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Like many digital natives, your children are probably on their way to becoming lifelong multitaskers (or so you think). As the research indicates, children these days spend about seven-and-a-half hours a day interacting with technology unrelated to school and when multitasking is counted, that number jumps to an astonishing ten-and-three-quarter hours. Your children may be doing their homework, checking their text messages, surfing the Web, and listening to music, all at the same time (or so they think). Why do they multitask? The short answer is because they can and it’s what just about every young person does these days.

There’s only one problem with this scenario: there is no such thing as multitasking—at least not in the way you may think of it. The fact is that multitasking, as most people understand it, is a myth that has been promulgated by the “technological-industrial complex” to make everyone feel more competent, efficient, productive, and, well, cool.

Real multitasking involves engaging in two tasks simultaneously. Here’s the catch though. It’s only possible if two conditions are met: 1) at least one of the tasks is so well learned as to be automatic, meaning no focus or thought is necessary to engage in the task (e.g., walking or eating) and 2) they involve different types of brain processing. For example, children can study effectively while listening to classical music because reading comprehension and processing instrumental music engage different parts of the brain. However, the ability to retain information while reading and listening to music with lyrics declines significantly because both tasks activate the language center of the brain.

Your children are actually “task switching.” Rather than engaging in several tasks simultaneously, they are, in fact, shifting from one task to another to another in sequence. For example, they switch from their phone conversation to their homework assignment to a text message to a newly opened hyperlink on their computer screen and back again in the belief that they’re doing them simultaneously. But they’re not!

Research has uncovered two findings that are at odds with the conventional wisdom about so-called multitasking. A summary of studies examining multitasking describes how so-called multitasking is neither effective nor efficient. These findings have demonstrated that when your children shift focus from one task to another, that transition is neither fast nor smooth. Instead, there is a lag time during which the brain must yank itself from the initial task and then glom onto the new task. This shift, though it feels instantaneous, takes time. In fact, up to 40 percent more time than single tasking—especially for complex tasks.

A 2010 study offers perhaps the most surprising result: those who consider themselves to be great multitaskers are in fact the worst multitaskers. Those who rated themselves as chronic multitaskers made more mistakes, could remember fewer items, and took longer to complete a variety of focusing tasks analogous to multitasking than those self-rated as infrequent multitaskers. Other research has found that children perform worse on their homework if it is done while watching TV.

Another study reported that when students are working on their computers and have the television on, the level of distraction is startling. This research tracked eye movements and found that, during a half-hour period, students switched their attention between their computer and television 120 times. Amazingly, the participants in the study weren’t aware of how distracted they were, guessing that they looked back and forth only about 15 times in 30 minutes. Even more astonishing, the median length of time that they looked at television and their computer was two and six seconds, respectively. Given this level of distraction, you wonder how children ever learn or get anything done while studying.

Still another study found that a sample of middle-school, high-school, and university students lost focus every three minutes during a 15-minute study period on their computers. Not surprisingly, these distractions were directly related to the number of windows (e.g., Facebook, instant messaging, web pages) that students had open on their computers. Further analyses revealed that children’s ability to stay “on task” was highly predictive of their good grades. Additionally, the best predictors of poor grades were a tendency to multitask (i.e., switch frequently from task to task), the total number of hours each day children spent with technology, and whether they checked their Facebook pages at least once every 15 minutes. How widespread is this phenomenon? A survey found that 73 percent of young people can’t study without some form of technology and 38% can’t last ten minutes without checking their technology.

Understanding Multitasking

What does this mean for your children who are growing up in a world in which so-called multitasking is not only the norm, but also considered essential for success (and social acceptance)? Well, it means that your children don’t really multitask. Despite appearances, your simply can’t talk on the phone, read text messages, and watch YouTube videos all at the same time. In fact, when your children think they’re cruising along the information highway, the research I just described shows that they’re actually stepping on the gas then hitting the brakes, over and over again.

Consider how children used to do homework. They would have an assignment they needed to complete, so they would stop what they were doing, for example, watching television or playing with friends, sit at the desk in their room or at the dining room table, and focus on their homework. The most distraction children would experience might be from the home phone ringing or someone entering the room. The very primitiveness and infrequency of these distractions enabled children to stay focused on their homework for extended periods and get it done quickly and well. The result? Children were generally productive and successful.

Now let’s fast forward a generation to the present and children’s ability to immerse themselves in a single activity is becoming a dying art. New technology, in the form of mobile phones, email, texting, and, more specifically, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, keeps children in a constant state of distraction. The result is less attention paid to their homework, more time needed for completion, and, in all likelihood, your children not doing their assignment as well as they could have and receiving a lower grade for their distracted effort.

Single Tasking for Kids 3.0

Hopefully, you’re now convinced that so-called multitasking isn’t what it purports to be  and definitely doesn’t do your children any favors. So, the next thing to do is to show them (and perhaps yourself) how to “single task.” The solution is definitely not rocket science; it simply requires your children to make deliberate choices about what they wish to focus on and maintaining that singular focus until the task is completed. The bad news is that it can be difficult for children to break multitasking habits that may have already become ingrained. The good news is that, with some commitment and discipline on your part and theirs, your children can retrain those habits and, in a relatively short time and with the benefits clear, become comfortable and adept single taskers.

