#198. Parenting Children in the Digital Age

0:00I'm Stuart Keltor and this is Delving In. Today's guest, Jenny Rudesky, is a developmental behavioral pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, where she directs the Division of Developmental Pediatrics and runs a research laboratory focused on family media use, digital design and tech policy. She is also a co-medical director of the American Academy of Pediatric Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, an editor of the textbook, encounters with children in fifth edition. Today's interview will focus on her book, CoVritten with Megan Moreno, Connecting, Raising Kids in the Digital World to be published this October. So Jenny, welcome to Delving In. Thank you for having me here. I'm excited to talk about the book. So first of all, I want to commend you and Megan on your much needed book, Connecting,

1:00which tackles an area of concern not just for parents, but also for educators on society at large. It seems that parenting has become more and more difficult in this digital age and combating negative influences requires the parents develop extra savvy in order to steer their children through potential mind fields. Tell us about how you came to focus on this topic, not only in your medical practice, but also in your research as well as in the parenting of your own children. Yeah, I didn't plan to do research on families and technology originally. I was really interested in things like parent depression or child behavioral issues or family poverty and other stresses. But I graduated from medical school in 2007, which was the year that iPhone was invented. And I moved to Seattle to do my residency. I practiced there as a primary care doc for a year. And there was just a tech boom happening around me in the clinic with me. I saw these mobile devices now occupying a lot of spaces in families when it was disrupting

2:05some interactions. It was a source of joy and in other interactions. And I just felt, wow, this is going to be a game changer type of technology. We've never had little computers that we could carry around in our pockets that carry so much of our lives or take up so much of our mental bandwidth. And so when I went to fellowship at Boston Medical Center, where I learned a lot of clinical work around relational health, so parent child relationships, emotion regulation, how we parent, how we mess up sometimes and repair. I really was learning so much about how as parents, we can support healthy social and emotional development in kids. And then I was looking at, okay, how does tech get in the way? How do we have those processes? How can we use it at times to support those processes? And it really just then took off as an area because you also had the boom of Facebook and other social media platforms that kids and adults were using. You have YouTube occupying so much more of kids screen time.

3:10And now we have AI and it just won't stop. So I have felt this passion to both learn about how this tech is designed and try to demystify it for parents and help them guide their kids. It's really hard to abstain totally from technology. And I respect parents who say we're going to go totally screen free. That's totally fine. But there are healthy ways to use technology that Megan and I really wanted to help parents know. Like here are some of the really down to earth things you can do to support this being a positive force in your kids life and really be clear about the boundaries of what's off limits and what you need to be monitoring for if your kids are using things like social media. And then your own kids are teenagers at this point so you're very much in the thick of these issues. Oh my gosh, they've grown up like with me and my research and technology. When they were little, I was doing a lot of studying of what makes quality content in

4:10early childhood apps or YouTube videos. So I was living it, watching Daniel Tiger with them and singing songs with them at the same time that I would sometimes experiment on them. Actually, I'd like bring home a tablet from work and say, hey, play these games. Tell me what you think and watch them sometimes become terribly behaved or get really obsessed with something like in-game currency. I was really learning a lot about, wow, look at this mismatch between all these gimmicky ways that tech is designed to grab our attention and what a young kid needs. I know how hard it is to try to get my kids to sit down and read some books or just listen to music or be in board outside. And so I've really seen that tension continue into the teen years as they're so interested in communicating with their friends, having their phones, being able to do the developmental work of who am I, who are my people at the same time of wanting to protect them from

5:12a lot of forces online that are not looking out for their best interest. And so I tell a lot of those stories in the book partly to show, gosh, this is so hard, even I, this is all I think about all the time and I still struggle with this. And so if you are a parent who also struggles with it, congratulations. You are normal. You are like the rest of us. This is okay if you feel like a failure sometimes because we learn one attachment concept that I learned in fellowship is you learn through repair. You don't have to be perfect all the time. You should just strive to be like good enough for where you're like, I'm trying my best. I'm wondering how my kids are doing. I'm trying to connect with them. But I also am learning if things get messed up. We're going to learn from it together. We're not going to be ashamed or controlling or harsh when stuff. Certainly there need to be consequences if my son stayed out too late and didn't text us like he told us he would. We're going to have some limits on his use of the car next week.

