Well, welcome, Melanie, my goodness, I've been so looking forward to, to this conversation, this fireside chat with one of my favorite movements and the leader and founder, right, Melanie, the founder of Screen Strong. Yes. I can't tell you how often I've referred people to to ScreenStrong.org. Yeah.
Thank you. And the feedback has always been so positive. You've provided support in a time that it's sorely needed.
So a very warm welcome to the Simplicity Parenting Podcast, Melanie. Thank you so much for having me. I love that I get to visit with you here for a few minutes.
Thank you. Yeah. It's just a big excuse to visit really, isn't it? Yeah.
Exactly. Melanie, could you tell a little bit about Screen Strong and where that began, what that came from? Because that's a very compelling story. And then we'll just look a little bit at the Screen Strong values and how that plays out and what do you see as the need with helping parents make? It's about choices, right? There's probably a few other choices that define us as parents, as the choice around our children's health and particularly brain health as it plays out with screen exposure.
So maybe take us back a little bit to the founding of this wonderful organization. I would love to. And I just want to welcome everyone listening because this is going to be really fun.
It's not going to be stressful, like, oh, no, we're talking about screens again. It's going to be really fun. You're going to get some really good answers.
And I am a nurse by training. I have four children, my husband and I. And our oldest son became very addicted to video games right under my nose. We had no idea this was happening.
And I became the game cop mom, which I hated that job. It was one of those jobs that you find out you have that you didn't really know you were going to have to do. And so as a result, we had a lot of conflict in our home with lots of rules and setting the kitchen timer and sort of having arguments around screen time.
And I'm sure everyone listening either know someone or this is probably happening in your own home. And we were so excited for Adam to go to college. And I just knew he was going to outgrow this crazy habit that had really kind of taken over his life.
But that did not happen. We picked him up from his freshman year of college and in the car on the way home after I asked him, Adam, are you on drugs? Because he looked like he was on drugs. It was the hardest thing for me to ask him.
And he said, no, mom, that video game did something to me. I have been in my bed for a week. I haven't eaten.
I haven't gotten out. And by the way, I'm not coming back. I haven't finished my classes.
He was really messed up. And so I dove into the research and I just started calling people that I knew. I went to school at Emory.
I knew people there. I started going to conferences. I started trying to figure out what had happened to my son.
And, you know, it all made sense. But it took that defining moment. It kind of took that that moment in time for me to understand, because up until then, no one was talking about screen addiction.
My friend said, well, you know, I guess he's OK in the basement playing video games for hours. You know, he's not out getting drunk. He's not, you know, doing drugs.
Little did I know that a video game was just like a drug and he's really safe. And I thought, wow, the bar is really low here. Right.
For our teenagers. And I was just I felt like I was being like taken away by the tide. If you know the current, you know, the undercurrent of this in our culture.
And I couldn't figure it out. So I dove into the research because lo and behold, what do you find when you do that is you start to get confident. You start to figure out what actually happened to your child if you're dealing with anything.
Right. It could be any health issue. You've got to get information.
You have to get educated because we were not educated. And so I learned all these things and I started having some little presentations at our school. The counselor told me, hey, I want you to come talk about all the things you're learning.
And so the first one we had about 20 handouts and I was all ready with my little PowerPoint and we had over one hundred and twenty five people show up. We immediately ran out of chairs. It was crazy.
And so I thought we are not the only family struggling, but this is sort of like an issue that people don't talk about. So initially we started ScreenStrong to get the conversation going and to help people like me and families like ours that felt so isolated. I felt so incredibly isolated that no one understood what we were going through.
And and so Adam did drop out of college and he ended up going to the military. And that's a whole nother show for another day that I learned that when your mom and you have a 19 year old sitting on your sofa with their black hoodie and they're playing video games and you call the the military. And so the recruiter came to the door and he actually recruited Adam.
I told the military recruiter that Adam loved to play Call of Duty. And so I'm sort of saying that tongue in cheek. But I was so serious when all this was happening.
