Psychology Today: Back Off: It Doesn’t Matter What College Your Kids Attend

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Almost everything we are doing in relation to our schools seems to be in the direction of upping the pressure. Academically gifted kids for whom school should be a walk in the park are encouraged into “honors” and “advanced placement” classes and are made to feel that their life will be ruined if they don’t get all A's in those classes. (In my opinion, they would be better off playing hooky and taking an actual, all-day walk in the park at least once a week.) As an illustration of the stress, here are quotes from four high school students or recent graduates who commented on one of my past essays:

• "I’m a senior in high school, and from a young age I’ve always been taught that I won’t be able to go to college unless I have mostly A's.”
• “Anything less than an A was unacceptable, and it was ingrained in us early on by our parents that perfection was our only choice for success in this competitive world.”  
• “They tell you that good grades are not enough, that getting all A's is the bare minimum. You need to be a member of a least two organizations, but being a member is not enough, you must be leadership.”  
• "High school was all about feeling trapped . . . The idea that it was all about grades and obeying the rules, irrespective of whether or not I actually learned anything, disgusted me.”

We have promulgated some terrible myths. The biggest is that we live in an incredibly competitive world and are all on the same track in some kind of race, somehow competing for the same thing. Nobody knows what that thing is, but somehow high grades and going to an expensive college are supposed to get us there. The truth is, the world is not that competitive. My observation is that people who know how to cooperate, to help others rather than worry excessively about their own achievement, are often the happiest and most successful, by any reasonable measure of success.  

The more specific myth I want to take on now is that there is a great advantage in getting into an elite, expensive, hard-to-get-into college. The myth is fed by a failure on the part of people who should know better to distinguish between correlation and causation. Yes, going to a prestigious college correlates with getting a prestigious job and high income later on in life, but that doesn’t mean that going to the prestigious college is in any way the cause of such success (assuming for now that this is how you want to measure success). There are lots of differences, to begin with, between the typical student attending, say, Harvard or Stanford, and the typical student attending, say, Framingham State. Among other things, the former come from much richer families and have higher levels of achievement motivation (along conventional lines of achievement) than the latter. It is very well established that, regardless of what college one goes to, people who come from wealth tend to go on to wealth, and people who are highly motivated to achieve tend to achieve.  

Stacy Dale, a mathematician, and Alan Krueger, an economist, collaborated in two large-scale research studies (Dale & Kruger, 2002 & 2014) in which they effectively controlled for the background characteristics of students attending colleges that varied in selectivity (based on average SAT scores of the entering class). The first study was of students entering college in 1976, and the second was of those entering in 1989. Essentially, their question in both studies was this: If people are matched in socioeconomic background and pre-existing indices of their academic ability and motivation, will those who go to an elite college make more money later in life than those who go to a less elite one? The overall result was that the college attended made no difference. Other things being equal, attending an elite school resulted in no income advantage over attending a less elite school, neither in the short term nor in the long term. 

There were, however, some interesting exceptions to this finding. For Black and Hispanic students, and for students whose parents had little or no higher education, attending an elite college did have a significant advantage. Perhaps for those students, attending an elite college helped by essentially boosting them into a higher perceived social class and providing valuable social connections, which boost was not needed by most white students of middle class or above. So, if you are Black or Hispanic or first-generation college, and you get accepted by Harvard or its ilk, you might want to go — especially if they give you a nice scholarship. But otherwise, there is apparently no financial advantage in choosing the elite school.

Well, income is one measure; how about other, maybe more meaningful, indices of success in life? A survey by the Pew Research Center (here), published in 2014, asked college graduates to rate their satisfaction with their family life, their current financial situation, and their current job. They compared these ratings for those who had attended public colleges versus private colleges and found no significant differences. This was even without controls for the background characteristics of the students. Those who attended the generally more expensive and prestigious private colleges were no more satisfied with their adult lives than were those who attended public colleges.  

Another survey, of 30,000 college graduates by Gallup Poll and Purdue University (here), assessed the degree to which the graduates were, by their own reports, engaged at work (enthusiastic and committed to their work) and thriving in their personal lives. They found no significant relationships at all between these ratings and the type of college attended. Whether the college was public or private, large or small, highly selective or less selective made, on average, no difference on any of these measures. However, the experiences they reported having in college did make a difference. Regardless of what kind of college they attended, those who recalled a professor who cared about them as an individual and encouraged their aspirations, or who had a job or internship in college that allowed them to apply what they were learning, had significantly higher ratings of engagement and thriving after graduation than those who did not. According to this study, it matters not what type of college you go to, but it does matter what you do there.

