Are the Kids Alright?

school life and pretty much everything else went virtual. Today's teenagers spend and estimated six and a half hours a day on their devices, and that I think is a number that is not counting the time they spend going to school on their licence. Here to help us think about how to approach this challenge, if it even is a challenge, is psychologist and New York Times best selling

author Wendy Mogul. Wendy has written several famous books about parenting, including The Blessing of a Skinned Knee and Voice Lessons for Parents. She's the host of a podcast, Nurture Versus Nurture, and she's here with me to talk about parenting in a distinctively challenging time. Wendy, it's such a huge pleasure to have you on the podcast. I've admired your work

tremendously and it's also affected my parenting. I wanted to ask you about a very concrete problem that I am confronting now, and I have the feeling I must be one of millions confronting it, like a lot of parents.

I tried very hard fighting the trend to be responsible about my kids in their use of tech and particularly phones, and then came COVID and experts, psychologists like you, other experts in childhood development basically said, you know, parents, you can sort of give up on this now because your kids' lives are now completely online. They're stuck at home. First it was lockdown, then it was school remotely. They need to have social interaction, and so their way they're getting

at right now is through their phones. So I gave up. Now as we begin to emerge into the post COVID world, knock on wood, it would be nice to try to return to something like a reasonable model with respect to tech, and yet I do not see the roadback. I don't see the roadback because the depth of let's call it, to use a polite term, connection to the devices is now so profound. Then, by the way, not only for the kids, I think this is true of a lot

of adults as well. So I want to start by asking you, did we get it wrong in the first place? And what can we do now? What I see in so many of the parents that I've been working with through this very very unusual period of time is tremendous ambivalence and double standards. So we don't want the kids on their devices too much, and yet for us we can always say it's work. So for example, you and I are talking to each other right now, and we're on opposite side of the country. We are looking at

each other. We're making a podcast. It's so easy to justify on lots of levels as a worthy enterprise. And yeah, right, we'll see, we hope. So exactly what I see parents doing a lot. Two things I see are one is not modeling what they are hoping to see in their children,

and the other is a kind of disgruntled ambivalence. So the parents say they are scornful and disparaging and sometimes naively mocking of the children's And I have air quotes on for our listeners right now addiction and then they say, okay, go ahead, they kind of give up with some disdain. And so my model for parents and almost everything right now is to treat your child as your spirit guide.

Your teenagers fourteen and fifteen years old, they know fantastic things that go on on the web that you don't know anything about. That is for sure. So it's a combination of incredibly alarming because technology is changing so rapidly and it feels hard for parents to keep up. And so then we take this position that is a cross between ludite and addicted ourselves, and so the kids just write us off, and rightly, I would say yes. And so the first piece is to be enchanted with their enchantment.

So have your children and I know the answer to this already, but I want to hear it. Have they introduced you to things you would never have known about that you were delighted to learn? For sure, There's no question about it. And also no question in my mind that for all of its downsides, social media broadly speaking, has a lot of upsides. It's created new forms of human connection and interaction, and those things are wonderful. Some

of them are wonderful. I guess I think of it though a lot like other new technologies they say they printing press in its day, you know, the printing press brought a lot of extraordinary possibility of the sharing and spread of information, and it also brought the wars of religion and profound polarization, violence, hate, and it took centuries to work out the relationship between those two things. And we're in the first you know, Gutenberg is still alive

and kicking. You know, we are in the very earliest stages of a transformational revolution in human consciousness, like the

one associated with the printing press. So, going back to shabbat, the reason for that spiritual technology of Shabbad is to create a frame around time so that we have an opportunity to reflect and to do the things that the species need so badly for its physical and spiritual health, which is to connect with other people, to be in community in our increasingly isolated, lonely and alienated maybe alienated. One part is to connect with other people. Another part

is to be in nature. We need to experience awe, which is super easy for me to say and is a challenge because what as you well know, what the algorithms do is whatever you look at it gets, it's darker and weirder and more extreme. To try to keep your eyeballs as long as possible for the purpose of the satisfying the advertisers. And our job as parents is

one to model. So we moderate our use that young people see us celebrating the tiny and delightful and grand and glorious things in our lives, and then we have a ritual formula even for the day. This is one of the things that's happened in the pandemic. People talk about blurs day. They don't know what day of the week. It is that we don't have our old markers of time, and so the default way to soothe our emotions, to entertain us, and to have company is to pick up

