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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 413: Hijacked Minds - How to Help Kids Build a Strong, Healthy Psychological Immune System | Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids
01:00:29
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- [00:01]
A
Hello friends. Welcome to the show. Today we're diving into one of the most urgent and eye opening conversations of our time with a guest who has changed the way so many of US parent Dr. Nicholas Carderas. He's back for his third appearance and if you've read Glow Kids or Digital Madness, you already know why. He's one of our most requested guests. Dr. Carderis has been sounding the alarm for years about how screens are hijacking our kids minds, impacting everything from their attention spans to their mental health. And he doesn't hold back. Today we're tackling the dangers of screen addiction, the manipulation of young minds by big tech, and why boredom is actually a superpower for your child's development. But this isn't just about the problem, it's about the solution. Whether it's unplugging, pushing back against societal norms, joining on the 1000 hours outside journey, or even legal action, Dr. Carderas gives us the tools we need to protect our kids in a tech saturated world. Before we jump in, I have a quick favor to ask. If you love this podcast and find it helpful, would you mind taking a moment to leave us a five star review? It helps more parents find this life changing content and it supports the work we do to bring you episodes like this one. And don't forget, my book until the Streetlights Come on has fantastic reviews and is the perfect companion to today's discussion. It is currently on sale on Amazon for less than $20. Today's episode is a must listen, one that every parent needs to hear. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Stay tuned, you don't want to miss a second of this show. We're so done with New Year, New you. This year it's More youe on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Geminis because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want and you know what? We love that. For you, someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumblebee. Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Urich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I am beyond, beyond, beyond thrilled. What an honor. For the third time back. I can hardly even believe it. I could hardly even believe when it happened the first time. Dr. Nicholas Carderis is here. Welcome.
- [02:12]
B
So great to be back with you, Jenny. Good to be on.
- [02:15]
A
I read your book Glow Kids years and years and years ago. Glow Kids How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids and How to Break the Trance and it changed my life. It is a life changing read and you are on the forefront. You were telling people what everybody kind of knew but was denying and denying and denying and denying. And you were telling people no, this is really messing with your kids. And it was so informative for me and really changed the course of our childhood. And then I read Digital Madness How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis and How to Restore Our Sanity and I just loved that whole story. It included your dad. I mean it was just a fantastic books. There just so much depth in them. They have really been so transformative for our family. And I know listeners have listened in and read the books and same for them and so welcome. I already said welcome but I just so glad you're here.
- [03:01]
B
Well, you know, and I'm glad that it was, you know, when I first wrote Glow Kids I did feel like the Paul Revere of the mental health world because you know, I was. Is anybody else seeing that this is a problem? Is anybody else aware of this? And I think, you know, people had their heads in the sand for a variety of reasons. No one wanted an be told. Maybe it was a message that you were unwittingly maybe harming your kids. So that's kind of a hard message to swallow. And I think, you know, we were all also so in love with our devices that we weren't noticing in our own tech love affair what might have been happening to our kids. So it was kind of a combination of those two things that kept people sort of under aware of the problem.
- [03:38]
A
Yeah, I think they should be must reads for parents. I mean they're just fantastic books.
- [03:42]
B
Thank you.
- [03:42]
A
What's interesting and I was thinking about was when I was a kid we had a TV in the living room and my grandpa who was probably born, I just texted my mom. He was probably born in the 20s. My grandpa would walk over, he lived like maybe a mile and a halfway and he would walk over almost every day and he would always bring the newspaper and we were a lot of times sitting in front of the TV when it was must have been in the afternoon and he would bop us on the head with the newspaper and then he would pull us back. He would say, you're sitting too close. It's just really interesting that he, you know, he's born in a different era and he had this wherewithal to say no, like you're too close to that screen. Yeah, never gave any statistics. He didn't cite any studies. And then here it is, you know, just like a couple decades later where the kids devices are like right in front of their face. I mean they, they're a couple inches away and nobody's really saying anything. So you talk a lot about how there seemed to be not much cause for alarm because we already had screens, we already had TV and this just felt like TV on the go. And yet it's not, it's so very different. So can you talk about like how that sort of crept in and why? I mean there's still so many issues with it. It's pretty unbelievable. But sort of that creep in that we conflated these modern screens with TV and we had TV and so we were fine and it's confusing.
- [05:04]
B
Right, right. And like you said, even you know, your grandpa was aware of it and you know, you read that. I read about my father who was born in 1931. He know they were hyper aware to technology because I think they were just more intuitively aware, you know, they hadn't been overeducated to how they shouldn't be afraid of some of these impacts. My mother used to say, be careful, you'll fall into the tv, you know, and lean in on Saturday morning cartoons and you'd be so into the screen sometimes. But I think you're right, I think that. What's the other main thrust of it? We conflated modern digital media with our TV sets that we grew up with. And you know, not to say that those TV sets that we grew up with were entirely innocuous. I mean there were problems. And you know, I remember when I was in high school they would say that, you know, by the time you graduated high school, you'd see, you would have seen. I think it was something like 2000 murders on TV police shows, you know, but the police shows were like Starsky and Hutch and you know, bang bang, pow, pow. Very unrealism type of shows that. And again, what I write about is television is a passive viewing experience. It's not an interactive participant immersive experience. And that makes the effects much more significantly impactful. And so a lot of us I think conflated modern screens with as you said, a perfectly TV on the go, just smaller versions. We didn't factor in predatory algorithms that target our viewing habits in a really heat seeking missile like way that really targets our psychological vulnerabilities. Because let's face it, Big tech knows that whatever leads to emotional reactivity increases engagement. So it's not just like we're, oh, we're randomly watching some TV show. We're being curated content that is really psychologically harmful to us because that's what's the most emotionally impactful and reactive. And it's ubiquitous and it's immersive and interactive. So all these elements together make this modern experience much more impactful than when you and I were sitting on the couch watching TV eight feet away with rabbit ears on it. And, you know, the TV in my house, you had to get the pliers to turn the channel because the knob would always break off. And you had three channels, five channels maybe. Now you have a buffet of thousands of instant digital media, instant gratification choices. And now, in addition to the medium itself being problematic, you have content that can be really mind shaping. You know, I call it brain altering and mind shaping because not only does digital media change the structure of our brains, and we could talk about that, but also the content in terms of everything from body image to how our values are created to the rapid cuts and, you know, the way it drives attentional disorders and psychiatric content. We don't have influences anymore that are just the Kardashians. Now we have influencers that are psychiatric, which I write about in Digital Madness. And they have undoubtedly, indisputably a social contagion effect. If I'm watching a psychiatric influencer for hours a day that's got either borderline personality disorder or bipolar disorder or dissociative identity disorder, it's going to impact me consciously and unconsciously. We begin to pick up some of those symptoms because those influencers become, for many of our young folks, aspirational. Look, look, this unwell influencer has got 10 million followers and a billion views and views and followers of the coin of the realm. So they become a value system that our kids begin to aspire towards.
