Are Classroom Screens Helping Kids Learn, or Quietly Working Against Their Brains? with Neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath (#257)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Are Classroom Screens Helping Kids Learn, or Quietly Working Against Their Brains?

ScreenStrong Families Podcast #257
Host: Melanie Hempe, BSN
Guest: Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath (Neuroscientist, Author of The Digital Delusion)
Date: March 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

This powerful episode explores whether classroom screens and digital learning tools truly enhance student learning or undermine it at a neurological level. Host Melanie Hempe and neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath discuss the widespread adoption of educational technology (edtech) post-pandemic, bust myths about edtech’s effectiveness, dig into the neuroscientific reasons why analog (paper-based) methods work better for developing minds, and outline practical steps parents can take to protect their children from the risks of screen-based learning—including future addiction pathways. The tone is frank, science-based, and incredibly actionable, with both speakers drawing on professional and personal experience.

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Guest Introduction and Motivation

• Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s background
  • Former teacher turned neuroscientist, passionate about understanding how people learn and applying this to education.

    “Teaching is my passion. But I started studying neuroscience, thinking that if I understood how human beings learn better and how the brain works, that's going to make me a better teacher.” (00:47, Horvath)

  • Author of The Digital Delusion, inspired by the abrupt and lasting digital shift in education after COVID.
  • Concerned about the loss of traditional, analog teaching and how tech-heavy schools are impacting both students and future teachers.
• Melanie Hempe’s Motivation
  • Shares personal family story: her son’s video game addiction was triggered by receiving a school-issued laptop; ScreenStrong was born from this crisis.
  • Positions herself as “a lifeline” for parents feeling overwhelmed and marginalized by dominant tech-positive narratives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Five Myths of EdTech [05:28]

Dr. Horvath breaks down the pervasive myths driving tech adoption in schools:

• Myth 1: “Education is broken and tech will fix it.”

  • In reality, educational outcomes were at historical highs before widespread edtech adoption.

    “We were at the golden age of education.” (06:38, Horvath)

• Myth 2: “Engagement equals learning.”

  • Edtech often confuses flashy engagement with actual learning; “bubbles and whistles” waste time without improving retention.

    "People will spend years doing their streaks on Duolingo... but you learned more in half the time on Babel than you did on Duolingo. That extra engagement was doing nothing but waste your time." (07:46, Horvath)

• Myth 3–5: “Learner Knows Best” (Agency, Choice, and Autonomy)

  • Children are seen as “mini-adults,” when in fact, they lack the expertise to guide their own learning.
  • Edtech’s claims that personalization replaces expert instruction have actually led to worse outcomes.

    “They look like they’re flying on these machines, but they’re just good users of it. As soon as the machine breaks… they’re back to square one.” (09:56, Horvath)

2. The Data: Does EdTech Actually Improve Learning? [11:56]

• Absence of Evidence Before Implementation
  • Tech was widely adopted without rigorous research, reversing the burden of proof:

    “Where else in the world can someone invent something and we immediately are like, cool, let's use that. Imagine I invented a new drug... Edtech in a nutshell.” (11:56, Horvath)

• Global and Longitudinal Findings
  • Across 91 countries, more school tech use correlates directly with declining achievement in math, reading, and science.
  • Peak achievement occurred in schools with little or no classroom tech.
• Effect Size Explained
  • Edtech touts a positive effect size of +0.29, but in educational research, benefit starts at +0.42—meaning tech actually hurts learning.

    “They were giving us the data for 60 years showing us we were making learning worse than analog methods.” (14:59, Horvath)

• Concrete Examples
  • Reading and writing are both more effective on paper than on screen.

3. The Neuroscience: What the Brain Needs to Learn [19:04]

Three Essential Mechanisms

• Attention

  • Sustained, focused attention is critical—multitasking (which screens promote) cripples memory and comprehension.

    “The worst thing you can do for learning and memory is multitasking... Your kid is a master of one thing, multitasking, which is the one thing you can’t do if I also want you learning.” (19:04, Horvath)

• Empathy

  • Deep learning is driven by the synchrony between teacher and student—something screens can’t replicate.

    “Empathy is what's called a transpersonal emergent property.... You can't resonate with a screen because there's nothing to resonate with.” (21:17, Horvath)

• Transfer

  • Skills learned in the analog world transfer easily into digital, but the reverse almost never happens. Real-world learning is harder and richer; screen learning is too contextually narrow and too easy.

    “When you do your learning online, you are doing it in the easiest, possible, frictionless way... Kids almost invariably will not be able to do the same skill offline, because offline is harder.” (23:46, Horvath)

4. The Slippery Slope: How Screen-Based “Learning” Shapes Habit and Addiction Pathways [30:28]

• Gamification’s Real Lesson
  • Kids learn how to play the game, not the content itself.

    “I learned the game [Oregon Trail], I did not learn the content.” (31:08, Horvath)

• Habit and Dopamine
  • Repetitive cue–action–reward cycles in digital tools prime the same brain circuits as addiction.

    “Anytime you take... a successful action in response to a cue, an action that resolves the cue, you will get a hit of dopamine... you have to act in a certain way just to regain control of your own biology. That’s what gamification does to learning—starts building habit cycles where now kids need to do something in order to just feel normal.” (31:09, Horvath)

• Gateway to Other Addictions
  • Screen-based multitasking and instant reward behaviors set the stage for future substance, gambling, and even pornography addictions.

    "All video games are nothing but addiction cycles, that's all they are." (33:09, Horvath)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “When EdTech started sending that message out... if education today can be said to be broken, it’s because EdTech broke it.” (05:45, Horvath)
• “You can't not learn. It's a biological process. So zero can't be our baseline. Because everything improves learning, doing nothing improves learning.” (14:58, Horvath)
• “If you train kids in the real world... and then you move it onto this wickedly uniform, simple computer, you can move over just fine. But coming online to offline is wickedly difficult.” (23:19, Horvath)
• “Our screens are setting our kids up neurologically to crave—need—high-frequency, low-effort, high-reward activity. That's the addiction pathway.” (Paraphrased from 30:28–36:26)
• “I assure you I’ve got a school over here with kids who never touch tech. I would put them against High Tech High ten days out of ten in the job market." (41:09, Horvath)
• "I've never heard a reasonable argument why a kid would ever need a cell phone. Because parent needs to get ahold of me? Okay, there's a phone at the front of the school. You'll be fine." (44:56, Horvath)
• "We didn't realize how much these devices took from our kids until we took them back." (41:49, Hempe quoting from the book)

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Practical Action Steps for Parents [42:05+]

Immediate Wins:

• Buy a printer: Print digital homework and resources; submit paper instead of digital files if possible.
• Tech-free weekends: Plan family activities away from devices, not just schooldays.
• Conduct a family tech audit: Track both your child’s and your own device use. Engage your kid in auditing you, too, to model desired behaviors.

