Digital Tools

6 Resolutions Every Family with Tweens and Teens Should Make in 2016

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Taken from: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/6-resolutions-every-family-with-tweens-and-teens-should-make-in-2016

6 Resolutions Every Family with Tweens and Teens Should Make in 2016

With tweens and teens spending more time on media than ever, these strategies can help to keep their experiences safe, productive, and fun all year long.

Caroline Knorr Senior Parenting Editor | Mom of one1/4/2016

If you’re feeling overwhelmed about managing your tween or teen’s screen time, you’re in good company. With 8- to 12-year-olds averaging nearly six hours a day on entertainment media and 13- to 18-year-olds racking up a whopping nine hours, according to The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, you’d be forgiven if you felt like throwing in the towel. But there’s good news:Parents who are actively involved in their kids’ media lives help them consume less, make better choices, learn, and understand more of what they’re interacting with. So even if your tweens and teens know way more about media and technology than you do, you can still help them navigate the digital world safely, responsibly, and productively.

Have the talk. No, not that talk. The one about being safe, smart, and responsible online. You don’t have to be an expert on Instagram or Call of Duty to give your kids a solid understanding of how you expect them to behave.

Help kids keep social media in perspective. Just because your teen is on Snapchat every minute doesn’t mean she’s really having fun. In fact, though 45 percent of teens use social media every day, only a third says they enjoy it “a lot.” However, teens whose parents talk to them about their social media lives report being happier. As with anything, social media has good, bad, and neutral aspects, but kids need parents to help them sort out which is which.

Encourage informal learning. Focusing on traditional academic benchmarks may not account for self-directed learning — the independent pursuit of knowledge, guided by kids’ interests, skills, and plain old curiosity. Studying guitar from YouTube videos, reading Star Wars wikis, and watching TED talks are all valuable screen activities that you can encourage this year (maybe after homework is done).

Have a media plan. It’s really easy for media and technology to overstay their welcome. This year, start off with a plan to maintain a balance and stay in control. A few ideas:

  • Create screen-free zones. Keep certain areas (bedrooms, for example) and times (such as dinner) off-limits to phones, tablets, TVs, and other devices so they’re reserved for rest and family time.
  • Cut down on multitasking during homework. Little distractions can add up to big misses on the algebra test.
  • Set limits. Everyone needs to disengage from their devices — adults included. But without someone to draw the line, tweens and teens may be tempted to text late into the night or play video games ’til they look like zombies. Establish appropriate boundaries and make sure you enforce them.

Encourage healthy skepticism. The ability for tweens and teens to think about the messages behind their media is more important than ever. Ads and content are increasingly becoming entwined, and studies show kids have a hard time telling the difference between them. Online stories are regularly unmasked as hoaxes. Even companies’ privacy policies are filled with legalese. Help kids to think critically about all the content they consume. Ask: Who made this? Who’s the audience? What are the messages?

Celebrate kids using social media for good. Across the world, regular tweens and teens who are tired of online negativity randomly pop up on social media with a positive message to share. Examples include Thomas Sanders’ Vines and a British teen’s antibullying YouTube video. This year, make a note to talk to your kids about the power of social media for positive social change.

Can Video Games Help with Dyslexia?

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This article originally appeared on the Mindshift blog on 2/5/14

 

Most parents prefer that their children pick up a book rather than a game controller. But for kids with dyslexia, action video games may be just what the doctor ordered.

Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities, affecting an estimated 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population. Many approaches to help struggling readers focus on words and phonetics, but researchers at Oxford University say dyslexia is more of an attention issue.

So programs should emphasize training the brain’s attention system, they say, something that video games do. “These video games require you to respond very quickly, to shift attention to one part of the screen to another,” says Vanessa Harrar, an experimental psychologist and lead author of the study.

When people with dyslexia had to shift their attention between sight and sound, their reaction was delayed. And they had significantly more trouble shifting attention from visual to audio than the other way around.

“It’s not just shifting attention from one location to another, but we should also be training shifting attention from sound to visual stimuli and vice versa,” Harrar, who is dyslexic herself, tells Shots.

She adds that at least for some people, making the association between a word and how it sounds might be easier if they hear it first and then see the corresponding symbols.

Scientists today still don’t agree on what causes dyslexia, but one theory says it has something to do with a faulty nerve pathway from the eyes to the back of the brain that is responsible for guiding both visual and auditory attention. When this network malfunctions, people can’t properly combine what they hear and see for the brain to process the information.

To test this, researchers asked 17 people with dyslexia and 19 control participants to press a button as quickly as they could each time they heard a sound, saw a dim flash of patterns on the computer screen or experienced both together.

The results showed that the dyslexic group took longer than typical readers to respond when they had to alternate their attention between a sound and a flash. What really stunned researchers was that the group reacted much more slowly to a sound if it followed the flash.

“We were very surprised by this result, that there was sort of this asymmetry that only occurs in one direction,” Harrar says.

The study was published Feb. 13 in Current Biology,

One explanation for this may be what psychologists call visual capture, says Jeffrey Gilger, an expert in language and learning disabilities at the University of California, Merced.

“As human beings we prefer visual stimuli,” Gilger, who was not involved in the study, tells Shots. “When you’re trying to listen to someone on TV and the sound doesn’t match the mouth moving, it throws you off.

“You’re trying to get the sound to align with the vision, not the vision with the sound,” he adds.

Since this was an unexpected outcome, Harrar says more research is needed to see if the asymmetrical delay is true for all people with dyslexia, and if video games that require quick shifts of attention would be helpful in overcoming it.

While the study did not directly test the effect of video games, her suggestion echoes the results of a 2013 experiment done in Italy. That study found that dyslexic children showed improvements in reading speed and attention skills after having played video games with lots of action.

Gilger cautions that while some dyslexic people do have attention deficit, it is not the underlying cause of every type of dyslexia. Some people may appear to lack focus, but that doesn’t necessarily signal that they have attention problems.

“The reason they look that way is because they’re disinterested in, perhaps, what they’re doing in school or they don’t want to stay on task,” he says. “But that has nothing to do with the neurological problems that’s causing the reading disability.”

He does agree with Harrar, however, that the study demonstrates a need for advanced and individualized training programs based on solid research.

“Unfortunately, even though we are beginning to understand more about what causes these learning disabilities, including dyslexia … treatment is way behind,” Gilger says.

Copyright 2014 NPR.