Hello, I'm Denusha Melina Durbin, host of Parents Who Think. I've spoken with Jordan Shapiro before, when his bold book, Father Figger Landed and Spart needed conversation about what it means to be a feminist father. This time, we're back together to take on another cultural lightning rod, Screen Time. Jordan doesn't scold or sensationalise.
He invites us to look beyond panic headlines and asks, what kind of lives are our children building through their digital worlds? We talk about the limits of the Screen Time debate, the difference between control and guidance, and how sitting beside your kid while they gain might be the most powerful parenting move you'll make this year. Welcome to the podcast, Jordan. I'm really looking forward to talking about this thing tech.
Hello. Hello. Thanks. It's great to be here.
I'm excited for this. You know, for most of us parents, the concept of Screen Time, I mean, a non-screen time, is a big, big area, isn't it, for parents? There's a big divide, I think, between parents, well, certainly from parents that I speak to, friends and media, read things about, you know, the evil screen time. Yeah, I mean, I feel here a lot of parents say, this is the big issue of all, the heart of most parenting decisions these days have to do with it.
I've always pushed against the term Screen Time in general, just because I don't think it makes sense that we talk about it in terms of a question of duration. It's sort of the wrong attitude. I mean, there's certainly lots of things to worry about, to be concerned about, to be monitoring around children's use of digital connected technologies, of network technologies. But the idea that that can be reduced to a simple question of duration, I think, is problematic.
And the example I'd give to me that clear is just, you know, you may have one kid who might be playing terrible violent video games all day long for eight hours. And then, yeah, that's certainly a reason to be concerned. But if I told you that my son was spending eight hours composing electronic music with his keyboard and his computer, you'd be like, wow, let's mark kid. I think what most of us are resistant to, but we also recognize is that at this point, you know, life happens through these digital technologies.
And so I think we need to, that what parents would really be asking is questions about the quality and the character of those interactions their kids are having and whether those interactions are aligned with their values, aligned with their sense of what's important, much more than they should be worried about time. You know, for years, I often point out that you could, for at least 100 years, you know, since the beginning of television, people have been trying to prove that Screen Time is bad, and they have not been able to find any sort of toxic impact. I think that 100 years of people actively trying to prove it, I think is enough for us to say, hey, maybe it's not there. Yeah, it's not a concept of the Dan television.
It's works on it. What drivel, you know, or not. Yeah. Yeah, you know, a lot of people hear my stuff and they go, wow, this guy just thinks everyone should play video games all day long.
You ask my kids, they go, I don't know what you're talking about all day long. He's telling us to stop that. He's telling us to change what we're doing. He's telling us to change what we're doing.
He's telling us to change what we're doing. He's telling us to change what we're doing. He's telling us to get off your computer, get off the video games. And that's true.
Because I think what so much of my work has been about has been about saying, hey, this is here. This is part of what it means to live in the world. And our job's parents right now is to teach our kids how to live well with it. And most of what we're doing instead is like trying to keep them away from it for certain amounts of time.
And we know, you know, for things like abstinence education, right, but keeping figured not talking about things and not doing it is actually the least healthy thing for your kids. It doesn't teach them anything. So it's always been a sort of proponent and what I've been promoting around the world. So even before I wrote in a childhood was saying, hey, parents need to get involved and they need to teach their kids how to live with screens because the world is now full of screens.
And instead we're always making it this sort of binary of screens are bad. I want to limit how much exposure my kids have to them. The screens are here. So I want to make sure my kids use them well.
Yeah. I mean, that's a wonderful, you know, message to be getting out there. But why are parents so scared to take? In my book, The New Childhood, I talk about this in a lot of detail.
If you look at the sort of the history of revolutionary technologies and there's parts of my book where I go back to the beginning of writing even where I go back to the wheel, you know, go back to the steam engine, the gas lamp, right, all of these technologies end up changing a lot more than just how we live our lives. They change the way we think. They change the way we make sense of the world around us. The same change the way we interpret our experiences.