And we're so proud of Adam. And he went and served our country. He's he did that for five years and he did come back and he finished college.
So we're not quite, you know, saying that it was the perfect route to take. But it was it was it was good. And so what happened after all of that happened with Adam, I turned to my other kids and I just said, all right, we're not doing this again.
And so to my daughter, I said, flip phone all the way through high school. We're not doing social media or smartphones because of everything I had learned. I learned so much about the brain science and what screens do to kids and their brains when they're really young.
And then to the younger boys, I said, guys, sorry, we're done with video games. I totally failed that experiment. So we're going to do another experiment and we're going to see what happens if you replace gaming time with things like music and reading and time outside and fishing and all the fun things they did with sports.
So we are so excited to have figured this out. But not only do we figure it out, I feel like I got a really good handle on how to help other families figure it out. So with my nursing background, I think it really helped me.
And I took a lot of notes and kept a lot of journals. And so I started blogging. I started doing my weekly podcast.
I started helping families who were just like our family on the outside. You would have looked in and thought, hey, they got it all going on and it's all fine. But it wasn't fine.
And I just promised myself that I would never forget that pain because it's a very deep pain to raise a child who is dependent on a screen. It changes your whole family dynamic. Nothing is simple anymore.
And that screen, whether it's social media or gaming or even just an iPad with YouTube, it changes your family's dynamics and it really changes your relationship with your child. It steals a part of their childhood that you can never get back. So it's screen strong.
We have very high standards over here. We set a really high bar and sometime, you know, I think maybe culture isn't ready for it. But I feel like, you know, kind of like with the smoking dilemma years ago, we were in a position with smoking where we thought, well, teenagers are always going to smoke.
So we had to build a smoking patio on their on their high school. Right. I don't know if you remember this or not, but that was a big thing.
And, you know, what we learned is with education and with awareness, you know what? We can turn the tide. So screen strong is not built on opinions and we're not built on little rhymey things. You know, we're not built on just the latest parenting trend.
We are evidence based and we take a look at child development. We look at brain development. We look at dopamine.
We look at addiction because now we know all these things are causing addiction in our kids. But we also give parents a fabulous roadmap to detour around the most problematic screens. We are not a screen free organization.
I think there's plenty of good uses for screens, but there are certain screens that are very toxic during the teenage years and, you know, all the way, of course, younger, too, but all the way through adolescence. And those screens are video games, social media and pornography. Those are the three areas that we focus on.
And our goal is to provide really clear education based on science and based on research and what the current data says and the medical piece to this, because I tell you, if you can shift your emotional kind of feelings brain to your concrete, more, you know, evidence based brain, you will win this battle. This will not be hard. And I think we are making this conversation too hard in our culture.
I really think we're making. What do you see? That's just an amazing overview. And you talk about this from the inside out.
This is something you've experienced personally. Yes. What would you say are the sort of seminal points that any parent, ourselves included, of course, needs to understand about this? Because you go over that in your book, which I have right here.
You know, kids, brains and screens. This is it's kind of almost a cliche to say it, but I can't help it. It's a breakthrough book.
And it's just everything you need in this one package. But what would you say when in writing this book and all that came before the book, all the different conversations? First of all, I'd kind of like to ask, what are the resistance points? And then what is the evidence based and the straightforward sensible? There's evidence and then there's sensible gut instinct as well. That's right.
Of course. Yeah. But what are the resistance points that you meet and how do you respond to them? So what a great question.
I think if I step back and really look at just even the one thing that's sort of the overview of the problem, if I'm going to diagnose, as we do in the ER, right, and nursing and all that, when you're in the hospital, if I if I'm going to triage, I'm going to say that parents are treating their kids like adults. OK, and we we get pushed to do this. We get pushed to push our kids in so many areas.
Even even I was really guilty of this back with Adam. He had straight A's. So that was a big push, right? You want your kids to get straight A's.
And so if they have straight A's, then they must be fine. And he wasn't fine at all. But that's what I was using to gauge his well-being.