- [08:33]
A
So very different new generation technology. Another piece of the puzzle is that somehow at some point got its grip on the schools. What's wild to me, Nicholas, is that, okay, Low Kids came out in 2016. You wrote it a decade ago. And yeah, I just spoke at a school just a couple months ago. School brings me in to speak. Then they did a Q and A at the end. And this mom raises her hand, who's from the district and says, they're giving my kindergartner an iPad. She's crying. She starts crying and she says, I don't want him to have the iPad. It's for schoolwork. But then all the other kids play Minecraft. They're five, they're in kindergarten.
- [09:09]
B
Yeah.
- [09:09]
A
She's crying and she's like, I don't know how to teach my child about the peer pressure. He feels like he's the only one that doesn't get to play Minecraft on the school iPad. And I had it, I had a message that came in yesterday from my mom, same thing. My kid is in kindergarten and I don't know what to do with the screens that they're giving my child. So here, this book, Glow Kids comes out a decade ago and we're still giving iPads to kindergarteners. Kindergarteners, Kindergarteners. So talk about how the. That was a whole piece of it too, where it's sort of like this fear, like, okay, my kids need this for school. They're gonna fall behind.
- [09:41]
B
Yeah, I think no. And I'm speaking at a school district tonight, as a matter of fact, and I do a lot of speaking at education conferences, you know, and I'm either asked to stay away or invited in because there are some evolved educators who get it, you know, but then there are mostly drank the Kool Aid and who just figured that this is kind of, you know, the, it's meeting the student where the student is and it's going to be having a high tech classroom get sort of misconstrued or conflated with having a better classroom. And there's not one research study, not one that shows screen time in the earlier grades leads to better outcomes in school and middle or later grades. So yet so many principals are in this arms race with neighboring school districts too, because a lot of parents are saying, well, what's your technology policy? When does my little Johnny and Susie get a Chromebook or an iPad? What started with initiatives to give every high school kid an iPad or a Chromebook, went to middle school and then went down to elementary school. And now to like you're saying kindergarten, you know, I'll one up you. I had a couple of years ago, I had a mom who was her child was in kindergarten and called me for help because not only did she not want her child to have a tablet in kindergarten, but when she told the principal, this principal threatened to call CPS on her because she was going to pull her child out of kindergarten. And so in New York State, kindergarten is not a mandatory school grade. So it's not educational neglect if you don't put your kid into kindergarten. But I had to call up this principal and say, really? You're really threatening this mom up with CPS because she doesn't want her kid to have a tablet at age 5. And then I have to kind of go through my shtick and say, let me show you some of the research. It isn't just the peer pressure of all the kids playing Minecraft, although it is that, but it's not age appropriate. The rapid screen cuts, that level of high intensity screen time is developmentally damaging to five year olds. So you're doing these kids a disservice. There's brain imaging research that shows the cognitive effects, the attentional issues. You're doing all sorts of harm. You're opening up doors to potential mental health issues. For what purpose? Give me the rationale again, why it's pedagogically or educationally beneficial to give 5 year olds tablets. And you, you know, it's just they've been sold, you know, Big tech has sold them this Kool Aid in the same way that's Big Pharma sometimes gets primary care physicians to kind of push products that they maybe I won't say that they're necessarily bribed, but it becomes sort of normalized that this is what you do. If you're a principal, you want your school to have, you know, technology in the classroom and they don't question it usually. And then those who do are the ones who begin to push back and say, I think we're going to pump the brakes, you know, like, and now we have countries, you know, like England and the Netherlands and countries like Finland is at the top of the food chain with their screen time and they don't allow any individual screens through high school because they realize these are distractions and these have all these other negatives to them. So let's allow kids have normalized educational experiences. You know, the traditional way of reading is much more, you know, there's been studies that show that if you read something on paper versus a screen, you have 20% higher retention rates. You absorb it better, you retain it better. And yet, you know, like you said, you still have this obsession with ill informed educators who are just sort of going with the herd.
- [12:51]
A
It's a lot, it's a lot to push back against. But your information gives parents the bravery. It gives them the knowledge to make the decisions that are the best for their kids in the long run and in the short run. I love the book so much, Glow Kids and Digital Madness. And you are working with kids. You're in a really unique spot to where you have kids that are coming in for recovery programs. This is an addiction like a lot of other kinds of addictions. And so you've been working with these families. You're working with these kids. You are, you have a program, I saw one of them. We're showing a family in the. And the son comes in and he's, you know, he's been off screens for 45 days. But you know, kids are getting almost violent when parents are talking about possibly taking their screens. It's a really big deal.
