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Episode #206: Why 1,000 Hours Outside Matters for Everyone with Ginny Yurich · Beyond Labels Premium

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another episode of the Beyond Labels Podcast with your hosts, yours truly, the farmer, Joel Salatin, and our favorite research uh guru, Dr.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Cena McCullough.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: We are just thrilled today to have one of the most dynamic, articulate, outspoken um uh apologists, and that's that doesn't mean you're apologizing.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: It means you're stating the argument for having our children replace screen time with green time.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, that's the subtitle of one of her books, A Thousand Hours Outside, that she's most famous for.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody, we want you to meet Jenny Urick.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: She's a Michigan mom of five, homeschooler, credentialed master's degree in elementary education school teacher.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: She's been in the classroom, she's been a homeschool mom.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Her latest book is Homeschooling.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: You're doing it right just by doing it, which is, I think, what we're going to concentrate on today.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Although, knowing Jenny, I'm sure we're going to go down a million different rabbit holes that you are going to be absolutely in love with her by the end of this program.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, Jenny, welcome to Beyond Labels Podcast.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: We are just delighted and honored to have you on.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: This is a total pinch me moment.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, can you even believe I'm here?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Also, I have read your book, Beyond Labels, A Doctor and a Farmer Conquer Food Confusion, One Bite at a Time.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, always.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: These books are so engaging and interesting.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you have a nonfiction that's a page turner.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: I want to read the next page.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: I want to read the next page.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm just honored to be here and so thankful for what you're doing.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Jenny.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we need to hire you as our marketer.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm in.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: So um, so uh I uh uh Cena, do you have do you have a you you have a list of questions there you want to start with?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I am totally all right.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'll turn let me take over.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like I am totally excited.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: This is a pitch me moment for me.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I saw you were recently on Fox News too.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, oh my goodness.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: And she's willing to come on our podcast.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, it's because of Joel, but still reaping the rewards.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so my first question is because I'm sure there may be a small handful of people who are not familiar with a thousand hours outside.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: So, what is a thousand hours outside?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: And how did you actually come up with that?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, which is brilliant, by the way.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's nice of you to say because for about five or six years, people thought it was really stupid, and they definitely told me.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: So, this is how it happened.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: I just was an awful mother.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: I had these kids and I thought I was gonna be phenomenal.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: I was like planning for it.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, I'm gonna be so good at this.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I felt very lost.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: We had our kids, we had a couple right in a row, really uh in a very short span of time.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I was very lost.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: I just really didn't know what to do with the day, which might sound silly to Joel.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: You have so much amazing intuition.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I have friends that are like that, or just you kind of like know what to do.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I did not.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: I I didn't know how how am I supposed to pass this 10 hours of time.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: My husband's at work.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: These kids are all crying, they're all nursing, they're you know, they're all needing different things.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so what I did was I enrolled.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: I enrolled in this program and that program.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the programs are 45 minutes, and it is just so much effort to try and take small children to anything.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you're only there for 45 minutes, but there's the packup and there's the take it all with you.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then when you get back, you got to undo it.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I just would be so exhausted by 11 a.m.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I would call my husband, like, is it are you coming home soon?
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I got seven more hours here, eight more hours.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it made it so that I really did not enjoy being a mom.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't like it.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly I love my kids, but I was like, this is a drudgery and I dread it and I'm just drowning here.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so one of the programs I did is called Mops, where you are supposed to have this, you know, twice a month.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's a reprieve.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: They have these wonderful, like often grandmas that will watch your kids for a couple hours and you get to meet with other women and build friendships.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I had a friend at my table at Mops who was going to be homeschooling, and she had a kid that was one year older than our oldest.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: So she's like, I'm gonna start doing the research.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, that's great.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: Just tell me what you learned.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so she came to MOPS one day and she said, Charlotte Mason says that kids should be outside for four to six hours a day whenever the weather is tolerable.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I thought that was a lunatic-ish idea.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Four to six hours a day.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Who does that?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, have you been to the library program?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's 40 minutes.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing is that expansive.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: And she did not tell me that Charlotte Mason was from the 1800s.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'd never heard of Charlotte Mason.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: I found out years later that Charlotte Mason is dead and has been dead for a very long time.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: I probably wouldn't have paid any attention.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking this is super current information.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought the idea was lunatic-ish.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then she asked if we could try it.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought this is gonna be the worst day ever.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: What are these kids gonna do for four hours?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And she says, Well, Charlotte Mason says you're not really supposed to bring anything.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna meet at this park.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: This is in September of 2011.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a long time.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: I had a three-year-old, a one-year-old, and a babe at arms.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: And my friend had three small children too.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: She says, We're gonna meet at this park.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And this is not a playground.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like grass, you know, a creek bed.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: She says, Don't bring anything.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, We don't bring anything.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Should I bring the train table?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I mean, I gotta bring.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: What are they gonna do?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: And she says, you just bring food in a picnic blanket.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I tell people it's the best day of my life because it was the first good day I had as a mom.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: Gosh, I get emotional.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: I had not had a good day as a mom for three years.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And and we go and I don't even know what happened.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was like the kids just played.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know that they could do that for four hours.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it held the baby, and the babies would nap and they'd, you know, they were just content out there.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so we changed how we were doing early childhood in September of 2011 for the sake of my own mental health and well-being.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: I thought, well, gosh, I'll be a better mom.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'll be more present.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: These days will go more smoothly.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: But very quickly, I started to notice changes in our kids.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, within a couple of days, they're they're eating better, they're sleeping better, they're getting along better, they're more imaginative.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: They um, they start I we haven't needed a doctor's appointment.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now we have five kids since 2011.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Haven't needed for anything, any acute nothing, not one doctor's appointment.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: It helped their health tremendously.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it is a parenting solution that has worked.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is how people used to parent.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not saying anything profound here.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: This is a parenting solution that has worked.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now we have a 17-year-old.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: And parenting is constantly changing.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of ebbs and flows.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: You're dealing with potty training, you know, you're dealing with learning to read, you're dealing with, you know, do they date, do they not date, all of these different things.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: But the concept of prioritizing hands-on living, prioritizing getting outdoors, that will work for the entirety of childhood and also for all of adulthood.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: And what it does is it helps kids in every facet of their development, their cognition, their emotional state, their social skills, their physical health and well-being in a myriad of ways.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: And also it's an opportunity to teach spiritual truth.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: So these are things that are lifelong lasting and it helps you too as a parent.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: It is a win-win-win-win-win.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's incredible.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was one of my questions, actually.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: So this isn't just for younger children, right?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: You're saying, are you saying that a thousand hours a year, it should be for younger children, teenagers, adults alike, like all of us?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: It should be outside.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's a woman named Doc.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's a woman named Angela Hanscom.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: She wrote a book called Balanced and Barefoot, and she's echoing Charlotte Mason to a degree.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Charlotte Mason said four to six hours a day with the caveat of whenever the weather is tolerable.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you, Charlotte, because we live in Michigan.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes the weather is not super tolerable.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And people live in the South, sometimes the weather's not super tolerable.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: But this Angela Hanscomb says about three hours a day is what's needed for optimal development.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: She's a pediatric occupational therapist.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Her book, Balanced and Barefoot, is phenomenally good.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: But this is for all ages.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: And what's interesting, and Joel, I think all of us, Cena, like we would be able to say, well, when we were kids, how much time do we get outside?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: If we were to really think back, and I would think, well, we walked us to school.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: It was a mile.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: That was an hour, you know, there and back, and a half hour there, half hour back, an hour.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then we had three recesses.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: That was an hour plus.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then my dad would play catch with us in the afternoon.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't have all that much homework.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: This is historically normal.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's very normal.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: People say, Oh, a thousand hours.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's so much time.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, no, that's like what everybody used to do up until 20 years ago.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: And now when you say about roughly three hours a day, are you specifically talking about unstructured play versus like a structure type play, like going into league sports or what we would call like adult supervised activities?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: Is there a difference in your opinion?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: Or these three hours a day outside, would um like going into a league sport count toward those three hours?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: Because you're still outside.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's a great question.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's the question we get asked the most often, Sina, is what counts?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: So people will say, if we're camping, can we count the time we're sleeping in the tent at night?