6:16But those sorts of natural consequences and limits are very different from some of the high shame, high control around technology and media that currently I hear from parents. They're so anxious about it that they sometimes do too much to try to control what their kid is seeing. So I wonder if you sometimes run your own writing as and for this book with your kids to make sure that it resonates properly? Well, yes, I did run all of the anecdotes by them to say, are you okay with me sharing the fact that I'm talking about you being distracted on your school device and getting in trouble for it? Because I have tried to, as a parent, treat these moments as learning moments, almost with humor to be like, why are you so obsessed with Mr. Beast? Of course, the pandemic and being at school on a Chromebook during the pandemic was really hard for you. So you got very distracted with Mr. Beast. We still call that the Mr. Beast moment when my son became so obsessed with it that he

7:18hit a tablet in his room so he could wake up early to watch Mr. Beast videos. I use that as a teaching moment, everything's a teachable moment where I said, do you want to know why Mr. Beast is so addictive, like why he is so good at grabbing our attention and holding on to it? Let's unpack that a little bit. He figures out how to grab a 10 year old boy's attraction to money, to dangerous stunts, to all of these outrageous things, like huge yachts and helicopters and endless amounts of pizza. And of course, he knows how to dangle things in front of you that you can't resist. And that's my goal was to go to my kids and say, can I tell some of the stories of ways that we've had some mess ups and repairs in order for other families to feel like they can go through this too? And they were totally on board with that because they're not ashamed of those moments. Filly minor and fractions, it sounds like.

8:19Yeah, there are certain things that I think, and we go through in the book, that are higher stakes issues, like being contacted by a predator or a stranger online, where you can have some really upsetting bullying or sex torsion interactions. And so we also draw some clear lines for families, okay, if your kid is interested in a video game where they can chat, then you should make sure the number one, the chat should be turned off. So they're not chatting during the game, or you can with parental controls make it so they only chat with people they know in real life. Or when they get their first phone, make sure you are approving all the contacts that they can chat with and text with. So monitoring and navigating who can contact your kid online is one of those higher stakes moments where I want parents to put more energy into being very firm about that.

9:22And then also if your kid has a mess up where they're too distracted at school or they binge on a certain YouTuber, make it a growth moment where you help them reflect on why that got out of control. And a lot of it's not their fault, a lot of it is the tech design. So there's a lot of advice in the book, which makes sense is published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, so you'd expect that. But in addition to the specific advice and there's a lot of it, it's way too much to cover it an hour. I want to talk about the title of the book, which I think really encapsulates the overriding message of the book, which otherwise might seem like an overwhelming amount of detailed information. If parents really dedicate themselves to connecting with their children, then the challenges, the dilemmas and temptations of the digital world becomes an engaging topic for discussion, guidance and growth. And I was impressed by the measured reassuring and optimistic tone of the book, conveying that parents really can navigate the barrage of potentially negative influences flowing like a mighty river from the internet into otherwise unwary young minds.

10:26With the help of books like this one, parents might still be paddling upstream, but at least they'll have a good paddle. Oh, I love that. Yeah, that's a great interpretation of what we were trying to do for a few reasons. One is that there's so much research evidence that the number one thing that supports youth mental health is a positive caregiver child relationship. If you are a parent or an odds or an uncle or a grandparent, if you create the space to listen to kids, to wonder about what's going on with them emotionally or mentally, to connect with their motivations and drives, and also to likely challenge them when you have to meet them on their level to be able to say, isn't this the coolest guy ever? Tell me about some other people that you really admire for their strength or their kindness. You can help them see things in a slightly different light, but not if you act from top

11:27down, not if you're like that. I'm in charge. You're doing this wrong. You're addicted to your phone type of role modeling. We have lots of these, what we call the goofus and galant comics in the dark. Those are from highlights for children and they were like, you could do it this way and it's like the rude or messed up way and you could do it this way. It's more of the positive pro-social way. I love the book, how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk. It has lots of comics that show you as a parent. Okay, you're instinct because you're anxious or you're worried about something, your instinct might be to come in hot, to be judgmental, to try to control things, but that, especially with teenagers may lead to them shutting down and then not trusting that you're there to listen to them. That's a big danger. Any even bigger danger is the temptation to let media be the babysitter and to become

12:32relatively neglectful emotionally just to not be there and not have these conversations in the first place because the kids are occupied. Yeah, and that's been a core aspect of my work is looking at how media becomes an emotion regulation tool, an emotional distancer where we, something feels like it's too much. And so we try to extinguish that feeling or escape from it through looking at a feed or getting distracted and we do the same thing to our kids. We see parents often report that if their child is showing really intense emotional behavior, really hard to control or hard to manage behavior, the phone sometimes becomes the only way they've learned how to get them to settle down or to listen or to sit and eat a meal or how to fall asleep. So we really wanted to point that out to parents, hey, tech is becoming this emotional tool that is getting in the way of other skill building opportunities that you could be

