Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
Early in 2007, as the case against Reggie was inching along, Terryl’s oldest daughter Jayme, a sixth grader, had become interested in Mary Surratt. Jayme started building an exhibit for the Utah History Fair. It included a description, photos, and a hangman’s noose. What made the noose unusual was that it had five loops in it, rather than thirteen, just like the noose that Surratt’s hangman had fashioned at the time because he didn’t believe Surratt should hang and he thought a noose with fewer loops would break.
In early April, Jayme won the junior division of the state competition, making her eligible to compete in Washington, D.C., on National History Day that summer. It was the first of what would become a string of academic successes for the Warner children, in the classroom and in competitions outside of it.
Jayme formed the early idea she might be a doctor. “I hate to see anyone in pain, or suffer.” She excelled in school, setting a bar her brother felt eager to match. When Taylor was in the second grade, the school’s principal suggested Taylor skip third grade and move on to fourth. That year, in fourth grade, Taylor went to the house of a friend whose dad was a heart surgeon. He decided right then and there he wanted to be a doctor, though not a heart surgeon because, he thought, “Ooh, the heart’s gross.” He became determined to be a neurosurgeon. “The brain,” he says he’d concluded, “is so cool.”
For Terryl, the exhilaration around learning was a sign of the enthusiasm she tried to instill in her children, tried to exhibit for them. This was the personal analogue for Terryl of her zeal at work. She was desperate to be an engaged parent, 180 degrees of difference from how she felt her parents treated her. If a child got interested in a project or hobby, Terryl was there, driving them to whatever event, staying up late with preparations. It was the zeal of a convert and, just as at work, her enthusiasm at home could tread a line.
In the back of the house, she and Alan had cleared out a big backyard. But it wasn’t particularly hospitable to play. Then it sunk in with Terryl that the neighbor had a backhoe.
“I decided I wanted a sandpit for the kids.”
With the neighbor’s help, she dug a hole, around four feet deep, twenty feet wide, and ten feet long. She ordered a huge dump truck full of sand, and she had it poured into the hole. There’s a picture of Taylor with his friend and neighbor Travis, both five years old, buried up to their necks in sand.
They had a chocolate Lab named Luke. Jayme and Taylor would tie a red wagon to Luke and then throw a ball across the sandpit and the dog would race to get it, the wagon trailing behind. In April of 2001, Allyssa was born, and she was little more than one year old when her older siblings would put her in the back of the wagon and Luke the dog would pull her around, sometimes chasing the ball.
Terryl and Alan put in a tetherball court, a trampoline, a swing set. Money was tight, but it was low-cost entertainment. Terryl could garden and be with them without being in their faces.
Sometimes, Allyssa would fall out of the red wagon, with Luke the Lab carrying her across the sand. “She’d go flying out,” Terryl laughs, looking back. The girl didn’t get hurt. But it did exemplify how Terryl, in her eagerness to be supportive and fun, to encourage a spirit of adventure, could push things to the edge.
When Taylor was around six, he expressed an interest in science. Terryl got him a microscope and a chemical experiment kit that had test tubes and glass straws, an alcohol burner, steel wool, and small containers of some not insignificant chemicals, like hydrochloric acid, sodium carbonate, and calcium hydroxide.
“My mother was always there and always giving us crazy things to do,” Taylor says.
A few years later, she took them to a nearby park, a nearly daily activity. Taylor wanted to ride the zip line. It was this thing where the adult gave you a little shove and you glided about eight feet to the other end of the line, feet dangling a few feet above the ground.
“I asked my mom to push me,” Taylor recalls. He rode the line. “I asked her to push me harder,” and she did. “I asked her to push me really, really, really hard, and she did, and I fell and I broke both my wrists. It was funny, but not at the time. At the time it hurt.”
It was a hard line for Terryl to draw—the line between support and engagement and going overboard—wanting so much to be involved and to let them have a childhood. Always there was the specter of what she’d missed. “I lived it every day,” she says, thinking back.
“The way I raised my children, I put a stop to domestic violence in my home. I put a stop to alcoholism in my home. I was a chain breaker, is the way I view it.”
THERE WAS ONE STEP
in particular she felt was essential in spurring her children to be engaged at home and in school. When Jayme was five years old and Taylor was three, Terryl cut the family’s cable TV service. Lots of families cut television when the kids are young, hoping to limit screen time. For Terryl, the step was substantive and symbolic; one of the few things she felt good about her own childhood—other than her devotion to the church and reading—was that she didn’t watch a lot of television. Her mom sent her and Michael out of the house, into the yard, which Terryl thought had less to do with any enlightened parenting philosophy and more to do with keeping Danny happy.
There was another motivator; Terryl remembered her mother-in-law, Alan’s mother, as someone who “didn’t get out of bed, because all she wanted to do was watch TV.”
“We were both greatly affected by parents who didn’t get involved,” Terryl says. “I just wasn’t going to plop them in front of the TV.”
TERRYL HADN’T LOOKED AT
the scientific research, but it was showing that television could have a powerful impact on the relationship between parents and their children. That’s because television plays to our attention systems in extraordinary ways, using light, sound, and story. The science explains why, for all the growth in our other gadgets, television remains the single most dominant form of media.
WHEN THE TELEVISION IS
on, parents and children disengage from one another. The parents, even if not instructed to watch television, talk less to their children and respond less to children’s inquiries and efforts to get attention, according to a summary published in 2009 by some of the field’s leading researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
In the study, parents interacted with their children 68 percent of the time when the television was off and 54 percent of the time when it was on. Further, the research showed, the “quality” of the interaction fell, too, with the parent less likely to be engaged or even look at the child when they do interact.
