Please read the article below by Tara Bahrampour and write a 2-3 page\u00a0essay\u00a0in which you clearly indicate why you do or do not find the writer’s argument effective. Be sure to organize your essay clearly and to base your discussion on specific details from the article. Follow\u00a0
MLA format for attributing quotations and paraphrasing.
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Happy teens have more in-person interactions, study finds
By Tara Bahrampour
The Washington Post
January 23, 2018
https:\/\/search.proquest.com\/docview\/1989792617?accountid=12390.
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Tara Bahrampour writes about aging, generations and demography for The Washington Post, where she has been a staff writer since 2004. At The Post, she has also covered immigration and education and has reported from the Middle East and North Africa, and from the republic of Georgia. She is the author of “To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America,” a memoir about revolution and growing up in two cultures.
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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When Marina Bowsher helped her niece move into college at George Washington University, she and her husband noticed something that alarmed them. “Every boy was carrying around an Xbox . . . and suddenly there was no monitor. It’s like drinking; nobody’s telling you no.”
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Bowshers, who live in Chevy Chase, Md., had been strict about screen use with their son Kent, 14, and daughter Zaida, 12. They viewed it “like dessert – sure, you can have some once in a while, but it shouldn’t be part of your every day,” she said.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 However, after the campus visit, they decided it was better to let their son have an Xbox and learn to regulate his gaming in high school, when he had parents on hand to help.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “It’s all around them, and they are going to have to learn to live with it in their society,” said \u00a0\u00a0Bowsher, whose son also has a smartphone and a laptop. Their daughter has a phone with no social media accounts.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Bowshers’ approach – screen time with limits – corresponds with a new report that ties a sudden and large drop in adolescents’ happiness with the proliferation of smartphones. The study also found that the more hours a day that teens spend in front of screens, the less satisfied they are.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The report, “Decreases in Psychological Well-Being Among American Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Screen Time During the Rise of Smartphone Technology,” was published Monday in the journal Emotion. The report uses a large national survey of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders conducted annually by the University of Michigan.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Adolescent self-esteem, life satisfaction and happiness, having risen since the early 1990s, plunged after 2012, the year smartphone ownership reached the 50-percent mark in the United States, the report said. It also found that adolescents’ psychological well-being decreased with the more hours a week they spent on screens, including with the Internet, social media, texting, gaming and video chats.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The findings jibe with earlier studies linking frequent screen use to teenage depression and anxiety, and with recent warnings by Silicon Valley executives about the purposefully addictive designs of smartphones and social media, which make them hard to put down, particularly for teenagers.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The ubiquity of the devices has mushroomed in the past six years. The percentage of teens who had smartphones jumped from 37 percent in 2012 to 73 percent in 2015 to 89 percent at the end of 2016, according to data from the Pew Research Center and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The study in Emotion graphed correlations between happiness and screen activities and non-screen activities such as sports, in-person interactions, religious services, print media and homework. For all the non-screen activities, the correlation was positive; for the screen activities, it was uniformly negative. “When I made that graph, I got up and took my kids’ Kindle Fires and shoved them in the back of a drawer,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the study’s lead author.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Twenge, who is also the author of “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood,” called the relationship of screen and non-screen activities “zero sum”; if you are doing one, it takes time away from the others.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Diane Tanman of Chevy Chase worries that is the case for her sons, 11 and 15. “Playing games in the field is one thing they used to when they were little, and I think it made them more happy,” she said.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 These days, her sons are more into online games, many of which have rewards built in to keep players coming back. “I think it’s addictive,” Tanman said. “It’s just junk food for the brain. . . . I don’t know one parent who doesn’t worry about it.”
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As with any addiction, breaking away can be unpleasant.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ed Lazzara of Salem, Ore., says his 12-year-old son, Leo, a fan of the game Minecraft, is more irritable after he has been playing a lot. “It’s like interacting in the real world doesn’t have that zing, you know?” Lazzara said.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The report’s findings were not all dire: Teenagers who get a small amount of exposure to screen time, between one and five hours a week, are happier than those who get none at all. The least happy ones were those who used screens for 20 or more hours a week.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The greater unhappiness among those with no screen exposure could be due to several factors, Twenge said. “It could be that they are left out of the social scene of high school, that it’s very difficult to carry on friendships in high school these days without texting at all or being on social media.”
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is also possible that those kids are outliers, she said – teens with special needs or in special education, or those whose screens have been taken away from them by parents.
The happiest teens, according to the study, are those who are above average in face-to-face social interaction time and below average in social media use.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Amanda Lenhart, deputy director of the Better Life Lab at New America who has conducted studies on teenagers and screen use, called the study interesting but said it is hard to separate screen time from other stressors that may affect teenagers’ happiness, such as the political or economic landscape.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “The culturally easy scapegoat right now is the technology: it’s new, it’s scary, it’s changed our lives, it’s changed our kids’ lives,” she said.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 While she generally advises moderation, Lenhart said that, rather than making one set of rules about when and how much screen time teens should have, she prefers a case-by-case approach. “Some of it is about your particular kid and your particular life and you as a parent,” she said. “Some of it is you looking at your child and saying, ‘Something is not right here.’ ”
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In many ways, some screen time is built into being an adolescent. Many schools require students to be online and to use iPads, Chromebooks or other devices to do their work. But teachers have also complained about the distraction that technology can become when students use their devices in the classroom for activities other than their studies.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Technology-free schools exist, including some in Silicon Valley that tech titans have sent their children to. And movements such as Wait Until 8th have urged parents to delay giving smartphones to kids until high school or just before. But even Bill Gates, who is known for limiting his children’s access to technology, allowed them to get phones by age 14.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The finer points of screen use in today’s society are still evolving. Recently, investors in Apple, the maker of the iPhone, signed an open letter demanding more options for parental regulation of phones, such as the ability to limit their use to certain hours or shut off social media access at a certain time each day.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The letter, which Twenge helped draft, cited research showing negative psychological effects of phone use on teens and noted parents’ “constant battle” over screen time, calling it “unrealistic and a poor long-term business strategy to ask parents to fight this battle alone.” Apple responded by saying it is planning new enhancements to increase parental control. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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