So here’s news that might help teachers and parents — and therefore students — relax. At least in the United States, essentially anyone, regardless of grades and regardless of what sorts of extracurricular activities they have done or not done, can get into a college; and generally speaking, the colleges that are easiest to get into are the least expensive. And in terms of all the usual measures, the long-term result is that it doesn’t matter what college you go to. So, ease up. Reassure your kids rather than stress them. Tell them you don’t give a damn about what grades they get; it really doesn’t matter. But tell them that you do care about their happiness and their pursuit of meaning in life. For happiness and meaning, they may need to spend less time grubbing for grades and more time pursuing their own interests (see here). The best predictor by far of future happiness is present happiness.

References

Dale, Stacy, and Alan Krueger. 2002. “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117(4):1491–528.

Dale, Stacy, and Alan Krueger. 2014. "Estimating the Effects of College Characteristics over the Career Using Administrative Earnings Data." Journal of Human Resources, Volume 49(2): 323-358.

How Parents Are Robbing Their Children of Adulthood

ImageCreditCreditIllustration by The New York Times

Today’s “snowplow parents” keep their children’s futures obstacle-free — even when it means crossing ethical and legal boundaries.

Nicole Eisenberg’s older son has wanted to be a star of the stage since he was a toddler, she said. He took voice, dance and drama lessons and attended the renowned Stagedoor Manor summer camp for half a dozen years, but she was anxious that might not be enough to get him into the best performing-arts programs.

So Ms. Eisenberg and others in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., the affluent suburb where she lives, helped him start a charity with friends that raised more than $250,000 over four years.

“The moms — the four or five moms that started it together — we started it, we helped, but we did not do it for them,” Ms. Eisenberg, 49, recalled. “Did we ask for sponsors for them? Yes. Did we ask for money for them? Yes. But they had to do the work.”

She even considered a donation to the college of his choice. “There’s no amount of money we could have paid to have got him in,” Ms. Eisenberg said. “Because, trust me, my father-in-law asked.” (Ms. Eisenberg’s son was admitted to two of the best musical theater programs in the country, she said, along with nine more of the 26 schools he applied to.)

College has been on their radar since her son was in diapers. “We’ve been working on this since he was 3 years old,” she said. To apply, she said, “I had to take him on 20 auditions for musical theater. But he did it with me. I don’t feel like I did this. I supported him in it. I did not helicopter parent him. I was a co-pilot.”

Or was she, perhaps, a … snowplow parent?

Helicopter parenting, the practice of hovering anxiously near one’s children, monitoring their every activity, is so 20th century. Some affluent mothers and fathers now are more like snowplows: machines chugging ahead, clearing any obstacles in their child’s path to success, so they don’t have to encounter failure, frustration or lost opportunities.

Taken to its criminal extreme, that means bribing SAT proctors and paying off college coaches to get children in to elite colleges — and then going to great lengths to make sure they never face the humiliation of knowing how they got there.

Those are among the allegations in the recent college bribery scandal, in which 50 people were charged in a wide-ranging fraud to secure students admissions to colleges. According to the investigation, one parent lied about his son playing water polo, but then worried that the child would be perceived by his peers as “a bench warmer side door person.” (He was assured that his son wouldn’t have to actually be on the team.) Another, the charges said, paid someone to take the ACT for her son — and then pretended to proctor it for him herself, at home, so he would think he was the test-taker.

The parents charged in this investigation, code-named Operation Varsity Blues, are far outside the norm. But they were acting as the ultimate snowplows: clearing the way for their children to get in to college, while shielding them from any of the difficulty, risk and potential disappointment of the process.

In its less outrageous — and wholly legal — form, snowplowing (also known as lawn-mowing and bulldozing) has become the most brazen mode of parenting of the privileged children in the everyone-gets-a-trophy generation.

It starts early, when parents get on wait lists for elite preschools before their babies are born and try to make sure their toddlers are never compelled to do anything that may frustrate them. It gets more intense when school starts: running a forgotten assignment to school or calling a coach to request that their child make the team.

