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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 501: Screen Time Too Soon Creates Highly Impulsive Kids | Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids
00:59:45
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- [00:01]
Ginny Urich
Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Urich and this is our third summer mashup episode on the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. And this one is with one of my favorite authors who has really changed my life, Dr. Nicholas Carderas. Dr. Nicholas Carderas is one of the world's leading experts on the impact of screens on children and adults. He is the best selling author of Glow Kids and Digital Madness. And he spent decades working working with tech, addiction, mental health and neuroscience. We've pulled together the most powerful moments from all three of his appearances on this podcast. So if you're new to his work or if you listen before but need a refresher, this is for you. Summer is when children should thrive. But in a world of addictive technology, it's getting harder and harder for kids just to be kids. This episode is your wake up call and your lifeline. It is full of hope, tools and truth. So turn it up, take a walk or gather the family and let's dive in. We're starting with the moment where it all began. Here is Dr. Carderas sharing the chilling story that launched his life's work.
- [01:08]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
Yeah, so as you said, I've been working as a psychologist and working in mental health for about 20 years and I noticed a shift about 10 years ago and I'd been working a lot with adolescents. I was doing a lot of school district based work, just teenagers that were getting referred to me. And I started seeing as an addiction specialist who also specializes in mental health, I started seeing a change happening. And initially there was sort of a drip, drip, drip of a faucet awareness that there was something shifting in the landscape of our, of our children. And then sort of my tipping point happened. I write about it in Glo Kids. When I had a young man that was referred to me, I was in full blown state of, let's call it video game induced psychosis. And he had been playing World of Warcraft for eight to ten hours a night. He had been sleep deprived and when he was referred to me, he had no idea where the game ended and where reality began. He was in the Matrix and couldn't discern reality. He had no psychiatric history before this episode. And that was sort of my aha moment because I had worked a lot with, we call those episodes derealization. You don't know what's real and what's not. And I worked with a lot of substance induced derealization, crystal met psychosis or the bad acid trip. But I've never seen someone lose their Touch with reality on a screen experience. That was a tipping point for me where I started to understand that this was a strange new phenomenon that we were dealing with. We hadn't seen things like this with reading books or even watching television. And that's. That was really sort of the beginning of my beginning to research this more clinically work or this more great programming for this. And you know, when I wrote Glow Kids five years ago, when it came out five years ago, there was a lot of pushback that screens can be.
- [03:00]
Unknown Speaker
Addicting or habit forming.
- [03:02]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
I wrote an op ed in the New York Post called Digital Heroin that went viral with 7 million views and shares. And that got me in a lot of national television shows where the, where I was asked really, can screen time be habit forming? There was a lot of brain imaging science to back that up. When I started talking about that, people were shocked. Today it's an accepted fact that oh yeah, we can all get habituated to our devices, especially vulnerable kids. But that wasn't the case five years ago. I think we've all come to the dance, eventually understood what's going on more and more clearly. More and more clearly we've had big tech, let's call it the designers of this new brave new world who have laid out their playbook. These are habit forming platforms by design and documentaries like the Social Dilemma and shows like that have pointed that out. So it validated my original thesis and I think Covid has validated the original thesis that too much screen time is toxic. Because that's what we've seen during COVID We've seen screen time has doubled while depression rates have tripled. And a whole host of other psychiatric disorders have also spiked during COVID That a lot of them are sort of enmeshed with isolation and being sedentary and quarantined in front of a screen all day.
- [04:23]
Ginny Urich
One child, one terrifying outcome. That moment changed everything for Dr. Carderas and the and led to a mission that has impacted millions.
- [04:33]
Unknown Speaker
Gaming companies will hire the best neurobiologists and neuroscientists to hook up electrodes to the test gamer. If they don't elicit the blood pressure that they shoot for, typically 180 over 120 or 140 within a few minutes of playing. They don't start sweating and increase their galvanic skin responses. They go back and tweak the game to get that maximum addicting and arousing response that they're looking for. That is mouth dropping. To me that's a really high blood pressure.