Parental Mindset:

• Don’t fear being a “problem parent” or “troublemaker.” Advocate boldly!

  “I'd rather be a troublemaker than have my kid stunted for the rest of his life.” (41:34, Horvath)

• Don’t buy into scare tactics: Children will be fine without early tech adoption.

• Use print materials whenever possible—even if it means sourcing old textbooks.

For Schools:

• Distinguish between curriculum (what you teach, e.g. technology lab) and pedagogy (how you teach, e.g. not digital math).
• If digital skills are required by curriculum, isolate into dedicated labs—don’t embed screens in every subject.

On Devices:

• Phones: No need for cell phones before 18. No reasonable argument for minors.
• Video Games: Acceptable only when local, social, split-screen, in the same room (e.g., classic Nintendo), not online or solo.
• ScreenStrong position: The later/less, the better. Prioritize real-world experiences and connections.

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Calls to Action and Encouragement

• “You don’t have to wait for your school system. You can start making changes at home right now.”
• “Remember: If you take away the screens, you’ll see what your children can really do.”
• “Stand up for your kids. Stand out from the crowd. Stay strong.” (Outro)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:47 — Dr. Horvath’s background & motivation
• 05:28 — The five myths of EdTech & why the “education is broken” narrative is misleading
• 11:56 — The global data on screens and declining academic performance
• 19:04 — What the brain actually needs to learn: attention, empathy, and transfer
• 30:28 — How digital tools shape habits, cravings, and addiction pathways
• 36:26 — School screens as a gateway to broader addiction risks
• 42:05 — Practical steps for parents; encouragement for taking a stand

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Final Encouragement

Melanie and Dr. Horvath remind parents: it’s normal to feel challenged, but you have far more power than you think. By choosing analog at home and advocating for real neuroscience-based practices at school, you can profoundly protect and nurture your child’s mind for a healthy, balanced future.

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Recommended next step:
Read Dr. Horvath’s The Digital Delusion for scientific depth and practical advocacy tips. Check out ScreenStrong’s curricula and resources for further support.

Transcript

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Foreign.

[Melody Hempy]

And welcome to the Screenstrong Families Podcast, bringing you the best solution for parents who are serious about eliminating toxic screens from their home. This is Melody Hempy and I'm so glad you're joining us today. If you are one of our regular listeners, welcome back. And if you're a new friend, we're so glad you found us. You have found your people over here at Screenstrong. So today I'm just going to jump right in. We are so excited and so thrilled to have a guest today and to welcome Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. And I would like for you to just give us a little bit of a background, just really quick, about your background and why you wrote the book the Digital Delusion.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Absolutely. So. So I am, I am a teacher turned neuroscientist, so teaching is my passion. But I started studying neuroscience, thinking that if I understood how human beings learn better and how the brain works, that's going to make me a better teacher. And I, unfortunately, I never got to put that to the test because I got stuck in academia. So for 18 years now, I've been studying how people learn. And my job is really just to work with, yeah. Teachers and students and parents and say, this is what learning is. What does that mean for school? What does that mean for teaching? What does that mean for homework and studying and helping our kids? Things like that. And so realistically, the book, the Digital Delusion, it came about, I. If you had to peg it to something, you'd have to peg it to, to covet. Right. So Covid comes, everyone goes digital, Covid ends, and everyone stayed digital. Like we put on this band aid and just never ripped it off when the wound had healed. So to the point where today, like 88 of school districts in the US are now one to one, every kid has a computer.

[Melody Hempy]

Right.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Why? It's. If you understand how learning works, you realize these tools aren't well aligned to human learning. They never have been. The data's always been tools. So that's why I figured now is the time we've crossed some sort of threshold where if we don't act now, not only will the next generation of kids be raised on tech, but the incoming generation of teachers will know nothing else other than tech.

[Melody Hempy]

That's right.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

We will lose any connection we have to the past and what it means to actually do deep learning in school.

[Melody Hempy]

That's right. Well, right before we got on, we were, we were just talking right away. We were just, you know, kindred spirits in this whole mess. And we Were just saying how if kids could just learn to live real life in the real world, they would be fine in the virtual world.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yeah, well, that's one of the strangest things. Well, I'm maybe most obvious things we've learned is that gen millennials are more digitally literate than Gen Z and Gen X is equivalent to Gen Z, even though we were never taught how to use computers. Why? Because we were taught how to survive in the real world. When you, when you know how to live and you have real world literacy and you know how to. You have real world manners and behaviors, those translate on online almost immediately because the online world is just an easier version of the real world.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So I always say, man, if you know how to live out here, you're going to be able to live on there just fine. You don't need to teach this stuff. But if you want to. And we have a different question.

[Melody Hempy]

Well, and one thing that has just come to my mind recently is looking at counterfeit science. And so what I mean by that is like, if you're working at a bank and you're trying to understand counterfeit money, the way you do that is you handle real money, you never handle counterfeit, you handle the real. So much so that you recognize it and you know it inside and out. And our kids today are just handling all the counterfeit stuff before they're handling the real. And they're confused and they'll. It'll never get ingrained in their brain how to do this. And I have so many examples about that. But let's jump in a second about your book. I. We have to talk about this today. I want to go through the first few chapters today. And as I set this up, I want to just remind everyone, of course, you know my story, but. And you and I have talked about this before, that our son, my oldest son, dropped out of college because he was addicted to video games. It was like we picked him up, he goes, mom, this game did something to me. I've been in bed for a week, and he looked like he was on drugs, and it was horrible. And the whole nine yards. People know my story over here. But the thing I'm so excited to bring you on today to talk about is the turning point in our life as a real family on this real planet with all this crazy stuff happening. Years ago when the tidal wave was just kind of hitting us, we were in that first wave of the experiment that, you know, really nobody knew what they were doing. But it was when he went to ninth grade and he got a school issue laptop. That was the beginning of the end for, for us, that was the moment in time where as a family, we lost it. We lost our influence with him. We lost our ability to manage his game, and we lost Adam. It was at that moment in time. And Jared, when I read your book, I'm so excited because you just give that voice to parents who, who are, you know, the quotes in your book that say, you know, I thought something was wrong, but, you know, I thought I was also crazy, and everybody told me I was crazy. So let's. Let's start by talking about that. And there's so many people in our audience that are really, really struggling right now. They're listening. We are sort of their lifeline. They're hanging on. They listen to these podcasts. They're like, oh, my gosh, I am suffering so much. And yet I'm told, like, all these myths. So start with those five myths. Just real quick. Just go through the myths that, you know are around. Why Ed Tech? You know.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yeah. And I'd say you're not alone. And you're. You're totally right. All your fears are right. And what I love is, is this big move to remove smartphones from schools. Brilliant. Absolutely. 100, everyone says. Do you agree with that? How could you not?