13:34doing that now those skill building opportunities they take longer and more practice. But I as a clinician, I've seen just hundreds of families when they put their minds to it and they get the right therapy support. They really do grow in ways that help them learn more adaptive and skilled emotional strategies. And they are able to say we're not going to use tech as much as this regular tool that keeps everyone quiet and makes us more conflict, but it's this big disconnector in our family. And so that's why the title really is both about the emotional connection or disconnection that can come from technology and just the pun of connecting online. I wanted to take it back from Mark Zuckerberg who always talks about how Facebook is supposed to be this great connector of the world. When you're just connecting through an online platform, that's not the same thing as sitting

14:35and holding someone's hand or seeing their facial expression or laughing together. There was a story in the times, just this morning about a lawsuit against meta succeeding if $15 billion dollars, I think something like that. Yeah, and so that is unfortunately not surprising because a lot of the designs that have been rolled out by big platforms like meta have been really prioritizing their profits and engagement over the well-being of young people. And so a lot of times in the book, I will point out where there are mismatches between tech that really wants our attention and what kids actually need. And so you might have a social media platform that pings kids throughout their school day with updates or with notifications or, oh, a live stream is starting. That's ridiculous. Kids are in school. Their minds deserve to be able to focus on the academic and the social stuff around them.

15:40And I think often we blame ourselves for having problematic relationships with technology when actually so much of it is baked into the design because that's how they keep us on longer and make more money off of us. So on the very first page, the book says, screen time doesn't occur in a vacuum, meaning that the family culture sets the stage for how issues of screen time and screen use get addressed. Give us a sense of possible family cultures, including those that successfully navigate digital issues and those that don't. And I use the plural here because I agree with you that there is more than one way to successfully parent and that it is counterproductive to try to be the perfect parent. Parents feel more reassured when they can be part of a certain screen free camp of parents. And I as a developmental pediatrician, I see kids are so individual, parents are so individual that the idea of fitting all kids into one overarching parenting response, like that's never worked for my patients.

16:41When my patients come in and say, everyone's telling me to do a time out with my kid who has ADHD or autism and they're like, time outs make things worse. I feel like a bad parent because everyone's telling me, this is the gold star answer to this parenting problem and it's not working for me. It must be something wrong with me. So we really make the statement of there are many ways to do this, right? The key ingredients are understanding your child. So we talk about these attachment concepts like being mind-minded where you're not just stuck in your own head and worries, you're actually wondering, hmm, what's going on in my kid's head? What's driving that difficult behavior? And then you are trying to scaffold rather than control. So scaffolding means I'm not going to micromanage you and I'm not going to be totally hands-off and aloof. And so this gets at your question about family cultures. So if your family's usual communication style is very reactive towards each other, critical

17:47of each other, trying to control what each other do and when there's a perceived slight, there's a big yelling emotional reaction or a big storming off or slamming something. Those types of, if we thought about it in terms of the parenting styles, there's like permissive authoritarian, authoritative and neglectful, I guess is the last one I don't love that term, but they're all a combination of warmth and limits. So if you have high limits but low warmth, a parent who's constantly trying to control everything and is reacting strongly to their children's tests for independence, that's often a family that's going to have more media conflicts, more screen time conflicts, parents are trying to control it and kids are sneaking. Kids have this natural drive to want to connect with their friends and so if a parent reacts to a problem by saying, I'm taking away your phone for a week, we've seen kids make

18:52suicidal statements or even attempts after their phone is taken away because it's this big extreme reaction on the part of the parent, I'm so angry, I'm just going to shut this all down and then the child doesn't know how to cope with that and then feels disconnected from their peer group. So those sorts of big reactions, all or nothing strict responses do not support either healthy emotional development or healthy phone balance. At the same time, you can also have a very permissive or I'm just too overwhelmed by all this and I can't even deal with it, let's let everything loose, kids can play whatever they want, there's just going to be phones and devices in every bedroom, everyone's going to have a video game console, they choose whatever they want to watch, we're all on our devices in parallel during dinner or during family time. That sort of more permissive, like anything goes approach, also can become a real disconnecter.

19:57You may be very warm and loving to your kids but there's just not a lot of time to show it because you're all in your own feed. Then the danger is to actually do both alternating between the two, becoming too permissive and so things get out of control and then coming down to heavily and then that creates a kind of a rift and then going back to more neglectful approach and going back and forth, back and forth. Yeah, and that sort of inconsistency also is very destabilizing for kids who are like what are the rules then and why are you on your device so much when I'm not supposed to be. Part of the key there is building some insight into why am I so sucked into my phone, why is it my habit that as soon as I get home after a stressful day I pick up my phone and just want to scroll rather than like sitting on the porch with my kid and telling some jokes or reading a book together. When you find a replacement activity that meets that same purpose, so the function of