And I think that that is the biggest thing that parents do. They treat their children like they are more mature than they are, and they also treat their children and they treat parenting like we can control our kids' maturity and our kids' readiness and their wisdom. And we cannot.
From a medical standpoint and just from the brain development and everything we know about development, an iPhone and a video game, for example, are two of the worst things that you can give a child during that stage of development for so many reasons. But parents do not understand what kids need during these developmental years. They just assume like I did, and please understand that I never judge anyone on this topic.
I say I made more mistakes than anybody out there, but parents just assume that their kids are different and we have blind spots. And I had a huge blind spot with Adam. I thought that he was learning all sorts of things on that screen.
I thought that if he had been on social media at the time, he wasn't. But if he had been, I would have thought the same thing. Oh, he's fine.
He can handle it. He's more mature. I've talked to him.
I've had these conversations before. You know, parents depend on conversations and conversations are okay, but they're needed. But it's like a seatbelt.
They're not going to keep you alive if you're in a bad crash, right? So I think that's the biggest thing. I think that we, there's something in our parent brain that we keep thinking we want our kids to be special. We want them to be ahead.
We want them to be better than the other kids. We want them to be popular. We want them to get an edge.
And what we don't realize is they're not getting an edge. We are hurting them because we are jumping the gun on these things. We're putting the cart before the horse and we're giving them way too much at an age when they are doomed to fail.
It is a failure recipe. It is the perfect recipe for anxiety and depression, which is what we're finding right now in our culture. So I feel like for parents, it's a blind spot that they, they need to realize.
We need to take a breath. We need to step back. We need to go back to the basics and we need to take life the way that it was designed for our kids to handle.
We cannot push these things on them too early. I think that's the biggest thing, honestly. As far as what parents are, like what their sticking points are and what is causing the biggest problems, it's fear.
I think parents are fearful, honestly, of their kids. And, you know, it's kind of like a coach. We use the coaching analogy all the time.
I even bring it up in the book. It's so easy to understand when you think about a coach and what a good coach does. If he has a losing season, he goes to his team and he does research.
He gets a new game plan and he says, guys, we're losing and we've got to fix it. And what we're going to do is we're going to go back to the basics. You know, if it's baseball, you're going to learn how to hold the bat again.
We're going to strengthen your core. We're going to go back to the basics and figure out how we can get better. And if we all would parent like this, there would be so much more joy in our life because, you know, with the sports team, those players want to know what to do, they want to trust their coach and they want their coach to have their back.
And when a coach comes in with a really bad game plan and everybody loses, this is not good, this is not what a team needs. And the other thing about that analogy, it works so well because what you don't want when you're coaching a good team to get to a championship, which is what we're all doing, we're coaching our kids, right? And the championship is life and we're trying to get them to the end of adolescence, but what you don't want is to bring another coach in to mix up the message and confuse your child. And so every time we hand over that screen and say, look, this is your, your coach is giving you this, they're going to trust you and then they're going to get burned and they're going to get hurt.
And then they're going to stop trusting you. So, yeah. Oh, sorry, Molly.
Yes. No, no, no. Just screens do a lot more damage than parents initially know.
Yes. Um, uh, forgive the interruption. The, the, um, the, one of the biggest, uh, uh, pushback points that I, uh, I experience, uh, from parents and, and, and, and also just had to address this myself is, and you mentioned it in passing, but I just want to come back to it and just come back to that frame of inclusion and popularity, unless my child has these devices, they're going to be standing with others who are all talking about the show on YouTube, talking about, about, um, the latest Instagram feeds or now discord that they can use that they, and I don't want my child to be left out.
It's a, it's a very primal. Um, I think it goes very deep within us is that we want our children to be a part of, of this safety of numbers. Um, it's a very primitive thing.
I would say of all the, all the things that we as parents need to understand and overcome that's towards the top of the list, it's in the top, uh, concerns we have, how what's your response to that? When that comes up, it comes up all the time. You're right. It's probably one of the biggest concerns that parents have.