[Melody Hempy]

In order.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

In order for there to be a debate, there has to be two equivalent sides arguing over data. There's no second side to this. Of course you get rid of it. But I think what that's done is that's opened up people's eyes and ears being willing to discuss, okay, if a small screen is bad, then why would a big tablet be any better? Why? Because I stamped the word education on it. Does that change anything this thing does? The answer is it doesn't. So, yeah, when Ed Tech comes along, edtech comes around really saying several things. One, that education is broken. Education is not broken, man. It's not. May not be fun, but we were getting the highest results we've ever gotten in the history of education. Yeah. Right. At the same time, EdTech started sending that message out. So if anything, you can say, if education today can be said to be broken, it's because edtech broke it. Yeah, but at the time when they were telling us it was all destroyed, man, we were killing it. We were at the golden age of education.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So just know that the way we were doing school from mid-90s into the mid knots. Brilliant. We were killing it. Kids were going deep. Kids were understanding things. Everything was kind of Moving fine.

[Melody Hempy]

If it's not broken, don't fix it. Right.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Exactly. And that's where a lot of this. Where people talk about, well, if we're going to start to. To divest, step away from edtech and schools, what do we do? What do we do? You're already doing it. There's nothing easier than just going. The infrastructure is already there. There's. You don't have to adopt or learn anything new. You just have to say, cool, that last 20 years didn't really work out too well for us. Let's. Let's just return to what we know was working.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

But I think then some other myths that were kind of coming out is this idea that engagement is synonymous with learning, that people love flashy visuals and stuff. And when you're engaged, you're learning. Engagement and learning are not the same thing. You can be wildly engaged with something and not learn a thing or flip it, be moderately engaged with something and learn a ton. I think the best example of that is Duolingo. People will spend years doing their streaks on Duolingo, hours a day doing that. Someone did research where they compared learning from Du Lingo to another learning app called Babel, which is just not. No bells and whistles at all. It's just pedagogy. You learned more in half the time on Babel than you did on Duolingo. So that extra engagement was doing nothing but waste your time. It's just bells and whistles. So a lot of ed tech is based on engagement, not learning, which is going to be their big problem. They keep eyes glued to the screen. That's very different than what we're trying to do at K12 school.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

And I'd say the next three myths that kind of just fit under the heading of the Learner knows best. We have this really weird belief that ed tech treats young kids like mini adults. Like they're exactly like us. They're just. They got small hands and they smell like Axe body spray. No, they're not like us at all. They're nothing like us. And our job is not simply to keep them alive as they get bigger. Our job is to raise them into adults. They were a different species and we need to put up walls and structures and that lead them into adulthood. So what is Ed Tech's biggest claim to fame? It's all choice. You can pick your own learning style. You can pick your own learning techniques, you can pick your own curriculum. Let kids guide the show. Learners are horrible at knowing what is good for learning. We are really good at knowing what feels good. But that is rarely what is good when it comes to learning. And when you let kids drive the show of learning versus an expert adult who knows, here's how pedagogy works. Here's the right way to learn math in the right order so that you can do the next level of math. When you take that out of the hands of teachers and give it to students, learning goes way down. And that is Ed Tech's biggest argument, is we're going to give agency back to the kids, even to the point where they're saying school doesn't need to exist anymore.

[Melody Hempy]

Right, right.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Why don't you just give surgery patients agency over their own surgery and get rid of surgeons? You, you realize you don't do that because there's a certain knowledge base that comes with making that true with learning. Teachers didn't just show up out of nowhere. They know what they're doing.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah, that's excellent. I love that. And, and I always say, you know, too, that we feel like our kids are so intelligent, so we think they're mature. And that's exactly what you're saying. Just because they're intelligent, you know, it doesn't mean that they know how to teach themselves. And yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

And to be fair, their intelligence largely stems on they know how to use computers. And to an outsider, it's like, wow, that, that seems really cool. You gotta remember, using a tool is very different than understanding how a tool works. I can drive a car, but I have no clue what's actually going on in that car. So if my car breaks down, I'm toast. It's the same with young kids. They look like they're flying on these machines, but they're just good users of it.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

As soon as the machine breaks or changes or shifts, they're back to square one because they didn't really get things. So whenever I, I, I speak with students and I have to talk about tech a lot with them, the first thing I'll always tell them is, look, your generation is really good at using tech. Our generation invented tech. Yeah. So what that means is it reflects our way of seeing the world way more than it reflects yours. Every time you use it, you're basically living in my head. Yeah. Which makes no sense to me because you hate everything else about me. You hate my clothes, you hate my music.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yeah. You hate my movies, but my God, you love my tech.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Why? You know, all you're doing is becoming a consumer of my idea of what the world should have been Rather than creating your idea of what the world should be.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah, yeah. They love candy too, by the way.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

You know, you love candy. Not ours, though. We had like, remember we did like Beeman's gum and we had the dots dipping dots. Yeah, I like that stuff.

[Melody Hempy]

Well, you are so brilliant with the data, so I just have to. We have to talk about the data. So, yeah, even by the way, we didn't need any data. Right. To get us into this mess. But it seems like we need a lot of data to get us out of it. So I'm saying that with a lot of sarcasm in my voice. So talk about the evidence. Talk about. I've heard you do different, you know, brilliant talks to the senate hearings and stuff like that. So let's just, let's just talk about that for our parents that are listening. Talk about the data with the whole education failure that's happening in the one to one devices and do they really improve learning outcomes?