21:00swiping and scrolling at the end of the day is why you need a brain break. You're tired, your brain is full, you just want a little escape, you want some meantime. We encourage families to build some insight into where your habits came from and then also find an alternative where you could say I'd rather snuggle and read a book with my kid or maybe I will make myself a cup of tea and put on some good music for my own teenage years where you can still meet that emotional need you have but you're not, I see it two ways. You're not letting the tech companies make money off of your exhaustion and your emotion does regulation on the one hand and you're not distracting yourself from your inner states that maybe needs a little bit more nurturing than just distraction. And the third thing I'll say is that an algorithmic feed can always deliver a surprise. You might think you're going on there for some laughs or some funny golden retriever videos

22:01but then you might see something terrible about a war or about a new scandal and it might trigger you to be more dysregulated than when you started. And so it's always good to really encouraging parents to pick up reading. Find some like shallow fun book or a magnet Indian or something else go back to spinning some records or when old DVD or something else that's long form old school media that doesn't have this algorithmic competition for attention and it might be more of a relaxing media experience. So it can't be overemphasized enough that helping children navigate the digital world as with any aspect of parenting requires providing a sufficient amount of undivided attention which is the very thing that digital media has been undermining for years now. So parents have to be clear about their own use of digital media as well as avoiding the temptation of allowing the children to occupy themselves with digital media for hours at a time. It would seem that combating the societal trend would require enlightened political leadership

23:06and a massive media campaign much like the television messages against smoking starting in the late 1960s. Do you have any inklings that such a campaign could actually happen? I've heard that idea from different philanthropic groups that want there to be this kind of big wake up for families to understand what's going on here but no specific action in that area. I think the biggest culture shift that happened after the anxious generation, John Heitz book was released was people started talking about it at least. That book suggested for very big high level changes, phones out of schools, better regulation, like delaying smartphones and social media I think and more offline play. Now those were very high level concepts. I felt like that book really got people's attention and I'll give them credit for that but it didn't give parents a lot of the on the ground advice on what to actually do,

24:08how to parent around media and it ignored this emotional role of media and the parent child relationship part of it. So that's where I hope our book builds upon it. And so I'd say that the biggest kind of sweeping changes that we've seen have really been in schools where families inspired by that book have gone and advocated for no phones in schools or restricted amounts of access to your device in school or less ed tech in schools. I think that still does not address this underlying emotional driver and insight into how tech affects our relationships. And so I would love to think about ways to do that. I don't know if you've ever seen this but Cominzen's media did this brief ad campaign about 10 or 15 years ago with Will Ferrell pretending to be a distracted dad at the dinner

25:08table. It was called the device free dinner campaign and Will Ferrell is so good at just being an idiot. And so he was like, look I made my face have a cat filter and he's like scrolling and the kids are like I'm selling meth out of the garage and he's like that's great darling. He's clearly ignoring or not really processing everything his kids are telling him and they're trying to increasingly get his attention through saying ridiculous things. So it was such a nice depiction of how phones can wedge between us and especially meal times carry so much meaning for families as a time at the end of the day to all just be together, understand how your day went, learn about what your kids are facing in school. So that's a recommendation is to have family dinners, right? Yes, yes, yes, but I really wish that we could get another campaign like that for because we need to make people laugh as part of their insight into this.

26:11What I hear over and over is parents don't want to be told that they're a bad parent and be made to feel guilty about this topic because it shuts them down. It leads to more paralysis and not feeling like you can take action. Whereas if you show how ridiculous something is and give people some really concrete advice on what to do instead, that's where I think we're going to see more collective action here. I'm also curious after these big social media trials, whether that spurs any sort of action to say you know what we all need to use these products less, they're not being run in ethical ways. We could all benefit from stopping or scrolling and moving over into more human activities that keep us resilient in the age of AI. And I think there's a lot of activities we talk about in this book that actually can help raise kids who think for themselves, know who they are, be more flexible, love just having

27:15awe and creativity. And so I think those are going to be even more important skills as kids are entering a workforce and a life that is more and more embedded with AI. I think the common fear is that media is a kind of sorcerer, as apprentice, kind of phenomenon that it's just good. It's out of control and gets bigger and bigger and bigger and you can't put it back in the box. Back to your question about thoughtful regulation. That's something that unfortunately we just haven't seen in the US. We've gotten a few piecemeal things passed in states or things like the Take It Down Act which focuses on deep fakes and sexual imagery. But we have no standards about safety by design, privacy by design or the types of ways that tech companies need to care about what impact they're having on youth. Now these exist in the European Union, in the UK, in Australia and other countries.

