 My name is Lauren Pear, your host of Screen Time Reset. And today, we're doing a sequel to our last show, Pioneers Navigating Uncharted Waters. Last time we spoke to a dad with his elementary age daughter. He reported getting little to no quality information from his doctor, school, or the government on the potential harms of screen time. He also noted that while screens are supposed to make parenting easier, in reality, it makes it harder as it added yet another thing to the list of things parents have to manage and say no to. So today, we're talking to April Hale, a mom with two young boys, a parenting blogger and a former teacher to get her perspective on raising kids in the digital age. Welcome, April. It's so nice to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. You too. Could you tell us a little bit about your family, your boys, your background, also your blog, and you have a really cool project that I'd love you to tell our viewers about? Sure. I'm just another mom, another Hawaii mom. I have two young boys, Marcel, who is two and a half and August, who is four and a half months old. So yeah, I feel like I'm both in the thick of parenting and very new to it because, like so many parents, I'm just kind of figuring things out as I go along. I have been a teacher both here and abroad, mostly with the high school level. So I've definitely seen screen time as it's played out as an issue with that teenage population as well as with my own children who are infants. Yes, I do write a mommy blog called April May Mars. It's a reference to my mom's name and my son's name. And I do typical reflections on parenting hood, parenting fail sort of stuff. But I also really enjoy interviewing other people kind of in the parenting space. And one of my favorite side projects is a little group called Baby Love Ambassadors. So we basically, it's a group of parents of young children who meet regularly at nursing homes across Oahu to interact with the kupuna and just meet other parents and have these moments of intergenerational connection. So I always looking for more members. Oh yeah. I would definitely encourage people to check out Baby Love Ambassadors online. I think it's so cool to bring kids with the kupuna, with grandparents and the older generation. It lights up the older generation and then I imagine when you get a bunch of the kids together it also gives parents a little relief. Yeah, it's a really sweet experience. I think those sort of bookend populations have a lot in common of living in the moment. And wanting a lot of touch and connection. Yeah, yeah. So it's that warm in the moment connection. So yeah, I've been privileged to have those experiences. And I would also recommend people checking out your blog. April's a really great writer. She's, I read it and I enjoyed it a lot. It's very generous of you. It's sort of sleep deprived rambling. But thank you. Agreed to disagree. But so jumping into it, from what I've observed talking to parents it seems to me like on the issue of screen time there really isn't an organized or structured method of getting this information to parents. And so on my last show I asked the dad and I'm just curious to get your perspective. Has your pediatrician brought up the potential harmful effects of screens? I pretty much had the same experience as the father you talked to in that, no. I mean, I just saw my pediatrician yesterday. And I didn't think to ask him about it either because I think just as a culture we don't really consider screen time a health issue at this point. It feels like just another sort of parenting decision in the vein of how do you potty train your child? How do you sleep train your child? What kind of, like, do they get to play with? It feels like more of one of those typical parenting issues that everybody deals with and not so much a health issue. So I should have asked my pediatrician about it. I'd be interested to hear his thoughts but it doesn't seem like that's a, and assumed to be a part of the conversation. Or certainly a priority. Right, yeah. And what about, have you seen anything coming out from the government, the CDC, a Department of Health, any government agency? Nothing I can think of. Yeah. And your kids are too young to be in school, right? Oh, my older son has been in childcare as soon as he was able. Though he's been in preschool actually for the last five, six months? Okay. And he was in daycare prior to that, yeah. And so in preschool, have there been any discussion at the preschool or have they given any information or hosted any talks? No. No. And actually at some point, I think my husband went to pick him up and the kids were actually, I don't know if they were watching TV but they were maybe listening to a music program that was like on a screen or something. So we didn't know that, you know, that was even part of the curriculum. And it's, I don't judge them for it. You know, it's a long school day. They're raising my child for all of this hour. So, you know, they do what they need to do but it wasn't communicated to us that, you know, that's something that the kids would be doing. Yeah. And just to second that, I guess, I'm not aware of really almost any schools that do it. So it's not like, it feels like your preschool is more the rule than the exception. So it's not to, right? As far as communicating to parents. Right. Yeah, yeah. I like to hear about other preschool that does give parents a rundown of this issue. If anybody out there is aware of them, please email