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm riding on a horse in an indoor arena but the doors are open, does that count?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm at it, I mean this is we get this is what I spend most of my time doing is feeling the does it count if my child is in a stroller?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Does it count if we're at a swimming pool that's inside, but there's glass over the top?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: Does it and we can see the sky?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Does it count if my kid is in a cardboard box, playing in a cardboard box in the driveway?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: They're in the cardboard box.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: What if I'm in the garage but the door is open?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: Does it count if I'm on a porch that's enclosed with the screen?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's uh an indictment on the state of the world, right?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: We really need good permission as parents.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: We're, you know, and that's the thing.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've lost some generational wisdom there.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: We count everything.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: I count everything from league sports to if there's, you know, to caves.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: We count family pictures if we go to get those done.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: Those are always the worst, right?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: You're like trying to keep keep your kid clean for 14 minutes while you get these family pictures done.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: We count it all.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: But to your point, there is a difference between structured adult-led play and unstructured play.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: And in a world that's rapidly changing, where the job market is constantly evolving and new jobs are coming in and old jobs are going out, and the statistics are something around the lines of the average person, the average child entering in the workforce will have seven careers.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Seven careers.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: I was at the Homestead Festival with Joel just about a month ago, and I ran across this man named Rory Groves, who wrote a book called Durable Trades.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And wow, has that one been really interesting to read?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, isn't that a great book?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: That is a great and and for for just so folks understand the power of this book.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: What he does is it it when you look at it, you don't expect it to be what it is, at least I didn't.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then you get into it, you realize what he's done, he's taken, I think it's 51, 51 historical trades and rated them based on income, family participation, and longevity and time, and and uh and rated them kind of on a on a matrix, you know.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you know the the this one this one returns more income, but it's harder to work with your kids at it, uh you know, that sort of thing.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and and you know what what what's cool about it, I'll just uh tell our listeners, cool.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: He did, I think you're 51.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And when I got done with it, so he's got imagine all these, you know, electrician, plumber, uh, woodworker, uh farmer, you know, midwife, earner, midwife, yeah, all these, all these trades.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And and and um he basically analyzes them for the for this matrix.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I got done with the book, and I realized here at Polyface at our farm, we do about half of these.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're about half of these.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, I mean, it just really was affirming to me personally, uh, the the the the durability of you know of of what we're doing here.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um it was it was really cool.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Very, very powerful book.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: All right, yeah.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Author.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, but so what's interesting is he talks about how at the at the start of the country, at the start of the United States, there were about 70 careers, and like the ones that you're talking about.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he's talking about shepherds and animal husbandry and author and lawyer, and there are these, you know, 70-ish careers that existed.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes through some of them in the book Durable Trades.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, today there's 30,000.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: And what you would think, common sense would tell you, oh, more options, how great.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: But what he says is the more specialized things become, and you talk about this, Joel, it's it's like then you become dependent on so many outside systems and things actually become less stable.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: So if we were to look around in the last 200, 250 years, one of the things that's really changed is that we've gone from this small amount of jobs to this explosion of amount of jobs.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: And what that means is that jobs are constantly coming and going.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: This one becomes obsolete.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's only been here a couple of years and now it's gone, and here's something new.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: So the statistics are that the person, average person heading into the workforce will have seven careers in a lifetime.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Seven careers.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's not jobs.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: A job change every two and a half years, mostly it's forced upon them because things are going to be shifting.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: So if we think about what types of skills kids need for a rapidly changing world, it is not seatwork skills.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: It is the type of skills that allow them to be good relational, have good relational skills.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: They need to be able to be with people.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: They also need to be able to be on their toes.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: They have to be adaptable, they have to be gritty, they have to be resilient, they have to be risk takers.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: They are going to be job creators, they have to have imagination.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so what we see often is we see kids who spend an entire childhood with an adult telling them what to do.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: They go to school, then they do their homework, then they have extracurriculars, and it's all adult-led.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then they step out into adulthood and they're lost.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: And of course they would be because they have not had the time to figure out their own lives.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a book out there called What Time is Noon by Chip Leighton.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: It came out, I think Joel, you and I have talked about this.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: It came out just very recently, and it's a funny book, but this man is a kind of a congregator, he's an aggregator of the different texts that teenagers are sending their parents in through college.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it just kind of is funny, but they're they're saying things like, Well, what time is noon?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: And what type of animal is a soy?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm at the grocery store and I can't find the pasta water.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And how do I get the clothes out of the washing machine?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Do I just use my hands?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: And you see that where in some level, it feels like as an adult, we should be directing these kids, right?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: They're five, they're six, they're eight.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: What do they know?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: But in the end, that really disadvantages them, especially in the world that we're in today.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, yes, we count everything all the way back to your question, Tina.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: We do count everything.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: If you're outside, you're outside.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're experiencing full spectrum sunlight, you're experiencing fresh air, you're playing sports.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Sports are great, super fun for kids, lots of benefits there.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: But there does also have to be some sort of unstructured time throughout childhood.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, John Taylor Gotto, when he wrote the book uh Dumbing Us Down, uh, you know, he talked about this, uh, Jenny, that that um kids grow up thinking the only thing worth knowing is what the teacher says is worth knowing.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: And and the all and the only time that you can study it is during the allotted time between bells.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: So so so so you know, our kids are growing, institutionalized kids are growing up completely stigmatized to explore, to imagine, to run outside those those uh, you know, adult norms, uh constrictions, if you will, you know, in their in their lives.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that that's what you're that's what you're describing.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, kids, uh I I think I think one of the most profound things is you you know, you don't have to take anything.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: They will find dragonflies, worms, rocks, twigs, interesting leaves.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we we've got this uh creek here on the farm.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Right now we've had a lot of normally it's dry this time of year, but right now we've had so much rain, it's just it's running.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And man, oh man, is that a kid joy to go out in a little, you know, it's a it's it's it's a it's a stream that's uh whatever, you know, set seven feet wide.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, there are pockets that it's you know a foot or two deep, but most of it is just, you know, uh four, five, six inches.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Man, building little rock dams in that, there is nothing as fun uh for a child as building a rock.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't have to bring anything, it's all there.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yes.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: Good creek is gold.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: When they're hard to find, it's hard to find a good creek bed.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: That is gold and it keeps the kids attention.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: John Holt has this quote, and this is one that's always stuck with me.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: He says, When children are living fully and energetically and happily, they are learning a lot, even if we don't always know what it is.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what if that's the goal?