But so what? So what if parent-child interaction falls? Researchers said that when parents talk to their children less, engage less—in a nutshell, put their attention to the television not the children—it can eventually retard language development. As the 2009 study concluded: “The evidence is growing that very early exposure to television is associated with negative developmental outcomes.”
It also appears young children who watch television can experience shorter-term effects. In 2011,
Pediatrics
, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, published the results of a study that measured performance of four-year-olds on certain mental tasks after showing some of them nine-minute clips of a fast-paced cartoon,
SpongeBob SquarePants
, while showing other children either a slower-paced show or having them draw and not watch television at all.
The children who watched the fast-paced show were less able to follow directions and, in a separate set of tasks, showed less patience. These are “executive function” tasks, meaning they engage the prefrontal cortex, that all-important part of the brain involved in focus.
The researchers wrote that the toll taken on executive function came not just from the fast pace but perhaps from the fantastical nature of the cartoon, which gave the children’s brains a lot of information to digest, thus potentially depleting cognitive resources. The researchers wrote: “The result is consistent with others showing long-term negative associations between entertainment television and attention.” Among those studies, one published in
Pediatrics
in 2004 found that children who watch more television in their toddler years are significantly more likely to have attention problems by age seven.
There is another impact from high television use. Heavy television watching creates a sedentary lifestyle, less activity, more weight gain, even obesity. The weight gain comes not only as a result of the sedentary nature of television watching, or even chiefly because of it. Rather, it’s the advertisements for junk food, notes the Harvard School of Public Health in a health advisory titled “The Small Screen Looms Large in the Obesity Epidemic.”
“Increasingly, though, there’s evidence that watching TV—and, especially, watching junk food ads on TV—promotes obesity by changing mainly what and how much people eat, less so by changing how much they move.”
SO WHY IS TELEVISION
so alluring? The reasons are more complicated than meets the eye. They have to do with attention capture, and attention theory. One of the leading researchers in the field, who helped write the 2009 Amherst paper, is Daniel Anderson, a professor at UMass Amherst, and he’s anything but a purebred television antagonist. In fact, he’s consulted on numerous television shows, including
Sesame Street
,
Dora the Explorer,
and
Blue’s Clues
.
Dr. Anderson has concluded that television’s lure owes its powerful appeal to two parts of attention that often compete: the top-down system and the bottom-up system.
To recap: Top-down attention is the power people have to set goals and focus on them, while the bottom-up attention systems—very primitive systems—get captured by changes in light and sound and movement and, in effect, warn the top-down systems that there is a potentially relevant change to the environment, perhaps an opportunity or threat.
Dr. Anderson has found that babies mostly glance at television because of the bottom-up system—in other words, they are responding to changes in sound and light. “When there is a change, you want to find out what it is.”
Then, as early as 1.5 years old, children begin to process the information on the screen, and then a higher order of thinking gets involved, Dr. Anderson has found. They want to understand what’s happening on the screen. This begins the engagement of their top-down attention systems, as the children focus on what’s happening in the show—the content—rather than merely being drawn in by the lights and sounds.
This doesn’t make the changes in light and sound and movement irrelevant. In fact, what makes television so powerful, Dr. Anderson notes, is that it uses these attention-capture tools to constantly draw people back into the story, should their top-down focus waver. “Television always had that lower level working for it,” he says, noting the mix of top-down and bottom-up tools: “Well-produced television makes it a fairly seamless experience. You’re getting attention brought back to the screen in a way you don’t feel you’re being manipulated.”
Adding to the lure, he said, there is a concept of “attentional inertia,” which shows that the longer someone stays engaged with the television, the more likely that person is to have trouble pulling away. This is the case even when the television flashes to a commercial, Dr. Anderson explains, suggesting that the attention systems lock on even when the narrative isn’t engaging the top-down systems.
Dr. Anderson has worked on many of the most popular children’s shows, and is far less critical of television than some researchers. He thinks the right programming can be educational and informative. At the same time, he agrees there is reason to be wary of too much television viewing, largely in light of the opportunity costs. The more you watch television, the less you’re interacting with other people, talking to your parents, moving your body.
“It doesn’t make watching television bad for the kids,” he says, but adds: “There are probably a thousand better things to do any given time than watching any given television program.”
Television turns out to be powerful because it so effectively plays the top-down and bottom-up attention systems against each other. But that is mere child’s play compared to the way personal communications devices can commandeer those systems. Television, after all, has plots that, while interesting, are not personal. Sure, you care what happens in
Orange Is the New Black
or
The Real Housewives of New Jersey
. But your phone and computer are bringing you a plot that is about
your
life. Your top-down system is heavily invested, and it gets reinforced by the bottom-up pings alerting you to what are, in a sense, plot updates. And so, as powerful a draw as television remains, our modern devices command our attention like nothing before.
S
INCE REGGIE WAS A
kid, he’d had a few favorite passages from the Book of Mormon. After the accident, another passage spoke to him: “Therefore this life became a probationary state; a time to prepare to meet God; a time to prepare for that endless state which has been spoken of by us, which is after the resurrection of the dead.”
Throughout the spring, the family worked through a process that was both bureaucratic and spiritual, aimed at getting Reggie back on track for a mission. He had more than a few hurdles, given that he’d already returned home after lying to a bishop about his premarital sex. And now he had this amorphous, ominous, legal cloud.
In April, church leaders explained the steps he’d need to take. Among them was composing a letter about his interests and commitment. He wrote that the tests of the last year had brought him closer to God and to his religion; that he’d never wavered in his faith; and that, but for a few months where he’d been absent from prayer and the church, he’d found time to do his studying and reading.