screentimereset and at screentimereset at gmail.com and let me know. I've also had my son like just randomly identify characters from TV shows. Like he'll see it like on a package or like somebody's clothes. I'm like, I don't know where you heard about that because we don't even have a TV. Like the, I know everything that he's been exposed to as far as free entertainment through us. It's a short list. So I'm like, where are you getting that information from? Is it just preschoolers like chatting with each other? I was talking to a mom who is saying that her two-year-old could spell Disney and it got her parents really excited because they're like, oh my God, your child can spell. She's amazing. She can't spell. Somehow she knew how to spell Disney, right? Yeah, it's just in the ether. It just gets them. Totally. So if you haven't gotten any like quality information from official sources, how have you figured out how to manage this? What information is it reading articles, talking to other parents? What information have you found and how do you use that? I mean, I guess like so much of new parenting. It's kind of looking horizontally at what other parents of children your age or slightly older are doing. A lot of private conversations but not a lot of public information or public debate on it. I mean, I have seen and you've posted some great articles, especially around how Silicon Valley executives, I remember are choosing kind of low-tech environments for their kids. So that definitely resonated with me. I definitely kind of try to pick up on those things as they appear on my social media feed or in newspapers or whatnot, but I don't, you know, I can't think of like a study reliable source of authoritative information on the topic. And in these private conversations that you're having with other parents, what's come up? What did you guys discuss? I think it's a concern and a struggle for everyone to kind of figure out how to manage it. I have heard that individual children vary quite a bit to the extent to which they feel that urge or that addiction to screens. My son has like a magnetic pole to any sort of TV or movie. The two and a half year old at the same time. Yes, yes. The little one he definitely has started noticing when there's an illuminated screen and that kind of bothers me. But yeah, the toddler for sure is just like drawn to screens. And I don't know if that's the result of us being pretty strict about it. Like he's pretty restricted and limited in what he's able to watch. What restrictions do you put on him and how did you come to those? He is allowed one movie per weekend and a movie if he poops on the toilet, which is a rare and exciting occurrence. I honestly am definitely, not probably, definitely the more lax parent between my husband and myself. My husband was raised without a TV. Like his family is very literary and kind of old school and did a lot of reading and quiet times sort of activities, which is wonderful. But I think I had TV, I had Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers growing up and I feel like it didn't turn me into an addict. Like I don't watch TV now because I don't have time for it. So probably if it were up to me, I would say, oh, 30 minutes a day is okay, but that could also, it's a slippery slope, if I could turn into an hour and cause it's a free babysitter. I mean, if I turn the TV on, my toddler is just enraptured for the time that it's there or not TV, but Netflix or whatever. Right. And of course I would love to have that free time, but thanks to my husband I try to be more disciplined. Well, that's some, and what sort of effects do you see when your son is on it and then when it gets pulled away? I mean, sometimes I wonder if prior to Disney or prior to children's entertainment, like if kids of that age just didn't even experience like this extreme of happiness. Like when I tell my son he's allowed to watch a movie, cause he's always asking, but it's like only on the weekend and only under certain conditions that I say yes. It's like, he's like overcome by this like euphoria. It's like, he like sort of like whimpers and shit. Like he's just so like beyond, like over the moon, beyond happy. He doesn't even know what to do with himself. In a way that like I could never bring that sort of happiness to him, destroy like being his mother. So yeah, I wonder like, did kids not have that feeling before? And what about when it gets taken away? It's a struggle. I mean, sometimes if it's like, you know, a movie is a pretty long time for a kid to sit and sit stills like an hour and a half. So sometimes it's a, he'll be ready to say goodbye after that, but other times it's a fight. He's like not ready to return to, you know, reality and the banality of everyday, you know, disappointments and, you know, say goodbye to the perfect world that Pixar or Disney has constructed. So it can be, yeah, it can be a sort of violent shock to tear him back into the real world. There was one quote you had on Facebook that I hunted down because I remember it like really like had an impact on me. And it was, it had a picture of your son and then you wrote intense focus reserved for Moana videos followed by existential meltdown when real world fails to live up to animated rendering. That's pretty much it. And I, yeah, I guess we all kind of had to go through that experience of learning that the real world is not as perfect as the fictional one. So I understand, you know, why he's drawn to entertainment in the way he is. But, you