The Family Firm by Emily Oster

Rating: 6/10

Unfortunately, I didn’t get as much from this book as I had hoped. The idea is to create a family Big Picture: essentially a shared family mission statement distilled from your parenting principles and goals. This Big Picture is then the underlying driving-force for all big parenting decisions, because the data are either absent, lacking, or conflicting.

Notes below are structured the same as the book itself:

Creating the “Big Picture” and The Four Fs

• The core of the Family Firm approach is an overall household structure and set of decision-making processes. Into any of your important family decisions, there will be many inputs. Your core values. Constraints put on you by financial or other circumstances. What you like to do. Your family preferences. All these will matter.
• We begin by outlining the “Big Picture” for your family.
  • This first step will require thinking deliberately about your household and parenting style. What do you want your family life to look like?
  • The second big piece of the Family Firm approach is designing a framework for making these big decisions.
  • The goal in this framework is to ask “How can we make this choice well?” Note that it is not “How can we make this choice correctly?” You cannot guarantee that you’ll make the correct choice. Parenting involves mistakes. It’s inevitable that sometimes you’ll make a choice that turns out to be the wrong one. But what you can do is approach the choice correctly, and make the choice well.
• When your family faces a big choice, I give you The Four Fs:
  • Frame the Question: Think about the question you are asking.
  • Fact-Find: Gather the evidence, data, and details you need.
  • Final Decision: Once you have the evidence, have a meeting, and use that meeting to make a decision.
  • Follow-Up: Most decisions deserve follow-up. Once you’ve made a choice and implemented it, the last step is to make a concrete plan about when you’ll revisit your choice.
• every small thing cannot be a hill to die on. If you start this process and it turns out one of you has rigid preferences about everything, that doesn’t leave much space for joint problem-solving. Articulating priorities together may help you recognize which are really important to you and realize that they cannot all be equally crucial.
• The first step in creating your Family Firm is to outline your mission, and then think carefully about what your family will prioritize, what your day looks like, and the basic logistics of your family.
• There are two basic steps.
  • First, at the broadest level, expressing and aligning values and priorities.
    • Everyone gets a piece of paper and writes down:
      • Your overarching family mission statement. Whatever you want! One sentence: What is your main goal for the family?
      • Three main goals for your children (big life goals; not something like “Use a fork better,” even if you desperately, desperately want that).
      • Three priorities for you, things you care about (could be working, exercising, seeing friends); what do you want to make sure you get time for?
      • Three activities you see as must do on (most) weekdays. (For example, mine would be: [1] eat at least one meal with the kids; [2] get some work done; [3] be there for bedtime. If I get all three things in a day, I’m likely to be happy.)
      • Three activities you see as must do on (most) weekends (for example, religious services, extra tutoring, competitive sports, hiking, seeing grandparents).
      • And then you switch papers and discuss.
    • Writing down your goals for your family will not give you control. Control in family life is illusory—things happen that you do not expect, the world throws you curveballs. No amount of note-taking and planning can avoid this. But not everything is unexpected, and we can avoid much daily stress by at least being clear about our real hopes for our family.
  • Second, getting to the more granular: creating the day-to-day schedule, establishing some family principles, and assigning responsibilities.
    • SCHEDULE: Have everyone outline their suggested schedule for the week; Once you do agree on everyone’s schedules, get them in writing.
    • PRINCIPLES The second practical component of the Big Picture is a set of principles. That is, a set of family rules that are more specific than “here is our mission” but general enough to speak to decisions that come up frequently.
    • RESPONSIBILITIES The final piece of the Big Picture is responsibilities. That is, thinking deliberately about who in the family is going to be responsible for what. I’m talking here about significant, repeated family tasks.
• You cannot be sure you’ve made the right choice, but none of this is about making sure your choice is right—that is impossible! What you can do is make sure you made the choice thoughtfully. Whether it is right will be revealed over time—that’s what the fourth F is for.