Later, it’s writing them an excuse if they procrastinate on schoolwork, paying a college counselor thousands of dollars to perfect their applications or calling their professors to argue about a grade.

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The bribery scandal has “just highlighted an incredibly dark side of what has become normative, which is making sure that your kid has the best, is exposed to the best, has every advantage — without understanding how disabling that can be,” said Madeline Levine, a psychologist and the author of “Teach Your Children Well: Why Values and Coping Skills Matter More Than Grades, Trophies or ‘Fat Envelopes.’”

“They’ve cleared everything out of their kids’ way,” she said.

In her practice, Dr. Levine said, she regularly sees college freshmen who “have had to come home from Emory or Brown because they don’t have the minimal kinds of adult skills that one needs to be in college.”

One came home because there was a rat in the dorm room. Some didn’t like their roommates. Others said it was too much work, and they had never learned independent study skills. One didn’t like to eat food with sauce. Her whole life, her parents had helped her avoid sauce, calling friends before going to their houses for dinner. At college, she didn’t know how to cope with the cafeteria options — covered in sauce.

“Here are parents who have spent 18 years grooming their kids with what they perceive as advantages, but they’re not,” Dr. Levine said.

Yes, it’s a parent’s job to support the children, and to use their adult wisdom to prepare for the future when their children aren’t mature enough to do so. That’s why parents hide certain toys from toddlers to avoid temper tantrums or take away a teenager’s car keys until he finishes his college applications.

If children have never faced an obstacle, what happens when they get into the real world?

They flounder, said Julie Lythcott-Haims, the former dean of freshmen at Stanford and the author of “How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success.”

At Stanford, she said, she saw students rely on their parents to set up play dates with people in their dorm or complain to their child’s employers when an internship didn’t lead to a job. The root cause, she said, was parents who had never let their children make mistakes or face challenges.

Snowplow parents have it backward, Ms. Lythcott-Haims said: “The point is to prepare the kid for the road, instead of preparing the road for the kid.”

Helicopter parenting is a term that came into vogue in the 1980s and grew out of fear about children’s physical safety — that they would fall off a play structure or be kidnapped at the bus stop. In the 1990s, it evolved into intensive parenting, which meant not just constantly monitoring children, but also always teaching them.

This is when parents began filling afternoons and weekends with lessons, tutors and traveling sports games. Parents now spend more money on child rearing than any previous generation did, according toConsumer Expenditure Survey data analyzed by the sociologists Sabino Kornrich and Frank Furstenberg.

According to time-use data analyzed by Melissa A. Milkie, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, today’s working mothers spend as much time doing hands-on activities with their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s. Texting and social media have allowed parents to keep ever closer track of their progeny.

Snowplow parenting is an even more obsessive form.

“There’s a constant monitoring of where their kid is and what they are doing, all with the intent of preventing something happening and becoming a barrier to the child’s success,” said Laura Hamilton, the author of “Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College and Beyond” and a sociologist at the University of California, Merced.

The destination at the end of the road is often admission to college. For many wealthy families, it has always been a necessary badge of accomplishment for the child — and for the parents. A college degreehas also become increasingly essential to earning a middle-class wage.

But college admissions have become more competitive. The number of applicants has doubled since the 1970s, and the growth in the number of spots has not kept pace, remaining basically unchanged at the very top schools.

At the same time, it’s no longer guaranteed that children will do as well as their parents. Children born in 1950 had an 80 percent chance of making more money than their parents, according to work by a team of economists led by Raj Chetty at Harvard. Those born in 1970 had a 61 percent chance. But since 1980, children are as likely as not to earn less than their parents did.

It’s painful for any parent to watch their child mess up, or not achieve their (or their parents’) goals. Now, however, the stakes are so much higher.

“Increasingly, it appears any mistake could be fatal for their class outcome,” said Philip Cohen, a sociologist studying parenting and inequality at the University of Maryland.

The problem is: Snowplowing is a parenting habit that’s hard to break.

“If you’re doing it in high school, you can’t stop at college,” Ms. Lythcott-Haims said. “If you’re doing it in college, you can’t stop when it comes to the workplace. You have manufactured a role for yourself of always being there to handle things for your child, so it gets worse because your young adult is ill-equipped to manage the basic tasks of life.”

