How can children "afford to put down" with mobile phones
——Survey on the status quo of mobile phone use and intervention measures among primary and middle school students
Editor's note
With the rapid development of electronic products such as the Internet and mobile phones in my country, minors, while enjoying the convenience and pleasure of digital information, are also facing increasingly severe growth problems such as "addiction to games", "behavior anomie", and "confusion of values". .
During the National People's Congress and the People's Republic of China, the topic of minors' addiction to online games became the focus of attention of many delegates and committee members.
Earlier this year, the Ministry of Education issued the "Notice on Strengthening the Management of Mobile Phones for Primary and Secondary School Students", requiring primary and secondary school students to not bring personal mobile phones into campus in principle to prevent adverse consequences caused by excessive use of mobile phones and other electronic products.
What is the current situation of Chinese primary and middle school students using mobile terminals and contacting online games? Is there a greater risk of addiction?
In response to this problem, the China Rural Education Development Research Institute of Northeast Normal University conducted a stratified sampling survey of 9 to 15-year-old primary and middle school students in Sichuan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Fujian, Hunan, Shanxi and other places, and distributed more than 12,000 questionnaires.
In addition, the joint research team has successively conducted in-depth interviews with some elementary and middle school students in Sichuan, Beijing, Hunan and other places, further enriching and perfecting their understanding of the use of mobile phones and other mobile terminals.
On this basis, countermeasures and suggestions are put forward to prevent and crack the predicament of primary and middle school students' network addiction.
Almost every day, the quarrels that occur in Feng Ying's house are related to mobile phones.
Two sons, one goes to high school and the other goes to elementary school, the older loves to play mobile games, the younger loves to watch short videos.
In order to prevent her son from indulging in mobile phones and affecting his studies, Feng Ying initially restricted the use time of mobile phones, but the children "bargained" and hid in Tibet with their mobile phones, making Feng Ying more worried.
"This will be a protracted battle." She knows that completely isolating the phone from the child is not a coup, but "If you return the phone, how should you guide it?" She herself couldn't find the answer.
Similar distresses are haunting many families.
Currently, how many elementary and middle school students have their own independent mobile phones?
What is the main purpose of primary and middle school students using mobile phones and other mobile terminals?
What is the duration?
What is the current status of mobile phone addiction?
How to accurately stop the mobile phone addiction of elementary and middle school students?
1. The current situation of use. Nearly half of primary and middle school students independently own mobile phones, behind their appeals for "identity"
Ride the subway, play games, take online lessons... Nowadays, many children need the company of mobile phones in their day.
In the parent group, almost all parents believe that "the use of mobile phones is a serious problem." With such thoughts, Li Jing has never dared to equip her children with mobile phones. The child soaked hard for half a month: "We are all in junior high school, can't we still have our own mobile phones?" "Which junior high school student doesn't have a mobile phone?" Li Jing had no choice but to "compromise" to the children.
I dare not completely isolate the phone, and I am afraid of being addicted to the phone. The agreement between Li Jing and her child is to put the mobile phone in the living room when not in use, "supervision cannot be stopped".
The survey found that nearly half of primary and secondary school students have their own independent mobile phones, reaching 48.56%.
Among them, the proportion of primary and middle school students with agricultural household registration and their own mobile phones accounted for 46.95% of the total number of primary and secondary school students in the agricultural household registration sample; the proportion of primary and secondary school students with urban household registration and their own mobile phones exceeded half of the sample number of urban household registration primary and secondary students, reaching 54.34% .
The proportion of primary and middle school students owning their own independent mobile phones shows an obvious trend of stratification increasing from village to county.
In addition, a phenomenon worthy of attention is: 12 years old is an obvious time node in the childhood stage, this age has its own independent mobile phone to 64.29%, and the proportion of 12 years old and above who owns their own independent mobile phone is significantly higher than that of under 12 years old.
In the interviews, junior high school students expressed more "reasonable" demands for having their own independent mobile phones, while a considerable proportion of elementary school students said: "My parents said that they will wait for junior high school in the future, and then buy a mobile phone for me" and so on.
The 12-year-old is often the golden age for a child to go from elementary school to junior high school. School upgrades and school changes naturally bring new problems in "identity" and "mentality adaptation".