- [13:31]
B
Not almost violent violent. I've worked with quite a few, you know, where the families have come in because they've been attacked by their kids, when they starting to take away the screen time or reduce the screen time. Yeah. The treatment program, Omega Recovery that I have in Austin, it's failure to launch older adolescents to young adults. Our classic profile is that failure to launch 17 to 24 year old. Typical profile is a smart kid, they go away to college and they just don't have the tools or the social skills or the ability to function well. And they're usually comorbid with some other mental health issue. So there's usually some level of anxiety, depression that are, you know, we call some of those issues bi directional with screen time, you know, chicken or the egg. Did the depression and anxiety come first and is the young person self medicating with the screen time or did the screen time cause some of the depression, anxiety or exacerbated? We certainly know that it makes it worse. And so a lot of these 18, 19 year olds, they kind of got through high school because mom and dad were helicoptering like hovering on top of them and making sure that they were getting their homework in on time and some level of oversight. And then once they go to college and no one's there watching, you know, so many of them just get stuck in their dorm rooms on their computer. Next thing you know they're flunked out, they're back in mom and dad's basement. Now they need treatment because they're depressed or anxious and they're screen addicted. And all those variables come together. And typically that's a really hard condition or issue to treat because it's a lot easier to prevent than it is to treat after the fact. But that profile of client is an epidemic right now throughout the country, especially post Covid Covid nuclear bomb. And all these dynamics is now you had kids that were zoom schooled and isolated and quarantined and so that amplified the depression and amplified the screen dependence. And so most of the male clients that I have are gamers. They're young men who are typically pretty smart, had been good students, have intellectual capacity, but they get Sucked into what I call digital escapism. So they feel empowered by leveling up to level 120. And they're, you know, fantasy galactic, conquering worlds of, you know, escapism. And a lot of my female clients are social media, shape, body image, depression, cutting, eating disordered, sometimes borderline, sometimes having some other issues. And the social media amplifies those mental health issues. So those are two broad buckets of clients that we treat and we're seeing more and more and more of.
- [15:56]
A
That's what I was going to ask. It seems like it's getting worse. One of the things that you talk about, which is really interesting, is that screens, they cause. I don't know if cause is the right word, but you end up being more impulsive. I even remember this from, like, right before I was having kids. I talked to this woman that I worked with, a colleague, and she was even talking about toys with buttons on them, toys with batteries and buttons. You give your kids a VTech and they're 18 months and it's buttons. And she's like, give them wood toys, you know, or give them sticks or give them rocks. It was just interesting. I'd never heard anything like that. But the fact that you are in control and you press the button and it reacts, there's this impulsivity and that. That is also related to addiction.
- [16:35]
B
Well, so we can begin. We can conceptualize this. I teach this at the university level. I teach addiction and neuropsychology. We can think of addiction as falling under the umbrella of impulse control disorders. It's a manifestation of an impulse control disorder. And, you know, substance addicts who I've worked many decades with, the part of their brain, the prefrontal cortex, that is our executive functioning that modulates or regulates our consequential thinking, what's called our if, then thinking, if I curse my boss out, I'm going to get fired. We often also talk about it as. It's the brain's braking mechanism. It allows us to pump the brakes on some kind of impulsive behavior. When you're a chronic substance addict, that part of your brain begins to atrophy. It actually physically shrinks over time. So effectively, if you're chronically abusing alcohol or cocaine or any other substance, your brakes begin to break. It becomes a double whammy, where now you. You're already addicted, and now the thing that might make you to be less impulsive is now not functioning properly, and now you're more impulsive. And round and round that spiral goes. So the same thing exactly happens with excessive screen time. They found that that part of our brain that regulates impulsivity begins to shrink over time with excessive screen time. So screen time neurophysiologically impairs impulsivity because that part of the brain, it's called the dgm, the dense gray matter, the DGM of the prefrontal cortex shrinks to. Now you can't not be impulsive and we know that impulsivity is so important or the ability to control your impulsivity. We knew that from the marshmallow test. You know, decades ago, Dr. Minchloo created this test where you, it was a developmental study that they would give 5 year olds a marshmallow in their hand and they would say, if you don't eat the marshmallow today, we'll give you two tomorrow. And almost no five year old can resist the temptation of eating the marshmallow. But as a child began to get a little bit older and their brain began to grow a little bit and that part of their executive functioning developed, usually kids began to, at age 7, 8, 9, would say, oh, okay, two marshmallows tomorrow, I will delay gratification. And wait for this, two marshmallows tomorrow. And they found that the kids that were able to delay gratification, they tended to have the better outcomes later in life. Because it turns out that being able to delay gratification, not be impulsive, is a really important skill to have as a human being. What we found is that screen time, hyper immersive, overly stimulating early childhood screen time breaks. That makes kids very instant gratification oriented. And so they become highly impulsive. And if your listeners get nothing else, it's know that screen time too soon, too early creates a highly impulsive kid. And that could look like adhd. It does translate into ADHD as they grow out. It can translate into addiction, kinds of issues or other kinds of impulse, kinds of disorders. And so let's not do that, you know, since we know that, let's get the message out there that all those bells and whistles, even the baby Einstein screen time, that was all proven to not be educationally beneficial. Kids don't need bells, bells and whistles. They need to be doing hand eye coordinating activities like building with blocks, where they use their own imagination.
- [19:47]
C
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- [24:09]
B
So when you use your active imagination and you're playing make believe. Playing make believe is so powerful it's the best thing your child can do is a bored kid who has to play make believe is creating neurosynaptic pathways of creativity as opposed to a two year old who's in the crib and getting overly stimulated by a screen six inches away from their face. That child, they're not developing the neurosynapsis of imagination and creativity. They're being overly stimulated in a way that becomes Addicting. And then they become dependent on that stimulation, and then they can't focus or concentrate without that stimulation.
- [24:46]
A
You have a quote, and I don't know if I'm gonna be able to find it. I have, like, a pile of notes here. But you say, do you want something? Like, do you want your kid to thrive in life? I think this is in glow, kids. And you say, lose the screens for the first years of life. And you say, there is nothing more beneficial than the boredom. Yeah, it's like a huge statement. Oh, here we go. I found it. I found it.
- [25:06]
B
Look at you.
- [25:07]
A
I quote this. Actually, I speak at a lot of homeschooling conferences, and homeschoolers sometimes are bored. Because, you know, as a mom, you can't really, like, engage with your kids constantly, all day, every day, and have something for them to do.
- [25:18]
B
Right.
- [25:18]
A
And so they're bored. And so sometimes we feel a little bad about that.
- [25:21]
B
Right.