Single tasking starts with looking for ways to maximize your children’s ability to focus and minimize their potential distractions. Given that single tasking may involve some pretty significant changes in your children’s use of technology, I would encourage that you collaborate with them so they see the value in whatever changes you want them to implement.

Let’s use your children’s homework as the setting to help them shift from multitasking to single tasking. First, if they’re like most children, they probably do their homework in the living room or family room at your house. This means that there is a lot of distracting activity going on around them, such as you doing chores or their siblings coming and going. So, the first step is to find them a quiet space in which they won’t be interrupted. Your first thought might be their bedroom, but that probably offers your children even more distractions when they get tired, bored, or stuck. A den or study, if available, is a better option.

Second, help them to get comfortable and organized. They should ideally sit in a chair that’s comfortable, but too comfortable. Sofas and beds are just asking for daydreaming or napping. Their workspace should allow them easy access to whatever they need for their homework and be uncluttered with irrelevant stuff (clutter equals distraction).

Third, and most importantly, have them put away distracting technology. This means no mobile phones (the pings and buzzes from incoming messages are an immense distraction), no social media (if your children can’t do it themselves, there’s software that can give you control), no television (old school, but still a huge distraction), and only instrumental music (as noted earlier). You don’t want these changes to seem harsh to your children (and they will be if they’re accustomed to multitasking), so it’s best to begin these changes with a discussion and try to get buy-in from them. Also, allow them breaks in which they can, for example, check their text messages, update their Facebook page, or call a friend.

My experience has been that children often offer initial resistance to this shift from distracted multitasking to focused single tasking, particularly if they’re used to the former. If you can at least convince them to try it out for, say, two weeks, and perhaps even offer them incentives (research shows that bribery to initiate behavior change is effective), then you create the time to retrain their habits, allow them to become comfortable with the changes, and, most importantly, see its benefits. Your children will find that single tasking is effective, that is, they’re able to focus better, learn more, and do better in school. They’ll also find it more efficient, meaning they get more done in less time, which gives them more time to do things that they want, such as use the technology that was missing while they were single tasking

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The Internet, and all of the new computer and communication technology that has sprung from it, have been a boon to the information age, making information available at children’s fingertips instantaneously. The sheer volume of information now accessible online is staggering; there are around 50 billion pages on the Web. Information continues to become more available to children in less time; from web sites to email to RSS feeds to tweets to text messages, children have input at an unprecedented rate and volume. This information age is the crazy new world in which your children are being raised and it will likely be a determining factor in how their brains and minds develop.

For all its benefits, a real danger for children is that they will feel like they are drowning in this torrent of information. Neuroscientists call this notion “cognitive overload” and it occurs when the inflow of information hinders rather than helps the ability to process that information and think clearly.

Now let me digress briefly and make an important distinction: information is not thinking. Thinking involves what children’s brains do with the information: perceive, remember, organize, synthesize, reason, create, problem solve, and make decisions. Raising children who will thrive in the digital world is all about teaching them how and wiring their brains to think, not just access information.

This overflow of information affects children in several ways. First, in today’s world of technology, information is coming at them from many directions, for example, television, computer, texts, hyperlinks, and on-screen ads. Children are enveloped in an environment of constant information and distraction. As a result, they have neither the time nor the attention to process most of the information and use it in productive ways, for instance, to learn a subject in school or explore a topic of personal interest in greater depth.

Second, with children’s minds being flooded with information, their primary motivation is not to think about that information, but rather to move the information through their minds as quickly as possible to make room for the next wave of information. Children can use one of two strategies when their “inbox” starts to overflow.

They can ignore the information completely, which means not retaining any of it, for example, delete emails before reading them or skip a chapter in a reading assignment in school. The downside here is that some of the information may be important, for example, necessary to pass a test in school.

Or children process it quickly through their minds just to get it out and clear their minds for new information flowing in. The problem here is that the “output,” for example, a paper based on a topic learned in class, will be of poor quality because the information wasn’t adequately thought through.

At the heart of the problem with information overload is that such large and never-ending quantities of input interferes with children’s ability to engage in what I call “interput,” which involves all of the processes that go into thinking between input to output. With so much information coming in and the need to get information out, interput suffers; there is neither the time nor the energy to adequately process all of the information that children receive these days.

Information is only a tool; it’s value lies in how we use it. The Internet has placed a universe of information at your children’s disposal; what a wonderful opportunity that is. What makes children successful in this wired world is not the availability of information, but how they use it, in other words, their interput.

Only through interput does information become meaningful to children and only then can it morph from simple data into knowledge, insight, expertise, and wisdom. That only comes when children have the time for interput; stopping in the middle of this flood of information to think about, wrestle with, challenge, and build on the information that arrives at their technological doorstep.

For children, information without interput has serious consequences. It means, as the writer Nicholas Carr so aptly puts it, being a jet skier rather than a scuba diver, skimming at high speed over the surface of information rather than going deep. The absence of interput prevents children from taking ownership of the information—making it theirs—and not only incorporating it into their information “hard drive,” but also integrating it into their knowledge “library.” It also keeps them from transforming the input from cold and lifeless data into a power plant of insight, creativity, and innovation. It ultimately prevents your children from putting the information into conscious, meaningful, and beneficial action.