In a new poll by The New York Times and Morning Consult of a nationally representative group of parents of children ages 18 to 28, three-quarters had made appointments for their adult children, like for doctor visits or haircuts, and the same share had reminded them of deadlines for school. Eleven percent said they would contact their child’s employer if their child had an issue.

Sixteen percent of those with children in college had texted or called them to wake them up so they didn’t sleep through a class or test. Eight percent had contacted a college professor or administrator about their child’s grades or a problem they were having.

“Some of them think they’re doing the right thing by their children,” said David McCullough, Jr., a high school teacher and the author of “You Are Not Special and Other Encouragements,” who helped popularize the “snowplow” term. “Parents understand that going to a highly prestigious college brings with it long-lasting advantage.”

It’s not just the wealthy. Recent research suggests that parents across lines of class and race are embracing the idea of intensive parenting, whether or not they can afford it.

Often, that involves intervening on behalf of their children. In a recent study that surveyed a nationally representative group of parents about which parenting choices they thought were best, people, regardless of race, income or education, said children should be enrolled in after-school activities so they wouldn’t have to feel bored. If a child didn’t like school, they thought parents should talk to the teacher to get the child different work.

Still, true snowplow parenting is done largely by privileged parents, who have the money, connections and know-how to stay two steps ahead of their children. Families without those resources don’t necessarily have the money to invest in lessons and college counselors, and may not have experience navigating college admissions or ultracompetitive job markets.

Carolyn O’Laughlin worked as a director of resident life at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia, and now does a similar job at St. Louis Community College, Meramec. “I don’t talk to parents nearly as much here, where parents are down the street, as I did when the parents were across the country,” she said.

At the elite schools, Ms. O’Laughlin said, a mother once called her to ask her to list the items in the school salad bar so she could choose what her daughter should eat for lunch, and another parent intervened over video chat to resolve a dispute with a roommate over stolen peanut butter.

Now, many of the students she works with are immigrants or first-generation college students.

“As I read about the scandal, I feel for those parents, I do,” she said. But “first-generation students coming through here are figuring out how to navigate an educational system that hasn’t always been built for them,” she said. “It is changing the course of their lives and the lives of their families.”

Cathy Tran, 22, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, is the daughter of people who immigrated from Vietnam who did not attend college. “They do give me a lot of emotional support, but they haven’t really been able to tell me about what I should be doing, like next steps,” she said.

Clearing her own path to college had some benefits, Ms. Tran said. “I actually think that I have a sense of independence and confidence in myself in a way that some of my friends whose parents attended college might not have,” she said. “I had some friends who didn’t even know how to do laundry. I guess in some ways I feel like I was forced to be an adult much earlier on.”

Learning to solve problems, take risks and overcome frustration are crucial life skills, many child development experts say, and if parents don’t let their children encounter failure, the children don’t acquire them. When a 3-year-old drops a dish and breaks it, she’s probably going to try not to drop it the next time. When a 20-year-old sleeps through a test, he’s probably not going to forget to set his alarm again.

Snowplowing has gone so far, they say, that many young people are in crisis, lacking these problem-solving skills and experiencing record rates of anxiety. There are now classes to teach children to practice failing, at college campuses around the country and even for preschoolers.

Many snowplow parents know it’s problematic, too. But because of privilege or peer pressure or anxiety about their children’s futures, they do it anyway.

Felicity Huffman, an actress charged in the college admissions scheme, has long extolled the benefits of a parenting philosophy in which children are to be treated as adults. On her parenting blog, What the Flicka (which was taken down this week), she described raising children as “one long journey of overcoming obstacles.” In another post, she praised schoolchildren “for walking into a building every day full of the unknown, the challenging, the potential of failure.”

