Back-to-school time has arrived again, with the usual debates about cell phones, with many schools trying a complete ban. That’s a good start, given what we know about the ill effects of smartphones on kids and teens. But the problem is even more serious than that—technology is literally rewiring the brains of our next generation. Beyond limiting screen time, parents and teachers need strategies for reversing the damage that’s been done and preventing further damage to young brains.
The problem is not just social media, but rather the quick “hits” of news, entertainment, and other information we experience all day long. These short bites, without context, are diminishing our prefrontal neural networks and affecting our ability to plan, organize, and solve problems. Teens who think they understand an issue because they’ve seen a 15-second video about it have not only missed the news, but they’ve missed the opportunity to understand context, evaluate sources, and draw conclusions. And it’s damaging their brains along the way.
In just a few decades, technology has managed to interrupt an evolutionary process that took millions of years to develop. It’s complex: In the time between infancy and adulthood, the human brain undergoes specific developmental steps in response to not just biological cues, but also environmental ones. The process is not static, but evolutionary. As humans developed language, for example, the brain developed eloquent areas that process written and spoken words. We have developed the intricate brain connections that allow us to manipulate symbols, create hypothetical scenarios, and coordinate events over time—because we have evolved to respond to complex stimuli. When we diminish the nature and fabric of these complex stimuli, we weaken the neural networks that support our responses.
The issue is that evolution takes millennia to change brains, but technology is doing that now at warp speed. Right now, I can see in my own patients the degrading of executive function as digital childhoods stunt the development of adult cognitive skills.
As Brains Develop
The problem is in the prefrontal cortex, the area behind the forehead that’s responsible for high-level cognitive functions including reasoning, planning, decision-making, and impulse control. That part of the brain doesn’t fully develop until adulthood, which is why those qualities are typically (and maddeningly) lacking in youngsters.
The prefrontal cortex is deeply interconnected with other brain regions, forming a complex network of neural highways. Executive functions are located where those networks converge and guide complex behavior: identifying a goal, planning the steps of required tasks, and executing those tasks. When development of the prefrontal cortex is interrupted, the ability to operate on an adult cognitive level is threatened—and young people today are not having the experiences needed for the frontal cortex to fully develop.
This is not simply an issue of social media addiction. The amount of time spent in digital reality (as much as seven hours a day, according to some studies) includes news bits, video reels, texts, and emails. We have integrated technology into everything—education, navigation, entertainment—but we don’t know at what point digital tools stop supplementing our lives and start degrading cognitive function. We do know that youngsters who once built things, played games, read books, and regularly engaged in social environments are now more likely to spend time immersed in floods of one-dimensional, passive tidbits of stimuli. One video or snap follows another with little or no context; the scrolling youngsters are unknowingly depriving themselves of the multi-faceted experiences the brain needs.
Worse, the relationship is reciprocal and self-perpetuating: Screen time eliminates opportunities to structure time and tasks and replaces them with passive viewing. Quick bites of information tire the brain and degrade its ability to sustain attention and process complex situations. That creates a deficit in executive functioning, then the deficit leaves the brain vulnerable to the siren call of more screen time.
Teaching Executive Function
In a world that requires more flexibility, intentionality, and focus, we need our executive functions to be more developed, not less. There is a growing body of literature that suggests many of today’s academic difficulties and declining performance are executive in nature. But this essential skill-based cognitive function belongs to no particular subspecialty of education, and therefore is not directly taught.
We need to deliberately and specifically model and teach executive functions and the cognitive processes that underlie them. We need to teach children to become mindfully aware of the cognitive processes involved in structuring time, planning tasks, and controlling their attention.
What would this look like? Kids should be shown how to cue themselves to stop and reflect on what’s in front of them, alerting their attentional resources to one goal-oriented item, then defining the task and goal. That sets the stage for frontal processing, where all cognitive resources are focused on thinking and organizing.
This is independent of subject; it can be “baked into” any class. At school, neuropsychologists can coach teachers in how to integrate executive support into lesson plans. Students could engage in role play or be given assignments that require planning as well as execution. At home and at school, we need to ask questions that foster introspection, reasoning, and perspective-taking, and encourage inferential thinking. Parents could give kids multi-step tasks that require setting a goal and planning the steps to reach the goal: not just chores, but tasks like shopping, creating a budget, and planning and cooking a meal. Yes, it’s easier and quicker to do these things ourselves, but we are crippling our children’s development of executive functions when we don’t give them a chance to flex that muscle.
The bottom line is that we need to teach cognitive processes starting at a young age in order to create fully functional, independent adults who do not depend on external algorithms. That’s not hype—it’s biology.
In another post, I write about some of the objective ways we can measure the ongoing changes in executive function in kids who consume too much digital media, and how healthy brains come to look more like neurodivergent brains after excess exposure.
This article originally appeared on Psychology Today.
