Latest / Campfire Guide to Parenting / Parenting in the Digital Age: Old Instincts, New Childhood
Transcript
- Mike McDonnell: Here's what I keep wondering. What if our instincts as parents were shaped by a childhood our kids will never know? It's nineteen eighty-one and I'm thirteen years old. And the school bus, it drops me off near home. I run inside, I toss my bag on the bed, I give my mom a hurried hello and a kiss, and then it's off out the front door to my banana seat bike before the door even hits the shut. Racing down the street, singing Jesse's Girl, I just ride until I find, I don't know, several other bikes that are tipped over in the grass. And I know that's where things are happening. By four o'clock We're in the creek. We've got a ramp made with some sketchy piece of plywood and two cinder blocks. And by 530, some kid, let's call him Brad, suddenly mentions that his mom's making mac and cheese. That means there's four of us having dinner at Brad's house. No mother knew exactly where we were until I turned up somewhere for dinner. Now it's 2026. My son is 13. He comes home, and by every measure that matters, he's home. But he's also in that exact same moment in like four other places. A group chat with eleven kids from school, a game with three friends he's logged on to, and an algorithm that knows more about him than maybe he even knows about himself. Nobody's tipping over a bike in the driveway to signal anything. Because nobody has to go anywhere to find out where the day is happening. And it wouldn't really anyway, because he has so much homework, it will fill his time until he goes to bed. Same age, same town, more or less. Almost nothing else is the same. It's in this moment that I feel as if I've let him down in some way, that he's not experiencing the same kind of childhood experience that that I did. But there's more. Like I've read all the data about Anxious Nation. I've seen thousands of kids at summer camp for 32 years, and in this moment I feel as a parent helpless. It's what so many of us as parents feel, helpless. But that's not how it has to be. Technology's here to stay, and I'm certainly not calling for us to all return to mullets and boxcraft mac and cheese. My name is Mike McDonald, and for over three decades I've had the privilege of serving as the founder and the president of Kid Venture. Together with some of the most dedicated, caring people, we've served over a hundred thousand kids. And before that, I was a mountain guide, a climbing instructor, and long before that I was a kid on the On that banana seat bike searching for an adventure each and every day. But the most important and most consequential thing that I have done and will ever do is being a parent. So let me be straight with you right away. I don't have parenting figured out any more than you do. Everything that you're about to hear on this show, including from me, comes from somebody who is still out there on this journey that we call life. Not somebody who summited and came back to report on it to everybody. My experience in the wilds and as a youth leader have taught me a few things, but nothing more than this. We as parents will never arrive. We are always and should always be on that trail to discover new things and become better for our kids. That's who's talking on this podcast. Just a father, an adventurer, wanting to be the best I can for my kids, knowing that I fail plenty of times sitting around a campfire. So why a campfire? Because some of the most real, honest, and memorable conversations in my personal life have been around such a fire and under an expansive star-filled sky. If you have ever sat around this campfire with others, you understand that something magical happens. Perhaps it's some subconscious feeling of security that was fostered over millions of years. Maybe it's the glow and the warmth that creates whatever that feeling is that tugs on your lower brainstem. The feeling is meaningful. Especially when shared with others. And so I mean to recreate those moments and share conversations with a host of people we can all learn from. From child specialists to educators, best selling authors to parents who have got it right and those who are failing big time. Along the way, we'll share those ideas and thoughts on parenting. We'll do it without preaching, and we'll do it with humility and a sense of community. We'll do it because we've entered a new era as parents. One that requires us to be adaptable to the changes taking place in the lives of our kids. One that requires us to be intentional about that change and our response to a world that is in many ways vastly different than our own childhood experiences. So here are a few examples of what that changing lane scamp, I think, are profound. Number one, the sheer volume of stimulation in a single day has no precedent. The average teenager today is spending somewhere north of about nine hours a day in front of a screen. That's not me passing judgment. That's just a fact about how much information and stimulation now moves through one ordinary childhood. A kid today can move through a text, a video, a game, and three more videos before I finish a sentence. Number two, in-person socializing has been quietly declining since 2010. Researchers who study this, they've tracked Something worth sitting with. Since about that time, the number of minutes teenagers spend actually hanging out with friends in person has dropped every year. And the share who say they have a few close friends has dropped right along with it. You see, kids haven't stopped socializing. That's not what I'm saying. It's just moved almost entirely onto a device. And that's a different kind of connection than what I watch thousands of 10-year-olds build over a summer of cabin life. Number three. Free time has quietly become indoor, supervised, and scheduled. A national poll about this time last year found that one in 10 kids under six plays outside once a week or less. Free time used to mean unsupervised, unstructured, occasionally bored time outside. For a lot of families now, that time means indoors, supervised, and scheduled. Even the downtime. That's not a failure of any one parent, right? It's just a different shape of childhood than the one most of us grew up with. Number four, the boundary between childhood and the adult digital world has now moved up by years. Right now, about