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: What if the goal is not this test score, that test score, they're gonna get into this name brand school?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: What if the goal is, are my kids living fully and energetically and happily?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: And we can know that they are learning things.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: We're not gonna be able to check it off.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Where are they living that way?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: In the creek bed.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Any kid in a creek bed is living fully and energetically and happily.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if that's the North Star, it changes a lot.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: What we talk about is this, and I am not coming from a place of know it all.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: I what I am coming from, a place of really messing it up and struggling.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: What happened was this made today better.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: Play makes today better.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Kids who are living fully and energetically and happily, that makes today better.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: But amazingly, that also prepares for tomorrow.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: You live that full day today, that's what prepares you for tomorrow.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think we have to be quite so scared.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I love that you bring up fear, but I was gonna mention as well when you're talking about these trades, and um, what a lot of the questions I get asked are well, what should I train my child to do when they grow up because of AI, right?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: The AI is entering this picture.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I saw an interview with the godfather of AI, for example, and he was talking about he would advise young kids today to become plumbers.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: Because just like the industrial revolution came and uh kind of wiped out some of the blue-collar jobs, now we have AI coming, it's gonna wipe out some of the white-collar jobs or at least thin them out.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so he's talking about pick up a trade.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: And like you're saying, with AI, one of the things they're saying that AI may not be able to replace is creativity.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: And that's one thing that I have found that getting my kids outside and not spoon feeding them with activities all day long, it forces them to become creative.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: That we're like one of my goals is to get them to a point where they're bored so that so that they will have to figure it out, use that imagination, right?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: And and creativity can spark from that place.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: And that creativity can foster um innovation in the job force, for example.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: It can foster them becoming entrepreneurs and creating a new business that like maybe AI couldn't do in and of itself.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that is so critical.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: And just wanted to piggyback on what you're saying as far as these benefits of letting the kids play outside and play unstructured.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I was reading these studies just yesterday where it was saying that on average, children are clocking each day six to seven hours of screen time, but only about four to seven minutes of unstructured outdoor play.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, wow, that this was when I first read it, I thought it can't be true.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: And then I started thinking about what do some of my friends do?
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: What does my sister do?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: What are her friends do?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: And it's true.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like, even if you think about the car ride, right?
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: I know so many moms that they will just put on a DVD in the car for their kids to watch the screen while they're on a car ride, or even just giving them activities to do in the car to keep them entertained, to like stop them from fighting or whatnot.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been one of those proponents that from the very young age of my children, I said, we will not.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: I have a DVD player in the car, and I said we will not turn that on.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like, because I never had that in the car.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like we always had to look out the window or play car games, you know, like Punch Buggy.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know if you ever played that one.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: We loved it.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: But we were forced to use our imagination.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't just sitting there and have something spoon-fed to us.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: So even something that simple, and again, it's not to judge anybody, it's an awareness of how far we've shifted since the time that we were children.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think you bring up a really important point when you bring up AI.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: This is part of parenting.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: We are parenting children, we are parenting grandchildren into a different age.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: The industrial revolution came, it changed a lot.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is the technology, you know, what people call it the technology revolution.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: With AI.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I've talked to this man.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: His name is Jerry Kaplan.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote a book called Humans Need Not Apply.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then he wrote another book called Generative Artificial Intelligence, What Everybody Needs to Know.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's a great title.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I do need to know these things.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: And he works at Stanford.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: He's been working with AI since the 80s.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Interestingly enough, this has been around for decades.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: People are talking about artificial intelligence all the way back to the 50s.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, computers, learning, and that type of thing.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: And what he says emphatically, after having studied this for 40 plus years, is that the jobs of the future are human.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: The jobs of the future are human because technology, people are sick of their technology.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: They don't want to, they're everyone feels awful.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so they're what they want is they want connection.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: So he talks about hobbies.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: He says, What are the jobs of the future?
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, a prized orchid grower, that type of thing.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody wants to go and have a robotic counselor.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody wants to go on the airplane and have a robotic stewardess.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: The jobs are human jobs.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so what's interesting when you bring up those statistics, Sina, about four to seven hours on a screen, four to seven minutes outside, you can see that that is not what is going to prepare our kids for the future, a future where the skills are going to be relational.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the skills.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Can you have these relationships?