And what I say to it is it is a myth. You got to listen to this a minute because it's, it's hard. We have blind spots.
And so we have anchoring biases and we have these biases and we think, oh, our kids are going to be left out. So listen to this just for a second, because it's a twist. Kids who don't have social media are more social than kids who have social media.
Kids who don't have gaming to rely on as their virtual social activity or their phone to rely on are getting together. They get together in person more with their friends. They also have maybe fewer relationships, but those relationships are deeper.
So it's a twist. It feels like it would be true, but it is not true. We, we just call it a twist.
It's not true. And we see this every day over here at ScreenStrong over and over and over when parents say, you know, we decided to go ScreenStrong, we took social media away. We took their phone.
We gave them a basic phone and they are spending way more time with their friends than they ever have. We have friends that were at our house every Friday night. We made pizza.
We have another thing parents tell me all the time is they're talking to me more. They're actually sitting in the kitchen, talking to me while I'm making dinner. They're not playing Fortnite.
So I want everyone to understand. I know it's hard to understand this because it's a twisted truth. You know, you think, oh no, they're not going to be friends.
They're going to have deeper friends and that's what the protective factor is for mental health. You have to have really good relationships when children are on phones and when teenagers are on phones, they have very shallow relationships. Hi, what are you doing? Hi, I don't know.
What are you doing? Hi, I'm on the couch. Hi, I'm watching TV. Hi, I'm whatever.
It's very shallow on their texts. It's, you can't, you know, text is for planning activities. It's not for building relationships, right? You and I know we can't build a relationship online.
You have to be in person to do that. And in that book that you have in your hand, I have a section in there that talks a whole chapter on how to build a friendship because our kids don't know how to do this anymore. So I have a whole chapter on it, but it takes 200 hours of spending time in person with someone to get them from a casual acquaintance to a good friend, 200 hours.
That's a lot. And that's in-person time. And so a lot of parents think my child isn't going to be popular.
They're not going to have any friends. It's not true. The other piece to this puzzle that I want you to think about for a minute is the idea of leadership.
So when we teach our children and we model this and we teach them how to be different, how to step out from the crowd and how to lead, then they become confident, they're healthy, they're happy. They have so many interests because they're not following the crowd. Now, this doesn't mean that they don't have their own crowd because we, our boys with our younger boys, you know, we decided they didn't have a smartphone all the way through high school and they didn't have social media.
They still don't have social media. They have so many friends, their social life is so rich. It is so rich because it is centered around real things that happen in real life, like baseball and fishing and music.
They both play two instruments and they love it. They're playing for weddings. Now they're meeting all these people.
They're outside constantly. They were each in student government at our school. And this is not just my kids.
This is the typical thing that happens now with our kids. It was kind of interesting that their senior year, one of them was the senior class president, which I was thinking that was really cool, but the other one was a student body president. And, you know, you wonder how did that happen? They didn't have social media.
They were left out, right? They must've been left out. They didn't have social media. So how did they get voted to be the senior class president and the student body president is because they knew people because they were not left out.
They absolutely were not left out and they were different. Yes, which is a very good thing, but they were not left out. They have so many relationships and ultimately as parents, isn't that our ultimate value? Isn't that our goal is to teach our kids how to be really good at relationships.
One of the things that I've discovered through having both Mike, our kids not have not have phones, they didn't even have dumb phones, they just didn't have phones through high school. And it was only really at the insistence of the school that they ever got even a laptop. And that is, for me, this is also another thing to address is how schools are almost like drug dealers, like drug.
Oh, is that what you were going to say? I'm sorry. Yes. I like drug dealers.
But the but the thing that that I found is and this is true of so many kids, is that there is intermittent relationships and there's enduring relationships. The intermittent relationships come and go and come and go. They're easy come, easy go.
But what's really interesting is when when your kids are screened, my kids were screened, screened free until the school insisted on that they weren't. And even then it was a tech tool and never a tech toy. But when when the class, there are painful years and I don't try and dodge this.
