categories of harmful media use. There's gaming, which affects mostly boys, social media, which affects mostly girls, and then pawn and information binging. Right, that's where you might get lost watching one YouTube video after another. Porn and information binging affect boys and girls more or less equally.

For many of Dr Rich's patients, things had to get really serious before their families decided to seek out medical help. But he said it's a slippery slope. Many children are being affected by their use of technology, just less severely. We are distracted all the time by that little buzz sometimes a fan on buzz in our pocket, right, and and so we behave with each other very differently than we used to. We can't get into an elevator without looking at our phone, or onto a bus or whatever.

We don't look at each other. We don't talk to each other. People don't um observe personal space the same way. Six study from the organization Common Sense Media found that half of teenagers felt addicted to their devices and said they checked their devices at least once an hour. But because there's very little awareness of how serious this problem can get, some parents may not even notice it. They might chalk it up to something else, like bad behavior.

I think that many, many kids are somewhere on a continuum of doing this instead of things that would probably be better for them, like taking a walk in the woods, or kicking a ball around the backyard, or beating up your little brother even you know, because at least that's a little social emotional growth. Dr Rich told me something else that's interesting. Tim affects some children more than others.

We have yet to find a young person who does not have a known psychiatric or psychological dysfunction that may have never expressed itself until it got into the digital space. In other words, I am not convinced that these are standalone diagnoses, so the technology itself isn't causing the problem. The kids who are most negatively affected by technology are the ones who have an under lying condition that could be attention deficit disorder, anxiety depression. Dr Rich described them

as mood disorders or relational problems. He said, sometimes children are drawn to online media because it's a coping mechanism for them. What we're seeing is that, for example, kids who have a problem with gaming often have problems with attention, and in a way, the computer video game is a much safer space than the chaos of real life because it gives you a very circumscribed universe with a set

of clear rules that don't change. The classroom is chaos, right, someone's talking over here, there's a bird flying there, you know, the teachers of droning on at the blackboard. Someone threw a spitball and hitch in the back of the head. You know, all of that stuff is going on, and that's very hard to manage. So the computer or the video game, which is in fact a computer, is an

environment in which they are masters. Sometimes, like in Jared's case, the child's condition may have already been diagnosed, but Dr Rich said that he also sees cases when nobody knew about the underlying condition until the child started over using technology. And once kids get in the habit of spending a lot of time online, it can be really difficult to stop playing or put the device down. That's because online media is interactive, which makes it different from other kinds

of content. A video game that is violent is very different than a movie or a television show that is violent in that it asks, in fact demands, that the player do the violence as opposed to simply witness it. That it rewards doing violence better and it punishes doing violence less well, which is interesting because technology companies deliberately design their products this way. The kid gets involved in a situation where the game keeps sucking him back in.

These games are very sophisticatedly designed to frustrate you just enough until you succeed and you get that little sport of dopamine, and I've succeeded, and your reward is to get to do it again, but a little bit harder, so you're frustrated again, and it draws you back in and constantly grabs you back in. Social media operates in a similar way that feeling of reward comes from seeing

people liking and sharing your posts. Recently, we've started seeing the first signs of the public and people in the tech industry are feeling uneasy about this state of affairs. In January, to Apple shareholders, the investment firm Jana Partners and Coasters that's the pension fund for teachers in California, wrote a letter to Apple calling on the company to develop features that would help parents control how their children

use Apple's devices. They also asked Apple to study the impact of their devices on children more carefully, and it seems like Apple might have started to listen. Back at the hospital, Jared has been visiting Dr Rich regularly for over a year. Jared's tall with big brown eyes, your regular teenager in a ball cap and check shirt. What can I help with I've actually been doing better with my medication. I'm taking it more often without um, mom

or dad reminding me. Like for the past few weeks, I've been really really Rich has been treating Jared in part with medication to reduce his anxiety and improve his concentration, but he's also helping Jared develop better habits. How are you feeling about taking it? Because I know that you had sort of mixed feelings about I still don't like taking it, but it's just the fact out it's going to help me rom and you're noticing and helping you, because I'm noticing and helping you, but I want to

make sure you do. I'm feeling less anxious over things, but I can definitely still tell that my depression will act up sometimes, but it's gonna take time for that to really adjust. So being responsible for taking his medicine is one of those good habits. Dr Rich is also helping Jared prioritize his time, so he does his homework first and plays video games later. The week when I was visiting, they were working on setting a regular bedtime.

Sleep is the number one thing that suffers with the gaming. You know, UM, not just because you're staying up late to game, but you're also doing something that's really stimulating and arousing UM. And so even when you stop, it takes a while to wind down from that to to get to sleep. I've actually been going to bed earlier, but what I've been noticing is that I'm waking up later. That's because your body is saying, oh, I'm getting more sleep.

I like this. We've talked a little bit about how you need more sleep as a teenager than you did as a little kid. But Jared isn't the only one who's learning to adjust. Halfway through, Dr Rich went and brought Jared's mom, Jen into the appointment room. So how do you think he's doing. I think he's doing good. It's still a work in progress, aren't we. I admit that myself. Yeah, he said that straight up front. He feels like it's improved, that he's got more work to do.