- [25:21]
A
So I read this a lot. If you really want a child to thrive and blossom, lose the screens for the first few years of their lives during those key developmental periods, let them engage in creative play. Legos are great. You talk about hand eye coordination. It nurtures synaptic growth. Let them explore their surroundings. You're talking about getting outside in nature, cooking, playing music. They help kids thrive developmentally. But most importantly, this is what I always say. I'm like, this is from a doctor. You know, he's got these incredible books. He says, most importantly, let them experience boredom. There is nothing healthier. These are big statements, Nicholas. There is nothing healthier for a child than to learn how to use their own interior resources to work through the challenges of being bored. This then acts as a fertile ground for developing their powers of observation, cultivating patience, and developing an active imagination. The most developmentally and neurosynaptically important skill they can learn. Let them live without the glow while their kids have plenty of time later on to deal with the screens.
- [26:19]
B
I mean, wow, who wrote that? That sounded great.
- [26:21]
A
Anyway, so good. Well, what about. Okay, so beyond the dgm, the dense gray matter, the shrinkage, there's other things going on in the brain, too. Like, you talk about the myelin.
- [26:32]
B
Yeah, yeah. So the myelin sheath, which is essentially, it's a white lipid, fatty fat that's around the. Our. So our brain has the. These. It's wired. And the myelin sheath is. Is the lipid that's around our. Our wiring in our brain. And so when. When our neurons are connected through this myelination, robust myelination equals, you know, a faster working brain, a healthier brain. And when you have myelin sheath abnormalities, what those look like are dementia and Alzheimer's are breakdowns of the myelin sheath. When you have somebody that begins where their brain begins to not be as optimally functioning because of this breakdown in the connectivity within their own brain. Intra brain breakdown, which again looks like things like dementia and Alzheimer's later in life. We have neurologists who are now saying they work with kids who look like, and this is a phrase now that's being used quite a bit digital dementia. Kids who seem like they are atrophying, that they have a delay or a slow. I mean, I've worked with a bunch of kids where I've seen it, you know, you've seen these kids who seem like they're almost stunted. But I also see that some of these effects can be because of neuroplasticity. If you pump the brakes and you kind of do some of the things that we talk about in terms of reducing screen time and getting kids back to a more natural, healthy way of being, these effects, can some of them be reversible, some of them not? You know, some of them are like, can be lifelong priming, but other times you can kind of correct some of these issues if you do it, catch it early enough. You know, I wanted to mention, because you were saying about, you know, let kids be bored. Most people know about Steve Jobs and how Steve Jobs didn't let his kids have screen time. But what they. Most people don't know that like Sergey Brin and Larry Page from Google and Jeff Bezos from Amazon, that they were Montessori students, that these tech titans, masters of the universe with brilliant minds, didn't have any technology throughout their childhood through their teen years. If you're buying into this narrative that you know, my child's going to be behind if they don't have a tablet in the crib or God forbid, in utero, then all you have to do is look at some of the best examples. In our society today, the smartest people are the ones who allowed their brains to grow by being bored by playing make believe, playing with blocks. All the Montessori stuff that happens, or the Waldorf school stuff that happens, or the homeschooling stuff that happens, where we're not just sticking kids in factory schools and dropping tablets in front of their faces and then just thinking that somehow we're tech is going to be the great solution to our educational problems.
- [29:01]
A
So, yeah, well, one of the things that you say is that, and this is what's so interesting to me about the kindergartners is that the younger you are, the more likely you are to be psychiatrically unwell. You know, if you're in your 60s or 70s, and then you go down to people who are in their 40s and 50s and, and the younger, and younger you get, the more likely you are to be psychiatrically unwell. And now, you know, like, they're just passing these iPads down to five year olds. It's just, just bananas. Nobody wants that for their kid. Nobody wants to be like, well, you know, I'm, I'm older, so I'm in a better spot. I didn't have those screens. And then you look at it and you're like, okay, like if they're this. I mean, you talk about some mental. Everyone's talking about it's a mental health crisis.
- [29:41]
B
Yeah.
- [29:41]
A
And that it was bad in 2019. You say even before the pandemic, you said it was a mental health crisis. It was the worst psychiatric metrics in all of history in 2019. Is there even room to get worse? And yet it's not changing.
- [29:55]
B
Could always get worse.
- [29:57]
A
You got people that you. I mean, more and more and more are coming. The younger and younger people are, the more psychiatrically unwell they are. Like, is there even room for it to get worse?
- [30:05]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, there is. Because going back to what you were saying about the younger you get. So when you look at generational cohorts starting with, let's say baby boomers are going down to Gen X and then Gen Z and Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The younger the cohort, the more psychiatric metrics they have, which is. Goes against the narrative because, you know, before social media, we were told that social media was going to be this wonderful thing. You know, you're old enough to remember the before times. Before social media, the promise of social media was going to be connectivity and people were going to be able to be connected. And it was going to be kind of a good thing for. It should have been a good thing for our mental health because we're social animals and this should have been the way to connect. And what we found was just the opposite was happening. And so one out of four Gen Z and millennials have no friends. Where they found that like the baby boomers have the, have the lowest rates of depression and the most friends. What was happening was that screen time was robbing people of two really important things that relate to depression. It makes us more sedentary so we know that physical activity is an antidepressant. So, you know, walking outside a thousand hours outside, being in nature, all those physically active things are, they release serotonin, they oxygenate the brain. These are healthy things. You know, when I have clients and they have mild depression, before anybody thinks about prescribing antidepressants, the two things you prescribe are physical activity. You know, three times a week, five times a week, walk, go to the gym, do activities. And the second thing you prescribe is socialization. We know that depression tends to thrive in isolation. And so leaning into connecting with other people face to face, we know that that's an antidepressant. And yet when we think about what screen time is, it's made people and kids specifically, more sedentary and more isolated. So they feel connected through the illusion of this connection through the screen. But that's not meeting their psychological needs in the ways that face to face connection is. So it makes sense that the younger the cohort, the more digitally connected they are, the less they're going to be face to face connected, the more sedentary they are, the more lonely they're going to feel. And then the thing we don't talk about that much is there's an emptiness. So many of the young people I talk to feel empty. I mean, that's a common phrase that I get. I feel empty. Screen time doesn't fill your soul in ways that are values laden. Like it doesn't give your life meaning and purpose is right. It's the empty calories of, you know, tick tock scrolling and you know, kind of like the digital masturbation of, you know, nonsense. But the things that are really meaningful get robbed, you know, so if you're like, if you're an esports kid who is playing World of Warcraft, you know, a million hours a week, you're not doing the things that are really giving your life meaning and you're not getting up and out and you're not really engaging because, you know, one thing I talked about in Digital Madness, I kind of looked at some of the research that they were doing with the blue zones, you know, and the blue zones are those parts of the world where people have longevity and they're living healthy, long lives into their 90s and into their hundreds. And there were a handful of common denominators with those folks. And a lot of it, well, some of them was their diet and some of it was their, a couple of things. But the two main things that relate to screen time were that they were, they had very, very tight social networks, they were very tight family and communities. So people didn't feel isolated. So there was a lot, much more of a sense of community. They were physically active till their 90s. They didn't just retire into a chair and stop moving. And so those two were some of the biggest healthier drivers that when you look at what screen time does, it's just a nuclear bomb in those things, you know, so of course we're going to be more unwell. And that's not even taking into account the psychiatric influencers that I talked about earlier. That's just if just the medium itself tends to make you sedentary and screen staring, then when you factor in some of the toxic content that go kill yourself suicide memes on TikTok and the body image nonsense that goes on on Instagram, then you're really exacerbating that effect and just unwell.