- [05:06]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
Yeah. Well, that's the end game, no pun intended. The end game is adrenalinergic and dopaminergic. Because the two ingredients in creating a habit, habituation or addiction are dopamine and adrenaline. Because at the end of the day, what creates engagement or creates a lot of engagement for screen time is the arousal factor. They have to raise our adrenaline or they have to raise our dopamine levels because that's what keeps us coming back. And if they're not adrenalinergic or dopaminergic, the game designers have not done their job. But the level of sophistication, because people have said to me, and it's true, we've always had advertisers and people that were creative jingles for McDonald's or different toys, but this is marketing on steroids. This is a whole level of sophistication manipulation that we've not seen before. And that's part of the problem of why we've seen it so pervasive and so effective really with addicting kids before you mentioned how quickly in five years we were kind of woke up. I think most of us, including myself, didn't want to believe that the things that we as the adults had fallen in love with. Look, I love my smartphone and I grew up as a Star Trek chunky. I love my science fiction. I wanted to believe that our technology could be good for us. And I think eventually though, you know, we had to be disabused of, you know, don't tell me that my smartphone or my tablet or my, you know, whatever, my laptop is somehow not good for my kids because say it ain't so. Because now I've got to start restricting that. And a lot of us who don't want to believe that.
- [06:50]
Unknown Speaker
Yes. I love how you said you use the phrase guilt free tech. You said I wanted it to be guilt. I think we all want it to be guilt free because it offers all of us a lot. It offers the parent peace and quiet, you know, it offers the child sort of an easy engagement, you know, so you say in here, unfortunately, many caring and well meaning parents are either simply not tuned in to how damaging screens are, or those who sense it there may be a problem remain in convenience induced denial.
- [07:20]
That's like right off the bat.
- [07:21]
The book is really good. Why is it so addictive?
- [07:25]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
Well, so if you look at, you know, if you look at the evolution of our entertainment media or, you know, they used to say, you know, when we've gone from print media to the radio to the television to modern Screens, let's face it, people have sort of been a little bit sort of warning about the latest iteration of technology. I write in Globe Kids how Plato had warned against the written word because he thought that it was going to erode our memory. So he was weary of this thing called written copy, because at that point we were. Our main mode of communication was oral storytelling. So he was afraid that the written word was going to erode our memory. And to some degree that's true, by the way, to some degree, folks who come from an oral storytelling tradition have better verbal memories than those of us who don't. But the difference, I think the quantum, the seismic shift of the quantum leap from television, I forget radio, but from visual media from television to modern screen time, it's really twofold. It's the. So when we watch television as kids growing up, and I was growing up in the 70s watching Starsky and much, the TV was off in the distance, it was somewhere in the room. And I was a passive, removed viewer from the experience. I was a passive viewer. Modern screen time is immersive and interactive. And so the immersive, interactive aspect makes it much more psychodynamically impactful. Right? It has much more of an impact for me because I'm in it, you.
- [08:51]
Unknown Speaker
Know, and our kids are in it.
- [08:52]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
And our young adults are in their platforms, they're in their gaming, they're in their social media. And the other part of it is the ubiquity. It's all, it's everywhere. You know, when we were watching TV back in good old days, you know, stereotype, but we had a big old TV in the living room and maybe there was one in the bedroom and you didn't carry that 24 inch black and white TV in your back pocket. It was not as all available as it is. So there's now this sort of instant gratification piece too that you constantly have the availability of it. So we've developed a dependence to these highly aroused interactive devices that have become second nature. We reach for our phones, we reach for a device whenever we feel anxious or nervous because it's our clutch now. It's the new smoking.
- [09:43]
Ginny Urich
When you understand the biology, it makes sense why screens are so hard to put down. And when those screens start young, the effects are profound. Dr. Carderas doesn't hold back. This is more than a health issue, it's a moral and spiritual one. But how did we get here? What happens when screens become the dominant form of connection?
- [10:03]
Unknown Speaker
It was so interesting to have read both books and to See such a stark difference. How much has changed in six years, just six years. Did you feel that way?