the device. Wendy, let me ask you a kind of philosophical question that kind of flows from what you're describing, and it's a reflection of my own on trying to find the right, as it were, Sabbath balance. And to me, all of the things that you described about a Sabbath day are wonderful, valuable, worth preserving and continuing, but at least in some strands of religious tradition, whether Jewish or otherwise,

they come with a certain rigidity attached. So you know, in order to do the delineation, there are rules, and the phone in some sense reintroduces something like that set of rules. And of course all pedagogy involves rules. Well, you know, let's say one has a rule, a pretty straightforward rule, no phones at the table, right, good, Okay, I mean that's a good rule. Yeah, right, But it's

supposed to be a bright line. It's not supposed to be a no phone to the table unless you're in a lousy mood or unless you're expecting a call from your friends, or right, it's supposed to be a bright

line rule. When you think about modeling for kids, what the right thing to do is, but also having rules, because you're a big believer that both that we should be reasonable and that we should have reasonable rules, how do you think about the rules part in association with tech that in our increasingly flexible yet rigid world, And this is one of the paradoxes of the way we're

living now. For example, for a fourteen and a fifteen year old, there are a whole set of expectations that have been applied to them since they were very small, but they're growing as they move towards what we see as a scarcity zero some future where if they don't reach certain benchmarks of achievement, they're doomed. And part of that is adult's own existential anxiety about their future and

the future of the planet. Lots of parents are older than their parents were when they had children, so we feel our own mortality a tiny little bit, and the children then become the the reassurance or the validation we have that we're doing a good job, and we look at them too closely but also not enough. So religion organized religion is really really effective for some families and

works very well in other families. All the openness and diversity and flexibility and discovery of new ways of living do not fit the template that has existed in the past.

But I guess what I'm really focusing on is identifying and effectuating the appropriate part of that, and I think that they are facing the same exact challenge that I'm facing with respect to the power of the technology that is not only a phone but is also a wallet, and is also a music maker and also also a mode of communication, and also as the thermometer to tell you the temperature, you know, and also the alarm clock

and you know, etc, Etc. Etc. And I am trying to come up with a way to nudge them, let's say, towards the kind of use that I would think of as responsible that I am also trying to model. Right even there, I think there is a disparity between their use and mine. And I think it's just largely generational, you know. I think they've just grown up with it to an even greater degree. But I do think it's about a moment where I say to them, hey, kids,

you know, we don't use phones at the table. And you can see in them the physiological resistance to that preposterous idea. They're willing to obey, but I can see in them that it is let's call it obedience by force and not obedience of thinking, the way we aspire for our children to think. That's a pretty reasonable rule. I realize that I I don't always follow it, but that rule is pretty reasonable. Here's a little bit of the heartbreak.

And when I was thinking about talking to you on this podcast, I've thought about the kids as instead of having them as our avatar, we have them as are portal because most of these kids are inside kids now, and when even when you were growing up, I imagine that you could play outside when you were a little boy without your parents knowing where your work. Could you

do that? Absolutely? And it is as it's not so much that my kids wouldn't be allowed, it's that they don't have the same instinct to go out and play in the street because there's nobody else in the street. No, I agree, that's part of the reason. What is the street so they need? There's a wonderful word in Tom Sawyer when Twain talks about Tom at the well and he Tom says the kids were skylarking, just hanging out at the well, teasing each other, all different ages, different races.

He talks about and when do these kids get to skylark except online? Which is part of the paradox in some ways, they are very sophisticated but emotionally young, and they don't have a lot of street smarts or street confidence. So yes, for sure, it is a much more enjoyable dinner if nobody is looking at or responding to their phone. But what I want, as much as that rule, is for the families to get outside and to have the opportunity to have their mirror neurons vibrate with I love

this term consequential strangers. My biggest concern about this generation is not whether they're going to master coding or Mandarin, those two things they probably won't need shortly, but to be able to talk to people they don't already know, to have conversations with adults, to enjoy the company and fellowship and sisterhood of new people. Because their parents are distracted, the kids are distracted, and the allure. There's a wonderful new book I believe the author is Michael Moss, and

it's called Hooked. It's about the addictiveness of fast food, and it's about so much how our brains operate and what appeals to what produces dopamine, and how it works. So we have these dopamine generators available at all times that are vital for school work, for communication, even for little kids communicating with their grandma and grandpa. And at the same time we are missing out on so much.