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

You make a really good point. Where else in the world can someone invent something? And we immediately are like, cool, let's use that. Like, imagine I invented a new drug and you said, hey, what does it treat? And I said, oh, why don't you give it to your kids and find out?

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

And now imagine every government said, great idea. That's ed tech in a nutshell. There was never any evidence, never any proof. They, so long as they invented it, we just gave it to kids. And now my job is to show the evidence exactly as you said, that it's harming. Talk about a wicked swing of a burden of truth. It never should have been my job to show you that it sucks. It should have always been your job to show you that. Show me that it works before we even touched it. But c lavites the world we're kind of living in. So. And I'll keep this as simple as possible because data can get dull fast across 91 countries in the world. Every country shows the same pattern, except for seven. But I can explain why they're different in a second. That the more kids use technology at school for learning purposes, learning goes down across math, across reading, across sciences, across all, all realms that we've tested so far. Kids who don't touch computers do best. Kids who touch it for up to an hour do a little worse. Up to two hours a little worse than that. And it's just this kind of straight line down. Now in some cultures you see a different pattern, but that's largely because they are so heavy tech now that you don't have any kids who aren't using tech. And so those patterns start to look a little bit different. But shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the highest scores we ever got on any international or national test came from schools that never touched tech. Kids who never touched tech at school when they were taking a test on a pen and paper. That's it. Why? Because we're built to learn from each other. We're analog learners. The digital world is new. We have biology that it's evolved for 150,000 years to do X. It's never going to adapt to Y and Y is just going to make everything worse. If you look at then the actual research, a lot of that testing data, then people say, well, that's just correlative. Touche. It is. How do you make correlation causation? You do research, you do academic research. Now we have academic research stretching back from 1962. So this is, we weren't calling computers back then. They were information computing technologies back then. But it was the same thing. It's just computers now. When I say this, bear with me. In research, when we talk about what impact something has, we we use what's called an effect size. It's a single number usually between negative one and positive one. Anything negative means my tool is harming the outcome. Zero means nothing's happening. Anything positive means good. So when we look at the impact of edtech, so in this case, I mean child facing Internet computer technology in schools, the average effect size on learning is positive 0.29, which is the signal ed tech uses to say, look, we're benefiting learning. We have a positive effects on. But what they failed to recognize, and they're starting to recognize it now, unfortunately, is in education we don't use the same scale as every other field. We don't use negative one to positive one.

[Melody Hempy]

Wow.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Because in education you learn just by being alive. So if a kid, if you lock a kid in a closet and they stay in there for 10 years, they will come out smarter than when they went in. You can't not learn. It's a biological process. So zero can't be our baseline. Because everything improves learning, Doing nothing improves learning. Yeah. So in education we have a different baseline. Our baseline is, is usually say around 00:42. If you want to say you're benefiting learning, you have to have an effect above positive 0.42. So now when you go back to all these tech companies and they're saying we have an effect of 0.29, that actually means you're harming learning. They just didn't even know it. They were giving us the data for 60 years showing us we were making learning worse than analog methods. But because people weren't real well versed on research and how it works, it sounded good. And so I guess we just kept buying more and more into it. Although you're right. I'd say the, the, the data have very little to do with why we bought it. I think the reason why it's in most schools has less to do with learning and a lot of other reasons.

[Melody Hempy]

It's a lot of dollar signs actually, instead of decimal points. Talk about, let's talk about that. And whenever you want to find the answer about anything in life, that's usually follow the money and you can see how it all came to be so there. So in, in, in your data and everything that you've studied, you were, you were feeling like it's safe to say that there's data that supports. And your book does a great job of bringing all this in.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

There's, there's not just data. There's over 21,000 studies we've analyzed to come up with that data. There is. There is. You don't name one other field that needs that much data to make a difference and people still aren't listening. But I mean, if you, if you get even super specific with it, like let's compare reading online versus digital. I mean, online versus hard paper.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

You learn better from a book than you do from a screen. Everyone does. What about writing? If I'm taking notes by hand versus typing. You learn more by taking notes by hand. You learn more by writing drafts of an essay by hand than by screen. It's wherever you want to dig in. You're going to find the same top decrepit. When you compare analog to digital method, so long as you're using the same method, analog outperforms digital because it aligns with how humans are.

[Melody Hempy]