The research team found that the mobile phone, as a sign of independence towards the adult world, has increasingly become a typical image in the heart of elementary and middle school students connecting the "children" and "juvenile" stages. Whether to have an independent mobile phone has become a stage similar to the "coming-of-age ceremony". Sexual expression.
Therefore, we should pay attention to the management of students' mobile phones under the key node of "small promotion and beginning" from the age level and grade level, and give priority to solving the problems of "identity" and "mentality adaptation" in the growth of primary and middle school students.
2. Usage 60% is used for entertainment projects and online games to carry social significance
Zhang Lei, a second-year student, found that many of his classmates did not want to join when they were playing mobile games. However, many of the conversations among students are about the topic of games, "It is easy to be looked down upon not playing."
From watching classmates play to "apprentice" to let classmates teach themselves to play, Zhang Lei discovered the fun of the game in a total of less than one month. Sometimes, he held his mother's mobile phone and played secretly until midnight, "If you lose, you want to win, and if you win, you want to win again." After playing games for less than a semester, Zhang Lei's grades dropped sharply.
The mobile phone is like a double-edged sword, which brings convenience but also harms.
What is the main purpose of using mobile phones and other mobile terminals for elementary and middle school students?
The survey found that the main uses of mobile phones and other mobile terminals used by primary and middle school students in descending order are: online learning (38.25%), playing online games (25.37%), reading novels and videos (21.69%), chatting and socializing (14.69%) Among them, entertainment projects accounted for 61.75%.
The first-choice entertainment project of the survey respondents is online games, which account for the highest proportion of entertainment projects, reaching 41.08%.
The survey found that mobile games are the most convenient and lowest-cost entertainment activities that primary and middle school students, especially rural students, can participate in. They use mobile games to combat the relatively monotonous and stressful campus life.
In fact, mobile online games contain rich social meanings.
For some students, playing games has already exceeded the value of "entertainment", and is more like building a platform for students who have worked hard for a week in the classroom field to "free themselves".
Some students with good academic performance will be willing to participate in such a common game. Students with relatively poor grades will often deliberately use clever discourse strategies to entice and mobilize more students with good grades to participate.
"You are out. It's shameful that you haven't played such a classic game!" "You can't even play the game. What can you do to succeed in the future?" "The weekend game is a collective'fight' for the whole class, don't let the next door Look down on the class, don’t hold back our class"..."online games" in the world of primary and middle school students invisibly carry the social function of "me" quickly becoming "us", and the "immediate experience sharing" brought by games "And "delivery of pleasure experience" have created unique social language and public relations within elementary and middle school students.
Different individual elementary and middle school students are either accepted into this jargon community, or rejected and isolated.
3. Forty percent of the use time exceeds 1 hour per day, and parental management falls into inefficient failure
"Mobile phones cannot be used from Monday to Friday, and mobile phones cannot be used for more than 1 hour on Saturdays and Sundays." This is a rule set by Liu Xicong, a rural teacher in Anhua County, Yiyang City, Hunan Province.
But Liu Xicong found that once the students left their sight, these rules were difficult to follow. Some children’s parents work outside, and their grandparents can’t control them at all. During the summer vacation, they spend a whole day playing with their mobile phones, and the elderly are helpless. Some old people also told Liu Xicong: "Children can use mobile phones. It's very powerful. We don't know how."
Many parents told the research team that their children had been playing with mobile phones or computers for too long, and the parents could not control them.
How long do primary and middle school students use mobile terminals such as mobile phones?
In the survey sample, 18.81% of primary and secondary school students do not use mobile phones or computers, and 39.96% of primary and secondary school students who use a total of less than one hour per day; 23% of 1-2 hours; 11.82 of 2-4 hours %; more than 4 hours accounted for 6.61%.
The survey found that in mobile phone management, parents often go through several different stages:
Early persuasion period.
When parents first discover that their children play with mobile phones and other mobile terminals for too long, they often adopt flexible methods such as persuasion to tell their children not to play, but they often do not work.
Children often adopt methods such as "deliberate silence", "oral promises but the actual action does not change", and "quietly stay away from the parents' sight" to respond to parents' persuasion.
In the face of flexible resistance from their children, parents will often upgrade their admonitions and adopt a "strict prohibition" approach.