This week, Ms. Huffman was accused of paying $15,000 for an SAT proctor to secretly inflate her daughter’s test scores.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/style/snowplow-parenting-scandal.html

Four Dangerous Parenting Styles Today

Just walk into any pre-school center and you’ll see that parents continue to evolve, even today in 2019. The variety of today’s parents is enormous. One teacher told me moms or dads will remain at the school until after the official start time, to make sure their child is safe and happy. Another administrator told me that parents are now dropping their child off with an extreme list of requirements for teaching and items their child is not allowed to be exposed to (granted, allergies are completely understandable). Still others report moms dropping their child off daily, with plans to go shopping, play tennis or get massages or spa treatments. The fact is—we are living in a new day, when parenting has become a competition. We see it in schools, soccer teams, theater and neighborhoods. Out of this stressful period, we’ve created new methods to help us cope with our new realities: The tablet is the new pacifier. When my kids were toddlers we gave them a pacifier when they became fussy or fidgety. Today—90% of preschool aged children are on a tablet or portable device amusing themselves. The baby monitor is the new baby sitter. These monitors have been around for decades, but now we use them to watch both the children and the baby sitter we’ve hired while we’re away from our home. Cameras are everywhere. Netflix is the new playground. Our kids were outside playing more than kids are today. Children now will spend hours vegging and binging on Netflix shows. They are sedentary, but safe, secluded and satisfied. Fortnite is the new pick-up baseball game. I recall playing outside for hours after school with whoever was available for a baseball or basketball game. Now, “pick up” games are played with friends or strangers on a video screen. Instagram is the new photo album. This one has made life easier. Instead of buying a physical photo album and storing it away in the attic, we now have our library of pics on social media sites we can access more simply and faster. Medication is the new time-out. Over the years, kids have been given larger amounts of meds for a widening variety of allergies or diagnoses. We have to be careful these meds don’t replace the pain of disciplining them. Four Dangerous Parenting Styles While none of these methods are tragic, they do signal a different way of coping with our busy lives. Some of us—quite accidentally—have failed to recognize how it’s affected our parenting styles in the home. I’d like to call your attention to four types of poor leadership within families, that eventually lead to unhealthy outcomes in the children. I offer them to you simply as a word of caution: 1. The Preoccupied Parent (Distracted) One of the more common responses we received from students in our focus groups was that they seldom spoke to their parents. One said, “When I get home from school, I never talk to my mom. She’s on Facebook all afternoon, then on her phone while she’s cooking dinner.” More and more, we adults have become slaves to our portable devices, as much as our kids are. We’re distracted from our highest priority—leading our family. 2. The Paranoid Parent (Distrustful) I see these parents all the time—refusing to let their kids take any risks; to ride their bike across the neighborhood; or attend a college more than two hours away. They micromanage. These parents are distrustful of others to take care of (even) their teens, and they always err on the side of caution and fear. They often raise kids who either rebel as soon as they possibly can…or who are fearful just like them. Fear rules the day. 3. Passive Parent (Docile) This parent is the opposite of the paranoid parent. They are so disengaged from or overwhelmed by their kid’s issues, they withdraw and become docile. They have no idea who their children’s friends are; they don’t know what questions to ask their teen; and they are emotionally absent when they are needed most by their kids. They fail to empower their kids, and neglect to invest in them during their rite-of-passage years. 4. Pandering Parent (Defenseless) This style may be as bad as the passive parent, but for other reasons. This parent is simply weak emotionally. They pander to their kids, giving in to every whim or demand. They’re afraid of being un-liked and afraid of conflict, in general. The child quickly learns they’ll get their way and pushes their parent as far as they want. This parent usually ends up with spoiled children who make demands as adults. My question is—in this new day—have you drifted into any of these styles? The post Four Dangerous Parenting Styles Today appeared first on Growing Leaders.

How I will educate my Children TED talk.

By sharing this video with you my intent is not to encourage all ISHCMC students to be home schooled but to reflect upon what we are trying to achieve through our progressive view of what education should be for our students today. Joshua Steimle talks about' the system' throughout the talk and how and why it is broken. Many of the reasons he gives for advocating for home schooling are what ISHCMC does as a school within a traditional constraints. Many of his objectives are ours, and so are many of the outcomes that he sites. It is interesting to look at a talk like this, that could be the antithesis of what we do or who we are, and yet discover there are many touch points and similarities.