Well, it's so fascinating and I know as you talk to parents across the country that you see this and you learn this every day. But in my world here at Screenstrong, with all the work that we do and we've got now, our curriculum for kids is all in print. It's a textbook, it's paper. Because we know that's how they're going to learn it best. And I will say after, after all of our horrible experiment, you know, on our poor first child, when we turned and did things differently for our younger three, one of the very first things I did was I got, I got textbooks for my kids. Like nobody had them. Right. And I went to the school, and I'm like, I know you got all this stuff online, but I need the history textbook. And they did so much better. And it's because of what you're talking about. So, you know, the data's out there, and the data is great, but, but parents have to apply this directly to what they have to do in their house now, and what we have to do to be different and to actually get real books and to have our kids write, you know, on paper and pen. And so let's talk a little deeper. Let's dive a little bit deeper into what does the brain actually need to learn, since that's your science and that's what you're the expert at. I love the quote in your book. I think it was in chapter three, where it says, every time I see him on his computer, he's just gaming. I know, you know, I shouldn't sound so cynical, but I swear, you know, we're, he's, he, we learned more with paper and pencil than they do with all this tech. I can't prove it, but I know something is off. That was from one of the, the quotes from one of the dads in the book. And I just, oh, my goodness. I related that so well, because parents, we know something is off. Like, that's such a good way to put something in, Right? So explain the attention and the empathy and the transfer and everything that you go over in chapter three. Just kind of condense that for us here.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yeah. So I, I, I usually say there are three kind of intractable mechanisms that tech will never overcome. One of them is attention. You want to learn something. Sustained attention is key. You must remain focused on what it is you're trying to learn. So I always say the worst thing you can do for learning and memory is multitasking. As soon as you start multitasking, learning is, is done. Memory goes down, speed goes down, accuracy goes down, recall. It's all done. Why does that matter? Look at any computer screen. Why are computers powerful? Because they're what are called parallel processors. You can do 15 different things. Well, no, a computer can do 15 different things at once. As humans, we are serial processors. We can only do one thing at a time. But anytime we use a computer, we try to do the 15 things. We try and think like and act like the computer, and we start multitasking. So if you really take a look at the numbers, your kids will spend, on average, 450 hours per year trying to learn from a computer screen, but they will spend over 2, 500 hours every single year using that same exact screen to multitask. So basically, if you just think of peer training, if it takes 10,000 hours to master anything, after four years of being introduced to a computer, your kid is a master of one thing, multitasking, which is the one thing you can't do if I also want you learning. So when we use the same tool for entertainment multitasking as we do for sustained learning, one is going to win that battle. And in the battle of entertainment, education, entertainment one. So these tools, by their very design, now are no longer learning tools, and they never were to begin with. But take it to the next level now for learning. Once I'm locked in with attention, let's say I can somehow focus without all the bells and whistles. Now I'm focused. Now you come up against another hurdle, which is empathy. So when it comes to empathy, empathy is one of the biggest drivers of learning. We know an empathetic student teacher relationship has a positive effect size of 0.68, which is well above that 0.42 we were talking about. And it's steady. We know that that's a good one. So what is empathy? Empathy isn't an emotion. It's not a feeling. It's not something you have. Empathy is what's called a transpersonal emergent property. What happens is when two people come together and they start to empathize, their biologies will start to synchronize. That is the empathy. Their hearts will start to beat at the same time. They will start to breathe at the same time. Their brains will start to look almost identical. We can measure empathy. It is the amount of synchrony between different pairs of biology. Take it to a screen. Empathy is one of the biggest drivers of learning. Empathy requires resonance between two pairs of biology. What is one thing a screen absolutely does not have? Biology. You cannot resonate with a screen because there's nothing to resonate with. So when you use tech to learn, you eliminate one of the biggest drivers of learning we possess. It's just gone. And that's why learning goes down. Most people who learn online, 85% dropout rate with it when it comes to online learning, because when you're not resonating with anyone, you can't understand it. It gets hard, you leave, you tap out. Third thing then is transfer. And I'll make this super simple. Transfer basically says, how do you move skills between different contexts? Like, I learned to do math in my Classroom, but I want to also be able to do math when I'm balancing my checkbook at home. How do I transfer my skill to home? One of the biggest problems of transfer is this first context is where you do your learning will ultimately determine how you can use that one. Real world is a very nuanced context. Every time you do math in the real world, man, you're doing it slightly differently. You're in this room, you're in that room, you're up there. Everything about a computer is exactly the same, which means every time you practice a skill on a computer, it is in the exact same context every single time, which makes that skill wickedly narrow. You can do it on the screen, but you can't do it off the screen. Which brings us to the second level of transfer, which basically says additive versus subtractive. Sometimes when you move a skill, you have to do less than what you initially learned. You trained harder than you needed to perform. Sometimes you need to do more than you trained too little. And now the performance requires you to do more than what you train. As you can guess, if you train too hard and then have to perform easy, you're fine. That's what all the sports athletes do. Train harder than the game.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

But if you do it the other way around, train really easy, and then you get into a performance situation where you don't have those skills, you're. You're toast. Computers, by their very definition, are the easiest things human beings ever have ever made. They did not make these tools to make life hard. They made them so babies could use them.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So when you do your learning online, you are doing it in the easiest, possible, frictionless way you possibly can. So when you learn online, kids almost invariably will not be able to do the same skill offline, because offline is harder. It requires them to do more work. But flip it like we were talking about earlier. If you train kids in the real world, which is difficult and nuanced, every time you pick up your pen, you have to do subtly different movements because the nub is changing or you use a crayon, or everything changes in the real world. And then you move it onto this wickedly uniform, simple computer, you can move over just fine. So when we think about transfer, coming offline to online is easy, but coming online to offline is wickedly difficult.

[Melody Hempy]

Wow. The way you describe that is so easy, you know, to understand. It's so easy. I remember even 10 years ago when I was talking about this, what became very apparent to me is, you know, because A lot of the arguments are with technology is, well, it's really good for at risk populations and poor kids and what we can get them all the same thing, you know, and what I said back then, and I continue to say now is it's a shame that all of our poor kids are going to have computers, but all the rich kids are going to have tutors.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Isn't that widen the divide?

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah, you're going to widen the divide. And for you, the exact reason you're talking about with this empathy factor, I'm so glad you put that in your book. That is so helpful. It's just so, you know, good to understand that. And because kids are craving low effort, high reward activity all the time, that is not learning. Right. So speak for one second about that part of learning in the middle of it, when you're in the middle of it, you know, because there's like three kind of areas. Like, you start, it's exciting, it's fun, but then you get to the middle and it's really hard before you accomplish the, the task. So what's happening in your brain? Why is it hard for a kid to get over that? I mean, what's happening and why did. I mean, that screen makes you feel like you learned it, but you didn't.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Oh, no. Gosh. The screen will trick you into thinking a lot of things. You're. You're spot on. That was actually a good way to put it. The first introduction to something is usually fun. When I was learning the paint, somebody said, okay, you're gonna paint an apple. You're gonna start, you're gonna be like, this is good. And then you're gonna keep adding layers and layers and it's gonna look real bad. And at some point you're gonna say, this sucks and you want to quit. Yeah, just keep adding layers, layers, layers. And then after certain amount of time, eventually you're going to say bing, and this really deep apple is going to come out and you're going to go, there it is. You just got to get through that slog. So what's going on during that slog biologically is your brain is basically taking a novel skill. When you're learning anything new, your brain has to open the engram. Everything kind of boosts up where your brain tries to figure out where does the skill belong. Is this kind of like what you did when you were in second grade? Is this like soccer? Is this like playing the piano? What's happening here from that stage to what we're going to call automaticity? Stage where now you can nail it. Your brain has to move through a process of plasticity and modularization. Basically, it has to physically rewire itself to make that skill automatic. Now that rewiring is uncomfortable. Yeah, it is. It is a physical sensation that most people don't like. Most people are not a fan of that sensation of when their brain is in that mode of change. And it also takes a long time. Repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, as your brain is continuing to just chip away at building this network until you get to the stage where, hey, the apple now looks good and now I can do this whenever the heck I want to. And you'll see, most people, they're in a realm that they kind of care about. They can handle it. Like if I'm learning to ride a bike or do a trick on my skateboard, whatever, whatever. These young whippersnapper kids are doing hula hoops and Pac man video games. But they're fine with it. They're absolutely fine being in the slog if it's something they love. It's real difficult to be in the slog when you're not 100% sure what purpose that's going to serve. Yeah. Like when we're trying to tell a kid you're learning history and they go, why? What good is this going to serve me? And the best we can do is say, I'm not teaching you history because you're going to become a historian. And they go, I know, I'm never going to use this. No, you are never going to use this. We're trying to teach you how to think through knowledge so you can solve

[Melody Hempy]

problems, so your brain can be rewired.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Bingo.