Although the children’s behavior will change at this time, they will often escalate from "flexible resistance" to "rigid resistance" deep down. The methods of resistance include explicit "crying", "running away from home" and "hunting", etc., as well as Recessive "depression", "anxiety", "deliberate silence" and so on.
When "rigid boycotts" become increasingly severe, they often force parents to change "prohibited" behaviors, thus entering a "consultation period."
Negotiations in the "negotiation period" include two types: "oral negotiation" and "written negotiation". Most families adopt the "oral negotiation" method.
After negotiation, children are often allowed to play mobile terminals such as mobile phones at the agreed time and for the agreed time every day. Sometimes, this "treatment" is also regarded as an additional "special reward" for children, such as improving academic performance and completing additional homework. Or rewards after goals such as housework, etc., children also often "bargain" with their parents in exchange for extending the time spent on mobile phones.
In addition, a small number of families adopt the form of “written consultation” when the “verbal consultation” is not well implemented, forming a prescriptive system, and publicly “going on the wall” to restrict the implementation.
The survey found that the negotiated governance around playing mobile phones is a protracted battle without gunsmoke and "you advance and I retreat".
Due to the inequality of rights and obligations between parents and children, consultation governance is often difficult to be perfectly implemented in the family. Temporary changes and flexible handling caused by various new situations often make it difficult to negotiate the use of mobile phones with a “democratic” nature. Fast forward to parental authority, and then to a new round of prohibition period, but children become more rebellious in the face of the prohibition, often adopting more imaginative means to obtain mobile terminals such as mobile phones, and then start retaliatory long-term play.
Such alternating cycles often make it extremely difficult for families to manage their children's mobile phone use.
4. The degree of self-perception addiction is generally lower than that of others, and the group difference is obvious
At present, the proportion of adolescent Internet addiction syndromes caused by excessive mobile phone addiction is soaring. Game addiction, pornography addiction, Internet communication addiction, information overload addiction and other types of addiction caused continuous depression and mania. Such unhealthy mental illnesses are becoming more and more serious among young people, and Internet addiction has gradually become a new social stubborn disease.
From this survey, what is the degree of addiction among primary and middle school students?
From the sample data, more than 80% of primary and middle school students have played online games, the proportion reached 83.60%, but the overall feeling is "not much addiction."
From the survey results, the self-perceived addiction of online games among elementary and middle school students is far lower than the one-to-one matching data of class teachers and parents.
in particular:
Boys are generally more addicted to online games than girls.
The percentage of girls who choose to never play online games (24%) is significantly higher than that of boys (9.58%), and the percentage of girls who choose "less addiction and moderate play" (56.36%) is significantly higher than that of boys (46.17%) ), boys choose "moderate addiction, able to control oneself" and "a lot of addiction, want to play all the time" are significantly higher than girls.
Primary and middle school students who are more tired of studying have a higher degree of addiction to online games.
There are significant differences in the degree of addiction to online games among elementary and middle school students with different levels of disgust.
The proportion of primary and middle school students who always have a feeling of being tired of studying (18.03%) who chooses to "have a lot of addiction and want to play all the time" is significantly higher than that of frequent (7.35%), rarely (3.09%) and no feeling of being tired of studying (1.77) %) is significantly higher than the average level of 3.25%.
The proportion of primary and middle school students who are often tired of studying who choose "moderate addiction and able to control themselves" is as high as 44.85%, which is significantly higher than the average level of 29.22%.
The lower the academic performance ranking of elementary and middle school students, the more obvious they are addicted to online games.
There are significant differences in the degree of addiction to online games among students with different levels of academic performance in their classes.
The percentage of elementary and middle school students whose academic performance is in the last few places in the class chooses to "have a lot of addiction and want to play all the time" (8.70%) is significantly higher than the class's lower-middle level (4.67%), middle-level (2.72%), middle-level Elementary and middle school students at the upper level (2.38%) and the top few in the class (1.50%).
Parents who have different attitudes towards their children playing online games have significant differences in their children's perception of addiction to online games.