28:17A lot of those countries are now passing social media minimum age laws to try to keep younger teens off of social media. But they do that on top of a framework for actually keeping tech companies accountable. The European Union sued TikTok and Instagram for having addictive design features that kept kids on longer, disrupted them during school hours, disrupted them during sleep hours. I used to work for the Federal Trade Commission part-time, actually helping teams with cases, legal teams, where I was more the expert on where does design cross the line into being manipulative or unfair in video games or in online platforms. So I do think that regulation is a really, really important component to keep tech products safe and accountable. And right now there's none of that for AI, which just keeps kind of barreling along even

29:20though a lot of people are not really wanting that. So another recurrent threat in the book is the enormous importance of teaching one's children to recognize the pervasiveness of manipulation on the internet, usually but not limited to the profit motive. Companies appeal to the basis instincts, including lust, envy, fomov, which is fear of missing out, violence and what have you, anything to grab the attention of the viewer and using so-called clickbait to keep it as long as possible. You might say that children need to learn to question the motives of what's behind the information on the internet and build a mental wall against negative influences as well as against dangerous requests for personal information. And again, the most effective way for parents to do this is by talking with their children about it, not by delivering a lecture, but by exploring and analyzing the internet together. Such discussions would likely be engaging and rewarding rather than dreaded or boring. At what age kind of parents start inculcating this kind of protective skepticism and are

30:21there graduated stages involved? I think you're tapping into the fact we take a very developmental lens in the book because you can't parent effectively around media unless you understand a little bit about what's happening at different developmental stages. And we really wanted to make sure this book both contained tips around media, but also just tips around child development and parenting as a whole, because they're so intertwined. In early childhood, you can start simply by having a role modeling of a healthy relationship with a device, because even infants and toddlers are learning through what's called informal learning. They are watching us and absorbing what they see and then they're building mental models of what's normal, what's expected. So if they see you as every moment of boredom or downtime is you scrolling, they'll start to see that as the normal way that you pass downtime.

31:22And as parents of kids, we often want our kids to be able to tolerate some boredom, be able to wait in line, be able to sit still and listen to their teacher, talking to them. And so if we are role modeling and then giving kids devices during all of these down times, we're not teaching those self-regulation skills. And so even though this isn't necessarily tied to this critical thinking that you're talking about, it is an informal way of teaching kids that these devices should have a time and a place. They shouldn't be attached to us and occupying our attention all the time. That sort of critical resistance and modeling that to our kids is actually really important in early childhood. And then has the added bonus of it's not going to be interrupting as much of your playtime or your talking time with them. And you can even say out loud, okay, I'm just going to text dad to pick up something before coming home or I'm just going to talk a little bit with Antara because we're going to, we're planning something for this weekend.

32:23So no, it's modeling a kind of moderation. Yeah. And you're also letting them know what should this technology be used for? That's one part of digital literacy of how should I use these products. And then when kids get into the school age, so more seven or eight and older, they start to be more logical and they can understand more rules like safety rules. Don't give out your name or your address. Don't be mean to other people online. Here's what you're allowed to access. Here's what you're not. And you can start to ask kids questions like, okay, you watch a lot of Netflix and Netflix has a recommender feed that sends you certain things based on what you watched. That's one way to teach them about an algorithm to say, what do you think Netflix knows about you? Does it know you are a boy or a girl? Does it know that you like dinosaurs or rabbits that you can build a little literacy there about how algorithms work?

33:24And then advertising, it's everywhere. You might as well comment on it when you see it with younger kids to say, oh, look, I got an ad for face cream. They must know that I'm a 49 year old mom who's starting to get wrinkles and show the way targeting and that sort of manipulation might work. So would it be too harsh to want to help your child be a little bit cynical? I think cynicism is fine. I think especially what's been hard doing research on media for the past 15 years, I am worried that the internet is getting worse. It's not regulated. And there are more and more terrible things that I hear about online with violent online communities and the way that social media platforms have behaved, even though they knew that kids were struggling with over using their products, it does make me want to teach a little baseline skepticism to say, hey, any product that is free just wants your time

34:28and attention. You want you to watch the mad. That's a pretty basic rule you can start with. Another thing that's basic, which is I would think difficult for parents to communicate to their kids, is that there's something about human nature that's attracted to really awful stuff. And don't let that be fanned into bigger than it needs to be. The internet is capable of making the kind of the worst of us bigger. Totally. And this is how algorithms can amplify this tiny morbid curiosity into something that actually becomes harmful. In the book, we get into the fact that developmentally, we expect that kids in their teen years want to start to take some risks. They want to have a little bit of an edgy experience of doing things that are a little bit outside their comfort zone, because that's how they learn what can I manage on my own. How do they start separating from us as their parents so they can become their own individual?