know, we can't just live our lives in front of screens, so. Yeah, yeah, no, that's true. It's, I do think that, I mean, we all had it, but it does feel like it's different with this newer generation as they have more access and then at the same time, I think it's most true with video games, but even with the animations, I mean the animation is more vibrant than the cartoons we watch growing up, right? And with video games, it's even more stark because they have this real-time information that they can tweak their game to just be so good at pulling you in, right? Yeah, that's one of the concerns I have about, because I don't think, I mean, they're great movies and they're, you know, when my son watches a movie, he watches it like the 10 times, you know, over the, over two months or something and we talk about it, you know, like we don't go to the aquarium without having to go find Nemo in, you know, whatever fish tank. And I know that's true for a lot of families. So, yeah, he gets really into it, but I do notice that the entertainment now, it's like a lot faster. Yeah. It's not sort of like the slow, kind of gentle, like entertainment that we grew up with, like the Sesame Street and the Mr. Rogers. Definitely, and that has real implications for the attention issue, you know, we've seen this huge rise in ADD and ADHD and they find that that faster pace of entertainment is connected to that. Yeah, and addictive for sure, because I, and I've tried to show him things that are a little bit, you know, slower. And he, he's bored. He's bored. He's used to a sort of, a different sort of straw. Sort of pie. Well, that is a perfect place for us to go to our break and we will be right back. Hey, loha, my name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii, airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii live from the studios. I'll bring you guests, I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your coworkers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We wanna teach you about those things in our industry that, you know, may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me because Security Matters, aloha. Aloha, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just gonna scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on thinktechawaii.com, one PM on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube, just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up and please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keepin' you safe, aloha. And we're back. So I'm curious, a lot of parents, not all, but a lot are hesitant to talk about this issue. And I'm curious why you think that is, and they can be hesitant even to talk about it with each other. You talked about horizontal discussion, but there are a lot of parents that don't have a lot of discussion with other parents. I don't know that that's exactly the experience I've had. I mean, I certainly am interested, so I do bring up the issue with other parents that I know of. I mean, I can only speak for my own experience. I don't, you know, I'm not a representative of the parenting community, but I kind of have a hunch that parents, we're all, especially parents of young children and people who are new at it, everybody's kind of in the trenches and like figuring all this stuff out as they go along, right? It's like parenting, it's like you're supposed to become an expert and all this stuff for like a month at a time and then move on to new curriculum. It's this crash course that you get to do once or maybe two or three times and then you move on with your life. So I kind of have a feeling that, you know, parents don't want to judge each other too harshly because we're all in survival mode and you know, if I'm out at dinner, which that's not a real possible situation, but hypothetically I were at a dinner and I saw, you know, other parents at a table giving a phone to their kids to play with. Like maybe that wouldn't be my choice, but I know that that's just one moment in that family's life and maybe not representative of all their time. So I'm gonna withhold judgment because everyone's, you know, doing the best they can, I think for the most part. Yeah, and that strikes me as a reason, honestly, that it's so important to have a government stepping in or a school or some outside party. Because from what I've talked to, yes, because especially if parents that are more conscious about it and are more restrictive are talking to parents who are less restrictive, I know that that can be a really difficult conversation because other parents feels judgy. Right, exactly. So it's sort of just to me evidence that there does have to be an authority that is explaining this to parents versus just assuming that they will take care of it within their own parenting circles. I mean, I think also beyond that, like adults have very complicated issues or complicated relationships with technology and with screen time too, and are figuring out how to incorporate and balance, you know, find a healthy balance of that screen time in their own lives. So it can be overwhelming to be navigating that as an adult and then also making decisions for your child. And in the midst of all that, you know, the technology is constantly changing. I already feel like, you know, I'm an aging millennial. There's so many like apps and social media things and video games and just technologies that are just like a whole, you know, a foreign world to me and my, when I was a high school teacher, my students