Big Data

• The evidence on these topics can provide a common touchpoint when there are disagreements, and they may lead you to prioritize differently. To be clear, the data will not always (indeed, will rarely) make decisions for you, but it can make them easier.

Sleep

• the quality of sleep kids get matters more than time in bed.
• sleep duration per se doesn’t predict academic performance, but whether the kids are sleepy does.
• the largest correlation was seen between measures of daytime sleepiness and school outcomes. This relationship is more important than, for example, the actual amount of sleep time.
• A meta-analysis from 2010 summarized the results of seventeen studies with almost twenty thousand children and found that a lower amount of sleep, worse sleep quality, and “sleepiness” were all associated with poor school performance.
• preschoolers need 10 to 13 hours a night, school-age kids 9 to 11 hours, and teenagers 8 to 10 hours.
• A child who is well rested should not feel sleepy during the day or be falling asleep in class. […] they should take a little time to fall asleep—perhaps 15 to 20 minutes—but not hours.
• Falling asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow may sound good, but it’s not a good sign of sleep quality.
• if you give your kids a chance to sleep in—say, on the weekend—they shouldn’t actually sleep in that much.

Childcare and Parental Work

• there is some good input data. It really comes in two forms: data on whether outcomes for kids differ if their parents work, and data on how work choices affect parents directly.
• it will be hard with data like this to know if the links we see between parental work and child outcomes are causal or just correlational.
• the volume of evidence points to two conclusions.
  • First, to the extent that there are either good or bad effects, they are small.
  • The second finding is that there do seem to be some differences in these effects across groups. The effects of maternal work seem to be slightly more negative in studies that include a greater number of wealthier families, and slightly more positive in those that include a greater number of poorer families.
• when both parents work, children seem to be at a higher risk for obesity.
• But even if we were willing to assume that all these effects were causal, they are still really small. The school performance effects are mostly insignificant, and even when they are statistically precise, they are tiny. The obesity effects are perhaps a bit larger but still swamped by other factors that drive children’s weight.
• life satisfaction is enhanced by having a career, and it’s also enhanced by having a family. But they don’t add up together—you don’t get both the family and career satisfaction boosts. And among more highly educated women, those who work and have a family are more often unhappy, stressed, and tired than those who stay home.