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the college professors are talking about that.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: The job owners are talking about that.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Look, they don't care what's on your resume.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like, can you be on a team?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Can you be a team player?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Are you optimistic?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: Are you enthusiastic?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: There's a book that came out called The Five Types of Wealth by Sahel Bloom.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic book came out earlier this year.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's blown up, it's in the airports.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, if you can just be the type of person that knows what needs to be done and you go do it, people will fight over you.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: So when you have this question, Sina, that people ask you, how do I train my children?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the wrong question.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think that they have to be the type that has self-reliance.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: They have to kind of train themselves.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's what unschooling is.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's they have to have some of their own time so that they can train themselves.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: Michaeline Ducleff has this book called Hunt, Gather, Parent, where she talks about she's traveled the world and seen how other cultures parent.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: And she says, in so many of these cultures, they don't have chore charts.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: They, but they are involved in the family chores and they just step in and do it.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: They see that the dishes need to be done.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: They see that their sister needs her hair brushed and a braid put in for school.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: They see it and they just do it.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: And they don't sit around and wait for someone else to tell them what to do.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: And those are the types of things that are learned when adults are not pushing it one way or the other.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in the military, they call that situational awareness.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: And situational awareness.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it's like the foundation of all special forces training and everything.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: Situational awareness.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh, you know, think about when you watch a James Bond movie, um, he seems to know everything about everything.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: He needs he seems to know, you know, when the uh when the room cleaner is coming and when, yeah, I mean everything, right?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: Very, very situationally aware.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what you get when you're in the car looking out the window and you're looking at trees and birds and and the community outside the car instead of looking at a at a screen and and uh situational awareness.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a pretty big deal.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Which which is kind of the part of the part of the uh the beginning of relational awareness, you know, being clued in.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, now we've got you know, we've got these uh we've talked about it, Cena on on here about uh one of the new things is people paying$200 an hour for dating coaches for young people.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: They don't they don't know how to interact with other people of the opposite sex.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: So a real hot, a hot uh coaching thing right now, a new job is coaching social skills.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: What do I say to her?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: How do I talk?
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know, everything is texting, and suddenly you're together across from a table from each other and you don't know how to interact.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: And the chat bots are here.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: So the chat girlfriends and the chat boy friends, I mean, that is that is actually sweeping in like a storm.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: There are over 20 million people that spend two hours a day on character.ai with fake people, with chat people.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: I had a podcast interview with an old friend of ours, his name is Jeff Shocker, and he works in the AI space.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: He's doing training.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: And what's interesting about technology is there's always gonna be the way that they sell it.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna say, look, there are people that are really lonely in nursing homes, and these chat friends really do something for them.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: There are kids that are really lonely.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: These can help kids learn new languages, they can help with schoolwork.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: So there's ways that it can be sold.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: But what's interesting is this man, this friend of ours, Christian man, father, you know, just but you're normal guy, but he's doing some beta testing on these chat girlfriends.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: So he has a couple.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's married, but he has a couple chat girlfriends and he's testing them.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: And what you're able to do is you're able to talk, you're able to converse, just like how we're conversing right now.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: There would be an avatar on a screen.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: It looks real, you can make it look how you want, and it's gonna interact with inflection and intonation.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna laugh, it's gonna think you're funny, it's gonna always ask you how your meeting was.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so Jeff told me, he said, he got so emotionally invested, knowing that this is fake, as a Christian adult man, with father with kids, knowing it's fake, he said he was so invested that he had a selfie.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: It'll take a selfie.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Here's a picture of you with your chat girlfriend.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: And his daughters were like, her dress is ugly.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: Tell her to put something else on.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: And he said he was so emotionally invested that he couldn't do it.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh and and and and he was doing it as an experiment.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he wasn't doing it because he was lonely, he was actually knowingly researching this and got and got uh that that's how that's how addictive or cultish it is.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's unbelievable.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and these things are out for the kids.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: I saw someone post just the other day that in the school system that they are they are implementing emotional chatbots, socio emotional chat bots as counselors.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: So they'll advertise it on the morning announcements.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: If you're having a tough day, we have this chat bot that you can talk to.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's here, it's here.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's terrible.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: I can only imagine, you know, thinking back to when I was a teenager and kind of all the questions that you have and you need that guidance and to just outsource it to a machine.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's oh my gosh.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: I I had no idea.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, I wanted to ask you, Jenny, because screens are really addictive.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so, but it's this balance, right?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's our kids now, like I have a 16-year-old or almost 16-year-old, uh 11-year-old, and a four-year-old.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: And the screens are everywhere, and people are telling me, well, they need to be involved in the screens to a certain extent because that's their generation, that's where the jobs are going to be.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: So at some age, you're gonna have to expose them to screens.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like as soon as we did expose our children to the screens, even though it was, for instance, for learning programs, you know, like not Joe, just sit on a video game, like, you know, something that we thought was a good intention, immediately it's addictive.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I think all the adults listening to this can understand because how many of us are addicted to our phones or you know, the pinging of when you get an email or a text, oh, who is it?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like releases that dopamine hit.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: So it is an addictive device.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: So how do you manage that?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like, are you you said you have a 17-year-old now?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: Are they not on screens at all ever?
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: Or are you able to somehow find this balance?
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really interesting question.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: So, to the point that screens are everywhere, I would say it's not totally true because they're not in Joel's house.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: So they're not everywhere, right?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: You have a screen.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: You no Joel the computer.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: He's got the computer.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: I get it.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he watches TV on that.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, totally news and stuff.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but you know, you can you can make the choice to not have screens in your home in terms of television.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: You can absolutely do that, and a lot of people do that.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what we found our 17-year-old does have a phone and he plays sports and he's got friends.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: He's up at a he's up lifeguarding at a camp right now.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't actually have a phone this week, is a wonderful camp where there's no phones allowed.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think those are fantastic.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: But he's up there lifeguarding.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: He does have a phone, and we do have some video games in our house, and we do have a TV.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so what I have found is that because our kids are wired for real life, we spent so much time, and we still do.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: We our kids are, I mean, required is the wrong word, but our family culture is that we're outside for a thousand hours every year.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's our family culture.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so what that does is it pushes out time for screens.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's just not that much time for it.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: We 1,000% limit it, but they have been wired for real life and for real relationships.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's not as big of a draw.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I will say that this man, Dr.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: Nicholas Carderis, who wrote a phenomenal book called Glow Kids and one called Digital Madness, he says that about 10% of the population are prone to screen addiction.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, screen addiction is gambling, sports gambling is a huge problem.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's pornography, it's social media, it's gaming, and it's the internet.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot of ways that you can become addicted to technology.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's what he works with uh in the he was an addiction specialist for drugs and alcohol.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: And now all he does is work with, especially, it's like the teen to early 20s failure to launch screen addicted kids.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: So he says, even with protective factors, there is still a propensity for 10% of the population, and you just don't know.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: You don't know if that's going to be your kid or not your kid.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's a huge deal.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: It must be limited.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: These algorithms are so powerful.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: I read a book by Erin Lochner.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's called The Opt Out Family.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's a fantastic book.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: And she was talking about how when Instagram, so they changed their algorithm.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: Instagram was a place to see the photos of your friends and the people you cared about.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: And you'd scroll through and you'd see what your friends are doing, and they were making something like$1.8 billion a year.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then they changed the algorithm.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: The algorithm is now what you might want to see.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a it's a way to draw you in to be more sticky, so that it's like the people that you don't know, and now you're sucked into watching, you know, a video of someone brushing their arm hair or whatever.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you get sucked in.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: When they change the algorithm, the and the numbers are not exact, but this is it'll give you a good picture.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: It went from something like$1.8 billion in profit a year to$48 billion in profit a year.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's how powerful these algorithms are.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that what we have to do, when you brought up those numbers, four to seven hours, four to seven minutes, at the very least, there has to be a balance there.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot have kids that are on screens dealing with someone else's imagination, becoming dysregulated because actually interactive screens, Dr.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Victoria Dunkley talks about this.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: Interactive screens are worse.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: You would think that interactive screens would be better because we're interacting.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm making, I'm working on Minecraft, I'm I'm doing, I'm building on this, and it's interactive.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: And she says, No, that dysregulates your entire nervous system.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: Also, the screens are so close to your face.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: The screens are different than they were.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: When I was a little kid, we had a TV in the living room, and my grandpa would come over every day and he would, if we're watching it after school, he'd grab my arm and he'd drag me back and he'd be like, You're too close.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: And now we got the ones, and it's right in front of their faces is not good for their eyes.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's not good for so many things, but the screens have changed.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I absolutely think that parents have to limit.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of good options.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's a Gab phone, you don't have to have the internet in your pocket, and your kids will thank you later on.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's what parenting is all about.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: My midwife has always said someday our kids are gonna look back and ask us why.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: Why didn't you limit that?