a third of kids who have a smartphone got it at age 10. And nearly two-thirds have won by the time they hit double digits. That means a lot of 10-year-olds are managing the level of connectivity and social pressure. That used to show up around like 16. Childhood isn't disappearing. The line marking where it ends has just moved. So here's the thing. I want to be honest with you. Knowing all that doesn't actually help you. Understanding that kids are on screens nine hours a day, that they're spending less time with friends face to face, that free time isn't automatically structured anymore. That's the diagnosis, right? It's not the treatment. And a lot of us as parents stop right there. Like naming the problem is the same as solving it. It's not. And here's why that matters more than it sounds like it should. Because almost everything that we know about parenting, we learn from watching our own parents, good and bad, or from a book, or from the same instinct that got wired into us a long time ago. And all of that was built for a different childhood, a slower one, one where boredom filled itself. In without anyone trying, where friendships got built because you were physically standing in the same room with someone, where the biggest threat to a kid's attention span was like a long car ride, not an algorithm built by some of the smartest engineers on the planet whose entire job is to make sure your kid doesn't look away. If you take parenting instinct that was built for that world and you just apply it unchanged to this one, one of two things happens. Either you fight a battle that you can't win, which a lot of us are feeling, or you're trying to control every input, every minute, every screen until you and your kid are both completely exhausted. Or you throw your hands up because it all feels too big, too hard, too overwhelming, and you default to whatever's easiest in that moment. Neither of those are adapting though, and both of those are just old software running on new hardware. Here's what adapting actually looks like. And I wanna give you two real examples, not theory. If free time used to be built around itself and it doesn't anymore, adapting means you build it back in on purpose. You don't wait for boredom to show up organically after school. You protect a chunk of time on their calendar the same way you'd protect soccer practice or piano lesson. And you call it what it is: unstructured time, no plan, figure it out. And if socializing used to happen automatically because kids were just around each other and now it doesn't, adapting means you actively coach the in-person skill instead of assuming it develops on its own the way it did for us. You create the reason for kids to be in the same room. And then you get out of the way and let it be awkward because that awkwardness is exactly where the skill used to get built. That's the paramount part. Not knowing the childhood has changed, deciding on purpose that your methods have to change with it. Look, the parents who are going to do it right by their kids in this era aren't the ones who are parenting right once. They're the ones willing to keep updating. Failing, succeeding, failing, succeeding, but always showing up. I've spent the last three decades working to create outcomes for thousands of children attending our camps. Outcomes like greater independence, a stronger sense of self-esteem, grit, empathy, and courage. We've done it by letting kids face challenges fueled by their curiosity and born from a burning desire to discover the world around them. It's what kids are born to do. But then I've gone home to my kids, tired, exhausted, and rather than give them those same opportunities of relented and let them death scroll their favorite app or hang out online with their friends. I'm a parent and by nature faulty. So let me tell you exactly what this show is and maybe more useful what it isn't. This isn't therapy. I'm not a therapist. And if you're dealing with something that actually needs one, go find a real one. Sitting across from you, not a podcast host. This also isn't a lecture series, and I'm not here to hand you curriculum or seven steps to a perfectly regulated household or a checklist that turns your kid into this finished product. And it's not clinical advice. If that's what you're after, there are far better places to get it. What it actually is, is a series of real conversations, the kind you'd have with someone you trust enough to be honest with. Not the kind you'd have with an expert you're a little afraid of disappointing. Here's how it'll come to you. Every week, no exceptions. Some weeks it'll just be me sitting with something that's actually on my mind, telling you a real story about it, and the kind with a messy middle and maybe no clean ending. Another parent or a fellow journeyman who's lived through something worth learning about, and we'll just talk. Now the tone. I I think this matters to me more than any topic list that I could give you. The show is meant to be warm. It's honest. Even when honest is a little uncomfortable to say out loud, it's occasionally funny because if you can't laugh at half of what happens in your house with kids, you're not paying close enough attention. And it is never ever tidy. I'm not gonna wrap an episode up with a bow with three easy takeaways that fix your kid by Friday. Parenting doesn't work that way. And I'd be lying to you if I pretended otherwise. So that's the deal. No lectures, no diagnosis, no pretending. I've got this more figured out than you do. Just someone who spent time over three decades in the middle of thousands of lives of kids telling you what he's actually seen and trying to be useful about. One honest conversation at a time. If any of this has landed for you, here's all I'm asking. Pull up a chair around the fire. Hit follow or subscribe, whatever your app calls it, and stay a while. A campfire is no good if it burns for one night and goes out. And I'm planning on keeping this one going every week, and I'd love the company. Over the next few weeks, we've got a few more nights like this one lined up. Plus, at least one conversation with someone I think you're gonna want to hear from. I won't tell you exactly when. Half the fun of camp is never knowing exactly what tomorrow holds for us. But it'll be worth you sticking around for. So go ahead, grab your seat, I'll keep the fire going.