Latest / The Parenting Podcast / Screenwise Parenting: Mentoring Your Kids in the Digital World | Ep. 95

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Screenwise Parenting: Mentoring Your Kids in the Digital World | Ep. 95 · The Parenting Podcast

• 0:06
  Fellow parents, welcome back to the Parenting podcast.
• 0:10
  I'm Cheryl Lang, your host on this adventure through modern Parenting, a world.
• 0:16
  where screens and devices are no longer the exception but the rule.
• 0:22
  Do you recall that moment when you first handed your child a tablet or a smartphone?
• 0:29
  Chances are it did not come with a user manual for safely living in the cyber realm.
• 0:38
  And that's where we step in.
• 0:40
  In the upcoming episodes, we're going to explore the concept of you becoming the media mentor for your family.
• 0:48
  Um, much like being a GPS to help you navigate your family through this ever evolving digital landscape.
• 0:58
  Together, we'll dissect the challenges and issues and share practical strategies and solutions.
• 1:05
  This isn't just about enforcing rules.
• 1:08
  It's about understanding the digital world as a family, having open discussions about choices, and nurturing self regulation.
• 1:19
  But here's the exciting twist.
• 1:21
  It's not just about your children.
• 1:24
  It's about you, too.
• 1:27
  Join us as we equip you with tools and insights to empower your family in this screen saturated world.
• 1:44
  Cheryl: The subject that we're going to be talking about, at least today, there's no comparison.
• 1:50
  Cheryl: It is definitely the number one thing I've been asked about over and over and over by parents.
• 1:59
  Cheryl: And we haven't addressed it yet.
• 2:02
  Cheryl: And I continually have parents, would you talk about this?
• 2:07
  Cheryl: And it is devices, media, and social media
• 2:13
  Christie: Wow It is the thing.
• 2:15
  Christie: It is the thing.
• 2:16
  Christie: In parenting, yeah.
• 2:17
  Christie: Well, it's the thing in the
• 2:18
  Ellen: world.
• 2:18
  Ellen: Right.
• 2:19
  Ellen: Everybody, I mean, you can't function in any culture without this,
• 2:23
  Cheryl: right?
• 2:23
  Cheryl: And, you know, Chrissy, do you even remember before the internet?
• 2:28
  Christie: Yes, I remember having to have a, at a friend's house that I was Wow.
• 2:43
  Christie: I think it was Windows 95.
• 2:44
  Christie: Wow.
• 2:45
  Christie: That's how it was.
• 2:46
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 2:47
  Cheryl: Uh huh.
• 2:47
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 2:47
  Cheryl: You know.
• 2:48
  Cheryl: It's amazing what we've seen happen.
• 2:51
  Cheryl: And you know, we're just talking about the universality of it.
• 2:56
  Cheryl: Yeah, over a decade ago, maybe 15 years ago, they said, by the way, more people have phones than toothbrushes in the world.
• 3:05
  Cheryl: Well, I was gonna
• 3:06
  Christie: say, that's disturbing.
• 3:07
  Christie: In my travels,
• 3:08
  Ellen: I've been able to travel a lot, but when we went to Africa, People that couldn't afford dinner had phones.
• 3:16
  Cheryl: Yes.
• 3:17
  Cheryl: That's what I'm talking about.
• 3:19
  Cheryl: And that was 10 and 15 years ago.
• 3:21
  Cheryl: Yes, sir.
• 3:22
  Cheryl: This say up front it is a monstrous monster and Not something to be feared.
• 3:30
  Cheryl: But what our approach is going to be listeners is we want to equip you and We're going to talk some stats and stuff, but we're just going to talk about this reality.
• 3:42
  Cheryl: Um, and what we want to do is equip you to be the media mentors for your home and for your children.
• 3:50
  Ellen: Right.
• 3:51
  Cheryl: We're going recommend different things and then get really practical, but it's here to stay.
• 3:57
  Cheryl: and it's a wonderful
• 3:58
  Ellen: tool.
• 3:59
  Cheryl: Absolutely.
• 4:00
  Ellen: I mean, it's really life altering for everybody.
• 4:03
  Ellen: Mm-hmm.
• 4:04
  Ellen: right?
• 4:04
  Ellen: And, and when used properly, I mean, every once in a while my daughter will text me who lives in town and says that my six year old granddaughter wants to FaceTime with me.
• 4:14
  Ellen: Aw.