The painful years, the latter part, like 13, 12, 13, through to about 14, 15, where it's just it's hard. I don't think we can dodge that. No.
But come 16, 17 and even earlier, 14, 15, kids who have curated screen use are the go to people when their classmates are hurting, when there's the teenage things that are coming up. It's the kids who are not going to respond OMG with a text. They're going to say, let's go for a walk.
That's right. Tell me about what's happening for you. And they become they become the go to people and become leaders.
There's it's almost a flip. It's almost the script gets flipped. But there but it doesn't happen overnight.
But it certainly does. What are some of the other resistance points and how you address this as well? And so that always fascinates me to anticipate and to think about resistance. Right.
And as a as a positive thing, it gives us the resistance we need. It gives us the grit. Yeah, that we need.
So but I just want to say real quick that the ages that you're talking about, that middle school period where, you know, everything is hard. Right. The the 11, 12, 13, 14, you know, that those awkward years, we can call it everything is hard then.
And this is where most parents fall off the cliff and they give in and they see their child going through some awkward things at school or awkward things with relationships and they want to fix it. So they want to give them a phone because they that will just make them feel better and it will fix it. But it doesn't fix it.
It makes it worse. If you can hang on, if you're listening right now and you have a 12 year old, you are getting ready to just kind of face the little tidal wave here for a minute and then it's going to be done and the sea will calm and you will rise out of it with a stronger kid if you don't give in to all the things that a middle school child thinks that they want you to give in to. So if we can just help parents get through that middle school age and even that eighth grade age, eighth grade is the worst time.
And I think that's one of the myths out there that people believe that eighth grade is the best time. And eighth grade, if we can address that just for a second, because that's a huge like rub rub point. Right.
It's like, OK, we've waited this long. So surely eighth grade is OK. Eighth grade.
I always say this. It's probably kind of silly. But if you had a dartboard and you could just if in the center of the dartboard was the worst age for a smartphone, it would be eighth grade.
I can't. There's not an imaginable time that's worse because what happens is they start getting a little confidence. Right.
And parents all of a sudden get dumber. And you know what I'm talking about. And and they their searches change, for example.
So what their brains are all getting a little little tiny bit more mature with the things that they're thinking about. They're getting, you know, interested in sex. They're getting interested in topics that maybe they weren't interested in.
Right. When they were in fifth grade. So between even sixth and seventh grade searches and we have research studies that show this searches are around things like funny cat videos and, you know, music or some things like that.
But by the time they get to eighth grade, it's like a switch turns on and their searches change. So the searches start changing to things like anxiety and depression and sexual topics. And now your sweet little child who you thought was mature and ready, they're all of a sudden taking a U-turn and they're they're not ready.
And so this is kind of the trap. This is the trap that parents fall into. And it's because if you understand the brain development and if you can explain this to your child, it will be so much easier to talk about this in your house.
But if you can explain the brain development, they're experiencing a mismatch in their brain development. Right. You know this.
There's not all not all areas of your brain develop at the same time. Like, wouldn't that be nice? Right. If we got our emotion center developing at the same time as our, you know, judgment center, that would be cool.
And if that happened, insurance rates would go down drastically for 16 year old boys. Because we know that between the age of 16 and 19, insurance, car insurance is three. They are three.
It's so high because these kids are three times more likely to get in a fatal car wreck than they are at any other age of their life. And the reason is because they're taking risks. The risk taking part of their brain is in full gear.
And, you know, we like to say the accelerator is working really well, but the brakes are not working. And this happens from 8th, 9th, 10th, all the way up. The CDC says that ninth grade girls are the highest risk for thinking about suicide, making a suicide plan and attempting suicide.
Not the 12th grade girls, the ninth grade girls. So this is a huge problem for parents because they just don't understand this. I remember that one of the very first workshops that I ever did was with a pretty large group of parents in the very first part of my slide deck.