Reducing Information Overload in Your Children

So how can you help your children swim against the tide of information overload and find the time for interput and quality output? The answer to this question is really quite simple, but nonetheless far from easy in this world of 24/7 connectivity. You have to be the “spigot” that controls the flow and type of information your children get.

The first thing to do is to engage your children in a conversation about information. You may be surprised to learn that your children are acutely aware that the current rate of information that is flooding into their brains is overwhelming and stressing them out. They just don’t know how to deal with it. That’s where you come in. Work with your children to find ways in which you can help them to reduce their input to a manageable level without, of course, causing them to miss out on important information, whether academic, social, or simply of personal interest to them.

Ask yourself and your children what purpose all of this input serves them and whether the typical information they receive each day really brings value to their life. Admittedly, you might have to do some negotiating with your children when disagreements arise about what is and isn’t important. For example, you may not see eye to eye on the value of Facebook updates. You will have to come to consensus about what information is important and what is not.

Then, work with your children to set reasonable limits on the inflow of information that will relieve their stress, enable them to engage in interput, and allow them to do better in school and other important activities. Hopefully, this exercise will put your children’s flow of information into perspective and show you and them that much of that input is simply distracting clutter that actually detracts from the quality of their lives.

With your children’s input load reduced and your and their new understanding of the importance of interput, they now have created a space in their lives in which they can absorb the information that is most beneficial to them and have the time to engage in the thing that’s so important to raising children in this wired world, namely, thinking. The result for your children? Fewer feelings of being overwhelmed and stressed, more time to devote to important things, more thinking, and better output in their personal, family, social, and school lives.

This post is excerpted from my latest parenting book, Raising Generation Tech: Prepare Your Children for a Media-fueled World.

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Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It’s what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting.

There is also little doubt that all of the new technologies, led by the Internet, are shaping the way we think in ways obvious and subtle, deliberate and unintentional, and advantageous and detrimental The uncertain reality is that, with this new technological frontier in its infancy and developments emerging at a rapid pace, we have neither the benefit of historical hindsight nor the time to ponder or examine the value and cost of these advancements in terms of how it influences our children’s ability to think.

There is, however, a growing body of research that technology can be both beneficial and harmful to different ways in which children think. Moreover, this influence isn’t just affecting children on the surface of their thinking. Rather, because their brains are still developing and malleable, frequent exposure by so-called digital natives to technology is actually wiring the brain in ways very different than in previous generations. What is clear is that, as with advances throughout history, the technology that is available determines how our brains develops. For example, as the technology writer Nicholas Carr has observed, the emergence of reading encouraged our brains to be focused and imaginative. In contrast, the rise of the Internet is strengthening our ability to scan information rapidly and efficiently.

The effects of technology on children are complicated, with both benefits and costs. Whether technology helps or hurts in the development of your children’s thinking depends on what specific technology is used and how and what frequency it is used. At least early in their lives, the power to dictate your children’s relationship with technology and, as a result, its influence on them, from synaptic activity to conscious thought.

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to focus on the areas in which the latest thinking and research has shown technology to have the greatest influence on how children think: attention, information overload, decision making, and memory/learning. Importantly, all of these areas are ones in which you can have a counteracting influence on how technology affects your children.

Attention

You can think of attention as the gateway to thinking. Without it, other aspects of thinking, namely, perception, memory, language, learning, creativity, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making are greatly diminished or can’t occur at all. The ability of your children to learn to focus effectively and consistently lays the foundation for almost all aspects of their growth and is fundamental to their development into Kids 3.0.

Attention has been found to be a highly malleable quality and most directly influenced by the environment in which it is used. This selective attention can be found in the animal kingdom in which different species develop attentional skills that help them function and survive. For example, wolves, lions, tigers, and other predators have highly tuned visual attention that enables them to spot and track their prey. In contract, their prey, including deer and antelope, have well-developed auditory attention that allows them to hear approaching predators. In both cases, animals’ attentional abilities have developed based on the environment in which they live.

The same holds true for human development. Whether infant recognition of their parents’ faces or students paying attention in class, children’s immediate environment determines the kind of attention that they develop. In generations past, for example, children directed considerable amounts of their time to reading, an activity that offered few distractions and required intense and sustained attention, imagination, and memory. The advent of television altered that attention by offering children visual stimuli, fragmented attention, and little need for imagination. Then the Internet was invented and children were thrust into a vastly different environment in which, because distraction is the norm, consistent attention is impossible, imagination is unnecessary, and memory is inhibited.

Technology conditions the brain to pay attention to information very differently than reading. The metaphor that Nicholas Carr uses is the difference between scuba diving and jet skiing. Book reading is like scuba diving in which the diver is submerged in a quiet, visually restricted, slow-paced setting with few distractions and, as a result, is required to focus narrowly and think deeply on the limited information that is available to them. In contrast, using the Internet is like jet skiing, in which the jet skier is skimming along the surface of the water at high speed, exposed to a broad vista, surrounded by many distractions, and only able to focus fleetingly on any one thing.

