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- [00:00]
A
We need to learn to use these incredibly powerful tools to help us be more human rather than less human and less connected.
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Welcome to Talking About Kids. I am your host are Bradley Snyder, researcher, activist and author of the Five Simple Truths of Raising Kids. This episode is about digital wellness and my guest is Michael Rich. Michael is a pediatrician, the founder and director of the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, and the author of the Mediatrician's A Joyful Approach to Raising Healthy, Smart, Kind Kids in a Screen Saturated World. In his book, Michael writes, the best strategy for protecting your child from potential harm is to teach them not just to survive, but to thrive in the screen media environment, to cultivate their awareness, develop their critical thinking, awaken their creativity and nurture their empathy, providing them with the skills to harness the positive affordances and to recognize and avoid the negative influences of the screens that surround us all. Michael and I discuss this wonderful goal and some techniques for making it a reality. This episode was intentionally produced to support the formation and coordination of adolescent centered care and services, so you also will hear from Vinny Chilani and Celeste Krell Colom of the Arizona alliance for Adolescent Health. It was recorded live using a webinar platform to encourage questions from alliance members and other listeners. It is sponsored in part by the Arizona Department of Health Services Must Stop Bullying campaign through its Title 5 Maternal and Child Health Program. For more information go to muststopbullying.org you know, talking about Kids is designed to help parents, teachers and other professionals help kids. If you enjoyed this episode, please give it a positive review and share it with your friends and colleagues. And now the interview.
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A
I actually was a filmmaker, a screenwriter and filmmaker for 12 years as the first part of my professional career and actually ended up spending two years working as assistant director to Akira Kurosawa, the guy that made Seven Samurai and Ron many people know of. And frankly that ruined me for the US film industry because after coming back from Rembrandt Studio I found myself in an automobile manufacturing plant and had an early midlife crisis, went to medical school, became a pediatrician because I refused to grow up as I was in my early training as a pediatrician as a resident was right when the American Academy of Pediatrics was really starting to get concerned about the role of screens in kids lives. Then television. Were kids becoming couch potatoes? Were they getting fat, stupid and violent in front of the television? Having been on the other side of the media industry, I did not see the either the point or potential success of kind of making the media the enemy or something that is harmful. I saw it as, you know, a part of kids lives, an essential part of kids lives that was, you know, not going to go away. And one of the things that I did early on was to work on policy statements, practice policy statements for pediatricians about how to integrate the role of screens in kids lives. And realized very early on that there was not a lot of good public health research on exactly how young people are changed by the screens they use and how they use them. That began now close to 30 year odyssey of building up the research on exactly how we're changed in positive as well as negative ways by the screens we use and how we use them with the understanding that they are not going away, but that we need to learn to use these incredibly powerful tools to help us be more human rather than less human and less connected.
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B
I had a similar trajectory as yours in the sense that when I first started working with kids there was a lot of concern about video games and what video games were doing to kids. And as I went back through, as you do in your book, and I looked at congressional hearing around the evils of television and I even went back further and looked at congressional hearings around the evils of rock and roll radio and. And initially comic books. Yeah, exactly. Pinball, right. So my first conclusion about the Internet is that this is just another use of medium. This is another one of these things that people are getting really frightened about for no reason. But like you, I've started to see this as being different. So what do we, why do we need to be vigilant about our kids digital wellness in a way that maybe we didn't need to be about television?
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A
Well, I think the issue ultimately is access. Now we now have devices that we are with 247 for all intents and purposes, even with television for most of its existence it was a big box in the living room in front of a couch, right. And that was something that showed a show at certain hour, it was over at a certain hour. There was kids, you know, bedtime, etc. Now we can't enter a built environment really without a screen being in it. You know, they're in elevators, they're on shopping carts, they're on our wrists, they're in our pockets. And as with other technologies, we blindly and enthusiastically embraced all the cool things it could do without much of a thought to what might the repercussions of this be? What might the long term influence of this be? And in many ways I look at this as akin to climate change in the sense that think about how the industrial revolution and internal combustion cars have really rocketed our civilization advances, and yet at the same time we were busy slowly killing our earth and we're only now realizing that. I think the same thing is occurring with screens. And ultimately, when you think about it, media simply is a way that humans communicate with each other, right? A handwritten note is medium. A painting is a medium, A book is a medium. And yet we have gone incredibly far toward both convenience and lack of resistance, lack of friction to getting to it, and actually lack of cognitive friction in the sense of having to process. So it is way easier to watch endlessly scrolling TikToks than it is to sit down and read Moby Dick.