never neglected to remind me of that, like that I was a different generation. Like I was, you know, the starter Facebook generation and they had moved on many times to other things. So yeah, I mean, it's kind of, you know, akin to an adult who has, let's say like eating issues, then trying to educate their child about how to live a healthy balanced lifestyle. Yeah, and that brings me to kind of another question I have, which is I think very much related to what you're talking about is, it comes up in a number of cases where there's sort of a disconnect, it seems, between feelings and reality when it comes to tech. So one example, I was just reading a book, Wired Child by Richard Freed, and he talks about how most parents will say that they think that technology brings their families closer. But then there's research that actually videotapes families and like it will show parents coming up on a kid and then sort of like backing up when they realize they're like engulfed in technology. And certainly there's another book called The Big Disconnect by Katherine Stein-Ardera that talks about how so many young kids literally feel neglect because so often when they're trying to bid for their parents' attention, their parents are just looking at their phones. And yet most parents do say that they feel like it brings their families closer. And this reminds me of something that you could maybe speak to too, high school students, they think that they're awesome multi-taskers, like they can do all these different things and they're killing it. But the research shows that is not true, it's horribly inefficient, it takes them far longer to get through their homework. Do you have any thoughts on how you address these kind of delusions or disconnects between how we feel tech is improving our life and the backdrop of evidence to the contrary? I mean, I am surprised to hear that many families think technology brings them closer. I don't think that's impossible. I think there are situations, watching a movie together and talking about it. There are certain apps that really facilitate sharing, actually, I have this app Lifecake where it's like kind of like a family, like baby photos where you can spam like your family members without annoying your friends, sort of app. And that is, it facilitates connection in a way. But I do think that it's kind of, I don't know if we're being honest with ourselves if we say that tech is bringing our families closer together. So I'm not sure about that point. Maybe I'd have to read a little bit more into that argument. And you were saying also about the misinformation, oh, like kids believing that they can multitask. Yeah, I mean, that's, I definitely saw that as a teacher that I would be giving a lesson on French grammar or whatever and students might be doing two other things at the same time. And they, of course, it's certainly possible that it was a boring lesson and they were entertaining themselves. But a lot of them did believe that, you know, that they could, they got this. Juggles, re-things. Even in college, I remember having my computer open and like checking my email while listening to the lecture and it's a very natural human impulse when you get just a little bit bored to like find something that's gonna keep you entertained as far as how to combat that. I mean, I think data always helps. I think maybe with students who are, you know, middle school or older, you could have them experiment a little bit on themselves. That sounds weird, but, you know, you could, I know what you mean. You know, there are tests that demonstrate very clearly that like even having your phone on the table, it strikes you and it makes you perform poorly on a memory test or something of that nature than if you weren't, if you didn't have that sort of pull on your attention. The discussion of like the teacher perspective leads me. I remember like I posted on Facebook one time an article that showed that a lot of parents, again, had this more positive view of how technology is affecting their kids, but teachers had a more negative view. And so... Because it makes parenting easier and teaching harder. That was what you said and I thought that was really interesting. So could you talk just a little bit more about that? It was, you know, as a teacher, it's kind of a battle that played out every day and maybe it's because I wasn't like tough enough on my students because, you know, you don't want to be the enforcer of rules, nobody, you know. And you can't constantly yell at them, right? Like I do some substitute teaching now at a variety of private schools on the island, none of which I'll name, but it's certainly an issue I run into. They'll sort of have study hall periods and it's like no playing games on your phone, but a bunch of them are playing games on their phone. So you have to walk around and being the sort of mean person, you can't bust half of the class every 10 minutes, you know, so you just try. And so much of the classroom work that we do now does rely on technology and does ask students to be on Google Drive or making a presentation or a video or, you know, editing a piece of writing or whatever it is. That's another challenge. At some schools I'm sitting behind the students, it's easier to see the computers than others I'm in front and I have to make loops and you can tell that they're changing what's on their screen as you're coming. Well, you're not gonna like dive across and be like, gotcha. You know, so, yeah, it's, so that's an interesting