And, you know, we have adopted it now. We have a wonderful parent course now online. But the very first part of the slide deck, one of the first three things I say is that your child's brain is not developed for 25 years.
It takes 25 years for that frontal cortex to develop. And I had a handout and this mom stood up and she had the handout with the little brain on it that I had with, you know, takes 25 years for the frontal cortex to develop. She raised her hand, she stood up and she said, if this is the only thing I learned today, this is all I need to know.
I had no idea. She said, this answers so many of the problems we have in our house right now. And I thought, wow, that's actually fascinating that we really do need to understand a little bit about brain science now, because when we were growing up, our parents didn't have to learn about brain science.
They just opened the back door and let us out to play and actually really didn't let us back in until nighttime. And they didn't understand that they were doing the very best thing for our brains. You know, you write in the book in a real clarity about the whole dark side of gaming and social networking and its relationship to dopamine and dopamine being pleasure and reward.
We know that. But also dopamine is what's not so well known, as of course, you know, is that dopamine has also got to do with safety and security. So if we hand our children a phone and in our ancient selves gets triggered and we're releasing dopamine because now I am safe.
I have enough water. I have enough food. I have enough shelter.
That's what dopamine is saying as well. I feel pleasure. I'm safe.
And then we try and take the phone away from them. We are no longer the caring parent with a predator. That's right.
We are bringing we are taking away their safety, which is why the reactions when we take away the phones can sometimes be so strong. And we're really amazed at like, wow, that was a very out of character, strong reaction. And it's not our kids fault.
It's the game designers have deliberately made it this way. Can you say a little more about that? Because you speak about it so elegantly. I love that chapter in our book.
And this book, by the way, Kids, Brains and Screens, the student guide is a curriculum. If you are in a school setting, if you know any school teachers or administrators, it's a wonderful curriculum for your school. Of course, it's wonderful just to go through with your own kids.
And like I always say, if you want to learn about world history, pick up a fifth grade textbook and you'll learn a lot. And that's kind of what this is. So we break it down for parents to understand it very well.
But let's talk about that dopamine a second, because like you said, the parent then becomes the bad guy. So once you understand that, first of all, it's really important to understand that then you want to explain it to your kids. So now you're no longer in a battle between you and your child, because I think that pulling I think I think the kids are being pulled away from their families.
And that is the worst thing that screens are doing today. We're detaching. Our whole families are just a mess because, you know, we're detaching from our families because we're attaching to our screens.
And this is really critical in childhood that they keep those attachments healthy. So you want to be sure that you get clarity around this. And so the way that we address it and the way that we fix that problem is that you you don't have constant access to the most highly dopaminergic screens in your house.
That's a really bad idea for kids to have an hour a day on Fortnite or, oh, Melanie, she just has an hour every night on her social media. It's OK. No, that is not OK, because their brain is getting revved up.
They're going to have a reaction. They're going to have a meltdown. You know, we have all the warning signs in there in the book that we explain to the kids what's happening to them, that they're not bad kids is what's happening.
It's a chemical thing. But what the parent has to do is replace the dopamine with healthy dopamine. So the other thing about dopamine, you mentioned so many good things about dopamine.
I love it. But the other thing, of course, you know, that dopamine does is it helps us remember what felt good. So that's where the craving comes in.
So dopamine is really good for making us feel good. But it also helps us remember what felt good. So even if you walk by a phone or walk by a video game or you hear the video game music, that's going to that dopamine is going to start releasing again and you're going to have a craving.
And so we have to take the triggers out of our kids' lives. And the trigger is always based on access. You know, I love donuts.
Certain brands of donuts are my favorite. I don't know if you know anything about Krispy Kreme donuts, but don't even get me started. My mouth will start watering.
I love them when I drive by the store, I see the hot now light flashing. So I know that I just can't go buy a dozen donuts, you know, every week and put them on my kitchen counter and pretend that I'm not going to eat them. The trigger is too high, even for me.
