Like many digital natives, your children are probably on their
way to becoming lifelong multitaskers (or so you think). As the
research indicates, children these days spend about seven-and-a-
half hours a day interacting with technology unrelated to school
and when multitasking is counted, that number jumps to an
astonishing ten-and-three-quarter hours. Your children may be
doing their homework, checking their text messages, surfing the
Web, and listening to music, all at the same time (or so they
think). Why do they multitask? The short answer is because they
can and it’s what just about every young person does these days.
There’s only one problem with this scenario: there is no such
thing as multitasking—at least not in the way you may think of
it. The fact is that multitasking, as most people understand it,
is a myth that has been promulgated by the “technological-
industrial complex” to make everyone feel more competent,
efficient, productive, and, well, cool. Real multitasking
involves engaging in two task