"This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Joshua Steimle gave an incredibly interesting talk on home schooling and his thoughts on why he believes it is better than sending your children to school. Joshua Steimle is a self-taught entrepreneur, with a day job as the founder and CEO of MWI, an online marketing firm with offices in the US and Hong Kong. He is a contributor to Forbes and Entrepreneur magazines, as well as other publications. Steimle was raised by a mother and father who both had college degrees in education and taught within the US public education system, and Steimle, acting as his mother's de facto teacher's assistant, saw firsthand the hard work teachers perform, as well as the limitations of the system. Steimle holds a Masters of Information Systems Management from Brigham Young University. His wife, also a BYU graduate, holds a Masters of Science in Marriage, Family, and Human Development, and they have two young children. Steimle has always been passionate about learning, but not necessarily within the bounds of traditional systems. Since having children, he has turned his pursuits in self-education to focus on various methods and philosophies of education including public education, private education, homeschooling, and unschooling."

Finland, Switzerland and New Zealand lead the way at teaching skills for the future

Finland is the world leader at the provision of future skills education, according to the Worldwide Educating for the Future Index (WEFFI), which is now in its second year, closely followed by Switzerland.

Both countries particularly excel in the policy environment category, and specifically in terms of formulation of future skills strategy, the periodic review of strategy and the assessment frameworks to support future skills training.


The WEFFI report, by the Economist Intelligence Unit, looks at policy initiatives, teaching methodologies and the socio-economic environment of 50 countries. It found the five worst-ranked countries to be Egypt, Nigeria, Algeria, Iran and Pakistan.

Hard truths for soft skills

We live in an era that is increasingly being defined by change – in terms of both its speed and its spread. A number of start-up businesses, harnessing the power of technology, have successfully up-ended the status quo of sector after sector. There’s Amazon, which disrupted the sale of books and became the world’s biggest bookseller, before disrupting the book itself with the creation of mass-market e-readers and electronic book consumption. More recently, Uber has managed to redefine the taxi sector, and in the financial world fintech companies have changed the way people manage their money.

But the next wave of change will have more profound effects, which is why it is so important for national governments to set in train the right policies. As things stand, according to the WEFFI report’s authors, most countries’ educational systems are not configured to equip the next generation with the skills they are most likely to need.

Part of the challenge facing educationalists is that technological change will call for skills that fall outside of age-old approaches to curriculum design and teaching. Emotional intelligence, creative thinking, and collaboration are just three core aptitudes that will be needed, but which cannot easily be taught in a traditional classroom environment.

Get out of the classroom

This fast pace of technological transformation - often referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution - is based on a suite of technological developments that includes automation, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, the fusion of genetic science with biotech, and always-on access to data.

The report highlights the importance of language learning and the role of AI as a teaching aid in the classroom. But it also points out that many key elements of future skills learning will take place outside the classroom. In the United States and United Kingdom, after-school clubs for primary and secondary school students are connected to evidence of better school attendance and better academic results. The benefits are being seen in high-poverty areas with low-performing schools, in particular.

“In research published in 2016,” the report states, “UK experts found that attendance in such clubs is associated with positive academic and social outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged children. Its findings also suggest that children who participate in organized sport and other physical activities have better social, emotional and behavioural skills than those who do not.”

While so many aspects of life have changed almost beyond recognition, classrooms have altered little in 200 years. A group of students sit at desks facing the front, where a teacher stands, ready to impart facts; the challenge for teachers will also be to keep up with the pace of change.

“Updating curriculum should always be on the agenda,” says Jaime Saavedra of the World Bank, quoted in the WEFFI report. “But it is incredibly urgent to invest in changing the behaviour of teachers and improving what happens inside the classroom.”

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/finland-switzerland-new-zealand-lead-at-teaching-skills/

Technology use explains at most 0.4% of adolescent wellbeing

A study of 300,000 adolescents and parents in the UK and USA shows that only 0.4% of wellbeing in adolescents is associated with technology use. Comparatively, eating potatoes has nearly as negative an effect, and wearing glasses has a more negative effect on adolescent mental health than screen use.

Researchers at the University of Oxford have performed the most definitive study to date on the relationship between technology use and adolescent mental health, examining data from over 300,000 teenagers and parents in the UK and USA. At most, only 0.4% of adolescent wellbeing is related to screen use – which only slightly surpasses the negative effect of regularly eating potatoes. The findings were published today in Nature Human Behaviour.

