Child Development In The Internet Age: Delay Discounting

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The advent of high-speed internet is one of the most astounding modern inventions of our time. It has exponentially increased the connectivity of human beings across the entire planet, which happens in a matter of seconds. This connection is something we take for granted, as it has become such an integral part of our lives in such a short amount of time. But if you think back even just 15 years ago when the internet was really starting to gain traction and compare it to the necessity it is today, you can see how much our world has changed. Now there are children who grow up and won't know what it was like before the internet, similar to how people grew up and didn't know what it was like before television or radio. The internet is now something we have to factor in when considering our children's brain development, as it can substantially alter the way kids grow up learning about the world.

So what do children use the internet for? I know I used it to watch silly videos and play games in a virtual world (which I have wasted hours/days/years of my life doing). Greenfield and Yan in their 2006 article published by the American Psychological Association entitled, Children, adolescents, and the internet: a new field of inquiry in developmental psychology indicate that the main reason children use the internet is for gratification. So a child who is going to use internet to play, learn, and figure out what the world is, similarly to how people used TV to do much the same.

Greenfield and Yan also talk about how communication is usually the primary goal of the internet. If there's a way we can talk to and interact with a lot of people in a very short amount of time and efficiently, why wouldn't we do that? We are socially dependent creatures after all, so it only makes sense that we would jump on the chance to socialize with as many people as possible especially when it's extremely easy to do so. Those silly videos and online virtual world games are fun and entertaining, but one of the reasons they are so fun and entertaining is because they involve communication. The people who made the videos are communicating to those watching them, and the other players in the virtual worlds are communicating with one another through game play. At the center of it all, the internet is first and foremost an expedited and efficient means of communication.

Adolescents, according to Greenfield and Yan, will not only be exposed to millions of other personalities while on the internet – theoretically helping their brains become more well-rounded in their ideas during development – but also will create their own environments in which they can thrive. Modalities of communication such as instant messaging, blogs, chat rooms, social media, etc. are all customizable, whether that is by the people you choose to engage with, the way your page or profile looks, or the messages you send to others. Through these tools, we come to understand "the Internet as a new social environment in which universal adolescent issues such as identity, sexuality, and a sense of self-worth are played out". 

What the internet provides is simultaneously beneficial and potentially detrimental to children's development. On one hand people will grow up being exposed to countless different points of view, which could increase tolerance and acceptance of others. On the other hand children are going to learn that they should be able to get everything they want instantly. See, when kids are on the internet they're not only controlling their environments and communicating with others, but doing so instantaneously. This means that kids' brains will be trained and conditioned by instant gratification, substantially decreasing the ability for them to be able to delay gratification. 

With the increased inability to delay gratification, comes significantly more impulsive children. Now, children are pretty impulsive as it is so with this added element of constantly clicking, getting what they want instantly, then moving to the next thing, and repeating that process over and over again, the child's brain will become conditioned to think, "oh I should be getting exactly what I want immediately”. When they don't get that because turns out, that's not how life works, they'll become exceedingly frustrated, similarly to how we do which I talk about in my previous article about attention residue. Whittmann and Paulus in their 2007 article Decision making, impulsivity and time perception published by Elsevier in ScienceDirect, talk about how impulsive children have a distorted perception of time, inhibiting their rational decision making abilities. The example they give is if you ask a child if they want $10 now or $20 in a week, those who have more impulsive tendencies will choose the $10 now, even though the $20 in a week garners double the money gained in total. 

Whittmann and Paulus describe this phenomenon as delay discounting, which is when making a decision between a smaller choice but sooner and a larger choice but further away in time, impulsive people will choose the sooner choice. Teaching kids how to engage in delay discounting early on in their development will result in them translating that to most other aspects of their lives. For example, an impulsive child or adolescent will choose to eat the tastier food now and forego healthier, less tasty options, the benefits of which they won't experience until much later down the line. That kid doesn't understand that eating healthier food, even though it doesn’t taste as good as other foods, is much better for them in the long run, they just think, "this food tastes good, I want it now". Now this isn't anything new to parents, kids always want sweets and unhealthy food more. I know I certainly always wanted Pop Tarts and Fudge Stripe cookies instead of actually nutritiously valuable fruits and vegetables because they tasted so much better and I could get them very quickly. The added component of increased structures of instant gratification will create the thought process, "this food tastes good, I want it now, and I expect to get it now".

So yes presenting the internet to children during development is teaching kids to control their environments and develop confidence, but it's also teaching them that they should be getting exactly what they want immediately. Because of this, I speculate that as instant gratification becomes more instilled in children, despite the growing health consciousness of our country, childhood obesity will either remain where it is or increase. Kids will not care if a food is unhealthy for them all they care about is getting the tastiest food possible in the shortest amount of time because that’s what their brains have been trained to expect.

The internet has now become an integral and inevitable part of life. The question becomes how do we highlight the benefits and decrease the detriments of it to our children? Well limiting their time on the internet is probably a good idea, but also really teaching and reinforcing the idea that yes while the internet is an extremely useful tool, it should not be solely relied on for communicating and socializing.  The internet is a double edged sword; it’s not entirely good or entirely bad, it’s both. The internet has improved the amount we can communicate with one another exponentially, exposing us to countless of other viewpoints and useful information increasing the amount of education of a lot of people. Using the internet too much however will cause delay discounting, decreasing the ability to delay gratification and increasing impulsivity, which could have very detrimental effects on a child’s brain and physical development. The key is balance, because as I said earlier, the internet isn’t going anywhere and there’s actually zero way you can keep your kid from using it. It’s all about using the internet as a tool, but also having authentic face-to-face interaction with others and teaching them they can’t always get what they want.