Nutrition

• the “fancier” the food, the more it is associated with a lower weight. Iceberg and romaine lettuce? They appear to be associated with increased weight. Arugula and dandelion greens? Make you skinny. Similarly, chemical-based sugar substitutes are associated with a higher BMI, and plant-based ones are associated with a lower BMI.
• Even if you were confident of the relationship between some food and weight, it wouldn’t be the same as linking that to the elements of health we care about.)
• there is good evidence that tastes are stable and are formed in childhood. This means what your kid eats now may impact what they like for the rest of their lives. No pressure!
• we have a lot of other evidence like this, showing that flavor exposures in utero and during infancy do seem to affect how much infants and children like different tastes.
• relative to toddlers, your older children are likely to have less “food neophobia” (fear of new foods). This behavior peaks around age four and declines from there,
• fruit consumption fell by 40 percent between third and eighth grades, and vegetable consumption by 25 percent. This probably reflects less parental diet control.
• We have a variety of evidence on how to push children toward particular foods.
  • A first principle: Exposure matters. Repeatedly offering a vegetable to your child and having the child taste it seems to improve their liking of it.
  • At the first vegetable exposure, the average rating was somewhere between “yucky” and “just okay.” But after six exposures, the average was somewhere north of “just okay”—moving toward “yummy.” More striking, at the end of the experiment, kids were eating way more vegetables; the average intake went up from 7 to 30 grams.
  • for younger children, exposure seems to be sufficient even for getting them to eat bitter vegetables (example: Brussels sprouts). For older kids, though, exposure helps with non-bitter vegetables, but for bitter vegetables, researchers show better effects with what they call “associative conditioning,” or what I call “dip.” 
  • The thing about these studies is that they do emphasize repeated exposure—either with or without dips—and occasionally resort to rewards to encourage kids to try foods. The key seems to be the repeated trying; it just takes time for kids to develop a taste for new flavors.
  • the way food is presented—the order, for example, or the relative amounts—and the way parents react to food rejections can matter a lot.
  • experiments in school lunches have shown that if you give children a smaller entrée portion, they eat more vegetables. Maybe kids eat their little bit of mac and cheese first, but if they are still hungry, they’ll consume some veggies.
  • this school-level experiment might lead you toward a more authoritarian version of dinner—as in “You can’t have seconds on pasta/have dessert/watch TV until you finish your vegetables.” But the broader view of the data suggests otherwise. Prompts like this may increase the consumption of foods in the short run, but also seem to decrease long-run liking of a particular food. Basically, telling a kid “If you eat your carrots, you can have ice cream” seems to prompt them to think carrots are not appealing.
• The second piece of this presentation is the reaction to food rejections. What do you do if your child refuses to eat the dinner you cooked?
  • kids are wily, and they really, really respond to incentives.
  • What to do about this? One option would be to simply refuse to provide anything beyond the family dinner.
  • introduced a standard backup meal. Ours is hummus and raw vegetables.
• A final, evidence-based note relates to forbidden foods.
  • Experiments have shown that children will gravitate toward restricted foods when allowed to have them, even if they didn’t initially prefer them. In other words, the restriction itself seems to make a food more enticing.
• Family meals
  • Relative to those kids who had family dinner 0 to 1 times a week, those who had family dinner 5 to 7 times a week were much less likely to use alcohol or tobacco. They were half as likely to be depressed, less likely to have eating disorders, and had more school engagement. On virtually every metric the researchers could measure, these kids were doing way better.
  • For adolescents in particular, family meals are associated with much better academic and socioemotional outcomes.
  • The correlation between family meals and positive outcomes for kids is so strong and so clear across the board that it is difficult to completely dismiss them as due entirely to other factors.
  • It is worth considering that to the extent that there are benefits from family meals, these benefits may accrue in part because this is forced time together. But it isn’t clear that this time has to be spent eating dinner for your family to experience the positive effects. It could be breakfast. Or an hour after school. Or at bedtime.

Parental Involvement

• In the global scheme of things, parental involvement is associated with better child outcomes, in school performance and elsewhere.
• we see evidence supportive of this finding from randomized trials as well. The evidence seems to point to the conclusion that it is possible to teach your child to read better in the elementary school years.
• Focusing on high school students, a recent study has shown that parental involvement is associated with better grades and school performance. This effect seems to go beyond what you’d predict based on mediators like TV viewing and homework time, so it seems that parental involvement is valuable somehow.
• meta-analyses in which more involved parents are shown to have children who do better in school.
• Studies have argued that kids whose parents are very heavily involved (especially when the kids are actually in college) have less autonomy and are less engaged with their peers. This work suggests that kids who are parented in this way are more likely to experience anxiety and even abuse pain medication.
• A telling counterpoint comes from a study that shows that helicopter-style parenting is associated with negative outcomes for college students only if they also perceived their parents not to be “warm.” One way to read this is that if you like your parents, having them involved is good; if you don’t like them, not so much.
• total responsibility transfer. When someone in the family (a kid or an adult) is responsible for some task, they are fully responsible for it. This means they are responsible for planning to do it, doing it, and experiencing the consequences if they do not do it. If your kid is given the job of remembering their soccer shoes, they are responsible for thinking about how they’ll make sure they remember, remembering, and, if they forget, deciding how to address the problem. If it is their job to make breakfast, they do everything (within the bounds of physical safety).
• A similar logic extends to physical freedoms. If your child is allowed to play in the backyard, then they are allowed to do it. They are allowed to decide whether to do it and when, and if you think it’s too cold or too hot or too rainy or too buggy, that’s just too bad.

