A Simple Parenting Playbook for Screens and Play (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Children, what's your message to parents, basic guidelines? I mean, there will be people here who are aware of your work, some who are less so, some who are deep in it, some who oppose what you're doing. As a broad principle, just give us three or four rules that parents could live by, for instance, about screens in bedrooms.

[00:00:21] Speaker 2: Let me just first start that by saying, I have incredible sympathy because I'm in the same situation. I made some mistakes. I did a good job on social media, but I didn't do a good job on device regulation. So I sympathize. As a social psychologist, my rule is if one person does some bad thing, that might be a bad person. But if 90% of people are doing something bad, that's a bad situation. We're all stuck in a bad situation. We're all sick of it. It's not your fault that there's this pressure for all kids to be on because all other kids are on. That's not your fault. So that's the prologue. So now, what are the principles? The first principle is once you understand it's a collective action problem, that everyone is trapped. And if you try to get off and you're alone, you're in worse shape. So principle number one, find allies, find other families. Okay. So you're raising your kid in North London, you said? How many kids do you have? Four. How many other families are there within walking distance for your nine-year-old? Plenty. Plenty. Plenty. So what you do is you form a playborhood. You say, hey, look, you know, do you want to have our kids have more of the kind of childhood we had? And let's say, you know, four of the seven families say, yes. Okay. Let's form a playborhood. The kids, you know, they can they can connect either by landlines. Americans are putting in landlines now again for the kids. Or when they start primary, when they start secondary school, they have a brick phone, a flip phone, whatever. The kids can connect. And the idea is all of our houses are open. The kids decide. And maybe it's just on Fridays. Maybe just do it on Fridays to start. Every Friday after school, the kids decide we're going to start at Billy's house. And you might even say, you know, mom says we can play half an hour of video games if we're together.

[00:01:55] Speaker 1: I'm obsessed with outside play. And yes, even negotiating. I mean, I live on a one way street, but even negotiating the fact that a neighbor comes out just that says, do you know what? It's that which they want to recall when they're older. Yeah. What does your child when they get to your age? What do they want to recall about? They want to recall the fact that they could run on the street. When you said a moment ago that you when you're growing up, your parents said in the age of sort of growing TV consumption and families coming together, get out of the house, get out of the house. It was easy. Don't come back until the lights come on. Yeah, I can't imagine saying that. And I feel so sad that I've never said that to my children. I think about it. That's actually a good ambition for maybe the next few years. Yeah.

[00:02:30] Speaker 2: But because play is a collective action problem, too. If you send your nine year old out and there's nobody else out there, he's worse off. There's no benefit to that. So it's a collective action problem. If you have a group of families, you send the kids out and they are so excited. I promise you at school, they're all going to be challenged. What should we do today? Oh, you want to go to the pizzeria? You want to go get ice cream? No, let's go down to the stream. Let's go to the park. They're going to be so excited. And they are self-governing. Now, we live in democracies. The whole point of a democracy, the whole reason that my country broke away from yours is that we said, you know what? We think we can be self-governing. We think we don't need a king. And you guys said, oh, you'll be back, you know, as in Hamilton. But we made a go of it. We discovered that you can be self-governing if you teach the skills of democratic citizenship to your kids. And that especially happens on the playground. Because what's happening? The kids learn to make the rules, to enforce the rules, to resolve disputes, to keep the game going. So when the kids have that independence, they learn to be self-governing. We've got to if we want our democracies to survive, we have to raise a generation that is suited for democracy. Instead, we're raising little authoritarians.

[00:03:30] Speaker 1: But you had the decency, little authoritarians. We're prepped for authoritarianism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds like a pun on Edmund Burke's little platoons. We've gone from little platoons to little authoritarians. Yes, oh, I like that. You were decent enough to say you made mistakes when it comes to device regulation. Looking back, what are some of the guidelines? This is not a sort of sanctioned manifesto. You're not seeking office. But what are some of the guidelines you might say to parents? For instance, might you say, no screens in bedrooms, no social media until a certain age? How would you do device regulation better?

[00:03:59] Speaker 2: Yeah. So let me give you two principles here. So the first principle, this is the one I wish I'd done, is no screens of any kind in bedrooms ever. Now, you can start that. When your kids are young, you can start that. And you can have a TV in the common room or family room or kitchen. You can have a computer. There are all kinds of reasons why they might use those. But you say no screens in the bedroom. When I was a kid, the idea that you'd have a TV in your bedroom was insane because you'd watch it all the time. So if you start with that rule when they're young, then they're not going to... The stuff is like a gas that expands to fill every moment. So if you have that rule, it won't fill every moment of your kid's day. You might have to make an exception when they have a lot of homework and they need to take their laptop in for two hours in the evening when they're 12, 13, whatever. But if you start with that rule, your life's going to be a lot better, a lot less conflict. So that's one. The second is let's talk about good screen time versus bad screen time. It's actually very simple. Here's what's good. Stories. Stories are good because humans are storytelling animals. Humans have always raised their kids in a sea of stories inherited from previous generations with some modification. Our brains are like LLMs. Our brains are neural networks. They need lots of patterns and fiction, stories, myths are the fastest way that we tune up along with real experience and travel, things like that. So your kid needs a lot of that to get smart. So what do you think about doing movie night with your kids? Does that seem like a healthy thing or is that screen time?

[00:05:24] Speaker 1: I've heard on the side of quite enjoying it. Yes, you're right. And partly because it's a common experience, particularly if you invite some neighbors around, which might well do this Friday. But also that feeling that there is a kind of there are certain traditions you want them to know famous things, but also that sense that they can actually sustain attention. Yes, you got it. That's the key. Yeah, that's it. Rather than just scroll doom scrolling, flick, flick, flick, flick, flick, flick. You know, that's a that's a different kind of neurological experience. I'm going to follow, you know, Dracula or whatever it might be for a long time.

[00:05:56] Speaker 2: Exactly. That's those are the two endpoints. So watching a good story, a long story, ideally an hour or longer, teaches skills of attention about characters in a moral world that have dilemmas, teaches moral development. Watching it socially improves relationships. So all that's good. You know, a movie or two a week for your kid is great. And if you use that to get some time to prepare dinner, you know, OK, you can have a half hour of the movie at five o'clock every day. Like, that's great. There's no problem with that. OK, the opposite is what you just said. The opposite is fragmenting time. The worst thing you can do is hand your kid a touch screen device because a touch screen device is a little Skinner box, stimulus, dopamine response, reward, repeat over and over again. And it mostly ends at short videos. And the short videos are not stories. There's no morality.