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: That was the only childhood I got.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you let me be on a screen for four to seven hours a day, they're not gonna be happy about it.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: Although it doesn't feel that way as a parent in the moment, right?
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: But that's that's what parenting is.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, parenting has always been that.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: That hasn't changed.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: Parent has always parenting has always been a period of time where you're not super popular.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: And what you're teaching your child, I mean, it's interesting when you think about all the things and lessons that kids get from their childhood.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: You're teaching them to be grateful.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe not grateful is the wrong word.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: You're teaching them to manage with what they have.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I think about, you know, when I was a kid, I wanted to have more name brand clothes.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we didn't have that.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: And and so what does that teach you?
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: It teaches you how to cope with the lack in your life.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone has some lack in their life, and you have to learn how to manage that.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so as a child, you know, you have to learn how to manage being a little bit different, going against the grain, you know, and the tides are changing a little bit, anyways, that's for sure.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's definitely going to be other parents out there that are reading sort of what's coming in the future and and changing things for their kids, not allowing them to spend so much time in someone else's imagination.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's what a video game is, that's what a TV show is.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: You're inside of what someone else is creating.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: But Victoria Dunkley says, better to have just a family movie night.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: Do that.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's not gonna dysregulate.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: If you need a little bit of a break, you know, you're exhausted, don't hand them to iPad.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Say, look, we're gonna watch the sound of music or whatever, you know, a little bit of a slower old movie, do that together.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and you can still have that downtime and snuggle and all of that, but not all screen time is the same.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, why is it that those interactive games are more dysregulating than like watching a family movie?
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you talk about um, you know, like you're tapping into somebody else's creativity and their imagination, when they're interacting, I know a lot of it's set up for them, but let's take Minecraft, for example, and they can build things and like now they can mod, they can do coding, you know, where they could build their own mods.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: So why would why is that more dysregulating than watching the like sound of music?
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm gonna read it.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Interactive screen time causes more dysfunction than passive, it because it contributes to hyper-arousal.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Interactive screen time has much more potent detrimental effect on attention and executive functioning than passive screen time because the interact the interactivity promotes higher levels of arousal and because the proximity of the screen causes more severe melatonin suppression and circadian disruption.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: She says no interactive screen devices at all until age 12, and after that, only sparingly.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, if you're a parent that's done those things, you can see that it's hard to pull them out of it.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: They're just like really sucked in because it's interactive.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: So what would you say?
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say there's a be I'm sorry, but because the the inherent the inherent interactivity is giving you immediate feedback and and that incentivizes.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: As Jenny, as you were talking about going through your your soliloquy there, I I was I I I I I couldn't help but um you know but think well Cena's question was how do you limit that?
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you were talking about, well, sometimes you just have to be a tough parent.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: And and I'm thinking there needs to be a way to incentivize something that's not screened.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, you you can't be you can't be, oh, look at your score on Angry Birds.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's fantastic.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you can't be fawning over gamesmanship.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you you you have to create a family culture where the things that get praise, the things that are incentivized to praise and encourage are are other things.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh how well you fed the chickens, how you built a you built a piece of pottery, you know, uh how you're doing in your in your business, uh mowing lawns or whatever, but but but but you're incentivizing something else, just like I would say around here, if you know, if your pond and woods can't compete with a screen, you're not being creative enough.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I mean it's a really big deal.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what one of the things that's changed is that parenting, we weren't really involved with the kids playing outside.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't have to deal with kids coming to you and saying, I'm bored.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: They probably did get bored, but they were out in the neighborhood with their friends.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so one of the societal things that has changed quite dramatically is that kids are no longer outside in the neighborhood.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: Play used to be a fairly hands-off experience.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: I have a book called Until the Streetlights Come On.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's a nostalgic phrase.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: People will say, I just had to come home when it got dark.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: When the streetlight came on, I knew that was my time to come home.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'd come home for dinner.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: But during the day, my parent didn't know where I was.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I have been jealous of that.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: I have thought, gosh, if I only could have been a parent in the 80s, I could have locked my kid outside all summer.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what everybody else was doing.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, I don't know what the moms were doing inside.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: I could have had a cleaner house.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: I could have had better meals.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: I I could have taken a nap.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: But there is investment here that's different than used to exist.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: You have to, you have to often make the plans.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: You often have to go with the child.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: You often have to find the friends and go get them and bring them over.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: And people are saying things like, Look, I just want to put on my pajamas.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's Friday night, but instead, I'm going to go get these five kids.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to run a cake baking class in my kitchen.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to have these activities.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to have a bonfire.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: The parents are more involved now because they have to be.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: But what I have found is that it also enhances your own life.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes a gift.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: It is a gift for me that since 2011, I have spent a thousand hours outside every single year.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: Since 2011, as an adult, as a grown woman, I would have never done that.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: I would have never.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: What a gift that is.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this man, Kim John Payne.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: He's one of my favorite authors.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote a book called Simplicity Parenting.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: And he says that when we rescue childhood, and that's really what we're talking about here, right?