- [10:15]
Well, you know, very much so. When I, when I wrote Glow Kids, the battle then, the uphill battle then was to really essentially convince people that our technology can be habit forming and that we can get addicted to our tech, that our love affair for our technology was potentially unhealthy, especially for children. And I really sort of tried to put all the clinical research together to show, wait a second, our shiny devices might be impacting our kids because we as the adults, we're all so smitten by our smartphones and our shiny tech that we weren't realizing maybe this was not, not all that glitters is gold sort of thing and that, you know, been there, done that, because now that's been an accepted clinical disorder. I think we won that battle. Where people, I think, do realize, even with everything from the Social dilemma documentaries, where the people that are behind the curtain pulled back the curtain and said, oh yeah, yeah, this is habit forming by design. But now the larger question was, is what is this habituation doing to our society so we can check the box that these are addicting. But now what? And that's really what's, I think, evolved and changed has been the landscape of our society, politically, psychologically, how we interact, how we are as human beings has totally transformed in a fairly short period of time. And that's what this new book is about.
- [11:38]
Both books have really transformed my personal life. I read Glow Kids years before you.
- [11:43]
And I got a chance to talk.
- [11:44]
I actually never imagined that I would get a chance to talk with you. But I know that there are families all over the world who have been so transformed. And it was so eye opening. It was cutting edge at that time too. I think a lot of people were floored to read the things that you knew and brought forth. And like you said, now a lot of things like Social Dilemma have given light to that. And I feel the same about Digital Madness. There were so many things in there that I was not aware of. Both books have such an incredible depth for helping us understand our families and helping us understand our lives. They're ones I treasure and I'm so glad to have on my shelf. Something I noticed different between the two that was really interesting to me is that you inserted a whole lot of humor into Digital Madness to the point that on top of it being filled with all this interesting information, it was really funny and amusing and I felt like it was such a breath of fresh air because the topics Are heavy.
- [12:45]
Right.
- [12:46]
So I love. I loved that it was. It was like this amusing nonfiction, which is hard to write.
- [12:52]
There was a.
- [12:52]
There was one part. I wrote one example here. But you wrote the irony was rich. Not as rich as the assembled tech titans, of course, but you get the idea. So all of these little quips in there that I thought did a great job of lightening the mood because the topic is heavy and has just gotten heavier over time. So well done. The book is a fantastic read. Not only informative, not only thought provoking, but also amusing. And so to have paired all of that together is incredible.
- [13:20]
In my field, we do call that gallows humor. Because, you know, sometimes you do have to lighten the mood. You know, I go to. My wife likes to kind of elbow me sometimes, you know, we'll go to a party or a social event and, you know, people will ask me about my work, and sometimes we'll get going on it, and it's, you know, it feels like, okay, you know, I don't want to break down the mood of the room because it can. It can get depressing sometimes. So you have to keep our sense of humanity. And humor, I think is critical because that's one of the antidotes. Or else, you know, that is really kind of what I'm fighting for. And I'm. And I'm glad you said that about GLOW kids, because one of the most gratifying things, you know, when I wrote that book and the response that I got from all over the world, from families that were struggling and had been gaslighted from either mental health workers or peers and friends, and really found a voice, and, yeah, this is what I've been seeing with my kids. And nobody was speaking to this. So that was one of the most gratifying pieces to see how it was helping connect and change and impact people from all over the all four corners of the globe. So that was really nice to see.
- [14:26]
Yeah.
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Both books are so phenomenal. Can you tell us what health trends are showing up that we can mostly attribute to this increase in technology?
- [14:37]
The first most the outer layer of the onion, or the most obvious one is the increased depression. Depression is spiking at a time when our antidepressant medications is significantly increasing. If you were to look at a bar graph of prescriptions that we're writing for depression versus the increase of depression. Depression is outpacing the huge spike that we've. By some estimates, we've tripled or quadrupled the SSRI prescriptions that we've been writing over the last 10 to 15 years. And yet depression is outpacing our prescriptions. So something's happening that we're much more depressed as a society, as a species. And again, as I write in the book, I attribute a lot of that to our highly technological, over mechanized, dehumanizing kind of the way that we're living. So depression is the first and foremost. And then of course, depression is the handmaiden of things like suicide and self medicating through addiction. Because, you know, if you're going to feel depressed about the world and life here, you may react in other ways as well. So depression does drive other types of problematic behaviors.