- [34:05]
A
And it's just getting worse and worse. And there's now there's the AI and the generative AI. So I mean, this is something that is going downhill and continuing to go downhill even though there's all this information out there. And I think what you're doing, you're doing work with lawsuits. We're going to talk about that in a minute. But like actually sort of fighting back, but fighting back against a lot. Especially if they're handing out iPads to kindergartners. I mean, we've really gone far down this thing and our kids are suffering. You talk about these kids feeling empty and you say like, you know, they're uninterested. They're uninteresting.
- [34:37]
B
Yeah.
- [34:38]
A
And who would want that for an 18 year old? I mean, nobody would want, you know, they got their four year old little guy, maybe they're listening to the show, they're out in a walk. They got their four year old, he's riding a scooter. And you know, they got their little, their little girl and you know, she's making her mud pies or whatever. Like nobody is like, oh my gosh, well, when my kid's 19, I hope they're uninterested and uninteresting and empty. And yet this is what's happening. And my mom always said we had alcoholism in our family. And my mom always said don't even try it. She's like, don't even try it because you don't know, don't have it. And so I didn't. And you know, I don't feel like my life misses one bit of anything because I don't drink alcohol. I think I have a fine life. I don't drink it, it doesn't matter. And I wonder with this too. It's like one of the things you talk about is you just don't know. There's no way to really know that like this kid is going to be the one that's kind of fine with it and this kid's going to be the one that's dropping out of college because.
- [35:30]
B
Right.
- [35:31]
A
They have no impulse control. So I know you can't really give blanket advice to parents, but overall it seems like kind of like my mom's advice which was like, don't do it.
- [35:42]
B
Yes. And you know, when you mentioned that uninterested and uninteresting. That, that to me is one of the most tragic outcomes of this whole thing that we're talking about from a generational standpoint. I work with some. These young people were, you know, traditionally one of the hallmarks of being a kid or a teenager was curiosity. It used to be the thing where, you know, the annoyingly little kids would ask why, why, why, why? And you'd be like, because, you know, when parents would get frustrated, so many kids don't even, aren't interested anymore to even ask why. They just want to be stimulated. They don't say why. They say, stimulate me. People don't talk about that enough that we've created a generation of kids who are profoundly not curious because they're again, they're heat seeking missiles for stimulation. They just want the flashing bells and whistles to be stimulated and engaged because that's what they've been habituated to since infancy. And so when a kid isn't curious, when you're not exploring, that goes so counter to who we are as human beings. That's such an important trait of a, of our species. The other part, like I was doing a group of young, these young 18 year olds and they were talking about reading and I, I just, this kind of blew me away. We take reading and what happens when you read for granted sometimes, you know, so when you or I are reading a page right, you're looking at essentially what are hieroglyphics, black squiggly lines on the piece of paper. And then we tran. We phoneticize those squiggly lines into a word, into a sound. That sound then becomes a word in our mind and that word translates usually or that sentence will translate into a visual image. If we're reading a story, story, we tend to then create a movie reel in our heads. And in that movie reel, we visualize what we're reading. So there's seeing what's on the paper, transcribing that into language in our mind. And then the language becomes a visual movie screen, for lack of a better way of saying it. So these young guys in my group, these 18 year olds, and these were college students, they said, yeah, yeah, we could read pretty well, but when we read, we can't visualize what we read. And I said, well, talk to me about that. And they said, yeah, we can read. We can sound out the word like, you know, the train is leaving the station, but we don't see a train in our mind's eye. We can't visualize. You know, first the one young man said it and I said, does the rest of the group share this? And they were like, yeah, when we read, we don't visualize it. The movie screen in their minds never developed because they were never forced to create visual imagery because they were getting externally pumped into their heads from their games or their screen time. So it never, it atrophied. So they don't have the ability to visualize, which I had so underestimated how important that was because I had, I hadn't personally initially even considered that. I was like, what do you mean you don't visualize when you read? And of course they don't because they never had to. So that part is incredibly sad to me when I hear about that because, you know, that's not something that's easy to kind of. It's not as if at each 30, you're all of a sudden going to be able to start having this visualization or active imagination that, you know, really happens, needs to happen when you're three, four, five, six years old. So that's depressing. But the good news I wanted to say because we were kind of going off on a little bit of, you know, God, the sky is falling. The good news is with what you're doing, there's a grassroots awakening that's happening where people are beginning to realize, here are no further. Yes, we fell in love with our devices. Initially we were drunk on our devices. And now we started seeing some of the impacts. And we started, you know, because we're the stakeholders at our kids schools where the stakeholders as citizens, we're the stakeholders as parents, and we do have a voice. If we unify and talk together in a loud chorus, we can affect both legislative changes and changes in our schools because they work for us at the end of the day. And so that's what I'm gives me the most hope is that I see that people are waking up to this and they are beginning to push back and they are beginning to do the things that we're talking about. I'm seeing that, you know, over the last five to seven years, both at conferences and at events, some of these legislative initiatives we've talked about, it's getting a lot more attention now where when GLOW Kids came out, it wasn't even the discussion. We were just accepting that our kids were getting more and more unwell and, oh, I wonder if it's something in the air and not realizing that we were, you know, unfortunately exposing them to things that were visual toxins or digital toxins.