35:31So we preface this risk-taking and curious behavior as developmentally expected so that you can say, this is what you need to watch out for. Kids are going to be curious about sex. They're going to be curious about violence or manosphere stuff that taps into some of their insecurities or their morbid curiosities. And how do you help them find a different outlet for whatever drive? They're dealing with. So we talk about risk-taking kids who are very sensation-seeking, find them a skate park, find them a climbing gym, do escape rooms with them, do stuff that is going to feed that interest but in real life rather than them seeking all that out on the internet. Because it's just going to balloon into something harmful on the internet, whereas at least in real life and with peers, you can have a little bit more of a lot of sight into it and your kid gets more out of the experience of a challenge of learning with skateboard and falling and

36:38getting back up again and doing it over and over. That's much more helpful to their sense of self and their emotional skills than watching someone else do all those tricks. So I'm wondering about gender differences regarding media preferences. I would think that girls might be more prone to time consuming and attention-splintering individual and group texting, which isn't to say the boys not to the two. The girls probably do more. Whereas boys might be more attracted to exciting but vacuous and that's the judgement value judge on their shooter games. How might parents manage each of these? Yeah, that is supported by the research that across the whole population, there are some gender differences in girls doing a little bit more of the social connection type of media use and boys doing more video gaming. My advice is figure out who is your individual kid. Some of their interests may travel along those gendered lines and you, if you are a mom or

37:40a dad, may have experienced some of that yourself. So be curious about what it feels like to be your kid in the world and how their experience of being a boy or a girl is affecting both what media they like, what media role models or terrible role-bad role models they are seeing online and unpack that with them. Because one thing we've seen since the days of TV is you can get stereotypes. You can get gender stereotypes with the Ditsy Blonde or the hyper-masculine, broy guy. And that is even more on social media where you get now all of this like plastic surgery, beautification stuff being fed to girls and all that. And man of spear, I'm so tough like Jim bro. It's kind of amplification of what used to be in the comic books and Mr. Radles. It is, but comic books still had an editor and a publishing company that needed to agree.

38:43They were somewhat of a filter. Now everyone self-publishes whatever they want on social media. And as long as it doesn't violate terrible policy terms from the companies, anything can get posted online and anything can trend. We have found that the things that trend, for example, there have been studies on dangerous challenges that the dangerous unsafe challenges like the choking game or the tight-pod challenge they trend much faster than the healthier challenges like the ice bucket challenge where you're like doing ice bucket pranks or tricks for charity. And those trend because they appeal to teenagers like risk-ticking or sensation-seeking or oh my gosh, that's such a tough guy thing to do or everyone's doing it and my peers just sent me this. So maybe it's cool. And there's been some effort by the platforms to try to stop those from trending before

39:47they can get out of hand, but there still are plenty of bad ideas trending on the internet and on social media. So one that kind of inoculation you can even do with your kids that helped build that skepticism early on is to say, listen, there is high quality media out there. There's beautiful movies. There's great storytelling. There's hilarious sitcoms. And then there's a bunch of kind of trashy stuff. Junk, brain rot. The stuff that anyone posts and they're just hoping it grabs attention and goes viral. You're hoping that parents can develop a more sophisticated and more refined taste in their digital media. Yeah, I do struggle with. I know that I'm a film buff. I love the fact that my teenagers love watching Dune with me or Star Wars or we like watching the Oscar movies when they come out. I love a good sitcom like The Office.

40:48I really enjoy that they enjoy these longer form types of media that have great human script writers that have great acting and role models. We watched the pit together last year and it created so many interesting conversations that I never knew I needed to have with my kids or I wanted to. I just didn't know the words to say. But then when we saw actors portray it, I could talk about overdoses from street drugs or other things that I wanted my kids to know about. So I definitely recommend and we have lists of movies in some of the book to say, even watch these movies about the internet, like Ready Player One or the social dilemma, watch these with your kids and talk about it because it's one easier way to build a little bit of that critical thinking. And then the other key to this though is don't watch it with them and be like, see, I told you, this is all terrible.

41:50No, actually pause and say, what do you think? That was pretty crazy. I reacted this way. What was your reaction to that? What did it make you think of? And monitor, watch and observe, put your own phone away and see, like, how did my kid react to that? And so I don't want to call it just taste. I want to call it design that respects our time and our intelligence. I love beautiful storytelling. I know what brain rot is. Don't even pay attention to it because then you are doing exactly what they want. Yeah, I only use the word taste because one would hope that your child would develop a preference for the better stuff. Here's a thing is if you start off early with the worst content, it's what your kid gets used to. So if you start off on YouTube early with all this flashy stuff that's really attention grabbing and very what I call high pleasure low friction, I'm going to watch everyone else unboxing toys.