'Our findings demonstrate that screen use itself has at most a tiny association with youth mental health,' said lead researcher Professor Andrew Przybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. 'The 0.4% contribution of screen use on young people’s mental health needs to be put in context for parents and policymakers. Within the same dataset, we were able to demonstrate that including potatoes in your diet showed a similar association with adolescent wellbeing. Wearing corrective lenses had an even worse association.'

In comparison, smoking marijuana and being bullied was found, on average, to have a 2.7 times and 4.3 times more negative association with adolescent mental health than screen use. Activities like getting enough sleep and eating breakfast, often overlooked in media coverage, had a much stronger association with wellbeing than technology use.

The method used by the researchers, called Specification Curve Analysis, revealed the reason there seems to be no firm scientific consensus on screen use and mental health. 'Even when using the same datasets, each researcher brings different biases with them and analyses the data slightly differently,' said Amy Orben, College Lecturer at the Queen’s College, University of Oxford, and author on the study. 'Of the three datasets we analysed for this study, we found over 600 million possible ways to analyse the data. We calculated a large sample of these and found that – if you wanted – you could come up with a large range of positive or negative associations between technology and wellbeing, or no effect at all.'

'We needed to take the topic beyond cherry-picked results, so we developed an approach that helped us harvest the whole orchard,' added Professor Przybylski.

In order to remove bias and examine practical significance (rather than statistical significance), the researchers used information from other questions in the same dataset to put the statistical findings on screen use in context. 'Research’s reliance on statistical significance can yield bizarre ‘results’', said Orben. 'We need to look at the size of the association to make a judgement on practical significance. If you told me the amount of time a teenager spends on digital devices, I could not do very well predicting their overall wellbeing, as only 0.4% is associated with technology use.'

'Bias and selective reporting of results is endemic to social and biological research influencing the screen time debate,' added Professor Przybylski. 'We need to put scientific findings in context for parents, policymakers and the general public. Our approach provides an excellent template for data scientists wanting to make the most of the excellent cohort data available in the UK and beyond.'

The full paper, 'The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use,' can be read in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The data was drawn from three large-scale representative datasets: Monitoring the Future (USA), Youth Risks and Behaviour Studies (USA) and the Millennium Cohort Study (UK), totalling over 300,000 individuals surveyed between 2007 and 2016. The findings were derived using Specification Analysis Curve method, which examined the full range of correlations relating digital technology use to child and adolescent psychological wellbeing. Details on methodology and all necessary code to reproduce the analysis are available in the paper’s supplementary material.

http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-01-15-technology-use-explains-most-04-adolescent-wellbeing

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube

Advice | 2:11

5 Ways to Make YouTube Safer for Kids

Smosh, Jenna Marbles, Markiplier -- the names may not mean much to you, but chances are your kids are on a first-name basis. These funny YouTube hosts, with their off-the-cuff commentary, silly antics, and bewildering (to adults) subject matter, are some of the most influential personalities on young teens, garnering millions (and, in the case of disgraced Swedish gamer PewDiePie, billions) of views. But information about these personalities' shows -- the content, quality, and age-appropriateness, for example -- isn't easy for parents to find.

It would be great to be able to just download YouTube Kids and have your kids watch something hopefully more age-appropriate than regular YouTube. However, YouTube Kids has problems of its own. And the bottom line is: kids want to watch the original. But it's tough to manage. Anyone can create YouTube channels, they crop up seemingly out of nowhere, they don't follow program schedules, and they're cast out among thousands of other videos. There are also serious concerns that YouTube collects data from young users, in violation of the Childrens Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). 

So if your kids really love it, you'll have to strategize. Reading Common Sense Media reviews of YouTube channels is a good way to get a sense of their age-appropriateness and quality. And digging into the videos themselves -- watching with your kids or on your own -- is wise. You never know what's going to come up on a particular channel, since all the content is user-generated. 

Here are parents' most commonly asked questions about YouTube and kids. Also, read our detailed review of YouTube.

What's the best way to keep tabs on my kids' YouTube-watching?
How can I find out what my kid has been watching on YouTube?
How can I minimize my kids' exposure to iffy videos on YouTube?
How can I find out who's behind the videos my kid watches on YouTube?
How can I manage the related videos on YouTube?
Can I get rid of ads on YouTube?
What should I say to my kid about all the mean comments people leave on YouTube?
Are there any parental controls on YouTube?
How can I find good stuff on YouTube? 