In fact, studies have shown that reading uninterrupted text results in faster completion and better understanding, recall, and learning than those who read text filled with hyperlinks and ads. Those who read a text-only version of a presentation, as compared to one that included video, found the presentation to be more engaging, informative, and entertaining, a finding contrary to conventional wisdom, to be sure. Additionally, contrary to conventional educational wisdom, students who were allowed Internet access during class didn’t recall the lecture nor did they perform as well on a test of the material as those who weren’t “wired” during class. Finally, reading develops reflection, critical thinking, problem solving, and vocabulary better than visual media.

Exposure to technology isn’t all bad. Research shows that, for example, video games and other screen media improve visual-spatial capabilities, increase attentional ability, reaction times, and the capacity to identify details among clutter. Also, rather than making children stupid, it may just be making them different. For example, the ubiquitous use of Internet search engines is causing children to become less adept at remembering things and more skilled at remembering where to find things. Given the ease with which information can be find these days, it only stands to reason that knowing where to look is becoming more important for children than actually knowing something. Not having to retain information in our brain may allow it to engage in more “higher-order” processing such as contemplation, critical thinking, and problem solving.

What does all this mean for raising your children? The bottom line is that too much screen time and not enough other activities, such as reading, playing games, and good old unstructured and imaginative play, will result in your children having their brains wired in ways that may make them less, not more, prepared to thrive in this crazy new world of technology.

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Values are a pretty darned touchy subject to bring up these days when it comes to raising children. Values have gotten a bad rap because of how they are discussed in politics and as they relate to religious beliefs. When most people hear the term values used, they often think of the hot-button value issues that are regular fodder for cable news, talk radio, and the blogosphere. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

There are three things I believe about values.

First, we Americans share far more values than those on which we disagree. When I talk about values, I’m talking about the ones that America was founded on and that have made our country great, for example, respect, responsibility, compassion, fairness, the list goes on.

Second, there is nothing more important to raising healthy children than values. They are the foundation of all that children come to believe and who they become. Values act as the sign posts in the direction that your children’s live head.

Third, it’s not my place to tell you what values you should believe. Given my small soapbox here, I will tell you that you should, first and foremost, be teaching your children healthy values. Without positive values, you are leaving your children thoroughly unprepared to survive and thrive in a time when popular media dominates their lives.

In my last post, I explained how values can protect your children’s from the unhealthy messages of the popular media. I also offered ways in which you could create a value-driven environment that surrounds your children with healthy values. This post will focus on more practical ways they can learn values from your direct interactions with your children.

Set Limits

One down-to-earth way values are expressed is through the rules, boundaries, and expectations that you establish in your family. Each of these prescriptions is based on the values that you hold and the messages you want your children to get about values, for example:

• Family chores,
• Helping others,
• Putting school first, or
• Being physically active.

Unfortunately, many children see rules, boundaries, and expectations as limitations placed on their freedom by their parents without rationale or purpose. When you explicitly link your values with these directives, you show your children the reasoning behind your dictates (you’re not just being an overly strict parent!) and they can then see the values underlying the restrictions. Don’t just simply “lay down the law,” but rather explain and discuss how the limits you place on them are related to your values and how they benefit your children.

Setting limits has real implications in your children’s involvement with popular media. When you don’t allow them to, for example, play violent video games or spend hours with social media, and you also explain to them the rationale behind your decisions, you’re communicating to them that you don’t value these activities. Your children may not like your decisions, but at least they’ll know that you have real reasons for them.

Consequences of Values

Perhaps the most powerful way to help children understand the importance of values is to discuss with and show them the consequences of healthy and unhealthy values. A valuable lesson for them is that if they act in valued ways, good things will happen, and if they act according to bad values, bad things happen. Examples of this relationship can include good effort in school results in good grades, being compassionate to others causes others to respond in kind, and being caught lying results in punishment and a loss of trust.

An unfortunate obstacle to teaching children about the consequences of living by one’s values is that acting on good values is not always rewarded and bad values are not punished in our society. To the contrary, popular media often glorifies and rewards bad values. For example, domestic violence, drug use, and other bad behavior don’t prevent professional sports teams from paying talented, though clearly troubled, athletes exorbitant salaries. The recording industry persists in promoting hip-hop artists and rock stars despite rap sheets that continue to grow. Sadly, young people worship celebrities. It is these conflicting messages that your children receive every day that make your job of teaching healthy values so much more difficult.

Value Dilemmas

A compelling way to foster your children’s understanding and appreciation of values is to talk to them about value dilemmas that they will face as they move through childhood and into young adulthood. For younger children, topics might include lying, selfishness, stealing, and cheating. Issues for older children can include sexual behavior and alcohol and drug use. You can also identify value breakdowns from popular media, for example, the poor behavior of actors, athletes, businesspeople, and politicians (there is no shortage of well-known offenders!), to help them understand that being rewarded for bad values not only doesn’t justify the values, it also has costs that may not be readily apparent to your children, such as loss of self-respect and admiration from others, threats to health, and lost opportunities.

Value dilemmas arise every day in your children’s lives. Either they are faced with dilemmas themselves, see them occur among their peers, or are evident in popular media. You should have your “radar” attuned to these dilemmas and use them as opportunities to educate your children about these quandaries. With younger children, you will want to emphasize the tangible consequences of the choices presented in the dilemmas, for example, what trouble they would get into if they stole a piece of candy that they really wanted. With older children, you can have more sophisticated discussions about self-respect, dangers to themselves and others, and implications for their futures, for example, what are the personal, social, physical, and criminal ramifications of drinking and driving?