42:51I'm going to watch all these cartoon characters just eating ice cream and having birthday parties. There's no substance. There's a lot of fluff, but kids could watch that for hours and you as a parent are like, oh, it looks good enough. I'm going to do my remote work or I'm going to do the dishes and they look fine. So I really encourage parents start with the higher quality content early. I mentioned PBS kids in Sesame Street. I don't know how many times in the book because I'm like, they are actually doing the work of having teams of developmental psychologists. They work with families to make sure that the content is landing the right way and is actually teaching kids. A lot of parents I hear are actually like going retro with their kids media because they're like, I'm going to have them watch Little Bear from Marie Sendak. Or Mr. Rogers. Exactly. Or some old Sesame Street skits that we watched because they are slower paced. They are not part of the attention economy.

43:51Isn't that ironic that Sesame Street would be considered slower paced? It was criticized at the time for being faster, but teachers were really upset with Sesame Street because they felt they couldn't compete that they weren't interesting enough compared to Sesame Street. I know, but I guess there is definitely a difference in things like the frame rate, like how much the frame cuts shift or how much different, what we call bells and whistles are all over the screen that naturally capture kids' attention. So that's one piece of advice I have for parents is don't let your kids watch shorts or reels or the other little, the next video, next video because that's what their brain will get used to and they're going to wilt it. So let's move now to talking about some of the really difficult potential problems the internet can bring such a cyber bullying. It's difficult to stop and the potential hurt is enormous. It may be possible, for instance, to warrant teenagers to absolutely never share a nude picture of themselves with anyone lest it be reposted, but that only protects against

44:54real such photos, not deep fakes, which substitutes the targeted child's face on the photo of a different person's body. If this happens to a family you're working with, what advice do you give for getting through this awful situation? So I give advice preventatively that when kids are starting a social media or getting their first phone is to not make their profile public because a public social media profile does lead to more bullying because you're just in contact with more people and to check in regularly on how's that group chat going or is anyone being mean to anyone else? Let them know bullying happens, kids do it because they're impulsive and they do it because they don't see that other kids face right in front of them like they do in school. So it's easier to just send off a rude text or something else that puts someone else down. So helping them build some emotional skills around recognizing bullying or the way people trash talk with each other and then helping them either say, I'm going to take a break

45:58from that group chat or I'm going to stand up to that kid or I'm going to support the kid that just got trashed on so there's smaller things you can do to help a kid navigate the little bumps and many bullying experiences that they might see online and experience online. Then when you get to the big where I've worked with families where someone is going after their kid through Snapchat or Instagram and in person at school, I recommend that they take a break. We go through this in the book of taking screenshots of what has happened, talking to the school if it happened on school premises, really being open listening ears for your kid. Bullying and cyber bullying are so shameful to teenagers and kids because what matters to teens, your friends' opinions of you, belonging and bullying is ostracism. It is someone telling you, you are terrible.

46:59You don't belong. It really hurts to the core of a kid. Don't blow it off and say, this seems really hard. I'm here for you to talk to and just create that space and it may not be face to face like that may be hard for kids but drives, walk the dog together, maybe watch a movie or something that might have some bullying themes in it to help open up the conversation. Something with moods or sex torsion is you just want your kid to know you can come to me about anything. Even if it's hard, we will get through it together. There might be some consequences but what the kid really needs to know is you're not going to blow up at them and double down their shame because they already feel terrible. I had this happen to one of my patients who thought he was chatting with a cute girl on a social media site and then they gave him a link to go to telegram and he went there thinking he was going to share some moods with a cute girl and it turned out to be a sex

48:03torsion event. He came to his mom and she did an awesome job. She just was like, tell me what happened. I'm here to help you. Do we need to call the cops? We're going to take our screenshots. We're going to help investigate this. We can talk about how this feels to you but I'm here by your side. I'm here to help you. It was a pretty stressful event for him. It did have some longer lasting ramifications for him where he struggled more emotionally in the months to come. That's where the important of prevention and teaching your kids do not click on links that anyone sends you. Do not believe that someone's a girl when they ask for nudes if you don't know them online. Even if you do. True. Nudes, they can travel so fast. The last thing you want is that circulating around your school. My older son said, I'd rather just have that all in person. He said something really funny back to me where I was like, don't do all that new stuff

49:05online. He was like, yeah, great. What's the point? I'd rather it all be in person. I think we have time maybe for just one more question. Another really interesting chapter was about paris social relationships, which is defined as an imagined one-sided connection in which a person developed a strong sense that they know or have a bond with a media figure such as a fictional character, an influencer, or a celebrity, which produces a bond without any actual reciprocity. While this may sound unhealthy, it's actually quite normal for a two-year-old to bond this way with Sesame Street's Elmo, or a third grader with Spider-Man, or a teenager with Taylor's Swift. Where it gets dicey is when the power of relationship is with an influencer who uses his or her massive popularity to manipulate their following. What specifically is the danger? I think the danger is that you use the power of this relationship to manipulate and to coerce or gently nudge even someone who trusts you to do something that benefits you as