And I'm an adult and I love the thing when you buy the donuts and then an hour later they're gone and nobody is going to admit that they ate them anyway. So this is kind of how our screen time is. If we are allowing access, our kids are being triggered.
One of the biggest triggers, believe it or not, that happens with a family is after school time. So their kids come home, you go to carpool, you go to the bus stop, you pick them up, they come home and they walk into the house and they are triggered to get on their screen because a time of day can be a trigger. So what a parent needs to do is figure out where all these triggers are.
We need to just not buy the donuts. All right. Maybe for a treat every now and then.
But we cannot expect our kids to have access to these high dopamine producing screen activities and then expect them to behave like an adult brain, which, by the way, most adults can't even control themselves on a screen. So but we expect them to be mature beyond their years and to have some kind of willpower that we're making up that they have because they don't have willpower. In fact, none of us have willpower.
The best way to have discipline and willpower, according to the different habit books out there, is to stay as far away from the temptation as you possibly can, not to get right up next to it every day and then start having an argument with your kids because they lied about their screen time or they stayed on longer than they said they were. And then now they don't want to get off in five more minutes and we're all in an argument. And there's nothing calm about that house, about that relationship.
That pretty much described my relationship with my oldest son. And it's sad. It's very sad.
You are losing a part of childhood that can never be recovered. So to answer your question, the way we handle the dopamine activities is you replace them with healthy dopamine activities. We all need dopamine.
We'll die without dopamine. We need to feel good. We need to be able to get up and have relationships and get outside and be in the sunshine and exercise and do all those things and create things and be productive.
But we as parents are the coaches in our house. We need to decide how our team is going to get all those needs met and how they're going to get their dopamine in that chapter, in that book that we have so many good points in there, but that one chapter with the dopamine chart on it. I've had so many parents tell me, hey, I want a copy of this and I want to put it on my refrigerator and I want to show my kids, hey, this is not this is not a good activity because the dopamine is too high and it's an addictive activity.
And we love dopamine producing activities like hanging out with each other, running, you know, creating something, an art class, playing a musical song for the first time. That is the dopamine that we need to be sure our kids are getting. And we are the coaches and we make that decision.
We don't let them make that decision. Dopamine activities that that are too high are things like drugs and alcohol and video games and smartphones and social media and pornography. Those things are too high.
And we need to stay away from those, especially during the teenage years, because we know that 90 percent of all adult addictions start in the teenage years. So as we give our kids more screen time because, you know, we think we have to teach them how to use it. No, we don't.
You know, have you ever noticed that smartphones don't come with a user manual? Nobody needs to learn how to use it. We all know how to use one. Even a four year old knows how to use one.
But we get confused because we think, no, I have to give it to them. That's that's another myth. That's probably in the top three of the myths.
They won't have any friends are going to be left out and they won't. They won't know how to use it. And I can tell you right now that every four year old knows how to use it.
So we don't have to worry about that. But we need to give them activities that they are going to love later in life, like fixing a car, like fishing, you know, cooking. My son today and I were in the kitchen cooking, preparing the meal for tonight.
And I I love it because he's getting a whole lot more interested in that. But if he had a video game like my oldest son, if he had a smartphone with social media, guess where you would be? He would be on the sofa doing that instead. So it's our job as parents not to be upset about this, not to be scared, not to be frustrated, but to get a hold of the issue and say, you know what? We're not going to do this right now.
And the cool thing is it's 48 months of high school. It is 48 months. Can we not give our kids this incredible benefit for 48 months? Doesn't it sound so doable? And you say that's a good point.
And as we round off now, I want to just reflect on on how much your work is putting parents back in that leadership role. Yes, some of the regular listeners to this podcast will know that I infiltrated a premier marketing conference to children, tweens and teens. I actually got accepted into it.
I usually get rejected because all I've got to do is look me up and I don't get in. Anyway, over COVID, I got in. And Rachel, one of the things that you're one of the things that is that's happening here, Melissa, is that you're giving parents permission to get back into that leadership role because in this conference, which is really one of the main conferences for children's marketing, parents, actually, we have a new name we're referred to not as parents, but purchasing friction.