School

• Whether your child will be happy at a school should clearly be part of your decision to send them there, but it isn’t a part you should look to the data for.
• kids with a more experienced kindergarten teacher not only did better in kindergarten (which seems obvious) but also had higher earnings in their late twenties.
• A large number of studies have demonstrated that smaller class sizes raise student achievement in both the short and longer term.
• Homework
  • homework may reinforce in-school learning. If you’re learning the multiplication table in school, it may be helpful to practice at home. It’s just more time spent on a task, and you do not necessarily have that time in school.
  • more complicated homework assignments may push kids to develop problem-solving skills on their own that are harder to teach in a classroom context.
  • the possibility that homework encourages development of noncognitive skills by requiring students to be organized and remember to do their homework and return it to school.
  • arguments that student time is being wasted on piles of busywork, that homework is taking away time from free and imaginative play or time with family. Or, possibly, sleep. Homework may teach students to hate school and to resent learning. And it may be unfair if it favors higher-income students whose parents have more free time to, say, build their solar system diorama with them or carefully review their math assignment.
  • students in the homework condition had higher test scores later,
  • evidence consistently points to homework having a positive effect on school performance. Across a wide variety of study types, with varying types of biases, we see evidence of this positive effect.
  • The effect sizes are generally moderate, and they are much larger for older kids than younger ones. That is, there is more limited evidence that this matters for kids in the six-to-eight range, but the effect seems to grow as kids work through middle school.
• Reading
  • First, if you want to encourage your kids to read for pleasure, it helps to explicitly make time for this. You may want to say, for example, “Our family is going to take this 45-minute block on a weekend afternoon to all read together.” Generally, the idea would be to pitch this as “free” reading time—you can read anything you want: catalogs, baby books, a serious novel, whatever. (More on the general issue of content choice to come.) It’s not a punishment, it’s a form of entertainment. Like family movie night, but with books.
  • you can read at breakfast and lunch but not dinner, which makes it seem like a treat).
  • The second key (and perhaps blindingly obvious) message of these books is that kids like reading better if they are good at it and if they understand what they are reading. Closely related to this is the observation that understanding the context of what you’re reading is extremely important for absorbing it.
  • Contextual understanding is hugely important for reading comprehension. And, by extension, for enjoying reading. If your kid has no interest in polar bears and no knowledge of polar bears, they are probably not going to enjoy reading a dense scientific treatise about polar bears.
  • Flexibility in reading choice is really important. Yes, your kid is likely to have to read certain books for school—that’s inevitable and probably good for them. But if you want to pitch reading as entertainment, to have a “family reading time” or bedtime reading—you need to be prepared to let them pick what they want.
  • most of the evidence on computer-based tutoring in reading for school-age children suggests relatively little effect.
  • One reason may be that computer-based tutoring is used as a substitute for in-person tutoring, which is pretty clearly more effective. Kids may learn better from a computer than from nothing, but having a person do the instruction is definitely preferable.
  • Kids like e-readers fine; they don’t seem to be much better or worse than regular books, which makes sense, given that they are not really that different.44 One thing kids do like— and this gets back to the issue of choice—is that books can be more immediately delivered to an e-reader, and there is more choice at your fingertips.
  • Audiobooks actually seem to increase student interest in reading.46 But more than that, they may actually help kids improve their reading abilities.47 As kids work to move from “M-A-T” to “Jack and Annie climbed the rope ladder to the tree house,” they benefit from hearing how fluent reading should sound, and audiobooks can help with this.
  • kids can listen to audiobooks with much higher reading levels than they can read, which may keep their interest and motivation.