Surround Your Children with Value-driven People

It can be exhausting and discouraging when faced with how ever-present, intense, and unrelenting popular media is. It can be frustrating trying to guide your children in the healthy use of technology when the world in which they are immersed has ideas to the contrary. One of the best things you can do to help your cause is to surround your children with value-driven people who will support your efforts and resist those of popular media.

This carefully chosen social world should be an extension of your own values that you hold and the value messages that you want your children to get. Like-minded people can be found in the communities in which you choose to live, the schools your children to attend, the friends that you and your children adopt, and the cultural, athletic, religious, and entertainment activities in which you and your children decide to participate.

This support envelops your children in a sort of value-powered “force field” that can help repel popular media when your children are outside your home. This shield acts to protect your children by keeping their immediate surroundings, relationships, and messages healthy even when the larger messages raining down on them from billboards, stores, television, movies, and the Internet are unhealthy. For example, if you don’t like your children to play violent video games, you’ll trust that the friends they visit will have a similar attitude.

Building a community of value-driven people means making deliberate choices about the world you want your children live in away from your home. Small changes can include finding a new sports league that emphasizes fun and participation over winning, a new piano teacher who is less demanding, or making the local mall off-limits to your children. Large-scale changes can include enrollment in a new school, attending a different house of worship, or not allowing your children to see friends who you believe are bad influences on them.

When you actively create a caring community, you accrue significant benefits for both you and your children. You’ll feel less alone and more supported as you attempt to teach your children healthy values in the face of the behemoth of popular media. Your children will feel less the burden to conform to the values imposed on them by a world that they know isn’t healthy. When your children leave your home, you and they will know they are entering a world that is populated by value-driven people who will assist them in making positive choices in the face of unrelenting pressure from popular media.

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So what values will children growing up in the 21^st century need to thrive? Perhaps surprisingly, my answer is the same values that have enabled children to thrive in previous generations: respect, responsibility, hard work, integrity, compassion, just to name a few. The increased presence of popular media in no way changes that calculus. To the contrary, more than ever, solid values are what will help children resist the unhealthy messages from the media.

You can, of course, do your best to shield your children from the corrosive values of popular media by limiting their exposure. This attempt will, as they become more immersed in school and the larger social world, become increasingly fruitless. You can’t just sit back and play defense when it comes to values. Popular media is just too powerful and omnipresent. You need to take your values directly to your children.

Unfortunately, many people have lost touch with what values are and their place in their families’ lives. They think that values are lofty ideals that have little connection with their daily lives. Yet, values should be woven into the very fabric of your family’s lives. You can show your children how values are reflected in the activities in which they participate, who they interact with, and the choices they make. For example, finishing a school project on time, taking out the garbage, and reading with a younger sibling all express positive values of discipline, responsibility, and caring, respectively.

Values are Your Family: Create a Family-value Culture

Everyone needs and wants to be part of a culture. Belonging to a culture offers people a sense of identity, feelings of connectedness, shared values, and support when faced with the challenges of life. Children will seek out a culture that is most present in their lives and that provides the most rewards. You can protect your children from popular culture by creating a “family-value culture” that has an equally powerful—but positive—influence on your children. A family-value culture that your children are raised in precedes the presence of popular culture and can fill the need for a culture in your children’s lives.

Simply talking about values is not enough. You must express your family-value culture in all of the ways that your children can learn healthy values. Most important, you must believe deeply in and be wholly committed to your family-value culture. Values can’t just be what you say, but rather you must be a walking, talking, feeling, acting, living expression of your family-value culture.

Values Are You: Make Sure You Walk the Walk on Values

For the duration of your children’s early years, you are their most powerful influence and role model. Everything you say, feel, and do sends your children subtle, yet influential, messages about your values. Because of this impact, you must ask yourself whether you are “walking the walk” on your values.

The question of conveying values to your children is further complicated by the fact that what you think you are teaching them is not always what they are learning from you. This disconnect can occur because your actions may not always be clear to your children. This is why you should not only make sure you’re living a life that expresses your values, but periodically ask yourself whether your actions clearly express the values or whether your children could misinterpret them. Also, ask your children what value messages they are getting from you, for example, you can ask them, “Why do you think Daddy (Mommy) works so hard?”

Values are Discussions: Talk to Your Children About Their Values

“Talk to your children” is perhaps the most commonly offered recommendation from parenting experts, yet it may also be the least adopted, particularly when it comes to values. Whether because of a lack of clarity of what their values are or simply a lack of time and energy, many parents don’t sit down and have this all-important discussion about values with their children.

Talking to your children about values can occur in a spontaneous or structured way. Your family’s daily life is filled with value lessons waiting to be taught. Having your antenna up for these opportunities allows you to spot them immediately and use them to teach your children about values. You can also make value discussions a part of your family-value culture. For example, you might designate one dinner per week to the discussion of a particular value.

Talking with your children about values and your family-value culture also communicates to them that values are important to you and should be important to them. It also gives them an opportunity to learn more about values. This “value education” provides children with the foundation from which they can further explore values and make healthy values their own.