- [39:54]
A
And it's not even that it wasn't accepted. It was really pushed back against. And for quite a long time. I mean, it was a brave, bold book to come out with.
- [40:02]
B
Yeah. Said parents are struggling for, you know, seven, eight, nine years ago, all these parents were getting gaslit. But, you know, I. I had parents that would go to therapists, and the therapist would tell them, oh, you're overreacting. You're crazy. What are you talking. Because they didn't know what was going on. They didn't really appreciate. And the parents were like, I'm not crazy. My kids are changing because of their devices. Can you help me? And they were. They were told that they were the problem.
- [40:24]
A
But, I mean, I've posted things and it's gotten less. But, you know, years ago, and people would say, no, you're wrong, Baby Einstein. Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, our commitment to get outside. And I think what's really cool is that part of the therapy that you offer, like at Omega, you offer adventure therapy and you offer nature immersion and those types of things help. And for me, we started getting outside in 2011. I started writing about it in 2013 to be pretty intentional about it. For me, it was more just like I was struggling as a mom. And then I got outside and I was like, well, we're all thriving out here. This is good for their development. And we stuck with it. In retrospect, you know, our kids were like little three, two, a baby at that point. Well, now they're teens. It's been such a protective measure for our kids and also for our family. And I had no idea. I had no idea that that was going to happen. I had no idea that 13 years down the road, I'm still going to be talking about this or writing about this or reading about this, having these conversations. No idea. I'm going to have a podcast. I didn't even know what that was. You know, it wasn't on social media, but the nature piece. And it's probably a combination of the fact that being outside fosters creativity and boredom and downtime and friendship. And at the same time, there's less screens because you don't have much time for it. What I've always said is our best days are the days we just run out of time for screens. Well, because we were cooking and we were singing and we were playing piano, and we. We were walking around the block and we had friends over, and those are our best days. And so I think it's a combination of the two. But I just. I guess I just feel really grateful. I got emotional when you talked about the fact that they can't visualize, like, actually, that made me really emotional because I love to read. I love reading novels. It's one of my favorite parts of life, really, actually, is reading books. And I'm like, yeah, well, what if you like your whole life? That kid doesn't get that. And the parent wasn't intentional.
- [42:11]
B
Right?
- [42:11]
A
The parent wasn't like, I'm going to give my kid this iPad when they're three, because I hope that someday they can't visualize a train that they're reading about. They give it to them because they're desperate. And there's the parents that they were.
- [42:21]
B
Doing a good thing, but I was giving my kid the leg up on this new tech world that we're in.
- [42:26]
A
Yeah. Or they're overwhelmed. And I was overwhelmed. And what I found was that, like, Dora, you know, that's what I used to do. Put on Dora the Explorer, which doesn't rhyme. That kind of bothers me. But it's 22 minutes, and it was gone in a flash. And I'm like, it didn't give me what I needed. It didn't give them what they needed because then they wouldn't even hear me when I said it was time to turn it off. And then they were really upset, and there was, like, screaming and crying. But it's like outside gave us all what we needed.
- [42:52]
B
Yeah.
- [42:52]
A
And I mean, I don't know. Who knows? Like, what if I wouldn't have fallen? I just. I stumbled into it. It was because I was a crummy mom. It wasn't because I had some grandiose ideas, because I was just, like, flailing. And it's just been such a gift to our family.
- [43:04]
B
Well, I think a lot of parents, I think you were able to need to tap, you tapped into your intuitive knowing that like you as a mom realized I need to find, you know, what, what, what's healthy for my child. And you know, the thing with nature, you know, it's interesting, you know, when we have adult clients with anxiety disorders, you put them in nature. Nature calms the whole system. You know, parasympathetic nervous system. You know, you can go into like there's a whole bunch of science behind why you put somebody, you know, even people that do earthing or grounding people need to sort of be reconnected to the earth. They, and they've done all sorts of research on the effects, the positive effects of being in nature on depression and anxiety. Again, with 40, 50, 60 year old adult psychiatric clients, nature can be calming, soothing and antidepressant, you know, combined. Yes. And now you're, because you're in nature, you're away from the screen so you're, you're kind of. But you mentioned the phrase protective factors, you know, so that's what we have to lean into, into because we're not going to push a magic button and have the world go back to, you know, the Amish way. And so how do we immunize our kids? And I talk about that quite a bit about a strong healthy psychological immune system. How do we immunize our kids against the digital toxins so that, because they're going to be exposed to it. And so nature is a big protective factor. Music, sports, all these things can be protective factors. And that's what we have to lean into. And then it's still Russian roulette at the end of the day to some degree. But the more immunization that we could give, the healthier psychological profile that we can create for our kids. A strong sense of community, a strong sense of identity, a strong sense of giving back.