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B
I think that's a great segue to this next question because as you point out, you're not saying that all of the Internet, all of social media, is bad. As a matter of fact, your statement is that you're wanting to help kids and families get the most out of this environment while avoiding the harms. So I think I want to start by talking about what are the hallmarks of a healthy relationship? How do we know when our kids are getting it right and we are helping them get it right?
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A
Well, I talk about the five M's of digital wellness, three of which you can do to help your kids and two of which you can, you know, benefit from once you've gotten there. And the first M is to model the behavior that you want to see in your kids, be the change you want to see. Don't be staring at that all important email from your boss while yelling at your kid to turn off Grand Theft Auto because to them that's the height of hypocrisy. And when they need one of these power tools, and we should treat these as power tools the way we treat a chainsaw as a power tool or driving an automobile as a power tool, as something that they get when we deem them able to take responsibility for it, able to use it in ways that are effective and not harmful and that respect themselves and others. Then the second M comes in, which is we mentor them in the use of that device or that platform. We sit down next to them and explore it with them. Not in fear, not in guilt, not in blame and shame, but with curiosity. One of the things that's really interesting that parents say to me is that they dread the Internet talk more than they dread the sex talk, because correctly or incorrectly, they think they know something about sex, but they know Their kid knows more about the Internet than they do. Right? They don't want to be in that, you know, equal or even inferior position. And that's why I say mentor rather than teach, because mentors learn as much from the mentee as the mentee does from the mentor. And what you're doing when you sit down with that smartphone and explore it together with your kids, you're much more able to say, wow, you know, look how easy it is to fall onto a hate site or pornography site or something of that nature. And you're able to talk about it not as something to that's wrong or something to feel guilty about, but as something that needs to be managed in that environment you're introducing to them and that open dialogue back and forth where you are learning from them and you will learn from them things that you never imagined you could do. Then it segues into the third M, which is to be able to monitor their digital lives, have their usernames and passwords, not because you're going to be watching them all the time. And this is the one that both parents and kids push back the hardest against. Parents say, I don't have the time to be gaming all the time. He's gaming. Or on social media. All the time she's on social media. But if they are able to, the kids behavior changes, just like random drug testing in the workplace, which is if they know that you can dive into their, you know, Insta feed, that they will, you know, behave differently on it. Now one of the things that'll immediately come up is, what about Finstas, right? What about those fake Instagram accounts? Here's the really interesting thing we found about Finstas as opposed to Instas. Instas kids use much the way corporations do. They use them to market themselves to the world, to show the great vacation they went on, or my dad's new sports car, my hot new boyfriend. Finstas are for their close friends. And on Finstas, they're actually much more authentic where they, instead of, you know, sort of bragging about themselves and, you know, make marketing themselves, they are actually saying, these are the things that scare me. These are the things that upset me. Did you. What do you think she meant when she said that? And I firmly believe that if we can all learn to use social media authentically, where we are our true selves, it can actually be an instrument of peace. Imagine if a kid in Ukraine and a kid in Russia are being authentic with each other on social media. And their respective leaders say, take up arms. They'll say, Wait a minute. I know that kid better than I know you. My ostensible leader. I'm not going to make war. So, you know, this is, maybe this is the 60s coming through again. You know, make love, not war. But I do think that if we understand these powerful tools for what they are and what they can be and bring our humanity to them, as opposed to bringing our Machiavellian competition to them, we can enhance our humanity rather than harm it. Now, I know you want the other two goodies.
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B
I want the other two goodies. But before I do, I don't want to get off of. I don't want to get off a monitor quite yet.
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Okay?
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B
Because I want to, I want to make it very clear to the listeners. I want, first of all, I want to make sure that they all get a copy of your book, the Media Attrition's Guide and read it for themselves. But when you say monitor, a lot of parents think about these tools, these automated ways of blocking and preventing and logging. But that's not what you're talking about with monitoring. You're talking about a much more the adult being present to what the child is doing.