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: We're rescuing childhood.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: The dysregulated, I want to read a little bit more.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: Interactive screen time shifts the nervous system into fight or flight mode, which leads to dysregulation and disorganization of various biological systems.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: Playing video games mimics the kinds of sensory assaults humans are programmed to associate with danger.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: Any electronic screen interaction, regardless of the content, regardless if it's learning content or not, can irritate the nervous system.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is from Dr.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: Victoria Dunkley.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: The book is called Reset Your Child's Brain.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's a fantastic book.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: But what we're doing is we're rescuing our kids from this onslaught of technology.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: And Kim John Payne says that when we rescue our kids' childhoods, that we day by day, inevitably, remarkably, rescue ourselves in return.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I found.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's such a win-win to prioritize hands-on living.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just for the kids.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: You have a better life too as a parent.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it may seem annoying.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: It may seem like such a pain that we have to limit these things and the kids are bugging for the screens.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: And why am I a parent now?
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: If I were just a parent 30 years ago, I wouldn't have to deal with all this stuff.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: But by learning how to navigate that in a way that allows our kids to be happy, energetic, and living fully, it bleeds into our life too.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Jenny, if if I'm a um Cena and I see Cena jumping, I'm not, but I I want to get this.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: You really triggered something, and I had never thought of it before, but uh um give me a feedback on this, that I would put out a challenge to parents out there, to parents out there to to develop hobbies.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, you come home from work and you sit down in front of the TV for you know three hours in the evening.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what does that tell your kids?
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: But if you if you go to a woodwork, if you have a little woodworking shop in your garage, or you're quilting or you're knitting or your whatever, a hobby, kids.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: I know in our own family, our both of our kids, every time Teresa did a craft, I built something, the kids were right under our feet.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: They're wanting to pound the nails, we're wanting to hold the board, you know, run the saw, uh, run the knitting, knitting needles, you know, uh churn the churn the applesauce, you know, grinder.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: Kids want to be up in your face.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so if we do, if if my challenge to the adults would be we need to, we need to um uh you know, challenge ourselves with having a more interesting life, interesting life.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, okay, there is a woman named Linda Flanagan, and she wrote a book called Take Back the Game, and it's about toxic youth sports culture.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's a fantastic book, but she had a question in there that changed my whole life.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the question is this How are we presenting adulthood?
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I was like, come on, this changes everything.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: And what she said is so often we are presenting adulthood like it is a big bore.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you spend this childhood and you do all these sports and you do all these things.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what happens when you become an adult?
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: You sit on the sidelines.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so she says, No, you have to cultivate your own relationships, miss some games, show your kids that adulthood is a destination worth arriving at.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: And she talks about how there's all this failure to launch.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: And might it be might it be because of the ways that we've presented adulthood?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and you come home and all you do is complain about the boss and complain about work and complain about that.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the next thing you know, the kids will who wants to work?
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: Who who wants who wants to do any of this stuff?
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I tell farmers, you know, look, if if you're complaining about weather price, pestilence, disease, disease all day, and that's all your kids hear, what kids gonna want to farm?
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: All they hear is mom and dad all the time.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that was such a good part of Beyond Labels.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: We were actually just I was talking about this with my husband Josh.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's a part in here where you talk about every single farmer is like, and we we have had these conversations.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the weeds, the weeds, what about the weeds?
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you say, no, no, you just focus on what you want.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, what what do you want to have there?
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: Don't stop talking about the weeds and don't have that be your focus.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: I was really powerful.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's in this book, Beyond Labels.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: I loved that part.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, we'll put a check in the mail for your marketing.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: No, I love this.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Donnie and I when um I read a book when my oldest son was very young.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_02: And it was it was right after I'd gotten really, really sick.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I decided, you know what, I need to change everything.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, like God gives us those opportunities so we can assess what's happening and we can turn in a different direction.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I knew that my homeschooling was one way that I needed to change, change that path.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and before then, I was checking the boxes, like, here's the state requirements, and we're gonna check all these things off, and we're gonna be two grades ahead at all times because people are against us homeschooling.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: So we need to prove the point, you know.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then after I got sick, it was such a blessing because we were already two years ahead.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_02: And my son was like um maybe six, okay?
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_02: And we were, yeah, I was that driven parent.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_02: Like, this is what we do.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so he was already two years ahead.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_02: And when I got really sick, I couldn't homeschool him.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: And my husband said, just let it be.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_02: Do nothing because there was nothing I could do.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_02: I was, you know, laying on the floor trying to listen to health podcasts to save my own life.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I just didn't have the energy or capacity to do it.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_02: I kid you not, Jenny.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_02: It was like right before that, my son was starting to push back.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't want to learn his sight words, right?
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like I was trying to get him to read.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: And he started to be like, now I don't want to do this anymore, you know.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, no matter what how much I incentivized him.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: After that point, when I just hands off and let him play, right?
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's all he could do was sit there and play around me.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: It took about maybe three weeks.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_02: And one day I look over and he's on the couch with one of his little Bob books, trying to read the book, like on his own.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the first time I realized, wait a minute, there is power in play.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_02: There is a real power in play, you know, like, and I don't have to push, I don't have to force for this to happen.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so the the book I read, it was like um it was like teaching from rest or something like that.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: And they asked that question of like, when your child grows up, like, say the child's 18, what stories do you want them to tell their their friends about homeschooling?
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, how do you want them to remember their homeschooling experience?
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I was like, wow, like so that's at that point, Donnie and I talked, my husband and I talked about it.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I I realized I was living in a space of fear.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_02: That, oh, you know, that that's a fear space that my kid has to outperform everybody else.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: He's got to be the two years ahead of everybody else because I was afraid of the judgment.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I was reading this book.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_02: This ties into um the fear concept.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_02: Have you read The Anxious Anxious Generation?
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's been on our show.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I love him.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_02: So he talks about the fear as parenting and how that parenting really changed a lot in the 1990s, um, partly because of the competitiveness of college admissions.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_02: Where we started to think of our kids as these projects and we needed to shape them in a certain way so that they could be competitive and get into the college, you know.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so we started all this like teaching the Mandarin and extra tutoring and all this stuff.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, play, free play went out the window because of our own fear.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_02: And then the other part of that, we lost free play because we became afraid uh as urbanization happened that everything and everyone was a threat to our children.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so we helicopter them.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, and we we lost that sense of community.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_02: When I was growing up, there was like community eyes, right?
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_02: We were all playing in the neighborhood, all of us are playing together, the neighbors knew each other.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_02: Nowadays, a lot of times you don't have that anymore.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have that neighborly community that Joel and I talk so much about on this program.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: So you don't have the neighbors' eyes watching out for the children.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so now we've a lot of us, myself included, I have noticed, are parenting from a space of fear out of versus out of a space of like joy and abundance and you know resiliency.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's it's fear in the space of lack that we're always behind.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: We're we're not doing enough.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_02: Our children are not enough, right?