- [44:37]
A
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- [45:07]
B
When it comes to raising kids, there's so much to consider. Things like what do we feed them, when do we feed them, how do they sleep? What does it look like to raise kind to kids? How does their nervous system work? How do I keep myself calm? What are my triggers? There's so much that comes into play, and we are distilling all of that information for you at Voices of your village podcast, where we bring experts in the field of early childhood and education and psychology and across the board so that you don't have to comb the Internet for information. You get to show up and hang out and have shame free judgment, free conversations and insights into what it looks like to raise kind, empathetic, emotionally intelligent humans. I'm Alyssa Blask Campbell. I have a master's degree in early childhood education. I'm a mom of two, and I am walking this journey right alongside you doing this work. Come hang out with me at Voices of your village and we can dive into real conversations with actionable tips. A lot of the kids that get sucked into digital rabbit holes, they might have some childhood trauma, they may have not a clear sense of identity. That's why we have so much of the gender dysphoria going on right now. And I've write about that quite a bit in Digital madness that, that this phenomenon that we're seeing with, you know, transgenderism has been, I think, directly related to kids who are struggling and not, well, psychologically fall into digital rabbit holes where it becomes aspirational to. To perhaps, you know, explore alternate identities. And I could see how that happens. Is it genuine gender dysphoria? No. You know, I've come to call it faux gender dysphoria, where it's a social media, social contagion effect where kids are kind of mimicking what they think might be healthier. Look, in the substance addiction world, there was a concept where an addict produced what was called a geographic. And the geographic was a concept where you're struggling with addiction, and you as the addict, now begin to conceptualize your problem as being geographically rooted. So I'm drinking and drugging because I live in a bad situation. And if I move to Wisconsin, I'll be happy, I'll be healthy, I'll be clean and sober. So the geographic solution, where people that did addicts do a lot of moves because they begin to say, if I change my. My environment, I'll be healthier and happier. And I've come to believe that something like the modern gender dysphoria explosion that we're seeing, a 4,000% increase in adolescents with gender dysphoria is a gender geographic. Kids who are primarily depressed, anxious, not loving their lives, feeling Disempowered are seeing on their social media feeds, oh, look at these influencers who are happy and getting millions of followers because they're trans. Perhaps if I do a gender geographic, I'll be happy if I go on the other side of the, the gender divide. And so I think that's a big part of the dynamic that's been created. Now I'm not saying in all cases, I'm saying in what I've seen in our treatment program in Austin, a pretty decent number of young people who are coming in with gender dysphoric types of issues when they're off the screens and when they do some of the work to rediscover who they are, they tend to then say, oh, okay, that was, I'm not really gender dysphoric, I'm actually depressed. But now I've worked on my depression or I had this trauma that I needed to work with and I worked on that and now I feel more, I feel more grounded, I feel better as who I am in my own identity. So these are some of the other, I think, more complex nuances that are happening in this new age we're in.
- [48:34]
A
Well, it's interesting, you talk about screen addiction and like, so I mean my, my mind just always goes to gamers and that picture of like the, you know, the kid that's 26 and in the parents basement and playing the video games and not sleeping. But you talk about that. There's really a lot of dangers here. So it's, it's social media. And there's a phenomenal book called American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales that was like gut wrenching. And she just talks about the pressure on girls and how they look and everything's about likes and if you're not hot, you're nothing. I mean it's like awful, right? And they're little girls. So that pornography, that's another one. Information overload in video games and compulsive spending. I mean, there's that too. I mean, I mean it's just, it's wild that you know, you, you buy on Amazon, it's a push of a button. But then, gosh, you could buy anything.
- [49:19]
B
Or in the gambling now with DraftKings and sort of, it's interesting. Well, I want to talk about that in a second because he reminded me also of like the doom scrolling phenomenon too. I just participated in a documentary called Doom Scrolling and it was so amazing. You know, that's why, you know, a large number of our teenagers are so depressed. Because if you go down doom scrolling rabbit holes of the earth is ending global warming. You know, with it's, it's all a horrible place. It just amplifies and exacerbates this tendency of gloom and doom. So of course you're going to be more. But you mentioned pornography gambling. So it's interesting. You know, 20 years ago, I mean I'm a big sports fan and I played a lot of sports and I, you know, I'm a, I'm a New York, so I'm a Knicks, Mets, jets fan. So I've suffered a lot as a following the teams that I've followed. But 20 years ago you weren't allowed to have any gambling anywhere near professional sports. And now the NFL, MLB, NBA, they have partnered with DraftKings and the Gambling sites there now have you know, all the commercials every five seconds on every professional. So my, I have teenage sons now and I've kept them, they didn't game. You know, I'm tech cautious. I thought I had protective factored them, you know, because they did a lot of. They played music, they played sports, but they started getting into fantasy sports league and at first, you know, fantasy sports, you know, fantasy leagues with their friends it felt fairly innocuous. But they became so wired towards stats and the numbers and so they were playing with these fantasy things and then, but then that was A couple of their friends now started going down the DraftKings rabbit hole because now it was like, it was almost like the connective tissue between fantasy teams versus gambling gaming. And I was like how, how did this swallow up this whole generation of kids now? Why, you know, you think you're are just following their team but it's so baked in now with gambling that it's really hard to uncouple those two. Now pornography was another one that so many teenagers now that we treat in Austin, sometimes somebody will get off of one, they'll get off of gaming and then they'll switch to porn. You know, the problem has gotten so significant with pornography and young, you know, kids and adolescents, they're exposed to really graphic sexual imagery at ages that, that are totally entirely agent appropriate. So a friend of mine who's a pediatrician was at a pediatrician's conference recently and they talked about that the topic was adolescent erectile dysfunction. And he said that never used to be a thing. We never used to have adolescent erectile dysfunction. But so many kids now are watching graphic porn. They're desensitized, not a sexual imagery. And so now if you're that kid that's watched thousands of hours of porn and you're 14, 15. Good luck going on a date with, you know, the prom queen. Normalized sexual relations have now been entirely changed to be again, like. Like everything else, screen time makes day to day experiences boring because everything on screens are more intense and amplified and reduced in time and bells and whistles and extreme, it's extremified. So if you're on screens all the time, you know, walking in the park feels boring. If you're on screens all the time, sitting in the class feels boring. If you're on pornography all the time, going on a date feels boring. So that's kind of what we've done. We've made day to day experiences really unappealing. And the challenge when I treat these issues is how do you make walking in the park and going on a date and sitting in the classroom engaging again? How can you then lean into those real life experiences?
- [52:46]
A
Which is why the preventative is the easier route to go.
- [52:49]
B
Prevention's a lot easier than treating. Exactly.
- [52:52]
A
Wow, is this important to know. And with any addiction, it's like you, you know, you tend to need more and more. And sadly that's what the tech companies are offering. They're offering more and more. So, you know, then you can have an AI girlfriend who thinks you're funny and who looks exactly how you want it to look. And you know, I mean, these are real things and I think our kids are up against a lot. And so to your point, you know, this is, you know, the parent is sort of that front line there. And I would just have to say that we've had a great time getting outside. I don't regret it for one second. We've had great childhoods. I think our kids are thriving. You know, if I were to go back in time, I wouldn't change a thing.