That is that that name is used interchangeably with parent. And the conference title, one of the main workshops was the case studies in the successful removal of purchasing friction. Wow.
And so the what is and $16 billion a year are spent on removing our values from our children's lives for the wonderful aim of selling them stuff. Of course. And what your work at ScreenStrong, you and the team there are doing is actually in a way that is gentle, strong and sensible, very doable.
Your parenting course is very, very doable. And it doesn't beat us up. It doesn't make us feel bad, but it is helping us reoccupy that space of authentic leadership.
And I just can't thank you enough for you and the team for doing this. As we close, what is something that you'd like to leave us with? I would love to encourage everyone listening to not give up, to not live in the city of regret and be sad about maybe what's happening in your house or if I only could have done something different or what it could have should have, you know, I've played that in my head so many times with my oldest son, but I want to really encourage you to just start today and follow your your gut feeling on this and pay attention. You know, something is wrong.
You know, something is wrong with giving a kid all this stuff and even your teenagers and you probably listening today probably could really relate to what I was talking about, that U-turn that they take where you feel like your fifth graders on board and then all of a sudden you've lost your kid. And I my heart goes out to the children that actually are detached from their families, that are on their phones too much, they're on games too much and they don't feel loved and they don't feel connected to their families. And I just want to encourage everyone out there that you have everything you need.
And it's your unconditional love mostly. But what you have is just everything you have in your home already. And you're the way you handle your daily routine, the way you handle your traditions, the way that you have fun with your kids, I think that we're we're we're just not having fun with our kids anymore, we're always arguing with them, we're we're so stressed over what we're doing that we are missing the mark.
And so I just want to encourage parents to really look at our ScreenStrong pathway and just it's really simple. You fall so in line with your brand, right? It is so simple. You I mean, can you imagine not having arguments over screen time anymore in your house? I feel what that must feel like.
It's a wonderful feeling. So just want to encourage parents. And what you just said a minute ago about your values as a parent.
I want to say very clearly that your values are not genetic and your child is not born with your values. So we have to do the work of getting to know our kids and being that coach and being that leader in their life. So they will continue to look to you to figure out what their values are.
And you can't do that if screen time is constantly interrupting that job in that role. And I want to encourage you to eliminate the toxic screens in your house. It's not that hard.
It's hard for a minute. And then it's like heaven. It's like, oh, my goodness, we're not arguing.
We're having so much fun. We got our kids back and you will find that your kids are making lots of friends and they're having meaningful relationships just to prioritize those life skills, those social skills and to prioritize those family relationships. I think I just that's why I just want to leave with the encouragement that it's not that hard and it's so much easier.
Trust me, it is so much easier than living in the quicksand of trying to deal with screen time in a teenager's life. It's so much easier to just skip that and take a detour. Beautiful message.
And again, kids, brains and screens. That's the book. And, you know, it's almost a cliche to say I can't recommend it highly enough because I think I did recommend it.
Yeah, don't you love the book, though? I mean, I just will say that the best thing about this book, of course, there's all the facts and the wonderful science that's just woven in such a positive way, but do you just love the graphics? I mean, kudos to our to our artists out there. We have an artist on staff and and you just look at those graphics and you just I mean, you know, there's so much more right to this book than just the written words on there. It's the graphics and I love it.
And kids love it. And we get reports that these twelve, thirteen year old kids are like carrying this book around them with them, you know, because it's a it's a print book, you know, so much of our content in this day and age is online. But they're like carrying it with them.
It's becoming their friend. And I'm so excited. And I think it's because it looks like a graphic novel.
So I think that's why. But I love the well here at Simplicity Parenting. And you are our friend and we're just so privileged to have you come and speak with us today.
Can't thank you enough. Can't recommend the website and the book enough and all all power to you. And perhaps we'll we'll sign off there.
But thank you so very much. Thank you. We are here to help anyone who needs help.
We can help you get your kids back.