Extracurriculars

• There is something deeply demoralizing about scrolling through your Instagram to see you friend’s five-year-old with a chess trophy while you play a board game called Wash My Underpants with your kids. There are no Wash My Underpants tournaments, and we lost the instructions, so I doubt we are playing correctly, anyway.
• Music
  • The basic fact is that kids who play an instrument or take music lessons in general tend to do better in school.17 This effect is long term and seems to grow over time: kids who play instruments do better in high school even after you hold constant their grades in elementary school.
  • it’s likely that nearly all the links between music and academic achievement are selection—specifically, other differences in family background or personality between kids who play music and those who do not—rather than some treatment effect of music.
  • There is no good evidence that learning to play music actually enhances brain function.
• Sports
  • football has the highest concussion rates: about 9 concussions on average for every 10,000 athlete exposures (that’s 10,000 games, practices, etc.). But soccer—especially girls’ soccer—is nearly as high. Boys’ soccer, boys’ wrestling, and girls’ basketball also have high rates of concussion. Researchers […] analyzing a fuller sample of college sports also pointed to soccer, football, and wrestling as high risk. To these they added basketball, lacrosse, and ice hockey. Low-risk sports include running, baseball, tennis, and—lowest risk of all—swimming.
  • Youth sports seem to have some small impacts on long-run sports participation, but no evident effects on being overweight or obese.
  • Concussions are serious, and some sports (football, girls’ soccer) carry more significant risks for concussion than others.
• General activities
  • students who were engaged in activities (sports, drama, etc.) in middle school were less likely to exhibit risky behaviors like drinking when they were in high school.
  • A 2012 review paper focuses on fifty-two studies published between 2005 and 2010. The results are not uniform, but in general they seem to point to better social adaptation, less depression, and fewer risk behaviors among kids who do out-of-school activities.
  • can [children] do too much—are “overscheduled” kids less happy? Broadly, the correlational data seems to say no—even kids who engage in more than 20 hours of activities a week show better outcomes than those who do none. (This is different from saying that you get more benefits from doing more, which the data doesn’t support—thank goodness.)
  • The most striking results are on “internalizing behaviors”—depression and social anxiety. Kids in the schools that got the integrated extracurricular programming showed lower scores on these scales—in other words, less depression and social anxiety. They were also slightly better on adaptive behaviors. Interestingly, they did not show better scores on externalizing behavior, which you can think of as “acting out.” This result echoes some of the correlations as well. Extracurriculars—sports in particular—sometimes appear to worsen, or at least not improve, external behavior problems.
  • Participation in extracurricular activities does seem to deliver some socioemotional benefits. This may be a result of an increased feeling of “belonging.” Your child does not need to engage in pre-professional levels of engagement in these activities to deliver these benefits.
• Camps
  • The evidence suggests summer camp can promote a “sense of belonging” among kids, especially kids who are more isolated in various ways.
  • Ninety-two percent responded yes when asked whether camp “helped me feel good about myself”; 70 percent of parents said their child’s self-confidence improved. There were all kinds of other positive results, too: improved independence, self-esteem, etc.
  • There are just two problems. First, it’s a bit hard to learn from a study that surveys people after an experience like this and just asks them if they liked it;
  • Second, this study was financed by the American Camp Association,
  • At the end of camp, the participants reported feeling more similar to their camp peers than their school peers, and there was a resulting improvement in “psychosocial” outcomes—self-acceptance improved, loneliness declined.
  • One paper interviewed kids at the start and end of a three-week camp experience. One of their main outcomes was measures of “self-concept”: Basically, do you feel confident in who you are, what you like, and what you are good at? Are you comfortable in your own skin? The authors found improvements in social self-concept (feelings about the ability to be comfortable socially) and emotional stability. They also looked to see if the children decreased their sense of academic self-concept, on the theory that maybe the self-comparisons would work in the other direction on academics, but found no change.
  • This literature really focuses on kids who are “marginalized” in some way—especially socially—and it seems clear that they benefit from a social grouping concentrated with kids “like them.” In a sense, this seems pretty similar to what the data says about the social benefits of extracurricular activities. Camp is another way to provide a social group outside of school.
  • if your child is struggling a bit socially. Camp may be a chance for them to experience a different peer group, to realize the world is bigger than the social dynamics of their classroom. It isn’t clear that the camp needs to be specialized in some way; it may be enough to simply introduce a different set of peers.
• Summer learning
  • Summer melt is a real thing: kids lose some learning over the summer. Tutoring can help maintain (or advance) their academic skills, but at the cost of time spent doing other things. There are always costs.
  • In a 1996 review article titled “The Effects of Summer Vacation on Achievement Test Scores,” Cooper and his coauthors looked at how academic skills evolve during the summer. They found evidence supporting the idea of summer melt: kids have lower test scores at the start of the new school year than at the end of the previous one. This seems to be more true in math than in reading, and with things like calculations and spelling than with more problem-solving-oriented skills. (Read: It’s easy to forget the multiplication tables over the summer but harder to forget how to think.)
  • The results showed that there was, on average, some summer learning loss. For example, between kindergarten and first grade, the average kid lost about 1.5 months of learning over the summer. This loss was a bit larger in older grades, up to even a little over two months between fifth and sixth grades. But this average masks a huge range. For the kindergarten-to-first-grade transition, kids ranged from a loss of four months to a gain of two months. This is a huge difference—now imagine it magnified over many years of schooling.
  • 60 to 75 percent of kids lost some learning during the summer
  • Less than 1 percent of the variation in summer learning loss is explained by socioeconomic factors.

