Driven but Distracted: Helping our teens reclaim their focus.
A student sits in her room. She has exams approaching. Her study plan is on the wall and a textbook is in front of her. She had been getting As, but this dropped to Bs at this crucial time. An out-of-tune guitar sits by the desk. She hasn’t played with her friends for over a month. They were learning their favourite Bruno Mars song for the school talent show after the exams.
Meanwhile her focus is on her soft glowing screen, gradually draining her attention away from the things she knows she needs to get done, and wants to get done. She is motivated, but her attention is missing.
It’s not that our kids don’t want to do great things, and engage in the things they love. It’s that the doom-scrolling device in their pockets is getting in the way. Its un-ending feed of videos has been designed to keep adults hooked - what chance to the kids have?
The Attention Economy
Attention has become a scarcity - a valuable commodity fought over by social media companies who want to convert it into advertising dollars. From the insight observed by Nobel prize-winning Economist Herbert Simon in 1971, we don’t consume information - it is the abundance of information that consumes our attention. Thanks to social media companies allowing everybody to create information, this can be considered an infinite resource (over 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube alone every minute). It is our attention that is therefore the scarce resource, and the Big Tech companies fight over it every second of every day, through notifications, gamified rewards and FOMO.
This costs our kids greatly, not only in developing their own power for controlling their attention but also for the lost opportunity of putting it to better use and achieving the things they want to achieve.
Screen Time: Regulate or Support?
The traditional method has been restriction and regulation, whether that be parents policing their kids screen usage or using screen-time-limiting tools. But is this sustainable? As kids get older they don’t want to be policed and monitored and this approach can cause a lot of friction. This approach also doesn’t allow them to develop their own self-control which they will need as they grow into adults.
We know that taking regular breaks from screens can benefit your mental health. Encouraging and empowering teenagers to manage this themselves will also allow them to develop this as a skill which will benefit them in their adult life. These ‘Self-Regulated Learning’ strategies may well help students to decrease their exposure to digital distractions.
Create a Healthy Balance
A healthy mix of habits is a key to success. From keeping phones out of bedrooms at night-time, to disabling notifications to regular screen breaks, our kids can learn the value of their attention and how to use it elsewhere. Screen Balance Online aims to be part of this formula. AI-generated videos inserted into a social media feed are designed to interrupt scrolling with highly personalised motivational messages. Using goals that the users have committed to themselves and familiar or inspirational figures, the viewer is snapped out of scrolling and encouraged to make better use of their attention. Rather that enforce limits, we want to encourage good decision-making.
Connect with us to find out more.