I have to say, I'm less worried. Then your description is about the kid's ability to meet people, because I actually think partly because of social media, they have a much broader acquaintance ship than I did at their age. I mean, my friends were limited really to the kids I could see in person, either in school or in

the neighborhood. And they have friends who don't live in the neighborhood and they don't go to school with And those online friendships can also blossom into real, real friendships and real you know, irl friendships and you know, in relationships. So I'm actually not so worried about about that aspect

of it. I do agree there's been a fundamental social change with respect to the street and how the street functioned, you know, in my childhood, and I live only a mile from where I grew up, but I can see a total transformation and how the streets are were a place of running around impacts and just are not anymore. There's wonderful work by Ellen Sandsetter, who is who studies

phobias in children. She wrote an article called the Antiphobic Effects of Thrilling Experience, and she says that unless kids are exposed to danger, they will be more fearful, and she names the kinds of danger she says they have to be. Take a zip line. Yes, that sort of thing, much worse than a zip line, so great heights where they could fall near fire, dangerous tools, aggression, social and

physical aggression, traveling at great speed, and wayfinding. One of the problems with technology is that's the main source of danger for our children. They don't get to learn how to titrate danger before they go off to college on their own that is not screen based danger. So I and and wayfinding. Wayfinding can seem obsolete in an era of Google Maps. No, that's really true, really true, And so these experiences need to be constructed, and it requires

a lot of creativity on parents' parts. So what they do instead is say, okay, two hours of screen time after all your homework is done. And we are then a cross between security guards, concierge services and keeping track from moment to moment of what the children are doing when we really want them to be able to monitor

and make good judgments about that. Yeah, I mean, what I hear you saying is that that kind of a rule is too rigid, and that this goes back to our conversation about rigidity, that it puts the parent in the position of enforcing a rigid rule, It puts the kid in the position not of being autonomous and making judgments and learning to make mistakes and fix them, but simply in the position of following yet another rule in a world that's already far too full of rules and restrictions, rules,

rest grades and ranking. Yeah, so what I mean, tell me if I'm if I'm hearing you correctly, I mean, what I hear you saying is some version of Noah, just relax, you know, I mean, this is fine. Our society as a whole may have gone down a rabbit hole of technological addiction, and kids live in the society too, but will self correct at some point as a society,

and they'll self correct when everybody else self corrects. And the kind of picture of erosion that films like The Social Dilemma do suggest is grossly exaggerated with respect to the great majority of people who can come to terms

with new technologies. And if that's the message, I'm jumping up and down with joy, because it, you know, it's sort of it suggests that we don't have to be in a panic, even in a situation like the post pandemic world where we've just as a society locked everything down, imposed rules, imposed rigidity, been very fear based, possibly rationally fear based, but nevertheless fear based. Now we're going to crawl out from under it. We have had to do this for over a year in order to save our lives.

The decision fatigue we have about tiny nuanced angles of things. And originally we thought the virus could travel on surfaces, and then we discovered it was aerosol. And now we're supposed to be allowed to take off our masks. But should we being paranoid or getting it right or wrong? Which is what we feel so often as parents. We want to do it right, and then people like me right parenting, but tell you how to do it and react like experts, and then you read them and think, oh,

should I do what she said? Not what she said? And there's so much thinking going on that what gets lost are the full range of feelings. And the other piece is laughter. And the part of what happens online is just a glory in snark and in dismissing other people and of feeling superior. But there is also wit and whimsy and good silliness to be found online and to be found in real life. So if you want to worry about your family, one thing you can say is not two hours of tag no more than that,

and get outside and get some fresh air. And why are you eating that? And why aren't you exercising. We're so close to the kids that anything you're close to you see all the flaws, and it's hard to step back and to zoom out and have the wide view. So if you want to worry about things, it may be that you're not laughing en up with your children and laughing about them in private with your partner. We'll

be back in a moment. It may be too soon still to have this conversation fully, but let me just ask you in a preliminary way, do you think that we went too far in the pathologizing direction in the course of the last year and change in trying to, as you said, keep ourselves alive. I mean, we were getting guidance, that guidance was shifting over time, but there

was inevitably a pathologizing component there. I mean, after all, we were surrounded by a pathogen, or we imagined ourselves to be surrounded by a pathogen, and lots of people got it and got sick from it, and some died from it. When you look at that retrospectively, do you think we'll look back and say we got it right, or we got it roughly right, or we took it too far in terms of the psychological costs for us as human beings who are not really designed to live

under consistent fear for that period of time. I am confident that we will look back and say we couldn't have done it differently because we didn't know. The part that concerns me right now is the fear that the children have had serious learning loss, they have lost their social skills, that we will not bounce back and recover from what was a tremendously interesting time that every single one of us. We have a big advantage now we live through this and we get to talk about this

till we're boring people to death about this. I think we're getting there amazing time in history. But I'm talking about if the planet does continue and there are future generations of children, they will be so interested. So this is the pandemic as a giant skinned knee that will resiliently bounce back from Yeah, a skinned and you get a skinned by doing adventurous things that we don't do.

