Multitasking & Kids

The American Psychological Association's magazine, Monitor, features an interesting article on the impact of multi-tasking on children and teens (Mini-Multitaskers by Rebecca A. Clay): http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/02/multitaskers.html

The articles suggest that more and more children are presenting with attention deficit symptoms as a result of growing up in a multi-tasking culture. Some interesting excerpts from the article (in case you are multitasking and don't have time to read the whole thing:

Peek behind the bedroom doors of children and teens who are supposedly doing homework, and you may find they're doing that and much more—text messaging friends, surfing the Internet and listening to iPods

In fact, according to a 2006 Kaiser Family Foundation study, almost two-thirds of 8- to 18-year-olds using a computer to do homework are also doing something else at the same time. And during a typical week, 81 percent of young people report "media multitasking" at least some of the time.

Like their adult counterparts, young people often believe multitasking boosts efficiency. But there is no such boost, says psychologist David E. Meyer, PhD, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Lab at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. People who multitask actually take longer to get things done.

Students with one eye on a teacher and one on a BlackBerry may be more likely to learn rote answers instead of developing a true understanding, says Poldrack.

"The entire culture is starting to look like what you see in attention deficit disorder, where there's a difficulty in focusing and distractibility," he says.

A recent study published by Common Sense Media suggests that may be true. In a meta-analysis of research going back to 1980, researchers from the National Institutes of Health and Yale University found that 69 percent of the 13 studies that examined media exposure and ADHD found a statistically significant relationship.

Waters-Wheeler has noticed a similar trend in the classroom. "In the past, kids were more able to sit down and focus on things for much longer," she says. "Now they can only attend to things for a short period."

They're also easily distracted, she says. "It's not that they can't focus," she says. "It's that they focus on everything. They hear everything—even things they would normally be able to block out—because they are now so used to attending to many things at once."

Referrals for attention issues are up, she says. Many of these students don't have full-blown attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, she says. Instead, she says, "it's just the way they've grown up—working short times on many different things at one time."