Values Are Emotions: Let Your Children Feel Values

Emotions have a persuasive influence on whether children act in valued ways. Some experts believe that emotions, such as empathy and guilt, are inborn and serve an adaptive purpose by helping to ensure that people behave in ways that benefit themselves, their families, and their communities.

Some emotions restrain children from acting badly. Fear, for example, is a visceral deterrent that makes children uncomfortable when contemplating immoral behavior. Guilt causes feelings of regret and shame after children have violated a value. Because children don’t like to feel bad, they are less likely to act against their values again.

Other emotions encourage the expression of certain values. Emotions such as inspiration motivate children to act morally because they connect valued behavior with this “feel good” emotion. Following ethical behavior, children experience other emotions, such as pride and satisfaction, which further reinforce their moral behavior.

Values Are Choices: Let Your Children Make Decisions about Values

Values provide the compass that children can follow in the choices they face and the decisions they make in their lives. When faced with competing options, for example, whether children will lie or tell the truth to their parents, their values and the related emotions will dictate what value choices they make. Children who understand values and connect positive emotions with those values have a much better chance of making value-driven decisions—consider their options, weigh the benefits and costs, and make a choice that is consistent with their family-value culture—rather than ones based on self-interest or in response to the urgings from popular media or peers.

The notion that values are choices means that children must, in the end, choose the values by which they want to live. All of the ways to create a family-value culture I have discussed encourage your children to think critically about their values and to make decisions about the values they choose to adopt. Recognize that your children will periodically make bad choices and act counter to your values. Use these opportunities to help your children learn more about their values, why they made a poor decision, and how they can make better choices in the future. For example, if you catch one of your children in a lie, you can ask several useful questions:

• Why did you lie?
• What were the benefits and costs of lying?
• What were the consequences of lying?
• What have you learned from being caught in a lie?
• Why is telling the truth a better option?

This discussion, accompanied by appropriate punishment (yes, it is essential that they learn that their actions have consequences!), helps your children understand why they made a poor choice and see the consequences of the bad decision, and shows them why they should make better choices in the future.

Values Are Social: Let Your Children Interact with Values

Values are influenced by the reactions that children get from others in response to their behavior. Value-driven behavior that is rewarded with social praise and validation will be internalized. Actions that are in conflict with positive values which are punished socially will be discarded. A problem is that children are vulnerable to social influence from many sources, including those that are unhealthy. Peer pressure often interferes with children adopting healthy values. For example, in some schools, children who study hard and have educational goals are ostracized, and those who are “slackers” are admired. Popular media exerts a similar influence. For instance, advertising, from fast-food and soft drinks to clothing and technology, convey the message that buying certain products will make children popular and winners, and if they don’t, they will be losers.

The pressure to conform and be accepted will grow substantially and your children may feel compelled to make choices based on their need for acceptance. Your best defense against this social influence is instilling positive values at an early age, so your children will recognize bad influences and unhealthy values, and not feel the need to adopt values and act in certain ways just to be accepted.

Fortunately, you aren’t alone in your efforts to protect your children from social influences that convey unhealthy values. Siblings and extended family members, friends, teachers, coaches, and clergy can all reinforce your value messages and have a significant influence over what your children come to value. To ensure that you maximize the influence of positive others on your children, I encourage you to actively create a “community-value culture,” comprised of your closest social circle that envelops your children with a “value-powered force field” and supports your family-value culture.

Values Are Experiences: Let Your Children Encounter Values

The best way to instill values in your children is to immerse them in activities that reflect and express your family-value culture. For example, when your children participate in charitable work, the arts, or sports, you’re not telling them that they will be learning about values. Instead, they are experiencing your family’s values, interacting with others who share your values, accomplishing goals that are consistent with your values, and experiencing positive emotions connected to those values.

Value-driven experiences are most influential on children when they have to “get their hands dirty.” For example, although donating money to a charity can certainly teach the value of giving, children aren’t really able to connect fully with the meaning of those values because they can’t see the end result of their actions. In contrast, spending a day in a home for the elderly, for example, connects the value of giving with an immediate beneficial result and causes children to feel deep emotions—empathy and kindness—which lie at the heart of children “buying into” the values.

Values Are Life: Let Your Children Live Values

The real power of values is how they are expressed in the minutiae of your family’s daily lives. Anything value-related that you do with your children in your family’s daily life, for example, doing household chores or reading to them, are small but powerful messages that communicate your family-value culture to your children:

• Responsibility: when they bring their dishes to the sink after dinner.
• Cooperation: getting ready for school on time.
• Kindness: helping their younger sibling.
• Hard work: practicing the piano regularly.
• Compassion: contributing to a favorite charity.

You want to show them that these apparently small acts are actually significant deeds that reflect your family-value culture and are the stuff that value-driven lives are made of.

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How powerful and toxic are the value messages that children are receiving from popular media today? According to a large body of research, the answer is very in both cases. Though I’m obviously making a judgment on what good and bad values are, I don’t think many parents would disagree with the values that I believe aren’t healthy for children. The research demonstrates that the values I’m going to describe actually hurt your children.

Though there are many values that you want to protect your children from adopting, I’m going to focus on the three that I believe are most influenced by the popular media, most harmful to children’s development, and that have research to support my stance. But don’t let my short list prevent you from identifying the unhealthy values that you see hurting your children and from taking steps to prevent your children from being exposed to those values.