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A
Absolutely. First of all, these tech fixes never work because the kids are smarter than we are and they will always hack around them. What happens with them is parents put something on and they say, I can relax now and I can not pay attention because that thing is taking care of my kid. When I am asked what the best software for protecting your kid online is, I say it sits between your kids ears. That it is how we educate and empower them to be digitally literate. That means both in their reception of digital information, but also in their creation and distribution of digital information. Because the days of television are over, right? It's not just receptive. These kids are in an ongoing dialogue with the universe and what they put out there goes far, goes fast and is sticky. The edgier it is. And they try to make it edgy so it gets attention. The edgier it is, the more likely it's going to end up in their college admissions folder or some, you know, employer's HR records. And so I actually encourage the kids to observe what I call the Grandma rule, which is don't post anything that you don't want grandma to see because she can. Parents, they piss off their parents all the time. That doesn't bother them, but they want grandma's unconditional love and respect. And in some ways that allows them to project into the future how other people will look at Them is to think about what grandma thinks.
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B
And the other two M's now, please, Michael.
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A
Oh, the other two M's are the good ones. The first one is make memories. I argue that we don't make memories of what we scroll online. We don't make memories of the Fortnite games we play or whatever. We make memories from, you know, a walk in the woods or playing catch in the backyard or, you know, trying to make spaghetti sauce and spilling it all over the kitchen floor. It's our human interactions, good, bad, and indifferent, that stick with us and that actually enhance and enrich our humanity and our ability to empathize and connect with each other. So making memories is something we don't do online. We make memories live and in person. And finally, with all of these skills, we achieve mastery of these devices of this ecosystem. A lot of people talk about Internet safety, and I argue against the idea of Internet safety for the simple reason that it presumes the Internet is unsafe and encourages people to enter into it back on their heels in a defensive stance rather than leaning into it and saying, this is a tool made by humans for humans. Let's humanize it. Let's be humans in it to each other. Let's not be afraid of it. We don't teach kids to drive a car by saying, oh, don't hit that tree. You know, we sit white knuckled next to them in the front seat and we help them learn to drive. And in the process, they don't hit trees or pedestrians. And so I think that we just have to get away from the idea of all these devices as the latest bright, shiny things in our world and realize that these are powerful tools that can be used for good or for harm or mindlessly instead of mindfully.
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B
In your book, you have a developmental approach to developing these skills that breaks it down from birth through teenage years. And. And Celeste, you have an interesting question about that.
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C
Yeah, so I have. I was explaining that I do have two teenagers, one of whom is currently on an esports team. And so monitoring everything is, I feel like you said one of those people that just feels very overwhelmed. I do feel like we communicate openly. I do have passwords to everything. I do spot check things. If I feel like, you know, attitudes and things are, you know, going on, I. I definitely take interest in that. But as far as the other M's that I'm missing, how can I, as they are 15 and 16 going on 20, 27, kind of implement these in a way that doesn't feel like an Invasion of privacy or like, I don't trust them in the way that we've already kind of built and understand our trust to be.
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A
Approach with curiosity. Always with curiosity. Have them teach you. Have you tried gaming with them?
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C
I do sometimes. I will admit I probably could do a little bit better at being a little bit more vested, but I, I do try. They. They just shut me down, man.
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A
Well, they, they certainly shoot you down. Right. Yeah. Winning these games. But think about what you're doing when you sit down next to them. As much as it like annoys or, you know, embarrasses them. You're saying, I love you, I respect you. I want to understand what engages you here. And then when you finally figure out the 47 different moves it takes to steal a car, you can turn to them and ask, why, why practice this over and over again. Is this, how is this helping? So you're, you're really shifting the, the field really for them and sort of saying, I value your time, I value your attention, and I want to understand how this is helping you and just let it drop there. Right. Don't want to get into this is not as good as doing your calculus or whatever. But more to say, be a little thoughtful, be insightful about how you are spending your precious attention and time because there are big corporations out there that are spending money, billions of dollars to capture your attention.
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C
Yeah.
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And you own that. This is part of your pride in yourself.