What's the best way to keep tabs on my kids' YouTube-watching?

Simply ask your kids what they're watching and join them. In general, kids are tuning into certain channels or following specific YouTube personalities because they're entertained by them (not because they are actively searching for "bad" stuff). Many kids naturally want to share the videos they like. But be prepared to watch some weird stuff such as unboxing videos. If kids don't want to share, get the name of the channel they're watching and watch it later. Watch a few videos by the same creator to get a feel for the content.

How can I find out what my kid has been watching on YouTube?

If you're concerned about the content your kid is watching on YouTube -- and you've tried talking to her -- there are ways of tracking her viewing habits. If she has a YouTube account (which only requires a Gmail address), her YouTube page will display her recently watched videos, recommended videos based on her watch history, and suggestions for channels similar to the ones she's watched. Even if your kid deletes her "watch history," the recommendations all will be related to stuff she's watched.

How can I minimize my kids' exposure to iffy videos on YouTube?

Encourage your kids to subscribe to their favorite channels rather than hunting around on YouTube for the latest ones from a specific creator. Subscribers are notified when a new video is uploaded, plus all their channels are displayed in the Subscriptions section, making it easier, and faster, to go directly to the stuff they like. Consider choosing subscriptions together, and make an event out of watching the newest uploads with your kids. You can also try the Watch Later feature. YouTube gives you the ability to save videos to watch at a later time, which improves the odds that your kids will be exposed to stuff you've preapproved. You can create playlists, too, virtually designing a customized programming schedule of content for each of your kids or for different subjects they're interested in. 

How can I find out who's behind the videos my kid watches on YouTube?

Investigate the creator. The name of each video's creator appears beneath the video window and usually has a bit of information about the person behind the video and/or the channel itself. Google the creator's name to find out whether he or she has a Wikipedia page or another Web presence (most YouTubers use other social media including Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram to promote their brand). You might find out that your kid's favorite YouTube personality has an impressive reach. Check out our recommendations of positive role models on YouTube. 

How can I manage the related videos on YouTube?

The suggested videos listed on the right-hand side of the page are related in some way to the main video. Evaluate them to see if they seem age-appropriate, and that will provide an indication of the appropriateness of the main video. Here are some additional tips to make YouTube's related videos a little safer. 

Can I get rid of ads on YouTube?

There are tons of ads on YouTube. Even if your kids stick to kid videos, they'll see commercials for stuff that may not be appropriate. You can try to reduce or manage exposure to advertising, but the best option is to talk to your kids about viewing all marketing critically so they don't get sucked in. Alternatively, you can consider subscribing to YouTube Red, which doesn't show ads and which also has exclusive content.

What should I say to my kid about all the mean comments people leave on YouTube?

YouTube comments are notorious for being negative, but it's worth reading them to get a sense of the channels' demographic and the tone of the discussion. It can be possible to find hate speech or child predators lurking in the comments of videos featuring or targeted to kids and teens. Channel creators have the ability to moderate their comments to reduce the amount of negativity. A well-groomed comments section may indicate a more responsible creator. 

Are there any parental controls on YouTube?

YouTube is technically only for teens 13 and up, and what the site considers age-appropriate may not match your values. But YouTube offers a filter called Restricted Mode that limits the iffy stuff. Go to your account settings page and toggle on Restricted Mode at the bottom of the page. (It will remain on for logged-in users on the same browser.) The YouTube app also offers some settings that remind you to take a break and restrict your time, although these features are more a part of Google's efforts to promote "digital well-being" than parental controls. If you want more control over what your kids can watch on YouTube, consider downloading the YouTube Kids app, which offers some features including screen-time limits and restricted search, to keep young kids a little safer on the platform.

How can I find good stuff on YouTube? 

Most kids find out about new videos either from their friends or by clicking on the related videos (which may or may not be appropriate). But YouTube itself offers several ways to home in on quality content. Go to YouTube Spotlight for curated content in a variety of categories. Read about YouTube news on the company blog and check out our YouTube reviews and curated lists of decent YouTube shows for kids, such as Funny YouTube Channels, Positive Role Models on YouTube and Best YouTube Channels and Videos for Preschool Kids.

 https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/parents-ultimate-guide-to-youtube?utm_source=NEW+03082019+TWEEN-TEEN&utm_medium=email