perspective. So like it makes teaching more difficult and parenting easier. So teachers tend to see the negative. I also wonder, I mean, what do you think about, teachers are a little bit more emotionally removed from their students, right? If you're a parent giving it to your child, you might want to think it's better versus teachers are a little more, maybe dispassionate about, not that they don't care about their kids, but what do you think about that? I don't know, I can, you know, my experience as a parent and as a teacher are very different because they're very different populations. I can imagine that parents drop their kids off at school and think, okay, during these, you know, six or eight hours or whatever, my student is, or my child is at school, they're getting an education, they're socializing, they're like, this is like, all the stuff that's good for them and they don't see what teachers see, which is during the break, you know, there'll be like 20 kids in out on the quad somewhere, like playing Fortnite on their computer screen and like before class, they're not talking to each other, they're just sitting there, you know, glued to Instagram or whatever. So maybe teachers have, you know, I mean, the adolescent has like, their family life and identity and then who they are beyond the reaches of their family. So maybe teachers kind of are privy to a facet of adolescent life that parents either willfully ignore or, you know, just don't see. That makes sense. And then wrapping up because it is that time already, amazingly, I kind of have two questions to end on. The first is, what do you think, you know, should be done to better educate and support parents? Whose responsibility do you think it primarily is and or who's the best actor position to educate parents, I guess, regardless of whether it's, you know, really their responsibility versus someone else's. And then the second question is, do you have any thoughts on what might be the best things to focus on when talking about the negative potential harms of screen time? I have this sense, like the more I've researched, the more impacts I find and I know that if I just start listing them, I'm like that Charlie Brown teacher, like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So do you have any, yeah, any advice on, on? Well, I'm pretty sleep deprived so I already forgot your first question, but to speak to your second one, I think it depends on the audience. Like parents of very small children of infants or toddlers are, you know, probably gonna be more receptive to issues around sleep quality, like how screens excite the nervous system and may, might be preventing your child from getting optimal sleep. Or developmental delays. There's new research coming out about that, yeah. Whereas parents of older children and maybe those, you know, children or teenagers themselves might be more interested to know about, you know, how screens impede our social interactions and maybe kind of stun our social abilities. Executive function maybe. Yeah. And the first question just to, to remind you was like, who do you think between governments, pediatricians, school, yeah. I mean, I think the government has to take a stance in order for it to be treated as a public health issue, you know, in the same way that the, I don't know if the APA, the American Pediatric Association or that sort of organization, and I kind of think of that as a larger governing body kind of akin to a government health organization. But those sorts of kind of global reaching organizations, I think, yeah, have to come out. A lot of authority. Yeah, with at least some, at the very least some guidelines that are continually backed up with research and data. Guidelines and don't you think it's important to list the harms? Cause for the pediatricians that do bring it up, all I hear is that they'll say like, you know, the child's not supposed to have more than one hour or two hours. Yeah, this is actually saying what? Exactly, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Of course, we're all more inclined to follow through on something if we know why and we're not just blindly listening. Especially when it's so convenient. I feel like you need to have a reason to deny yourself that convenience in the free time that parents are so starved for. I have a lot of empathy for that. Harsing looks really hard. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. But I do think schools are an extremely kind of fertile terrain for treating those issues because students are so susceptible to their peer group. Just as parents are looking around at other parents figuring out what to do, children are seeing what their classmates are doing, what they're allowed to do, what kind of phone they're allowed to have and a lot of their self-expression and their social life now comes through social media and these apps. So, yeah, getting schools on board and having those be kind of community discussions with parents and families, I think is going to be super important. And that is a perfect place to wrap up. To the audience, if you have any other ideas of how we could get this information out to parents who you think should be in charge of disseminating education and support, please email screen-timereset at gmail.com and let us know. Thank you so much, April, again, for coming on. I would highly recommend checking out her blog, April, May, and Mars, and also Baby Love Ambassadors. It's a really great project. Thank you for tuning in. Until next time.