- [15:45]
Ginny Urich
The fallout is not just emotional, it's biological. What's happening to our kids on a neurological level, what's happening to their very brains.
- [15:54]
Unknown Speaker
The one that got a lot of media recently was the Tourette's piece TikTok. Tourette's that got written up in Rolling Stone and some other national media picked it up the Wall Street Journal. Young teenage girls beginning to show signs of Tourette's disorder. And, and it was a perfect example of this social contagion effect because these young women did not have Tourette's disorder. But their pediatricians discovered that they were following these Tourette's influencers on TikTok and were beginning to consciously or unconsciously mimic their psychiatric symptoms. And that was an interesting phenomenon. That was a head like, oh wow, look what's happening here. Because we've always known that we're a social species and that we mimic each other, right? Like smoking is a social contagion. If you hang out with 30 people who smoke, the odds are you're going to start smoking at some point. Suicide can be a social contagion that happens in clusters. People sort of begin to emulate that because we know it's a social species, we mimic each other. But the fact that people were beginning to mimic psychiatric symptoms of their influencers and that these influencers were getting literally billions of views, and that part was also interesting because they, it made me have to analyze social media in terms of the, the hierarchy of it, how does it work? And so what you realize is that in social media, who gets the most views and who gets the most followers? It's the most performative, the most over the top, the most entertaining. So the thoughtful, the thoughtful person who's got a, you know, wants to share their views about something is going to get two views and the most over the top histrionic, you know, dancing, dancing or, or, or, or the more Mentally ill. Like, like the part that I really found interesting was the. Did the dissociative disorder influencers who claim to have over 100 altered personalities, you know, 100 multiple person, which, look, in the real clinical world, did is a real thing. Typically you've been sexually abused as a child and historically you'd have three or four alter identities. You know, some of us remember the classic movies with Sybil or Three Faces of Eve with Joanne Woodward where three or four personalities were protecting the main, the main ego with, through this alter because it was a defense mechanism against a reality that a person couldn't tolerate. But now you are having these really performative, histrionic did young people who were saying that they had 100 identities and the popcorn moment, there are hundreds of millions of followers were following what was called switching, like the entertaining piece when you would switch from personality A to personality B. And then their followers were also beginning to identify that they were having alters as well. So that was, wow, this is what we're spreading online now. We're spreading these kinds of issues. So that was new, relatively new. I've really grown to perceive social media now as almost a living organism. It's almost this thing that thrives and grows more powerful when we feed it our lizard brain, most vitriolic emotions, right? So we, we type in behind, you know, the keyboard. Warriors will key in whatever. The keyboard acts almost as a gateway to a person's ID or their lizard brain because now a person can really like, let loose with their most ugly or again, more most extreme motions. So they feed into this thing called social media. Social media absorbs all this vitriol and then because of the, the nature of algorithms and feeding people back content that they, the algorithm thinks the person wants, and then the extremified way called the extremification loop. So now all of a sudden, we feed the beast all our anger and, and extreme emotions, and then the beast takes it, spits it back at us in the more extreme way, and it becomes a vicious feedback loop.
- [20:13]
Ginny Urich
The evidence is overwhelming, but if we understand the depth of the problem, we can also start moving toward the solution. And that starts with understanding exactly what these screens are doing.
- [20:25]
Unknown Speaker
We've kind of shaped them into this now highly reactive, less resilient group because, you know, let's face it, resilience is born of having to struggle and work through things and having to persevere. And now you have young people that have been essentially helicopter parented, oftentimes or bubble wrapped or protected, and, and they're living in this sort of synthetic, you know, world where, where again the cancel culture offended people. And that's just not a very healthy way to live because if everything's going to offend you, you're not going to be very happy, you're going to be constantly reacting and so being highly reactive. And the, an underlying piece of that, which I think is a deeper psychological dynamic is this very extreme form of black and white thinking that social media creates, I think our young people and I've had conversations with thousands of them, there are some of them that really cannot critically think and think in the realm of nuance that you say a word or an issue and you go right to lizard brain reactivity as opposed to, oh, let's have an informed discussion about whatever the topic may be that's almost disappeared. I was a university professor for 10 years and you saw it even just in the 10 years that I taught, how each cohort of students were becoming increasingly, increasingly fragile, triggered and, and again, these were the social media babies that were finding communities to kind of like, yeah, let's get upset about this and let's get upset about that and wasn't leading to a lot of health and happiness when they were getting out of school.