Feelings

• by the age of three, about 55 percent of children could recognize emotions; by five, this was up to 75 percent.
• By the age of five, kids can start to understand emotions. They begin to comprehend, for example, why a story where a kid loses his ball or his cupcake would connect to a picture of a boy with a sad face. By seven, more kids can understand the idea that there may be a distinction between felt emotion and expressed emotion—I can be smiling but really feeling sad. And by the age of nine, kids have a better sense of ambivalent emotions; that is, the understanding that someone can be sad and happy at the same time.
• In order to develop empathy, kids need to have a “theory of mind.” Basically, they need to be able to understand what other people are thinking and feeling.
• A highly developed theory of mind can improve the quality of social interactions; that is, your ability to interact with others.
• Studies of this argue that when [parents] use more mental-state language, their kids also seem to have a better theory of mind.
• [parents] were asked to explain the contents of a picture to their child, and they were scored (in part) on the extent to which their explanations focused on the mental state of the people in the picture. The researchers found that the children’s theory of mind was related to their mothers’ use of mental state language and that the timing was suggestive of causality. That is, mothers’ use of mental state language predicted future theory of mind, but not past or current. In addition, the relationship remained even when adjusting for a wide variety of demographics and for the child’s earlier theory of mind scores.
• Two groups of children were randomized into treatment—one treatment involved the experimenter explaining the ambivalent emotions of some of the characters; the other treatment involved the child answering questions and explaining these emotions. A third group was the control group; they were asked factual comprehension questions about the stories. At the end, all the children were tested again on their understanding of emotions.4 The researchers found that both of the treatment groups significantly improved their emotional understanding relative to the control group, suggesting that thinking through emotions in particular storytelling contexts may help develop more general understanding.
• seven-year-olds read stories and afterward were either engaged in conversation about the emotions in the stories or asked to draw pictures of those emotions. The group that discussed the emotions showed improvements in emotional understanding relative to the children who just drew pictures of them.
• this suggests that theory of mind can be taught to some extent. More than that, it gives a sense of one way to do this—namely, by talking through the emotions in example situations. Books are obviously a great place to look for these examples,