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Yeah.
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A
So. So, Brad, if I might, you know, if, if Michael has his five M's, Right. I really think back to Ken Ginsberg, seven C's of resilience. But there's an eight, and that's critical consciousness. Think that's something that parents really have to intentionally cultivate in an era of monetization of media where everyone is a. Of misinformation of really how we teach young people to critically think about the messages they receive. How about we teach all of us to critically think about the message we receive? I think part of why we are in the situation we are as a society right now is that we've gone through a generation that has not learned critical thinking in school, that has been taught to the test as opposed to thought, to question, question authority, question answers, question why things happen. And we have to get back to that. That is a much harder way to teach. It's much harder on the educational system. And yet in countries where they do that, instead of teaching to the test, like Finland, they have extraordinary results in terms of education because they allow the kids natural curiosity, natural drive for something more to blossom as opposed to rote learning of things. I think that we made a real mistake a generation ago when we decided to defund or less fund our education system because it wasn't as important as other aspects of our society. And I think that we're continuing in that direction now. And what we really need to take a step back and ask ourselves is how does this serve our future? I mean, we. We're now at a time when people are questioning our democracy. Yeah, right. And. And that shouldn't. We should never be there. We should. We should be thinking critically about what do we want for ourselves, but more importantly for our children and grandchildren going forward, what legacy are we leaving?
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B
A population that has a interesting relationship with digital media is LGBTQ youth. As you point out in the book, the. You know, social media can. And the Internet can be a place where these youth can explore their identity in a way that they might not be able to in their communities. You also point out that LGBTQ youth are twice as likely to be cyberbullied as youth who aren't. So do you have any sort of special advice for parents or teachers or adults who are working with this population to help them create the best possible experience for them?
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A
So, Brad, there's another dimension to this too, and I'd love for Michael to comment. And these are young people that may purposely seek these sites who are not out to their families where that monitoring is not there.
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B
Right.
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A
Where.
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B
Yeah. I mean, in fact, they often go to sites to learn how to talk to adults about these issues. So, Michael, I think one thing that's
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A
really important about what Vinnie just said is we cannot assume that every child has a parent who loves, protects them, no matter what. Right? And there are a lot of kids out there whose parents are either too busy, too stressed out, or basically just not paying attention to them. And one of the things that I learned from Dr. Eli Neuberger, who's really built the whole idea of child abuse as, you know, a medical practice as protecting against it, is every kid needs one adult at least, who's just crazy about them, but that is not necessarily apparent. So we can't go with that assumption. And to extend Vinny's thought beyond, you know, a place to explore themselves, explore their sexuality, but a place to be accepted, a place to be seen and heard, affirmed, and frankly loved that they may not have in their physical community, either in their nuclear family or in their larger community. And this is not just, you know, LGBTQI plus kids. This is also disabled kids. This kids of minority races or, or languages or religions or cultures. It's anyone who has been othered in their immediate community. And one of the things that has happened with media is that the traditional Bronfenbrenner, you know, ecosystem of, you know, extending circles out has sort of been blown up by media because media is, is as intimate as our nuclear family and as large as the world. So it cuts through all of those and it allows kids, and sometimes these other kids to choose their role models in the world. Now sometimes that's a wonderful thing. And sometimes they're following some, you know, content creator, some influencer, whatever. And in fact, content creator, which is now how you call influencers, because that's so five minutes ago, is the number one career goal of kids right now. They don't even care what content it is. They just want to be a creator because that makes them a celebrity.
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B
You know, I think, though, if I may, that if you practice the other M's that you've talked about, if you are present in the life of your kid and have that kind of open communication, then having discussions around identity or identity expression or orientation, those all can become easier the more time you spend discussing anything and starting those discussions early, letting people know that your love for the child is, is absolute and, and that anything can be brought to you.
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A
Yes, absolutely. And, and the extension of that is the building of media literacy and of digital literacy starts with that child who can just barely sit up straight and a board book on your lap. Right. And this is just extends into other media than board books. The other thing is having those open talks is the easiest to do on a car ride. You're sealed off from the rest of the world. You are strapped in, you don't have to look at each other. Yeah, right. And interestingly, that's one place where, barring you know, video screens, air, dead air is okay. Right. And, and sometimes we need to sometimes just be silent with each other and be at peace with each other and let our thoughts flow. And then the conversation comes out of that, but it becomes much less punitive, much less accusatory, much less conflictual when you approach it as a problem to solve rather than a harm to be mitigated or, you know, a crime to be punished.