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_02: And hence we push and push.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_02: Is that what you're seeing at all in parents who you may talk to?
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, I think people are really afraid because there's a lot of change and there's a lot of unknowns.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: There used to be a middle class script.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: Leonard Sachs talks about it.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: He says actually it never worked.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he says the problem with the middle class script is that it's wrong and it doesn't work.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, like you go to school, you go to a good college, you get a job, you're happy.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: And he said it's never, it's never worked like that.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's never been this straight and narrow road, but but people are afraid of falling off of it.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: And Lina Flanagan talks about the college admissions.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's all a scam and a sham.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're trying to jockey for positions and get more people to apply and then say it's it's uh more selective than it ever was and it's not.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: But I I would love to, I know what we're probably wrapping it up here, but I would love to hit on a point that you brought up, Cena, because you talked about the power of play.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, yes, there's so much power.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much power in doing things the way that God intended.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, that's really all it is.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: What are kids?
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I got that out of Pignus of Pigs, you know, it's like in all of your books, Joel, it's like, well, what are the pigs supposed to do?
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: What are the kids supposed to do?
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: We know.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's a trust factor here, but there's also a power in I couldn't.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: And you said, you know, I couldn't.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't get up off the floor and I couldn't do it the way I wanted.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I couldn't figure out how to be a mom.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't figure out how to deal with, you know, my kids without doing all these programs.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't, I couldn't.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: But that is such a good spot to be in because the Bible says, in our in when we're weak, he is strong.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I will boast all the more of my weakness that Christ's power may rest on me.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, we're trying to control too much.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: We look at what's around, and Dr.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: Madeline Levine says when the world is shaky, we double down on old things, we double down on the testing, we double down on the standardization.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: But there has to be a faith there.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_01: There has to be a faith in God's providence, in God's provision, in God's way, in the way that He made children.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: They're biologically designed to self-educate.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: And we have to, I believe, put a lot of effort into combating social norms and societal messages.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: You have to read.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot, I do not think that you can parent well in this day and age without being a reader because there's such an onslaught of cultural messaging, and you have to have a baseline of what do I believe?
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: So, like Joel, so many of your books for me have been philosophical.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm never thought about this.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: I've never thought about that.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: What if I implement this?
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you read a book like Durable Trades, and I didn't know.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know there used to only be 70 jobs, and now there's 30,000.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: And instead of that being a positive thing, that thing makes things more shaky.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you start to make these decisions.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: You read John Holt, learning all the time, how young children learn to read, write, investigate the world, and do math without being taught.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: You read John Taylor Gotto, you read these things, and then you can combat.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: But otherwise, you don't have that foundation in yourself.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so you got and you read the Bible, and the Bible says, when you're weak, then you are strong.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it's okay.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it's like we don't have to be, we don't have to raise trophy children.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we can we can glory a bit in our weakness.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's a book that came out recently called God Was Right by Mark Gerson, and it's about how social sciences prove the Old Testament is true.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that was one of the things I really got out of his book was he was talking about often, like, like for me, an insecurity that I have is I feel like I don't look like all the other people on Fox News.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's a big insecurity that I have.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I don't look the part, but you know what he says is it's in your weakness.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm like the everyday mom.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think I look like a lot of the other moms, you know, and that sometimes you're the things that seem like a lack, like I wish I could do more for my kids.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I could helicopter more.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you've got a lot of them.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: You're trying to do all of your farms and your durable trades, and it feels like it's a negative, but often in those spots, that's where God I think meets in with your story and makes things more powerful than they ever could have been.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I love that.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, Jenny, we like to leave with solutions, like to help, you know, educate and then empower our listeners.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I wondered if you would uh talk a little bit about a blog post that you wrote and then talk about uh rescuing our kids.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh a blog post on your website is called Let's Stop Stealing Time from Children.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: Let's stop doing that.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_02: Let's do it.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_02: We take all their time.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_02: How do we do that?
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_02: If you could just even give us some even some highlights of how we can rescue our children by stop stealing their time.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I have one solution.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like a one-trick pony.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: 1000 hours outside, as simple as it sounds and as silly as it may sound, has completely changed childhood.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: It is the solution to so many of the modern-day parenting problems and also modern-day childhood problems.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: The fights over screens.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: What happens when you prioritize getting outside is you just lose time for all of those other things and your kids become more imaginative.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: Kim John Payne says an imaginative kid is the best babysitter there is.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: We think the screens are the best babysitter, but he says no.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: If they can cultivate their imagination, that's the best babysitter.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes I'll speak on panels and you know, people ask these questions in my answer.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's just always basically go outside.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: Struggling with my marriage.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: Go outside.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, take your kids out there.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna have an opportunity to connect with your spouse while your kids play.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: They're engaged in creation.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm I'm struggling with fighting over screens.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: Go outside.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: And my kid's struggling with dysregulation.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: My kid is struggling with uh these different problems, but go outside, let them be exposed to the dirt, it's gonna help their immune system.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it just it's the answer.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: To be in God's creation is the answer.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it's nothing profound.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: This is the way that people lived up until 20 years ago.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: They lived outside, and now so much of our time is indoors.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so, if I were to give a practical step, I would say, listen, have a goal.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds so silly.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_01: No one in the 80s had a goal for being outside.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: No one in the 60s had a goal.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: The punishment was to come indoors.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: That would be your punishment, that you can't play outside with your friends.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we have flipped that on its head.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so, if you can have a goal to be outside more, that will seep into a lot of other areas.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: You might start growing some things, you might go meet the farmer because you know you're gonna do some agro-tourism and you get to go meet the farmer up the road.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna join a CSA, you're gonna help them plant their lavender.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, these are all just random things that we have done.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna grow some zinnias and you if things are gonna be so overgrown and you're gonna be scratching your head out there trying to figure out what to do.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna, it's gonna bleed into other areas if you can prioritize outside time.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say we have 1,000 hours outside.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's our goal.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you fail, you win, even if you fail.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_01: But it has changed our life and it has continued to work from age three to age 17.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: And this is, and my dad does it.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: My dad, he's in his 60s, my dad does it.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: And um, he'll tell me, I've been outside for 500 hours.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: Six, he doesn't have to go outside.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: He could be inside all the time.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a lifestyle commitment that is profoundly impactful.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_02: And then what do you do on those times when the weather is not permissive?
