I sent this link to my own teens

Troubling research findings reported by AFP: TV and video games increase teen depression risk.

Key points:

"Time spent engaging with electronic media may replace time that could be spent on social, athletic or intellectual activities that could guard against depression. ... Being exposed to media at night may also disrupt sleep important for emotional and cognitive development."

I'm not one of those people who believes today's young people have been dumbed down or made unproductive by media saturation, or spoiled by common access to privileges we considered unattainable in my middle-class, small-town childhood. Young people today are smarter and more worldly than we were.

I do believe, however, that today's accelerating access to all kinds of rapid, concurrent stimuli may adversely affect the attention spans and social engagement of some young people. And I have seen, in experience with my own extended and blended family, young people who seem nonplussed by things I would have found fascinating or compelling as a kid: mountain ranges, the ocean, large aircraft and spacecraft, travel to exotic places, taking a first date to a movie, or spotting famous people in an airport or restaurant.

I don't know why. But when I see parents flip on the back-seat DVD player to keep the kids quiet just long enough to drive two miles to the supermarket, or see kids tagging along with Mom at Target with their heads buried in Nintendo DS games, bumping into passers-by because they can't be bothered to look up -- well, my non-sociologist brain says those may be clues. What do you think?