Parents who have a “strictly restrictive and manageable” attitude towards their children’s online games, the proportion of children who never play online games (24.96%) is significantly higher than the average level of 16.12%; parents’ attitude is “play it, it’s better than going out. The proportions of children who are “have a lot of addiction and want to play all the time” (15.09% and 10.41%, respectively) of children who “run safe” and “feel bad but can’t manage” are significantly higher than those of parents who hold “moderate play is beneficial to intellectual development” "(2.21%) and "strictly restrained and manageable" (1.61%).
5. Suggestions for countermeasures to unblock and combine to let children discover the wonderful world outside of their mobile phones
Through regression analysis of the factors influencing elementary and middle school students’ mobile phone addiction, it is found that whether parents play online games, living space, teacher care, school-weariness, academic expectations, frequency of communication with parents, parents’ marital status, parents’ attitudes towards network management, and a sense of security. Primary school students’ addiction to online games has a significant impact.
In this regard, it is necessary for families, schools, and society to form a joint effort to guide primary and middle school students to establish good Internet usage habits and get out of the predicament of Internet addiction.
Among them, the positive intervention of "family factors" is the most important, and parents themselves addicted to mobile phones have the greatest negative impact on children.
At the family level, parents’ communication, companionship, demonstration, and guidance are a good medicine to prevent addiction.
Parents should arrange their children’s life after school and holidays, have a reasonable schedule, truly assume the responsibility of supervising children, improve their own network literacy, master the knowledge of early identification and intervention of indulging in the Internet, guide children to go online green, and timely discover, stop and correct Children are addicted to online games and other inappropriate behaviors.
In addition, raise parents’ expectations for their children’s academic work and express them clearly and repeatedly at appropriate intervals through appropriate words or actions; increase the frequency of communication between parents and children. Parents who "talk to children once a day or more" should change to "communication every day." ;Teachers take active strategies to improve the mutual understanding and communication effectiveness between parents and children through channels such as home visits, parent schools or parents’ daily social groups; strengthen parents’ ability to intervene and guide their children’s scientific management of online games; improve and consolidate parents’ families Marital status, etc. are all effective measures to actively intervene in the family aspect of primary and secondary school students’ indulging in online games.
At the school level, it is necessary to attach importance to "moral education recognition" and "education guidance", place primary and middle school students at the center of the care system, and effectively improve their mental health.
Teacher care significantly affects the degree of primary and secondary school students’ indulging in online games. Healthy, scientific, and sincere care is especially important.
Teachers should place elementary and middle school students at the center of the school’s care system, effectively improve their mental health, focus on reducing their weariness of learning, and improve their sense of security. They must not implement “prohibition” and “discipline” in the name of “for your good” Care, and never openly "label" or conduct "performance training" to students who are addicted to online games.
In addition, the school should implement detailed campus management measures to improve the service functions of the communication infrastructure equipment on the campus, so that the communication function on the campus can be substituted for electronic products such as mobile phones.
At the social level, restore the public soil of traditional games and increase the interaction, interest and authenticity of the daily life of primary and middle school students.
It is necessary to pay full attention to the impact of residential space on primary and secondary school students’ indulging in online games. Online games are showing a rapid occupation trend on the soil where traditional games are declining and even forced to withdraw. It uses realistic virtual scenes and real stimulating experience. Features such as simple and easy-to-learn game rules have broken through the drawbacks of traditional games, and have become more and more "machine nanny" for families of many elementary and middle school students.
Therefore, to prevent and improve elementary and middle school students’ addiction to online games, social education centered on the place of residence is indispensable.
This kind of education should not be carried out in a way that strongly prohibits online games, but should construct a new "acquaintance society" living space, increase the interaction, interest and authenticity of students' daily life, restore the public soil of traditional games, and develop traditional games In order to offset the addictive dependence of primary and middle school students on online games.
The research team called on the whole society to form a consensus: as "indigenous people" in the Internet age, primary and secondary school students must have sufficient network identification capabilities, information literacy and self-management capabilities.
As long as all walks of life work together to help elementary and middle school students establish a positive and healthy outlook on the Internet, and form a scientific and reasonable green surfing habit, mobile terminals such as mobile phones will definitely not be "discretionary".
(Author: Northeast Normal University, Chinese Research Institute of Rural Education and Development Guangming Daily joint research group research group members: Li Tao, Wu Zhihui, single-Na, Chen Peng, Chen room, Zhang Wenting)