- [22:07]
Right.
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They weren't functioning well in the real world because how do you live in the real world if every other thing is going to trigger you?
- [22:14]
Ginny Urich
It's a whole new world of overstimulation and schools were not ready. The pressure came fast and many families were left confused and hurt. Here's what happened.
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Unknown Speaker
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.
- [22:54]
Right, right. And like you said, even, you know, your grandpa was aware of it and you know, you know, you read that. I read about my father who was born in 1931. You know, they were hyper aware to technology because I think they were just more intuitively aware. You know, they hadn't been over educated 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 2, 000 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 over 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 a 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. 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.
- [26:23]
Ginny Urich
And what about the consequences for creativity and focus? If you've wondered why your child struggles with boredom or imaginative play, this may be the reason.
- [26:33]
Unknown Speaker
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. Yeah, 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 a. 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 kindergartners.
- [27:14]
Kindergarteners.
- [27:15]
Kindergarteners. So talk about how that, 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 going to fall behind.
- [27:24]
Yeah, I think. And I'm speaking at a school district tonight, as a matter of fact, and I do a lot of speaking at education conferences, 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 most who 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 gets 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 and so school in 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 years ago, I had a moment 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, 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, 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 a 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 country 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 to 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.
- [30:35]
Ginny Urich
But the problem goes deeper. It's not just that imagination is eroding, it's the whole sensory experience of being human.
- [30:43]
Unknown Speaker
One of the things that you talk about, which is really interesting, is that screens, they cause. I don't know if the 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, to toys with batteries and buttons. You give your kids a VTEC 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.
- [31:19]
Well, so we can begin, we can conceptualize, you know, 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've, 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. So 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. Minchlow 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 begin, 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 kind of impulses, all 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 and whistles. They need to be doing hand eye coordinating activities like building with blocks where they Use their own imagination. 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 neurosynapses 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.
- [35:06]
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.
- [35:26]
Look at you.
- [35:28]
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.
- [35:39]
Right.
- [35:39]
And so they're bored. And so sometimes we feel a little bad about that.
- [35:41]
Right.
- [35:42]
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.
- [36:40]
I mean, wow, who wrote that? That Sounded great anyway.
- [36:43]
So good.
- [36:46]
Ginny Urich
And when kids lose their curiosity, they lose their spark. Listen to what happens when kids stop asking why.
- [36:53]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
But now their imagination also atrophies. And I work with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids and teenagers and I could always tell right away the ones that were the two year old on the tablet because they have almost no imagination. You ask them to draw a picture or write a story and they're stimulating. I call them the shoulder shruggers. They don't have, they never developed the ability to, to create or to imagine because their imagination was programmed for them. And that's pretty damaging.
- [37:26]
Unknown Speaker
Well, it's an interesting thing, you know, as a parent, just practically speaking that you know, what, what seems to make parenting easier and maybe it does make it easier for this short period of time actually makes it harder in the long run. So I love you talk about that. You say, you know, algebra homework just doesn't cut it. If they're used to these fast scenes or, you know, just sitting outside and watching the ants walk by or those type of things, they no longer cut it because, you know, the child isn't interested for the amount of time it takes to enjoy those slower experiences.
- [38:01]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
There was a quote in the book, there was education professor Monkey and he talked about the screen time compresses and accelerates everything to kind of an artificial, artificially synthetic platform. And he gives an example of like even watching a nature show on tv, right? Let's say you watch a fishing show on. And I use this example in the 30 Minute Fishing Show. You're going to bait your hook, you're.