And I think parents intuitively get that. And so what they're scared of is the idea that their kids are going to let go of the things that matter to them, like go with things like kindness and compassion and ethics and all these really, really important values. And I think the mistake is, is the parents think of this as being too revolutionary. When I think if you look back in history, you realize that all parents in all eras have always had to go, hey, how do I take the old things, the things that have mattered since the beginning of time, since humans learned how to live in community together?
And how do I make sure they can still be meaningful and change it? Economic context, changing technological context, changing cultural context, changing political context. I mean, that's what we have to have parents do. And for some reason, this one is especially scary.
Sometimes I blame the tech companies. I think they've tried to sell it as this is so revolutionary. It's changing the whole world. Nothing will ever be the same.
And I don't think it's quite that big. The essence of this is that it brings enormous change. And the fact about screen times, if we send our kids off just to watch whatever they want without us actually being part of that, isn't that part of the problem that we're not actually, you know, we're kind of slightly scared, don't really understand. So we're either saying, don't do that, but we still really got no clue what they're actually really doing.
Not really, we're just kind of saying, blanket, it's probably not good for you. In most cases, it's either don't do that or, you know, get alone in their room with a door close, doing something completely by themselves. I've read, you know, most families, both self-reported by families and also, and also monitored by researchers have shown that most of the conversations around tech between parents and kids are either, you know, a negotiation of screen time limits or tech support, right? There's almost no mentoring.
There's almost no guidance. There's almost no teaching. And to me, that's just absurd. We need to grab back that responsibility as parents and go, I'm going to let you use the screen.
I get you love video games. I get you love these videos. I get you love connecting people in digital space. But I am going to show you how to do it in a way that aligns with the kind of world I expect from my child.
Okay, that's a wonderful place to arrive to. Where do you go from there? So I've often said, you know, just sit down in the sofa and play video games with your kids. That's where I started when I first got involved in all this.
And, you know, sit and play the games, talk to them about the games as you play it. Just sit down and go, what are you playing? Tell me about it. It's that guy, right?
Ask them questions while they're playing. You don't have to play. But what is this game? Why is it so bloody?
I don't understand. Why is it fun to kill someone? Explain to me why you're enjoying this, right? All those things sort of sending very subtle messages where I don't feel like that.
I have to create very strong limits because I'm teaching them how to interpret things and make sense of them. I've never been afraid of kids playing violent video games. I am afraid of kids playing violent video games and not having the capacity to make sense of that. And that's true for everything, right?
If you think about, you know, take it out of screen time, right? You might go, I'm not afraid of my kids being exposed to lots of sexual content provided they already have the level and maturity to be able to think about it, right? I don't definitely don't want them exposed to it before they're immature enough to think about it. Yes, absolutely.
So you sit with them. So sit with them. It's really important that we don't kind of ashamed or say you're not a good person because this is something that you like. I was like, try.
You might go, I don't know why you like this. This is weird. I find this game abominable. I think it's sexist.
I think it's racist. I think it's too violent. But I don't think you are those things as you're playing it. There's one thing that's true about parenting is you have to pretend to be interested in things you're not like, I don't ever want to go to a gaming watch my kids.
It's so boring. I don't want to watch a bad school play. It's terrible, right? But I have to go there and learn how to get into it and learn how to love my kids while doing it because it's what they need.
Like our job as parents, whether we're sitting and playing a video game, whether we're texting with our kids, whether we're sharing on Instagram and our kids are watching or whether we're talking about their artwork is actually to set the bar. We're supposed to show them where the expectation is, something that they're trying to achieve. The only way to do that is to actively do it and then consistently explain why that bar is there. That's what we do when we're trying to teach kindness.
We go, talk it out. We're going, this is what it would look like when you resolve your conflict nicely. We hope that they aspire to achieve those things. We need to do that in a digital space.