(Digital) Entertainment

• TV and gaming
  • If your child would otherwise be playing a sport, then the opportunity cost of the wall-staring time is whatever benefit they’d be getting out of that sport. This crowding out of time that would be spent in other ways does seem like it can have downsides. Consider one study from
  • If your child would otherwise be playing a sport, then the opportunity cost of the wall-staring time is whatever benefit they’d be getting out of that sport. This crowding out of time that would be spent in other ways does seem like it can have downsides.
  • boys who grew up with television access had lower test scores and were less likely to graduate from high school than those who did not. The authors of this study argued that it was the crowd-out of time spent on schoolwork that was responsible for this;
  • video game play per se is not associated with lower test scores, but time spent reading is associated with higher test scores. In other words, if you were reading instead of playing video games, that could increase your test scores. But that you’re not reading because you’re playing video games as opposed to wall-staring isn’t so important.
  • video game exposure promotes violence in general. In reality, this seems to be a stretch. Short-term, laboratory-generated increases in aggression do not obviously translate into long-term changes in behavior.
  • it doesn’t seem like the violent content–aggression link is very important in the field. Longitudinal studies that try to link changes in aggression to video game play, holding baseline features of players constant, do not show any relationship. Other studies have shown that when data can do a more complete job adjusting for differences across families, these links between video games and bad outcomes melt away. On a related but not identical note, other studies have debunked claimed links between video game play and sexist attitudes.
  • whatever link does exist isn’t big enough or long-lasting enough to have an impact on real-world behavior.
  • TV or video game content can be explicitly educational. Studies have shown that math video games can improve knowledge of fractions.
  • time playing entertainment-based video games is just that—time not spent on other things—but unless it’s upsetting to your kid, the content itself is probably not something to worry about.
  • Aggregating across a large share of studies, one review article put the average share of “problem” gamers between 2 and 10 percent. This is generally based on studies of kids who play video games regularly, so that share would be much smaller if you included all the occasional players, too. The vast majority of kids who play video games do not show signs of problematic game play or video game addiction and are generally unlikely to develop these issues.
  • what characterizes players who develop addictions or for whom game play becomes problematic, they find they are more likely to be boys. They are also more likely to come from backgrounds with other disadvantages—more likely to be poor or from single-parent households. Perhaps most notable, there is some evidence of the same psychological features that characterize other forms of addiction.
  • When it comes to sleep, though, the evidence says screens and sleep do not mix.
  • more television watching—especially television watching in bed, near bedtime—impacts sleep. Kids with TVs in their rooms sleep less. Adolescents who watch more TV have worse sleep in young adulthood, and decreases in TV viewing seem to improve their sleep.
  • One helpful study monitored sleep patterns among adolescents after a single session of extensive TV or video game exposure close to bedtime. The authors followed eleven children in three different settings: no media exposure, an hour of video games from 6 to 7 p.m., or an hour of television from 6 to 7 p.m. Bedtime for the kids was around 8:30 or 9 p.m. The authors found that sleep patterns—continuity, efficacy, and “sleep architecture” (i.e., how much time is spent in each phase of sleep)—were affected by both television and video games.
  • screen exposure close to bedtime made sleep worse. The evidence seems sufficient to provide some caution around allowing television or video games close to bedtime and around letting kids have an in-room TV.
• Social media
  • collated findings from forty-three papers on the impacts of media technology on adolescent well-being.
  • Social media has both positive and negative impacts in the narrative reports. On the plus side, there is evidence of impacts on self-esteem, and increased ability to experiment with identity and share concerns in a safer space. On the negative side, for some kids, social media seems to increase social isolation and depression, and leaves kids vulnerable to cyber-bullying.
  • The data does make clear that some share of kids—probably a small share—seems to be at risk of problematic media usage.
  • about 4.5 percent seemed to have what they term “problematic social media use”—basically, excessive use of social media combined with depressive symptoms and low self-esteem.
  • A smaller study within the US showed elevated risks of anxiety, depression, and “fear of missing out” (FOMO) symptoms among kids who have a large number of social media accounts.24 Other work suggests that higher FOMO is associated with more social media accounts, lower self-esteem, and other risk factors.