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then we don't go, you know, and and that's kind of a gift.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, part of part of life is the sort of the contrast, and people will complain about the snow.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, nothing feels better than coming in to a warm fire when you've been out in the snow for four hours.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you don't that relief and that sort of like coziness, it's not as cozy if you don't have the cold.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so the days when it's really rainy here and storming, I'm like, thank goodness, because I, you know, I gotta catch up on laundry or there's some other things I needed to do.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I, so that's why we have a year-long goal over the course of a year.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: We are looking to balance out screen time with real life that accounts for different seasons that's figurative and literal.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you had a baby, sometimes you had a surgery, sometimes you're caring for your mom.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: She's, you know, she's aging, she's six.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we have all of these things that happen.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you're grieving.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: All of these things happen in life.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: But on a whole, if kids are able to spend 1200 hours a year on screens, that's what the statistics say.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: We should at least, at the very least, be able to match that with real life.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then my last question, this is a more practical one as well.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because I imagine a lot of our listeners um have kids that are addicted to the screens, or they're on, or they're just on the screens more than they want them to be.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_02: So, in your home, what have you adopted as your belief in terms of you say you limit their screen time?
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_01: What does that look like?
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: Ready?
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, just pretend like you're a parent in the 1980s.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: What does that look like?
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: And do that.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: What in the 1980s?
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: There we could watch cartoons until noon, and that was it.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: In the summer, there was no new television.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was all reruns.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: So don't do screens in the summer.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and in the school year, it was like on Tuesdays, there was full house from seven to eight.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, kids there we did watch a little bit of screens.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: We watched them together, and then when it was over, it was over.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's all you have to do.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: Just limit it and in make sure our best days are the days where we run out of time for screens.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like, oh, the kids want to whatever.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: They want to play a video game.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's bedtime.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we were out chasing fireflies and and we were out in the garden and we were hiking with a friend and we were playing in the creek, and we just ran out of time.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that's it.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's really, uh it sounds maybe it sounds too simple to work, but it's what people did all the way up until really recently.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: It works.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: And you're gonna say to your kid, I'm the parent, right?
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: And and you talk about it.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: Talk about how the screen manufacturers are trying to addict them.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: Talk about how if they're old enough, say they're mining your data.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: They want you to be a customer for life.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: You are being manipulated.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_01: You can have those conversations with your kids and you can always change.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: What a thing that you are modeling to your children if you say, you know what, what we were doing yesterday isn't really working.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: I learned something new.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: I read this book called Glow Kids by Dr.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: Nicholas Carderis, and he says that the gaming manufacturers want your blood pressure to be at 180 over 120 within three minutes of playing a video game, or they go back to the drawing board.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to do that anymore.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I read this book.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_01: Let's read it together.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: Are your kids old enough?
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: Let's read the marvelous pigness of pigs.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: Let's read it together and talk about these things.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_01: You can always change.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I would advocate that making changes is modeling what is what is a that's what's good about life.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's what makes life good, is when you are humble enough to say, we were going in the wrong direction and we're gonna change a little bit.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then you model for your kids because they're gonna have challenges that we don't know.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: Goodness this stuff is rolling away with the chat, girlfriends, come on, the robots are coming, they're here.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: So our kids are gonna have their own challenges as parents, and we have to model for them how to parent with intention, with values, with things that we believe in our core, even if they're different than what everybody else is doing.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it's always okay to make a change.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I love that.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_02: I love that such a sense of humility behind the parenting, you know.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like I don't have all the answers.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna figure this out together, and but we're not gonna give up, you know?
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like I love that.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness, you just gave me goosebumps.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'm totally gonna try this and I'm gonna report back to you and let you know.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm gonna download your trackers.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_02: Can you can you tell people?
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so first of all, what's your website?
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_02: And you have these amazing curriculums and you have these amazing trackers that they're free.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_02: They're free.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: And you know what?
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna seem silly.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it might seem silly because no one did this before, but it's a tracker, it's free.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: You print it out, you're gonna color in one space for one hour or one space for one half hour.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: And what it does is it models to kids how we find balance in a world that is steeped in technology.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then what it does, I just talked to a mom the other day.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_01: I spoke at a farm.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: Joel, you had spoken there too.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's called Great Country Farms in Virginia.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: And anyway, the guy that did our tour was wearing a polyface farms hat.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: So that was really cool.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, I spoke at this farm and this mom came up to me and she said, and this is part of it.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: She says, I if I got outside for five hours today, I feel like I did something that's worthy.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, and that's what it does.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: It it gives some validation to it because it is a worthy use of time.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: What kids find to be worthy, what they're driven to do, those are worthy uses of time.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: And in our day and age where we sort of discount play, that's important.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's important to celebrate the fact that you got outside for a bunch of time in a day and age when no one's getting outside.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a modeling component of it, but there's also a little bit of a celebratory component of it when it's hard to be a mom.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they say that there's nothing more competitive than motherhood.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you think so-and-so, such and such and so is competitive.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_01: Try and be a mom today.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so let's give ourselves a pat on the back when we have done our done, you know, our due diligence in setting aside screens and prioritizing hands-on real life living.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Jenny, you are a treasure.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_00: You are a treasure.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um I can tell Cena's Cena's ready to cloud up.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: I know I'm ready to cloud up.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I wish you were my neighbor.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um everybody wants Jenny to be their neighbor, and then she wouldn't be Jenny.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, we're we're just so thankful.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we always we always close our podcast um with a question.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so my question to our so that they can respond to us and and kind of create a dialogue.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_00: So my question today is are you happy with your balance?
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, are you so I'm so happy.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so happy with my life.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm not asking you, I'm asking our our listeners.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh well, they can be if they try one thousand hours.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's so funny.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's hilarious.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_00: I feel a little sheepish.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: So my question to our listeners is are you happy with your balance?
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if not, what's your new goal?
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a that's a fair, and and I just love uh I love I love the one-string banjo, the the the one thing, you know, um we we we get besieged.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: We want to complicate everything and and have all these different options, and often the per the the number of options paralyzes to doing anything.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so I love that you're just so true to yourself.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I am with the food emancipation proclamation.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_00: What do we do about we free up food?
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: What do we do about Monsanto?
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_00: We free up food.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: What do we do about cargo?
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: We free up food, you know, and and you're a lot like that as well.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it just that simplicity is is do it makes it doable.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: It makes it doable, and it takes the paralysis out of it.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_00: So for our listeners, uh uh, do you feel do you feel after this program that you're balanced?
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if not, what are you gonna do?
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what's your new goal to change it?
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_00: Jenny, you have been delightful.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're so grateful for you coming on here.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_00: Bless you in your work, your ministry.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is it is so powerful and so needed in our culture.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_00: And for me to have the opportunity to write that forward for you for your for your book was just such a such an honor.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much for being with us.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you all for listening to another episode of Beyond Labels, and we'll look forward to visiting with you again next week.