We need to do it when it comes to art. We need to do it when it comes to their choir concert. We need to do it everywhere. Our job is to set the aspirational bar and then to be the sort of sherpa for our kids to help them get there.
So actually, what you've just done is tell us the core of parenting, which funnily enough, a lot of people don't think that their job as a parent is to set the bar. Their job isn't that for many. It would appear to be their job is to be friends. Their job is to set memories, to give their children experiences in life.
Maybe that's because they didn't have them, but then their big thing is like, right, the only thing I do, the big thing I do for my kids is I'm going to give them things. I'm going to, whether it's experiences or materials or set the bar is so often from my observations, not necessarily the actual core of what they might be doing. Well, I'll give two possible answers to this. My first reaction to you saying that would be, you know, these things aren't mutually exclusive, right?
There's no reason you can't do both at the same time. Giving someone an experience is also about teaching someone how to interpret that experience. It's also about teaching someone how to make a meaningful narrative to go along with that experience. And to do that, you have to be modeling something and setting up our, you know, think about a baby.
Baby doesn't make any meaning out of an experience. All we do is teach them how to make meaning out of experience until they're older and able to do it themselves. And then we do a lot of correcting and intervening when we think they've made the wrong meaning. And if you're not doing that, I think that's a problem.
But I don't think you can absolutely do that while creating experiences while being the friend, while providing support while doing all of those things. You can do one of the other. No, that was my one way of answering it. My other way, if I wanted to be a little more obnoxious.
And please do. I would go, fine, that can be your responsibility to your kids. But your responsibility to the rest of the human race is that you raise kids who are trying to meet ethical, moral, and social levels that allow us to live together in community. You know, parent thing is not just your responsibility to touch your kids.
It's also your responsibility towards the rest of the community, especially looking at the world right now where there's so much confusion and so much binary and so many issues. And we do have our responsibility as parents to make sure that we raise a generation of kids who can do this, connected, did build globalized world way better than we're doing it right now. We have to do that. We're failing.
So we better teach people how to do it better. I once came and said, I talk, we're like, our job is to get a video game and our job is to hand our controllers and hopefully they can get a level further than we did. That's a beautiful idea. It's a really wonderful metaphor, isn't it?
And I'll say, are we doing a good job? Because we're in such a mess. How are we going to do that? I mean, I think there's a place where we have to acknowledge that we jumped into this world of digital technology and connection and we've handled it pretty badly.
Right? And it led to a lot of pretty terrible things. We've made a lot of mistakes. And now one of the parts of the things we need to do to fix this jumble mess we've all gotten ourselves into is to make sure we raise a generation that won't find themselves in the same mess.
Yeah. How are they going to do that though? Who's going to really help them? I'm truthfully wondering for this appearance.
Well, it's always a combination of parents, teachers, lots of things. But you know, unless you raise a generation, again, this is where I'm talking about setting the bar unless you raise a generation who knows what your expectations around kindness, compassion, civility, participation, activism, unless they know what those are, unless they understand those values, unless you've taught them to be able to articulate them and speak them and interpret in that way, then there's no hope. As a father, on a good day, how do you feel you're doing on this setting above? You know, I will say, when I look at my children, I'm very, very, very proud of them.
I see really kind, really thoughtful children. They tend to be interpreting things in the ways that I would want them to be. I think they're fine at this point in the sense that like, if I were gone, I still think they'd become the kind of adults I wanted them to be. That being said, you know, every day they do something that is dumb and I have to intervene and correct it, right?
Every day they do something that I don't approve of and I have to go, why are you doing that? They say things they picked up from games or from online chats or from tv and I have to have a long conversation about why is that problematic? Why is that not an okay thing to say? So on the one hand, I would say, I think I've done a great job of raising kids who asked the right questions, but that doesn't mean I have perfect kids either, right?
If they were already there, they wouldn't need me. Yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much for today. It's been really, really insightful.
I love it. Yeah, thank you. It's been a pleasure.