Back in 2010, we decided to study what would happen

when kids were chronically multi-tasking.

Using email while on Facebook, while trying to do their homework,

while listening to music, texting, etc., etc.

Would it change the way their brains work when they weren't multi-tasking?

[music playing]

The very powerful and surprising result of that 2010 study

was high multi-taskers - kids who multi-task all the time -

even when they were asked not to multi-task, when they were only doing one thing,

showed less ability to filter out irrelevancy,

much more difficulty managing their working memory

and ironically even the ability to multi-task.

We then decided to look at a different domain

namely emotional development. We focused on 8 to 12 year old girls

because that is the most important age for social development in girls.

So we created this study, a survey of 3400 girls and looked at

how much they used media. We also asked about multi-tasking.

And then we asked a bunch of questions about their social and emotional development.

How likely were they to succumb to peer pressure?

How good did they feel about themselves?

How much they slept? How many kids their parents thought were bad influences?

And the results were incredibly upsetting.

Kids who were heavy media users, heavy multi-taskers, showed much worse social and emotional development.

So what's happening is, kids are not practicing basic emotional skills.

There seems to be a pretty powerful curative,

a pretty powerful inoculant to this. And that is face-to-face communication.

As your kid grows up, that old-fashioned saying of "Look at me when I speak to you"

should come back. Yes, it was annoying for me as a kid, yes it is annoying, but it is annoying for an important reason.

It's hard work. But it's a hard work that leads to incredibly positive outcomes.

For more, please visit us at stanford.edu