The Winter of Our Disconnect (32 page)

No one knows for certain why screen-based media seem to wreak havoc with children’s sleep patterns in a way that reading doesn’t. But one hypothesis is that the bright light emanating from computer, TV, or even MP3 screens may interfere with the release of melatonin, a naturally occurring hormone important in the regulation of circadian rhythms.
¹²
The so-called hormone of darkness, melatonin is normally secreted by the pineal gland in the middle of the night, but exposure to light can significantly reduce melatonin levels, which in turn disturbs the sleep-wake cycle. There is also a link, albeit less understood, between melatonin and immune function.

A Finnish study of more than seven thousand children aged twelve to eighteen found that intensive media usage was associated with poor perceived health, especially (or in some cases only) when kids’ use of technology was interfering with their sleep. Not surprisingly, there was also a correlation with increased daytime tiredness. Among older teens, researchers noted a clear gender divide, with boys most at risk from intensive computer usage, and girls from overuse of cell phones.
¹³

What’s so important about sleep in the first place? Researchers are only just waking up to the facts themselves, now that the entire developed world is staggering under an unprecedented burden of sleep debt. Recent surveys show that about one-fifth of adults report insufficient sleep. Among teens, the figures are even worse, with as many as a quarter clocking in six hours or less a night, compared with a recommended minimum of nine hours for their age group. Disturbed sleep is associated with a nightmarish range of psychological, social, and physical problems. Teenagers who sleep poorly report more depression, anxiety, hostility, and attention problems. They also struggle more at school, and they are at greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse. Physically, they are more fatigued, less energetic, and more prone to headaches, stomachaches, and backaches.

The effects of insomnia have been widely studied. The long-term consequences of what researchers call “short sleep”—the real epidemic among our Digital Natives—are less well understood, but are believed to have even broader negative consequences for later functioning involving somatic health, interpersonal relationships, and even general life satisfaction, according to a wide-ranging review of the current literature published in 2009 in the respected
Journal of Adolescence
.
¹⁴

Yet if it’s true, as one recent study found, that only 17.2 percent of young people are actually getting the sleep that experts insist they need, isn’t some degree of sleep deprivation . . . and I hesitate to use this term to describe teenagers . . . normal? Absolutely, note researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center. “Sleep deprivation among adolescents appears to be, in some respects, the norm rather than the exception in contemporary society.”
¹⁵
For once, when our kids tell us, “But Mum, everybody else is doing it!” they are making a statistically accurate observation.

Nonetheless, when you dig a little deeper, it’s clear that “normal” is not the same as “the norm”—and neither term necessarily implies “healthy” or “recommended practice.” A generation ago, it was “the norm” for adults to smoke in the car with small children present. Seat belts in those same cars, let alone car seats, were
not
“the norm.” Now we know better, and we wish they had. Traveling on a plane recently, I watched a
Mad Men
episode in which an attractive, affluent family eats lunch in a wooded picnic area, circa 1963. When they finished, the impeccably groomed young mother simply shook their rubbish onto the lawn, folded up the blanket, and drove away. It seemed such a heavy-handed period detail—surely no one ever
did
that? But I am old enough to know that they did. I remember when the anti-littering slogan “Keep America Beautiful” seemed downright radical. In fact, I swear I remember when the verb “litter” appeared for the first time, in 1960. (Yes, okay. I admit it. I Googled it.)

The “normal” but still mind-blowingly destructive sleep patterns we tolerate today are the result of a huge range of changes in the way we live, from the long-hours lifestyle our jobs demand (or encourage) to the trend toward smaller families and more relaxed household rules. (Behavior that would be untenable in a bigger brood—kids going to bed when they feel like it, for example—can be accommodated when there is only one child at home, or even two widely spaced ones.) Technology is therefore not to blame for our global sleep debt. But the role that it plays in extending and entrenching those dysfunctional patterns within families is significant and, especially as far as our teenagers are concerned, alarming.