Success at any cost. An unsettling aspect of the media’s perspective on success is its imperative that success must be achieved at any cost. This culture of success causes children to believe that they must succeed in our culturally defined ways to be esteemed by society, peers, and, most sadly, by their parents and themselves. Not surprisingly, this message has created a desperate need for success in children. When that need is combined with growing up in a culture of greed, fraud, and absence of culpability, they learn that they can use any and all means to attain that success.

This culture of avarice not only tolerates, but also encourages this “win at all costs” mentality by modeling and messaging dishonesty, cheating, manipulation, and back stabbing. Examples of this distorted view of success abound in our culture. Reality TV relishes lying and deception. Corporate malfeasance, for example, insider trading and tax fraud, is revealing itself to be the rule rather than the exception in Big Business. Sports has seen the proliferation of illegal performance-enhancing drugs among star athletes who are revered by young athletes.

This “the ends justify the means” attitude is starkly evident among high-school students. Recent surveys found that 75 percent of students had cheated on a test in the previous 12 months, as compared to only 25 percent in 1963 and 50 percent in 1993. Particularly unsettling is the finding that about 50 percent of high-school students see nothing wrong with cheating. The rationales that students use to justify their cheating are disturbing, for example, “I actually think cheating is good. A person who has an entirely honest life can’t succeed these days,” “We students know that the fact is we are almost completely judged on our grades. They are so important that we will sacrifice our own integrity to make a good impression,” and “I believe cheating is not wrong. People expect us to attend 7 classes a day, keep a 4.0 GPA, not go crazy and turn in all of our work the next day. What are we supposed to do, fail?”

This “just win, baby” message that children get from popular culture can also be life threatening. The use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs is present at all levels of sport and increasing among young athletes. Recent research indicates that between four and 12 percent of high school male athletes—500,000 to one million by some estimates—said they had taken steroids. Pressure to make varsity teams, receive college scholarships, and pursue the dream of professional or Olympic success (however much of a pipe dream that is for all but a few young athletes) compel many young athletes to take drastic steps to improve performance. These athletes are heavily influenced by professional athletes who act as their role models. They see that the benefits of steroid use are significant and the consequences of being caught are minimal. The invincibility that many teenagers feel precludes them from considering the health risks of steroid use, including infertility, high blood pressure, liver damage, and prostate cancer. Young athletes also ignore the psychological and emotional dangers of steroid use, for example, hyper-aggressiveness—what is known as “roid rage”—irritability, and, upon their discontinuation, depression, lethargy, and feelings of hopelessness. At least two suicides have been attributed to steroid withdrawals in recent years, as well as an undetermined number of suicide attempts.

Technology now enables young people to cheat more creatively, with less effort, and with less chance of getting caught. For example, students can now plagiarize written assignments with ease from the wealth of information on any subject they can find on the Internet. There are also web sites from which students can purchase papers rather than actually write them.

Research has also found a “social contagion” effect in which young people are more likely to cheat when those around them cheat. When children hear or see others cheat, they assume it’s acceptable to cheat or feel that they must cheat to keep up with their peers. Before the recent advancements in technology, though, the circle of contagions to which young people were exposed was quite small, for example, a group of friends or a sports team. The Internet now exposes children a much wider and more diverse range of contagions, from peers to professional athletes to politicians to businesspeople. The messages from many of those contagions tell children that everyone cheats, it’s okay to cheat, and they must cheat if they are going to keep up with those who are already cheating.

Disturbingly, cheating in high school and college doesn’t appear to be something that young people grow out of. To the contrary, recent research indicates that those who cheat early in life are more likely to cheat later in life, for example, by lying to customers, bosses, or significant others, overstate insurance claims, and falsify tax returns.

There are few more powerful indications of the corruption of children in America by popular media than this unprincipled attitude toward success. This is the crazy new world in which your children are growing up. With so much of our culture sending messages through its technological conduits to your children that it’s okay to lie, cheat, steal, be irresponsible, and act selfishly, how can your children not come to the conclusion that such behavior is not only perfectly acceptable, but absolutely necessary to find success in life.

Wealth and Materialism. Money certainly has great value. Money provides for basic needs, such as food, clothing, and shelter, as well as freedom from financial stress and opportunities for interesting and enriching experiences. Additionally, material possessions, “stuff” as the late comedian George Carlin called it, can fulfill practical, aesthetic, entertainment, athletic, and other needs and wants.

The pursuit of wealth and material goods for their own sake or in the belief that they will offer something deeper and meaningful is, based on extensive research, a fantasy foisted on parents and children alike by popular media to meet its own profit-driven ends. Materialism refers to “focusing on attaining material possessions…” and the belief that the amassing of wealth, “materialistic pursuits, accumulation of things, and presentation of the ‘right image” are necessary for happiness. Our culture does its best to convince people that wealth and materialism will make them happier, more attractive and popular, and of higher status. Yet, to the contrary, the research shows that it has quite the opposite effect, specifically, people who value high financial success are less happy, have lower self-esteem, are more depressed and anxious, and have less healthy relationships. Unfortunately, in the battle between popular culture and the facts, popular culture is winning and its influence has trickled down to children.