[Melody Hempy]

It's.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

It's in. So if they don't see the immediate benefit, like you're saying that immediate reward, it's really tricky to engage them and to keep them going through that. But you eventually, you always get there. I mean, you hit our age and you're like, thank goodness I learned all that stuff. But if I don't use history, what I was doing was training myself how

[Melody Hempy]

to tackle the world, how to think and. Yeah. And how to learn. And so, you know, and that. I mean, this is so fascinating to bring the brain science into this because we know our kids are craving lower for high reward activities. And when you put them on a screen in a school, they're going to continue to crave the low effort, high reward activities. Which is why when I walked through my high school and my son was in high school, my oldest son, all the boys would be sitting during the break, you know, along the hallway. They're all on call of duty on their, their laptops. And the teachers were just scratching their head like, we don't know why they're doing that. I'm like, oh my gosh. You know, because they're, they don't want to learn because it hurts to learn. It's uncomfortable. It's quite lonely, actually. And this is the grit that is missing. And this is why we have to teach our kids grit in the real world before we put them on the device that's going to make everything too comfy. So let's talk about this. I am dying to hear your thoughts on this. And I haven't prepped you ahead of time, so I'm not really sure what you're going to say. But what I want to talk about is this habit formation that happens when you are in this constant state of digital. We can't call it digital learning. I guess it's just digital entertainment that we're pretending we're doing math, but really we're chasing little blue, you know, balloons and we're doing crazy stuff. And so what we're, we're doing is we're, we're training this habit. And kids are getting very. And I know this because I, I raised an addict. So I know what I did and I know now what I did wrong. But, but they're getting very comfortable with that habit of that low effort, high reward, stimulating activity. So what's happening in their brains? Talk about how this environmental input during these early years, you know, because if you and I were going to go try to learn math, you know, on our computer, you know, good for us. I'm talking about elementary and adolescent brains and how screen based stimulation shapes that dopamine system and what happens to that pathway.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yeah, so, and this is why gamification never really worked. A good rule of thumb is human beings will only learn those things they're focused on. And when learning becomes gamified, what people focus on is the game.

[Melody Hempy]

Right.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

How do I get the high score? How do I get the balloon? How do I get the bells? My example was always, we grew up, our big game was the Oregon Trail. Man, I haven't played that thing in 30 years, but I can tell you every single button you need to press to play it. I know the game like the back of my hand. The one thing I don't know is anything about the Oregon Trail. I don't know where it started, I don't know when it started. I don't care. I don't know who did it. I, I learned the game, I did not learn the content.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So bring in now gamification. Not only are you automatically going to be harming learning, but go to the dopamine. So what happens here is all habits start with a cue. Something in the world has to grab your attention. So let's just say my phone, ding, ding. In response to a cue, you can undertake an action. You don't have to, but you have the choice. So ding, you know what, I'm going to check my messages. Anytime you take what we call undertake a successful action in response to a cue, an action that resolves the cue, you will get a hit of dopamine, you will feel good. So cue action reward. Cue, action reward. Cue action reward. Now you do that in enough times, your brain is not stupid. Eventually your brain is going to preempt you. Eventually you're going to go Q ding. And your brain is going to say, I know what's coming and it's going to spit out that dopamine before you've done any action in anticipation of the action. Now the trick is this. When you get a hit of dopamine after you've done an action, feels good, it feels rewarding. You get that same exact chemical before you've done an action. It no longer feels good. Now it feels like a craving, now it feels like an urge. Now you have to undertake the action just to calm the system down and get a sense of, of normalcy and homeostasis. So when the brain moves cue, action reward to cue reward action, you've now built a habit which as you've caught on, is just another fancy word for saying addiction. You now have to act in a certain way just to regain control of your own biology. That's what gamification does to learning is it starts building these habit cycles where now kids need to do something in order to just feel normal. But that feeling of an urge is not learning. That feeling of an urge is just like scratching an itch. It just makes you feel comfortable, but it doesn't lead to anything deeper. And the real danger comes is when you don't have that. So when kids know, like all video games are nothing but addiction cycles, that's all they are. That's why kids can get addicted to them. Let's say I'm in a 40 minute class, but I know I can't have access to my game for 40 minutes, so I can play it between classes, but I can't play it in my game. Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to get a cue. Now, a lot of cues are internal. For instance, if you're hungry, that can be a cue. If you're tired, that can be a cue. If you feel uncomfortable, that is one of the biggest cues people have tied to their technology. Learning is uncomfortable. About two minutes into the class, I'm going to start to feel uncomfortable. I'm now going to get the urge to say, go play the game. If I don't have immediate access to that game, but I know I can get it within the next hour or so, my dopamine is going to ramp and ramp and ramp and ramp. My cognition is gone, and I will be doing nothing but basically watching the clock until class over. I'm over you. I just wasted you. I need. Didn't need to be in that class. That was 40 minutes of nothing but me waiting to get out there. And that was the problem when people started talking about cell phone bans versus policies. If you ban a cell phone, what's gonna happen is in that very first period, kids are gonna ramp. And if they know they can't get to the cell phone for six or seven hours, that ramp will fade. And then by hour two, they're now present. Now they can pay attention. But if you have a policy that says you can use your phone between classes or at recess, you're gonna ramp, lose the class, fulfill, go to the next class, ramp, do the whole cycle again. That's why policies never work. They never had any impact in schools. It was a hardcore band. And that's why digitized learning and gamification, it just is playing. It's playing a slot machine cycle. What? That's not how you learn. That's how you engage. But as we saw earlier, engagement is not the same as learning.