I observed it firsthand in my own household, as we wound back the clock to simulate a simpler and yes, sleepier, era.

When Sussy returned home in mid-February and surrendered her laptop, she was more square-eyed and exhausted than I’d ever seen her. The six-week stay of execution at her dad’s had been fun, she reported, but also a little lonely. She missed the chaos of kids coming and going, of the pets’ annoying but adorable attention-seeking. And Hazel the Handheld Kitten was a powerful draw card. She may even have missed having her mother breathing down her neck, who knows? (Although she maintained that her father and I were equally strict, only about different things—probably a fair call.)

Her first reaction to the sensory deprivation tank that we now called our home was to flop heavily on her bed and lose consciousness. This didn’t surprise me much. Before The Experiment, Sussy catnapped like a newborn or a narcoleptic. She napped after school. During school (or so I suspected). Even in the morning, after she’d put on her uniform, when she’d clump back into bed with her black lace-up Oxfords. Or she’d sleep through all of Saturday, waking up at four or five p.m., bright as a button and agitating for a sleepover. Come Monday morning, I’d practically need a forklift to drag her out of bed. She also had a knack for what I thought of as “defensive napping.” If there was time to kill before a big event, or an obligation she preferred to avoid, she could somehow will herself into an accommodating slumber. On Christmas Eve, while the other kids lay wide awake for hours with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads, Suss went out like a blown fuse. “How do you
do
that?” we’d all beg to know. She’d smile mysteriously. “I just tell myself!” was the only explanation she’d give us. It was all the more magical given that, on a normal night, she was capable of fussing and fighting sleep for hours. “Just friggin’ TELL yourself!” I was often tempted to shriek.

Now, recovering from a nonelective laptop-ectomy, she channeled her extraordinary capacity for inner hypnotic suggestion once more. But this time, it went way beyond the usual defensive napping. Not only did she sleep until noon, she slept until noon having gone to bed at 7:30 p.m. And she did that not once or twice, but on and off for a month. On the weekends, she was in virtual hibernation, emerging like a bewildered bear cub to seek sustenance (usually at odd hours), or to call Maddi on the landline. Despite this, she also missed some school, pleading tiredness. I tried to discourage this, but there were days when I didn’t have the heart. She seemed so listless, so wrung out.

Under other circumstances, I would have had her assessed for clinical depression. As it was, I decided to bide my time, choosing to frame it as a withdrawal, not a clinical mood disorder. It was comforting to see that when Suss was awake—admittedly a rare occurrence—she was cheerful. She also stayed in touch with friends after school and her appetite seemed fine.

Equally important, while the behavior was slightly pathological—or at least way beyond the norm—it also made sense. At one level, it was just another manifestation of the ingenious avoidance tactic she’d perfected years ago. The prospect of life without screens was simply too unpleasant, or perhaps too confusing, for her to confront head-on with full conscious awareness. But I also became convinced that her oversleeping was a way for her body to literally make up for lost time—to pay off a sleep debt that had been compounding menacingly for years.

Well, that was my theory. And when, at length, she awoke from her torpor by around week five, I’ll admit I felt vindicated. It would be an exaggeration to say Sussy arose like Snow White (albeit sporting hair extensions and DIY fake tan), the spell broken forever. There were no bluebirds twittering from her shoulders on a school morning, trust me. But something did, rather suddenly, switch on for her—or off again. On school nights, she started going to bed before eleven, and within another week or two by ten. She allowed herself to be roused by seven—and I no longer had to play my part of human snooze button to make it happen. Most mornings, there was time for breakfast. Sometimes—and here’s where it gets really weird—eaten at the table in the kitchen. On the weekends, instead of sleeping in until noon, one, or even two p.m., she woke up at around 9:30 a.m. “Random!” she cried the first couple of times it happened. “What is
wrong
with me?”