- [38:25]
Unknown Speaker
Going to catch the fish and reel.
- [38:27]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
It in and have it all done in 30 minutes. And then if you actually really go fishing, you find out that this might take five or six hours. And you've already primed that person to think that everything's going to be ribbon.
- [38:36]
Unknown Speaker
Wrapped, you may not catch any fish.
- [38:41]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
And that's, that's if you're watching like a, you know, a fishing show, which is, you know, in the, in the continuum of screen experiences is like the most innocuous type of digital food that you could be consuming. So all these experiences that are so stimulating, you know, we went bowling. My family and I like my boys, I have twin sons who are now 14 and we hadn't been bowling in a long time.
- [39:04]
Unknown Speaker
And it's interesting because now you watch.
- [39:06]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
How almost everything has to compete against the stimulation of gaming, especially for young boys, right? So we went to this bowling alley and I remember a bowling alley, you know, growing up it was a place with a lot of lanes and there was. And you walked into this place and I could have sworn it was Las Vegas. Over every lane there was giant screens and there was lights and bells and whistles. And I said to my wife, what's happening here? Is this some kind of, is this some kind of special bowling alley? And she's like, no, no, this is the way bowling alleys are today because.
- [39:35]
Unknown Speaker
If they don't have all the bells.
- [39:37]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
And whistles, they can't compete. A kid's not going to want to go bowling to a traditional bowling alley because they're so used to the Las Vegas effect that I like to call it all the bells and whistles and neon and exploding things. Or else it's not engaging for them anymore. Or you create a stimulation dependence, whether it's cocaine or digital media. Because they both, by the way, they did a dopamine study and they talked about dopaminergic. Dopaminergic means how dopamine activating or dopamine increasing an activity or substances. Dr. Koch did this research way back in 1998 and they found that a 1998 video game, which is, God knows, that's ancient history now, but a 1998 video game was as dopamine activating as a sexual experience, where it was 100% dopamine activating and cocaine was about 300% dopamine activating. So not quite as much as cocaine, but as much as a sexual experience, which is pretty arousing and I say more impactful than the sexual experience. And I think it crude for any of your viewers, but sexual experiences tend to be short lived. A kid can play a video game for hours, days. I've worked with gamers who've had three or four days of playing in a row. So you're releasing this dopamine for an extended period of time. And so the stimulation response, that's happening. So now you're chasing. And in addiction psychology we call it the dopamine reward loop. I've experienced something that tickles my dopamine or releases my dopamine feels good, now I want some more. And then round and round that wheel goes.
- [41:13]
Unknown Speaker
Children between the ages of 10 and 17 will experience nearly one third fewer face to face interactions with other people throughout their lifetimes as a result of the increasingly electronic culture at home and in school. And that study is from 200020 years ago.
- [41:34]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
I think that's fascinating. The other important nugget of information is the other study that showed the importance of Eye contact during interpersonal interaction. What that other study showed was that when we talk in person to each other, if we're not maintaining eye contact at least 70% of the time, that interaction doesn't have psychological emotional resonance. So let's say if you're talking to someone in person and they have their head down, they're staring at their phone, that doesn't hit your sweet spot of what you need in that interpersonal interaction. And what they found was that kids under 21 are only making eye contact less than 30% of the time in face to face interactions. So even when our kids, God forbid, in the rare times that they're out of their bunker and they're out of their quarantines, even when they aren't interacting face to face, we've vacuumed out eye contact out of how they interact. It's become a lost art. So the lost art of eye contact is to their psychological emotional detriment because they need to be making eye contact. It's part of our hardwired psychological DNA to be able to look into people's eyes. And that's part of the reason why even zooming or you know, when kids will say, well, you know, I get my socialization through my gaming platforms, but no, it's not quite the same. It's not. It's the illusion of social connection, but it's a counterfeit connection.
- [42:59]
Unknown Speaker
Wow, that is really. And I didn't think about that. Yeah, they're not actually getting the eye contacts through all these screen engagements.