Dr Rich often talks about the concept of digital parenting. He says it's important for parents to engage with what their kids are doing online, even though it can sometimes

be overwhelming or scary for the parent. They feel that their kids are so much more facile with these devices and with these environments, um that they don't understand that they often check out of parenting in the digital space, and so the internet and interactive media runs the risk of becoming rock and roll in the sense of it's something mom and dad don't understand, it's something mom and dad hate. How cool is that he wants parents to

learn how to participate in their children's online activity. What I do recommend they do is, instead of saying I hate that, turn it off or wag of finger, is to sit down and play the video game with their child, or go on social media with their child. Um And just as you wouldn't just toss the car keys at a twelve year old say have at it, or give a six year old power saw, we need to give them these tools when they are both in need of the tool and responsible enough to use it wisely. So, Peter,

this seems like good advice. But as we said earlier, awareness among parents is pretty low. So how do we fix that. One thing Dr Rich is working on is something he calls anticipatory guidance. That means he wants to rain other doctors, other pediatricians about how they should be talking to the parents of their young patients about what

to expect as their children grow up and start using technology. Okay, so I'm a I'm a parent of young kids, so how how might my kids doctor start talking to me differently? About their tech use. Okay, well, when your kids see their pediatrician for their annual check up, let's say, Um, your doctor might talk to you about things like vaccination, nutrition,

you know how much weight your kids might gain. Right and, by the way, tech never comes up in that discussion, right, And and Dr Rich wants tech to become part of that discussion. He wants doctors to be kind of giving parents a heads up that you know, these are healthy habits, but this might be too much for your child who's only X number of years old. Um. And for and for parents to be aware of the fact that, yes, tech is having an impact on the way the child

is developing. It's interesting as a parent, I mean, you're just you know, I kind of feel like I'm in the dark a little bit. Kids are drawn to the technology offer and instead of TV or like conventional toys. Um, some of the some of the games they play seem like they're pretty stimulating. But sometimes the hours they're spending

staring into a screen can feel a little recome. And that's something that Apple, for example, has just decided it's going to take some action on to help parents limit the amount of time that their kids spend on their devices, right, they made They made some announcements at their recent developers conference. Um. Well, the main new feature that's going to come in the next version of the iPhone operating system that's iOS twelve.

The main software it's called screen Time, and it will help people track how long they're spending on their own devices. Apples planning to break that out by apps, so you can see how much time you've spent on Facebook versus your emails, for example. Um. But then for parents, you'll also be able to see how much time your children are spending on their devices, and you'll be able to set time limits or even set kind of off off limits time when your kids can't use their devices at all.

And what what does Dr Rich think about what Apple announced stuff? Well, actually I had a chance to ask him about that because I was with him in Boston when Apple made those announcements. Do you think the stuff Apple announced yesterday is going to be helpful? I think

it's a move in the right direction. I think that what I'm hopeful of is that the tech companies and media makers will see the information we have on how we're changed by our media as something that will allow them to evolve their product to the next step where they're dealing with the second bottom line of of social and individual outcomes, not just profit, and to recognize and not deny that the media have an effect on us

they do. I think this is going to require a major ce change in the way they do business, which has been very much proprietary and very much, you know, behind closed doors. But I think that there's a good possibility that that's the solution for this current suspicion and concerned about what these products are doing and how they

are affecting kids in the way they grow up. So it's interesting that Apple is being responsive to the letters sent by shareholders and to what folks like Dr Rich are saying, Pa, do you think they're authentic and wanting to solve the problem or or do they just want to avoid getting blamed. I mean, it's interesting Apple has been ahead of the curve on some issues like privacy,

for example. At the same time, I guess Apple must be sort of looking at the way the kind of press coverage that some of their big tech competitors are getting in in the press right now, and you know, maybe they're they're deciding this is an issue they want

to get out in front of UM. It's interesting. Other other tech companies like Amazon, for example, have recently rolled out some kind of child friendly parent controls UM for their Echo devices, and it could be that Apple is kind of realizing they're going to have to follow suit. You know, Apple is so good at marking its devices and some of the big features of its devices. It will be interesting to see if they advertise some of these new tools to limit the use of their devices. UM.

I guess we'll I guess we'll see. So what's next for Jared? Well, for now, Jared is still making regular visits to Dr Rich and with the school here ending soon, Jared's looking for a summer job. Jared and Dr Rich came up with the idea of becoming a camp counselor. That caused some anxiety for his mom. And then the other thing is I think it would be great if we could get him a job. Yeah, I think so too. You think you could be a counselor that camp, the camp he was a c I ta, why not? He's

going to be miserable. I don't want him going to no, hold going back, hold on, hold On. By the end of the session, Jen had agreed to let Jared apply for the camp counselor role, and because Jared's grades are improving, He's been chosen for a school trip to the Okay next year. So I'm excited. I'm I'm a little concerned because it's like the farthest I've been away from home. Um, I'm not going to be with family, so that's kind of scary for me. But I'm mentally preparing myself for it.

And Michael Rich is working on getting the word out to more parents about how to raise kids in the digital age. I would um reassure parents that parenting is more of an art than a science, and that all the science we bring to bear on it just helps that art be better. So they shouldn't approach this as something that they feel they've failed because they've given their kids a smartphone or a Facebook account or something like this, but as something we can always be perfecting, even though

we're imperfect at it. Yeah, and that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with Dr Rich, you can write to him at Ask the Media Attrition. The link is c m h dot TV. Forward slash of parents, forward Slash, ask the Mediatrician, and let us know what you thought of the show. You can email us at decrypted at bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at pa Gadkari

and I'm at brad Stone. If you have it already, please take a moment to rate and review our show. It really helps us find new listeners. This episode was produced by TOFA forehead Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson, and edited by Anne vander May. A special thanks to Jen and Jared for telling us their story. Francesco Levi is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.