The Experiment confirmed my strong suspicion that media had been robbing Sussy of sleep for years. She’d been our family’s most militant multitasker, and the one who’d gravitated to a digital lifestyle at the youngest age. Unplugged, the changes to her sleep patterns, energy levels, and mood were correspondingly dramatic.

The evidence strongly suggests she is no isolated case. For Generation M, the links between our diurnal habits and our digital ones are as direct as they are disturbing. Add this to the already crumbling boundaries around family diet, and the synergy is unmistakable.

A 2009 study of one hundred Philadelphia-area children aged twelve to eighteen, published in the journal of the
American Academy of Pediatrics
—the same respected body that has recommended banning TV from children’s bedrooms—found that kids who spend more time online also drink more caffeinated beverages, with a resulting one-two punch to their prospects of good sleep hygiene. “Subjects who slept the least also multitasked the most,” the authors concluded succinctly.
¹⁶
Among heavy multitaskers, more than a third took naps after school; 42 percent did so on the weekend; and a third reported nodding off at least twice a day. One child in the study, who slept for an average of five hours a night, reported falling asleep eight times during a typical school day. In the opinion of the researchers, the upshot was a recipe for “changes in school performance, difficulties with executive function, and degradation of neurobehavioral function.”
¹⁷

Among American teenagers, sleep duration has decreased by one to two hours over the past forty years. The proportion of kids who sleep for fewer than seven hours a night has doubled in that time.
¹⁸
To address the problem, many educators and other experts have recently started calling for a change in school hours, arguing that they are a poor fit for teenagers’ “natural biological rhythms.” That may well be. But no one seemed to worry about that forty years ago, and school hours were exactly the same as they are now. If our Digital Natives are in danger of becoming a generation of sleepwalkers—and the evidence suggests that is exactly the direction they are tending—maybe we could
all
use a wake-up call.

 

 

 

Christian, German exchange student friend of B.’s, here for weekend. Apologized about lack of technological hospitality but he seems more intrigued than repelled. (“My mother alzo vants to do zis!”) Boys amused selves taking Rupert to the beach, playing music, hanging out in front of fire, taking 2.5-hour nap (!!). Headed out to a party by bus after dinner.

A. & S. prognosticating at dinner on the subject of their future careers—a possible joint business venture of an indeterminate nature. They imagine “hell beautiful suits,” excellent hair (“I see a bun . . .”), and very large, very light-filled, very white-on-white offices.

“What will you actually be doing, though?” I ask. They look at each other and shrug. “No idea!”

 

 

 

B. delivered drunk at midnight, vomiting into the bougainvillea, croaking apologies as I stalk off to bed. Disgusted by the spectacle. Pleased, perversely, by the awfulness . . . assuming in my ever-hopeful way that there is such a thing as a lesson you don’t forget.

Discovered on couch at seven next morning, gravely reading Murakami (still reeking even after shower . . .). It was dark rum, he says, swigged straight from the bottle. Barf me out.

 

 

 

S. & A. fighting like catfish (do catfish fight?) over kitchen mess. If more cooking equals more mud-wrestling, takeout is looking good.

Mollified by news of S.’s top mark in math test. “This studying thing . . . I’m thinking I might try it again sometime,” she muses. We celebrate by eating cupcakes and inspecting Hazel’s teeth, exclaiming over their tiny perfection. Handheld kitten that she is, she endures patiently.

Okay, it’s not
America’s Got Talent
, but it works for us.

 

S. home sick with stuffy nose, fever. (“P.S. I feel like I’m going to throw up.”) She and Maddi conferring already on festivities for Independence Day, aka Return to Screens Day, on July 4. Should we make a video? What about B.? He’ll be in Germany on his water-polo tour then. Can we Skype him?

B. rehearsing for gig at local pub. Learning Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green.” Soaring, soulful, effortless, lyrical.

Thrilling-slash-annoying how much time now spent playing Satie (and/or humming ostentatiously to Brandenburg Concerto score—they are learning it in Music) while girls and self play Boggle. Hazel’s dentition continues to enthrall.