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C
Now I have a question on that. So how would you, or how do you feel about, you know, the phone as a method of communicating emotions? So one of my sons is on the spectrum and it's very hard for him to sometimes articulate how he's feeling in the moment. And so one of the things that works for us is just that he's able to have his space and then send me a message with how he feels, and he feels that's a safer space for him to kind of express himself in that way.
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A
And that's a brilliant example of using these tools for what they do well. And one of the real problems I have with, for example, the idea of banning smartphones in schools. First of all, it won't work because the kids will instantly have burner phones, you know, but, but ultimately this is a power tool in kids lives. And this is a power tool that can do some things that other tools cannot do very well. And particularly for someone on the spectrum or for kids with a whole variety of different neurodiversity. And I'll talk about that in a second. There are real affordances in these tools that can help them level up in a way to what other people are able to do without these tools. I hate, hate, hate the word neurotypical, because all that neurotypical means is someone like me, right? Everybody else is neurodivergent, whatever. I personally, after seeing thousands of kids as patients and just living life, I believe that we are all neurodiverse. And that is what's really interesting about people. Think about the people you have who are musical geniuses and can't kick a soccer ball for the life of them, or who are great mathematicians and can't hold a conversation. Many young people on the spectrum are absolutely brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but have a hard time expressing that or communicating that in various ways. So instead of us othering them, why not have them enrich us with the differences? Have them show us how to play music, even if we'll never do it as well as they do. And so I really think that we need to take a step back and stop fearing these tools and start understanding that social media is not doing something to us. Smartphones are not doing something to us. It's what we are doing with them that can actually help or harm us. And we need to take responsibility for that. And that's one of the reasons why in our clinic for interactive media and Internet disorders, we have found that addiction is not only an inaccurate but a counterproductive model for what's going on. Because if you think about it, well, first of all, addiction isn't a medical term at all. It's a social term. We think of it as somebody who's weak, who, you know, weak in character, who needs to be, you know, cured or punished or both. But when you think about it, it's use of a pleasurable but unnecessary substance, whether it be alcohol or opioids or cocaine, that is driven by physiologic cues, as in, I want to feel better, I want to feel high, and then I don't want to feel bad when I withdraw.
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B
Right.
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A
And it continues despite negative consequences. But our therapeutic goal is abstinence. You don't need alcohol to live. You don't need cocaine to live. When you look at interactive media, that is now something that we need. It's a necessary resource to. To learn, to teach, to communicate, to connect with people. The kids who get in trouble with it are. In every case we've seen so far, it's driven by psychological drivers, not physiologic drivers. Every single kid we've seen has one of four underlying conditions. Adhd, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, social anxiety or depression, or sometimes a combination of two or more of those. And they go to these interactive media to comfort themselves, to feel in control, to, you know, basically distract themselves in many ways. And so we actually see this as more akin to binge eating disorder, which is the most common eating disorder, where we are eating not because we're hungry, but because we're trying to fill that empty hole inside.
- [34:54]
B
Right, Michael? I suspect that if we had more than the half hour that we've blown through, we would have taken another half hour and another half hour after that ad infinitum, because this has been so incredibly enriching. Thank you so much for being on Talking About Kids. Thank you for your book. There's going to be links to it in the show, notes and links to your clinic as well as to your wellness lab. And thank you for everything that you do for kids. Really appreciate it.
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A
Thank all of you for all you do for kids every day. And tell people it's also available in audible form so they can listen to it on their way into work.
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B
Wonderful. Excellent. Thank you all. That was Michael Rich. More information about Michael the Digital Wellness Lab and his book is at talkingaboutkids.com and when you visit talkingaboutkids.com please let me know what you think about the podcast. The Talking About Kids theme song is by the Senators. For more their music go to the senatorsmusic.com and remember, kids are young goats and young humans, and the difference is that young goats are easier to manage.
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A
Sam.