[Melody Hempy]

No. And that's exactly how you start an addiction. You do little bits at a time. You. You do this, quote, moderate amounts of, you know, because when you moderate a highly addictive thing, you're going to get addicted to it. That's how you do it. That's how most families in this country are doing it with video games. That's how they're doing with phones. Or we're just going to let you use your phone here, and we're going to let you just game here. And to what you're. The point that you're making. This is all they're doing then is they get all this craving and the dopamine ramping up for it. I understand this so well. Because we did it and we lived it in our homes. And I know.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

And go back to that idea we were talking about, about the brain changing itself is. Let's say I'm doing a little bit of video game every day. What's going to happen is my brain is going to change and make that little bit normal. And now I'm going to say, well, what happened to that thrill I used to get from video games? So I'm going to play a little bit more. My brain will change and make that normal. And I'm going to go, what happened to that thrill I used to get? Because the brain is constantly changing. That's where addiction starts to ramp. Because the brain will change to make your addiction your new normal.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Which no longer makes it fun or exciting for you. And so you start chasing. And that's how you now cycle out of control in that way.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah. And that becomes the craving. And so talk a minute about how school screens are actually setting our kids up for future addiction patterns. I, I see it with gamers that are gaming all through high school. Then they start they're, they're doing pot. Then they're gambling. Then they're into porn. It all kind of is the gateway to start these other addictions is what we're used to. We're used to this ridiculous amount of dopamine.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yep. And you, you get that through rapid switching. What does tech do? Rapid switch. There used to be two minute videos on YouTube. There's now 10 second videos on YouTube. It's everything gets shorter. And when it gets shorter, that means you're going to get fewer good. But you're going to get them more spaced out. So if I'm scrolling through YouTube, not every 10 second video is going to be good. Every third or fourth will be really good. But that type of staggered reward actually makes the process worse. If everything was good, you would do. You would see less addictive behavior than when one out of every four or five is good. That's a slot machine. You won every time you pulled. No one would get addicted. It's called staggered reward. When you win every once in a while. Oh, that was fun. That was a bad post. That was bad. Oh, that was a funny meme. Those are the little hits that keep you coming back for more. And now you just get caught in this idea of anytime I feel slightly uncomfortable. I'm going to reach for this device, this tool and people recognize this. Finally, with phone. Phone is nothing but a small computer.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So if it's a problem here, do you Think this is going to be any different because it's 14 inches larger? Oh, it's going to be the exact same. They. They use the exact same hardware, software design. There's nothing different about it. So I think that's my big hope is that when people realize that phones weren't going to be good in schools, now we can start to ask then, what use is a tablet in a school or a laptop unless you're explicitly learning about it? And that's the curriculum. Curriculum question. If you think you need to teach a kid a computer skill, that's a curriculum question. We need to teach kids how to use AI. Cool. You have a computer lab and you go and you learn AI.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

That is not a pedagogy argument. So pedagogy is how we teach. Curriculum is what we teach. The big problem most people have made is they've said we instead of we need to teach kids how to use AI. How to. I don't agree with that, but let's imagine you do. That's a curriculum question. We build a class that has morphed into we need to teach all skills through AI. That's a pedagogy question. And now you're telling me how to teach math. No, I'll tell you what's best for math, but that's it. It's. People are thinking that the best way to teach digital technology is to embed it into every class. No, the best way to teach technology is the same way you teach shop class. Yeah. You have a computer lab. You go, you do it for one hour a day, and the rest of the time you're doing pedagogy that aligns with what else you're trying to learn.

[Melody Hempy]

Because if you don't do that, then what we're doing is we're creating these little mini addicts all day long. So then by the time they do graduate, if they do, they graduate. And now they're like little addictive brains. Now they're searching for the next addiction. And I think this is the next field of study that's going to go wide open because now we have all of these mental health issues with kids that it. Their brains have been wired, you know, for this strange sort of learning that never really worked. And their dopamine pathways, their reward pathways, are wired to continue to crave addictions once they leave 12th grade. Right.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

I pray they get mad. That's what I tell the kids I work with. I'm like, you didn't choose this. Yeah. You don't. You don't even know what you're missing at this stage. You will learn as you get older and you start to realize, wait a second, why is nothing working for me? And I hope you look back and you get mad at us for saying, why did you take 12 years of my life? Yeah. Shove me in front of this screen and make it so I can't even comprehend for two minutes what the heck is going on around me.

[Melody Hempy]

Well, and that's the rallying cry for parents right now is we have to be able to think ahead. We have to use our frontal cortex, we have to use our executive functioning skills and we have to say, wait a minute, this end, the outcome is really not what we want it to be and we have to start doing something. So in your book, you've got a quote in there. I don't know if it's from a mom maybe, but it says, I don't think we realize how much these devices took from our kids until we took them back. And I love that because that's with Screenstrong, of course. That's our whole mission over here is to help parents take them away and help parents figure out how to do life at school and at home without the screens. It's not, the screens are all bad. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about giving your kids the best chances and increasing the benefits and removing the risk. But I love that, that quote because it was like we didn't even realize it until we took them away. Then we realized, oh my gosh, they're actually learning math. They're loving, you know, they know how to read now they are playing outside. They're doing all these things. So for parents, if we could spend the last few minutes here talking to just be an encouragement to parents. Because I'm not gonna lie, it's really hard. It is so hard. I'm a parent. I know we, we, we talk to parents all day long about how you've got to have a backbone. You got to not believe these things that you hear about. Tech is here to stay and your child's going to be left behind and they'll never get a job.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

And I assure you I've got a school over here with kids who never touch tech. I would put hit them against High tech high 10 days out of 10 in the job market. It's not even close how much brighter they're going to be.

[Melody Hempy]

But I love it when you said that, that you know, because if, if you speak up, you might be labeled a problem parent. And we should wear that badge with honor. So we should be problem parents out there. I am.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

I'm a troublemaker. People have always said that you're a troublemaker. Cool. Give me a card. I'll. I'll carry that in my wallet. That doesn't, doesn't phase me in the least. I'd rather be a troublemaker than have my kid stunted for the rest of his life because you didn't want to pay attention to what the heck was going on in the school.