Children these days are inundated by media that is saturated with messages of wealth and materialism, from celebrity magazines that feature mansions and expensive cars to start-up millionaires (and even billionaires) in their 20s to reality TV shows in which ordinary people get rich with little talent or effort. Children get the message early and often that they way to distinguish themselves is with money and “stuff.” These messages, combined with the “anything is possible” messages that children get from our culture, conveys to them that wealth and material possessions are not only important, but also attainable. It’s no surprise, then, that a recent survey revealed that 81 percent of young people rate “getting rich” as their first or second most important goal. There is not, however, any accompanying messages about what it actually takes to make money or any discussion of the problems that come from valuing too much the acquisition of wealth.

Other research indicates that the strongest influences on the materialistic values that children develop about money and stuff comes from their parents, peers, and popular culture. For example, children’s materialism was predicted by the materialist values of their mother (the more materialistic mom is, the more her children are), how involved and nurturing mothers were in their children’s lives (the less involved and nurturing moms were, the more materialistic their children were), and children’s perceptions of inter-parent conflict (the more conflict they perceived, the more materialistic they were).

Popular culture, also not surprisingly, has an impact on whether children come to value wealth and materialism? Most of the research has focused on television advertising and those findings are clear: children who are exposed to more advertising are more materialistic. They also ask their parents to buy more things and those requests lead to more parent-child conflict. For example, heavy television viewers use the “nag factor” far more than light television viewers to persuade their parents to buy things they want. Moreover, materialism is negatively related to prosocial values and behavior and to self-esteem.

Strategies for marketing products to children using so-called old media, notably television and radio, include repetition (e.g., repeating the same commercial during Saturday morning cartoons), branded characters (e.g, Chester the Cheetah, Cap’n Crunch), catchy slogans (“They’re great!”), product placement (e.g., E.T. eating Reese’s Pieces), merchandising tie-ins (e.g., SpongeBob Squarepants, Shrek), and giveaways (e.g., Cracker Jack: “A prize in every box”). The advent of new media in the last decade has allowed popular culture to create supersystems that include web sites (e.g., Candystand sponsored by Kraft), Youtube videos, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, video games, tracking software and spyware, online and video games, and viral and stealth marketing, that exposes children to even more undue influence on their values.

Fame. A recent study reported findings that I think you will agree are truly alarming. The researchers analyzed the values expressed on the most popular television shows among so-called tweens (children ages 9-11) every decade from 1967 to 2007. Just so you can get a sense of how TV viewing has changed, here are the shows that were selected:1967: Andy Griffith, The Lucy Show; 1977: Laverne and Shirley, Happy Days; 1986: Growing Pains, Alf;  1997: Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Boy Meets World; 2007: American Idol, Hannah Montana. The results revealed little change in values presented on the shows between 1967 and 1997 during which time, the five most expressed values were Community Feeling, Benevolence, Image, Tradition, and Popularity (three out of the five would be generally considered to be healthy) and the five least expressed values were Fame, Physical Fitness, Hedonism, Spiritualism, and Financial Success (three out of five would be generally considered to be unhealthy values). Only during the most recent decade did a dramatic shift in values occur. The new top-five values were Fame, Achievement, Popularity, Image, and Financial Success (with Self-Centered and Power close behind) and latest bottom-five values were Spiritualism, Tradition, Security, Conformity, and Benevolence (with Community Feeling to follow).

An additional analysis of the data revealed a significant increase from 1997 to 2007 in the centrality of fame to the main characters in the television shows. Related values that also increased substantially included Ambition, Comparison to Others, Attention Seeking, Conceitedness, Glamour, and Materialism.

Given that the findings described in this research were not a gradual shift across the decades studied, but rather an abrupt change only in the last decade, the results can’t readily be attributed to demographic patterns related to increased wealth or education. Instead, the most dramatic change, and the likely cause of these results, is the rapid and all-encompassing emergence of new technology that has given popular culture new and startling reach and influence.

The programming through which these value messages are being communicated to your children are growing by the year. Since the data from this study were collected, more televisions shows aimed at the tween audience are being produced, including Big Time Rush, True Jackson, and iCarly. In fact, seven out of the top ten shows aimed at tweens are about teenagers who have achieved fame with careers in entertainment. Not surprisingly, all of these shows send the same message, namely, that fame is the singular goal and it can apparently be achieved with little preparation or hard work.

Of course, you could argue that just because popular media is sending value messages to children doesn’t mean that they’re paying attention to them, much less internalizing them. Unfortunately, preliminary research by the same investigators examining this question indicates that children are getting the message from popular culture. According to this new study, fame is now the number-one aspirational value among children nine to eleven years old. Another survey of children under ten years of age found that, among their ten favorite things, being famous, attractive, and rich topped the list and being fat topped the list of worst things.

Should you be alarmed by this dramatic shift in the content of popular media? Absolutely! Is there any way for you to exert influence to reverse this destructive trend at a societal level? Probably not, as the forces supporting these messages are powerful. All you as a parent can do is educate yourself about these unhealthy influences on your children and do your best to limit their exposure to those messages and expose to them to positive values that will counteract the bad ones. And, perhaps most importantly, don’t allow yourself to be seduced these harmful messages.