- [53:26]
B
Awesome.
- [53:26]
A
People kind of think you're weird and you just, you do it anyway and it really makes a difference. So that preventative piece, so the parent is the front line, but then you're also involved with class action lawsuits and legislation. What's going on there?
- [53:39]
B
Yeah, there's a couple of multi state, multi law firm class action lawsuits against both the, the gaming industry and against all the social media companies. And not only the social media companies, but the carriers of Lexo, it's a Google and you know, meta and gaming platforms. So it's some really high powered law firms that have gotten a couple of thousand plaintiffs right now who kids have been harmed and you know, and the narrative is intentionally harmed. By these companies because these kids, it's a similar legal playbook to what they did with Big Tobacco or Big Pharma. When the pharmaceutical industry first came out, OxyContin and Purdue Pharmaceuticals was sued by plaintiffs who said, wait a second, you told us that OxyContin wasn't addictive. And meanwhile they had internal emails where they knew it was addicting and they mass pumped it out to the, you know, started the opioid epidemic by pumping out this toxin into the, into our society. And the same thing with Big Tobacco. Big Tobacco knew that tobacco was a carcinogen. They didn't tell people it was carcinogen, and they still marketed Joe Camel to kids anyway. So similarly, the thrust of these lawsuits are big tech. You've known that you're, you've made your products addicting by design. You've created these algorithms to be habit forming. You knew, like at, for example, through the Facebook whistleblower made or knew that Instagram increase suicide rates by 14 in adolescent girls. You knew that you had your own internal research. And yet when there were there was internal emails having a dialogue saying, should we dampen down the algorithm and make it less predatory? Nope, absolutely not. That's going to decrease engagement. So it would be one thing if a product accidentally harmed kids and there wasn't malice of intent or knowledge that it was harmful. Like I've created a toy, oops, I didn't know that there was some kind of harmful ingredient in this plastic toy. But they knew, they knew that their platforms were hurting kids. They made them addicting by design. They did it anyway. So that's what this, these lawsuits are. And you know, in my experience, that's where you get real change when you hit these companies where it hurts. Because part of the lawsuit isn't just damages for the families who've had their kids commit suicide or were otherwise harmed and impaired, but it's also regulatory changes, you know, warning labels and who has access to sort of these devices. I've also been involved in some of the state initiatives, like I testified in Florida for the social media bill where they, you know, Governor DeSantis had signed. The one law was, you know, no kids under 16 on social media. The other law that I testified for was banning all social media in schools K through 12. So they are initiatives that are happening that are going to be, I think, really helpful. And I'm a free speech person. I don't think that digital media should be, you know, I don't think, I'm not a disinformation Miss, you know, I don't, I think that if you're over 18, you should have access to, you know, free reign of the highway. But I do think we need to put guardrails in for the kids because these are predatory powerful companies that have so much impact on kids. And what I do find to be really powerful when we as parents have conversations with our kids, you know, no kid wants to be restricted, no kid wants to be told, no, you can't use device, you can't use your this, no, you can't do that. What I find impactful, even when I treat kids or when I work with my own kids, was sort of pulling back the curtain in the way that the documentary, the Social Dilemma did. Hey, you don't want me telling you what to do. But you've got these companies that are manipulating you, that are gamifying you, that are monetizing you, that are actually doing things to you that you don't even know. So you, you, you're telling me you want the choice to be able to do A, B and C on, on your computer, but these companies aren't giving you the choice. These companies are totally hijacking you, your brain, your, your creativity. And then I get a response, usually where the kid gets angry like, hell no. I don't want, you know, some company brainwashing me doing this and that. And that's when I typically get a better response of like, okay, so own your. You know, the phrase we use a lot now is your agency. You know, be your own person now. Don't be manipulated by these big tech people are just making money off of you. You don't want to be that, do you? And so that seems to be an effective kind of call to action for kids sometimes, you know, when we kind of show them how this is not, not just not healthy for them, but how it's a manipulation of their freedom. So yeah, this is a helpful tip.
- [57:59]
A
Wow. Dr. Carderis, thank you. These are some of the most influential books and most needed books of our time. Glow Kids, How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids and How to Break the Trance Digital Madness, How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis and How to Restore Our Sanity. You are a wonderful writer. I mean, the books are just a fantastic read. They're interesting, but also they are life changing. You're working on these class action lawsuits. Are you talking about. Should I say the Blue Light health thing?
- [58:22]
B
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. We're also working on a Blue Light health is going to be a platform for adolescents to help help link them. Teenagers who are struggling with their mental health and with screen time. Oftentimes there's therapists who aren't trained in how to work with screen related issues and how they impact mental health. So a quick way to describe it is it's like better help for teenagers that have screen time issues. We're training therapists to provide online therapy for young for teenagers who need help. That program should be launching in about March or April. Blue Light Health. And we're trying to create some solutions for people who are struggling. Families who need help with their teenagers.
- [58:58]
A
Yeah, that's fantastic. Dr. Carter. Calm. And then also people can go to the Omega Omega Recovery Center. You constantly have fantastic information out there. I think what we need a lot is just that little reminder, that little push like hey, these gaming companies that are trying to get your kids blood pressure up to a certain amount, but you just need those little reminders to say nope, nope, not screens today or, or we're going to do lesser or whatever. We're going to hold off. Our kids are little. Just gonna hold off, hold off, hold off. We had one year where we got water kids iPads for Christmas and then never gave them to them because I probably because I'd read your book or you know, it's like, you know, like, nope, nope, we're just gonna hold off. And you're always glad you did. You're always, always glad you did. I am so honored. You've been here three times. What an amazing, amazing gift. These books have changed my life. I'm so thrilled with what you're doing. You're just, you're out on Dr. Phil, you're on all these different places. You're really significantly helping parents of this day and age as you are.
- [59:52]
B
As you are. We're all in this fight together. So let's lock arms and let's keep on fighting the good fight. Thank you for doing what you're doing as well.
- [59:59]
A
Thank you.