- [43:08]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
You know, in this age of COVID and quarantine, what I have said, and I've said it recently, it's better to have a zoom session with grandma but no contact with grandma. We'll take that. But the gold standard is face to face. Now I get it. Sometimes we haven't been able to. And there's been a benefit to be able to zoom with family members at some level of contact. But that's second tier benefit. That's not the first tier ideal benefit that we can get.
- [43:37]
Ginny Urich
Yeah.
- [43:38]
Unknown Speaker
What I love about your book is that it lays out these practical reasons about why we should change. So if you know that these video games are meant to raise the blood pressure, it's just that little extra like kicking the pants, a gentle kick in the pants to make a change. Or if you know that you should be making eye contact 70% of the time, it's that little nudge as a parent to set my phone down to make sure we don't have screens out at dinner. Another one of the really big sort of hit me in the face things was this study that 15 years ago people could distinguish, that were losing sensory awareness. So at a shocking rate. So it says 15 years ago people could distinguish 300,000 sounds. Today, many children can't go beyond 100,000. And 20 years ago, the average subject could detect 350 different shades of a particular color. And today the number is 130. Like, we're really losing what's happening here.
- [44:40]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
So essentially, because we're getting so bombarded by stimulation, we're getting 24, 7. Beeping, tweeting, scream again, the bells and whistles. It's dull in our senses, essentially. Think about if you go to a really loud movie, if you go to see some kind of Marvel Spider man movie in an IMAX surround sound, and when you step out of the movie theater, your hearing is a little bit. You have some ringing in the ears. It's the same thing with the visualization. When you get so much visual content, it's dulling, it's eroding our sense of sensory. It's called sensory acuity. And this other social psychologist, Marsha McCulak, Years ago, decades ago, studied indigenous kids and their sensory acuity versus industrial kids, kids from industrial societies. And you know, maybe shocking, maybe not so shocking, but these indigenous children, their sensory acuity was significantly more pronounced. Because these kids, they have to sit in nature and they're aware of every little movement and nuance and color. They're aware of that. They're not living in the little Las Vegas color spectrum wheel that's flashing and beeping all the time. So they had not only much more sensory acuity, but then Marcia McKillick found.
- [45:56]
Unknown Speaker
That when those indigenous kids were put.
- [45:58]
Dr. Nicholas Carderas
Into a modern classroom, their ability to learn was almost double. Modern children, because these kids brains were much more sponge like and receptive because.
- [46:08]
Unknown Speaker
They hadn't been dulled down.
- [46:10]
That's the best way that I could put it.
- [46:12]
Ginny Urich
Our kids have been dulled down, but there is hope. It's not easy, but there is a path to healing, to reconnecting, to restoration.
- [46:22]
Unknown Speaker
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. 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 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, at what screen time does, it's just a nuclear bomb and 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 Tik Tok and the body image nonsense that goes on on Instagram, then you're really exacerbating that effect and just unwell.
- [47:38]
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 kindergarteners. 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.
- [48:11]
Yeah.
- [48:11]
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 his 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.
- [49:04]
Right.
- [49:04]
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.
- [49:15]
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, with some of 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, we tend to then create a movie reel in our heads. And then 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 age 3, 30 or 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 and 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 tension 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.
- [53:28]
Ginny Urich
And finally, this isn't just a parenting issue. It's a public health and policy issue and Big Tech knows it.
- [53:36]
Unknown Speaker
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?
- [54:16]
Which is why the preventative is the easier route to go.
- [54:20]
Prevention is a lot easier than treating. Exactly.
- [54:22]
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.
- [54:56]
Awesome.
- [54:57]
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?
- [55:09]
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, it's a similar legal playbook to what they did with Big Tobacco or Big Pharma when the pharmaceutical industry first came out with 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 a 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 a new 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. I've created a tool 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. 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, suicide or were otherwise harmed and impaired. But it's also regulatory changes, you know, warning labels and who has access to or to 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, 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 missing. 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, 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, 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.
- [59:29]
Ginny Urich
Thanks for joining us today. You're not imagining it. Something is deeply wrong. But we can speak up, we can push back, and we can choose differently for our families. Thank you for being part of the movement to reclaim childhood. Now go have some fun outside.