[Melody Hempy]

That's right. That's right. But the encouragement is. There is a lot that parents can do right now. So walk us through just a few things and I know, gosh, we got to get you back on here. Talk about the. The last half of your book. This has been so fascinating. But let's close with this encouragement for parents.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

I'd say what you can do at home is, is some quick and easy wins. One, Buy a printer. Yeah. If your school is going to go digital curriculum, cool. You print it out. Digital homework, cool. You print it out and your kid hands it to the teacher and they say, you got to hand it in an lms. Take it up with my lawyer mate. My kid will hand you the work. You can figure out how to put in the lms. Yeah, that's the medium was never the point of k through 12. So buy a printer, print everything out at home. Consider your own tech free weekends as well. Like, that's where if we make it through kind of a tech free week and then you get to the weekend, that's when kids usually let it rip. So that's when can we already in advance have a plan that says, yeah, bad news. Saturday's the day we're all going hiking or whatever the heck it's going to be, where we take away that opportunity to say, well, it's the weekend now. It doesn't matter anymore. The weekend when you're not learning is as important as the weekdays when you are learning. All of that is part of the learning process and should be kind of held sacred, which I would then say is going to come back to us as we've got to do our own little mini tech audit. We can do a tech audit with our kids, do it with them, but don't do it on them, do it with them. Say, let's just track what you're doing, how much you're using it, make changes there, but then let your kid work on your tech audit as well with you. So, so I. One of the scarier things that I'VE read recently was survey just came out with the Girl Scouts of America. Just got asking these young girls a bunch of questions and one of the questions that was buried in there I haven't heard a lot of people talk about was how often do you think your parents screen use is interfering with your ability to connect with them emotionally? And over 80% either agreed or strongly agreed.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So we're putting up a barrier between us and them and anytime there's a barrier between us and them, they will return to what makes them feel good, which is going to be their tech. So if we're going to do this, it's got to start with us. So do a tech audit with your own kid where they get to say all right, for the next two days, let's just track. Every time I pick up my phone, you tell me we're going to write it down. Yeah, I'm going to write down what I was doing or something like that. And we've got to get a hold of our own behaviors and start to recognize if I'm ever going to touch this like I have this computer is in a shack. My house is over there. I, my computer is in this shack. I do not touch it outside of this shack because I just don't want my kid to see me ever on. And it sucks because that means if I got to do an email at 2am I'm trudging through the snow to get out here. But that's, that's the price I, I paid to make that decision.

[Melody Hempy]

And I know you gotta run, but let's just wrap with your opinion and your advice on, on phones and video games because over here we don't believe that kids need them at all until they're 18. I mean we, we set our bar really high over screen strong. We, we don't believe minors need all this stuff that their life will be better and enriched and much more enriched without it. But what is, what is your take on that? What is your.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

I, I always say there's no. Tell me why a kid would ever need a cell phone and I'll start listening. I've never heard of a reasonable argument why a kid would ever need a cell phone. Because parent needs to get a hold of me.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah. Why?

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Okay. This school at the front of the. There's a phone at the front of the school. You're going to be fine. Don't worry about it. Oh, how else am I going to keep tabs on them? You're not.

[Melody Hempy]

You're not.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

That's the point. Let them get away from you, you get away from them. It's kind of how we're going to grow together here. So I, I'm still waiting for a good argument as to why a kid would need a cell phone.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So I'm totally fine with that. Video games I can get away with. If you go back to, like, what we have, like the Nintendo growing up, where you had two controllers and one screen.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

What happens is when you're playing video games like that, where you're side by side with somebody in the same room, your body releases dopamine, oxytocin, which is a sign that you're connecting with another human being. When you game on two separate screens, and especially with a wall between you, your body no longer releases oxytocin. It no longer recognizes that as, as, As a unified or social activity. It recognizes it as isolating and threatening.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So the video games kids are playing today, unnecessary. Any Internet video game I. And you're a kid, don't touch it.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

But if you're talking about, like, let's pull out the Nintendo and you and I are going to play Mario Kart side by side and punch each other while we're doing it and make fun of each other.

[Melody Hempy]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

I can get away scientifically with that as saying, at least you're connecting with your kid.

[Melody Hempy]

At least you're connecting. But you're also connecting when you're smoking pot together with your friend, too. So that's not a.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Not wrong. You're not wrong. That's it.

[Melody Hempy]

Just saying. I don't know.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

I just say, you want to smoke pot, you go for it. Yeah. So I, I. From just a pure connection standpoint, I can go with it. But you're right, there's going to be other, Other aspects of it. The addictive aspects that I'm just.

[Melody Hempy]

There's other aspects. It's like smoking pot together, you know, and maybe one of them is going to be fine, but the other one isn't going to be fine. And I know because I raised one. That was the other one that really struggled with all the screen addictions and everything. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I can't believe that the time just evaporated. We got to run, but thank you. And we're definitely going to have you back really soon, I hope.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Do it again. Thank you. And you all have a good one.

[Melody Hempy]

Wow, that was such an incredible podcast today. Thank you all for listening. I hope this episode has helped encourage you so you can get a handle on the screens. And in your schools and to get the book, the Digital delusion, It gives you all the steps in the second half of the book, it gives you all the steps about how to write a letter to your school and do different things. But there are a couple things I want to say about that when you're working with schools. Number one, just remember to be positive with your school. Your school administrators and your teachers and your principals have a lot on their plate. They have so many things that are stressing them. So when you go to talk to them about this issue, be sure and be very, very positive about it. You need to empathize with them and tell them how hard, you know, this all has been, and you want to be there to help. And one way that you can help is to get this curriculum that we have in the school. And I know I don't want this to sound like a sales pitch, because it's not. This is a very positive, positive thing you can do for your school. For the elementary school, you can use the Adventures of Super Brain in the activity book, and that is can be deployed through our Super Brain week. And this is where you, as a mom or dad, can go to the school and say, hey, let's just do this book for one week. And we have all the instructions on how to do this. And we go through and explain to our kids why learning on pen and paper is better than on a screen. And then the second thing you can do, of course, is to offer the curriculum, KBS curriculum for the middle school. These are very practical things that you can do. We have all the professional development that comes with it. We've got a whole team that goes into schools and does this training about the science. A lot of the stuff that you just heard today, we have in our slide deck. We go, we talk to teachers about it, we talk to parents. So we have the whole package for your school. So please, please, please remember, kids, brains and screens when you're talking to your school. And remember not to be just the squeaky wheel, but to be the squeaky wheel with the solution, because we have the solutions over here, and we can help you with that, with your kids. And I just want to say, finally, to wrap this up, that whatever you're feeling right now, if you're feeling discouraged, if you're feeling like there's no way you can take on your. Your whole school system, there is a lot that you can do in your home. And one of the things that I did that Dr. Jarrett was talking about today was we got textbooks from our school. And then I even had to order some, like, on, you know, ebay. I had to get some old textbooks for my kids, but it was very, very, very helpful. And you learn today the reasons why. So thanks again for listening. And remember, we've got your back over here at Screen Strong, and we're here to help you have everything you need to remove the screen conflicts from your home. So until next time, stand up for your kids, stand out from the crowd, and stay strong.