Not wish this on anyone and all the extreme losses, but The other thing it did is it came in parallel with the reckoning about all kinds of issues about social justice, about the eco, to me, about how we've organized children's lives and our expectations for children, the national everybody went through this, not equally, but we went through this, and it is a life experience that we now can use to look back at the way we were living and evaluate how much we want to reinstate and how

much we want to change. So, I don't know if you've felt it personally in your family, some of these sparkling moments or insights you had about the pace of life, the expectations of what one does in a day, what brings comfort and delight, and what brings a necessary overthinking and anxiety. But it really has been an opportunity, yes, to quiver in terror, but at the same time to gain new insight and perspective on what children need and what parents are responsible for giving them and what we

are not responsible for doing, but they are responsible for themselves. Wendy, in your practice, you're seeing lots of people who are all coming out of COVID right now, and I'm wondering if you have any big picture advice that might apply to lots of us as we try to figure out how to navigate the next stages. One thing that's been very helpful to parents is to see who their child is.

So there's an impulse to be back to in person school where the kids have a choice, to be back to baseball and the practices and the games, but maybe not to parties or socializing. So we're sort of eager to have them back to all the transcript worthy activities or what feels wholesome and healthy to parents and is, but very fearful about what can feel maybe a little bit more frivolous or even more risky. And that gets back to the moderation, celebration and sanctification that for each

child it's going to be different. And some are just like when they go off to preschool. Some are slow, too warm, and others dive right in. They go into preschool. They don't even look back at mom or dad who's there.

They just dash in. So every single family will have different standards and each child will have different standards dirts, and the piece of guidance that I give parents is don't listen too much to the barking chain or the loud mouths or the know it alls, and to really think about your child's pace of reentry, what feels safe to your family and appropriate, and that may be different than your extended family. And to have the courage and confidence to be able to say, and this is a

wonderful thing to say to teenagers all the time. I know you don't see it the way I see it, but that's how I am, or that's where I stand, or that's this is the rule or the expectation that I have. And then the relative or the child can jump up and down in distress, and you can stand on your spot, and then you can always say I've thought about it some more. I see your point. But at first to listen to what they have to say

about what they wish to do. And the other part is not too not to allow yourself to become too fearful or too aggressive because of the opinions of other parents who feel so strongly one way or the other. Wendy, in reading your work, I always walk away with this strong feeling of having heard something deeply sensible that also makes me feel better because I think she's right. And if I could just take a deep breath and admit that she's right, then everything would be a lot better.

And I'm thrilled to see that actually talking to in person has the same effect. So thank you very much for your your wisdom, your rationality, at your thoughtful judgment, your pragmatism, and for your your insights here. I'm really grateful, thank you, Oh no, thank you Wendy to come on the podcast, because at a very personal level, I was really troubled by the question of whether we need to turn the clock back to the time before the pandemic

in thinking about tech and our kids. But as I spoke to her, I also realized that the theme of power that we're focusing on on deep background this year was very much in evidence the power of the technology itself to draw us in our power as parents, and the limits on that power when it comes to telling kids what they should do. Kids power as human beings in interaction both with themselves and their worlds and with

the adults around them. The truth is that getting these questions right, Wendy points out, is not just a matter of setting rules and imposing them. That is an old fashioned,

simplistic conception of what adult power over children looks like. Instead, what Wendy is advocating for in our conversation, as indeed in all of her humane and thoughtful work, is balancing through empathy and thinking through how to make the right decisions in a collaborative fashion without pathologizing ourselves, without pathologizing

our parenting, and above all, without pathologizing our kids. If we can pull that off, then we've learned Wendy's lessons, and I think all of our lives would be just a little bit better. At a minimum, we could stop worrying and start living again. Until the next time I speak to you, Be careful, be safe, don't worry about your phone, and be well. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mo laboord our engineer is Martin Gonzales, and our shore runner is Sophie

Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Skara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jean Cott, Heather Faine, Carly Mgliori, mag Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman.

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