50:08the influencer, or in the case of the app examples. In my research, we have found that strawberry shortcake or Barbie has in their apps. We know kids love some of their characters that they feel very close with, but they would say things like, oh, I really want you to bake the cake with the blueberry flavoring, but the blueberry flavoring is locked, and you have to spend $1.99 to unlock it. Then strawberry shortcake is, oh, no, you didn't make what I wanted. You can eat it, and we were like, that is shaming and inappropriate in order to try to get an in-app purchase from a kid. In the case of teens, part of it is if you have a following and people love you, and then you're like, oh, you should try this diet fad. You should try this new cosmetic. You should try all these things that they have really strong influence over their followers who have what's called parasocial, wishful identification.

51:09If you remember back to your teenage years, if you have a certain sports star or celebrity that you were like, oh, I just want to be just like them, you might follow their advice. I want to get those shoes that they're wearing, or I want to use their makeup. That's the concern is that if an influencer is not honest about the fact that, oh, I made money in order to tell you that you should buy this cosmetic that's dishonest, and so that could be a way to convince kids that they should buy a product. That's a financial harm that you're wasting money on a product. There was actually just a study that found that kids who follow lots of influencers online and use lots of cosmetics have actually more dangerous chemicals absorbed through their skin, and they're exposed to thalates and other sorts of unhealthy endocrine disruptors that enough is a secondary reason. Don't waste the money. Don't have the chemical exposure. And then lastly, I don't like the fact that influencers promise teens are insecure.

52:15And so they go to an influencer for all the answers and to be like, oh, if you just do this, you'll get really strong or get really beautiful. I don't want kids to have to think they need to follow some influencers advice or use some sort of brand in order to feel whole and worthwhile and good about themselves. I feel like there's often a lot of commercialization in the US where we try to just have certain brands or certain ways that we express ourselves that are a little inauthentic because we just rely on, I have this type of bag or I have this type of jewelry on or other things that kind of cover up for the uncertainties we may have on the inside. And of course, some of the influencing is not necessarily explicit. It could be implicit. You should look like me. You should be dissatisfied with your body. You should be dissatisfied with this or that without having necessarily to say it can be quite sophisticated. I worked with kids at a summer camp one summer who were as young as eight or ten who were

53:15saying like, I want to look like that. I want to have all that money. Why can't I fly in a private jet? Why can't I have a Lamborghini? And so they get this feeling of being less than because they're seeing all of this wealth and perfection online and they don't realize this is all a performance and they are more likely to say, why can't I afford new shoes or why can't I have all this stuff that seems to make this person so happy? And then it gets amplified in social media where people post only pictures of themselves as happy and beautiful looking. It gets amplified and amplified and amplified. So if we teach kids, all right, you may go online and you may see that there's people doing more or better stuff than you. Just know that that's a natural response that you're going to feel this social comparison. And if you can be aware of it, I always feel like if you can name it, you can tame it. If you can like be aware of it, you may not be as susceptible to its influence.

54:18So it sounds like you're not recommending the back to the future solution, which is just to go back and just not have the internet occur in the first place. I think that there's some degree of, wow, this has moved so fast, so commercialized. In many ways, the internet has done amazing things for hospitals and health care and for patients to access their medical records. It has done really incredible things at universities, but the social media and social gaming and the ability for anyone in the world to access our kids is the part there hasn't been enough care taken to make sure that these online spaces are safe or created in a way that aligns with what our kids need. So I have always advocated for regulation and better guardrails on things. I also think it's fine if families want to talk about, what was it like to grow up in the 80s or 90s?

55:20What did it feel like if you didn't have email yet? How did it feel to not have streaming video and you had to wait for something to show a, I remember we didn't have a cable as kids, so we would wait for the channel 11 movies. Yeah, those days they were seeding into the past. They were fewer and fewer people even remember that. Anyway, unfortunately we're at a time, but I just wanted to mention that the book connecting raising kids in the digital world, which is what we've been talking about, is just chock full of interesting advice and information about these topics, as well as resources to find on the internet about each of these topics at the end of each chapter. So thank you so much for coming out to Delving in, Jenny Rideski, a developmental behavioral pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan. Thank you so much for coming out to Delving in. Thank you, Stuart. I really appreciate it. You have been listening to the podcast edition of Delving in with Stuart Keltor, originally broadcast on KTALLP, the community radio station in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

56:23Please visit our website, lccommunityradio.org, and see what KTAL has to offer. We appreciate listener donations to help us stay on the air. Please send comments and questions about this and any other episode of Delving in to Stuart Keltor that's STU-ART-K-E-L-T-E-R at protonmail.com.