• 4:14
  Ellen: 'cause she hasn't seen me.
• 4:15
  Ellen: So we just talk for five minutes on
• 4:17
  Cheryl: FaceTime.
• 4:17
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 4:18
  Cheryl: Ellen, a blessing.
• 4:18
  Cheryl: What is the first computer you remember having?
• 4:22
  Cheryl: Can you remember it?
• 4:23
  Cheryl: Or, what's something you remember early on, like, back in the Dark Ages, you know, what do you remember?
• 4:30
  Ellen: Absolutely hating it.
• 4:32
  Ellen: Yeah, always.
• 4:33
  Ellen: Until, um, Apple, until they got Apple Pro.
• 4:36
  Ellen: Oh, okay.
• 4:37
  Ellen: My brain did not work.
• 4:39
  Ellen: Uh huh.
• 4:39
  Ellen: With PCs.
• 4:40
  Ellen: Yes, with PCs.
• 4:41
  Ellen: Right.
• 4:41
  Ellen: Where my husband worked with them, uh, in, in his job and everything.
• 4:45
  Ellen: So he was very smooth with them.
• 4:46
  Ellen: I just was like, I don't even know what to do with this thing.
• 4:49
  Ellen: The minute I got an apple, my brain synced up with how that worked.
• 4:55
  Ellen: Yes.
• 4:55
  Ellen: My husband, even to this day, struggles with his apple products and I have to come over and fix
• 5:00
  Christie: it for him.
• 5:01
  Christie: I resisted the apple Kool Aid for quite a while.
• 5:04
  Christie: And now I...
• 5:05
  Christie: drink it regularly.
• 5:07
  Christie: That would make
• 5:08
  Cheryl: Steve Jobs so well.
• 5:09
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 5:09
  Cheryl: So
• 5:09
  Christie: happy to know that.
• 5:10
  Christie: So our first computer was the black and amber screen.
• 5:14
  Christie: Do you guys remember that?
• 5:15
  Christie: Like that all the text was amber colored.
• 5:18
  Christie: You had to type in like C colon slash slash DOS startup or something to get it
• 5:24
  Cheryl: to work.
• 5:25
  Cheryl: The DOS prompt.
• 5:25
  Cheryl: So Bill worked for a software company and they had PCs and then this alternative called Macintoshes, right?
• 5:36
  Cheryl: It's interesting.
• 5:36
  Cheryl: He said what you said, because he came home, said, I love the Macintoshes they're amazing.
• 5:43
  Cheryl: But there are much more of sort of an artistic or, um, architectural usage and so forth.
• 5:51
  Cheryl: But he has no idea because he hasn't been around for all this revolution.
• 5:55
  Cheryl: And I remember I thought, sure you use it in engineering and science.
• 6:00
  Cheryl: And I didn't like video games.
• 6:02
  Cheryl: So that's kind of where I relegate it all.
• 6:04
  Cheryl: And I thought, oh, he cares so much.
• 6:06
  Cheryl: So.
• 6:08
  Cheryl: Someone gave us a 250 megabyte computer, and the screen was about 10 inches wide and it had the Doss prompt Uhhuh, and it weighed as much as my dishwasher weighs.
• 6:24
  Cheryl: Yeah, Uhhuh, they're huge.
• 6:25
  Cheryl: And then he brought home Perfect.
• 6:28
  Cheryl: Yeah, that's, and started showing me how to use it because I didn't know that if you weren't an engineer of science or a gamer, you had a use for it and he started showing me how you could do a word processing and then he said, and then you can copy.
• 6:41
  Cheryl: I go, you can do what?
• 6:43
  Cheryl: And he said, yeah, look, you get a dot matrix printer.
• 6:47
  Cheryl: You highlight this.
• 6:49
  Cheryl: And then you can copy it.
• 6:51
  Cheryl: And I said, so I can, like, write my parents and then copy what I want and write my other friend Kathy?
• 6:58
  Cheryl: He said, absolutely.
• 7:01
  Cheryl: Oh, my goodness.
• 7:03
  Cheryl: You know, so that was my introduction to it.
• 7:05
  Cheryl: And of course, the blue screen of death, if you remember.
• 7:08
  Cheryl: You know, it would just lock up and that's right.
• 7:11
  Cheryl: Uh huh.
• 7:11
  Cheryl: And
• 7:11
  Christie: well, I remember when I first heard about the smartphone, about the first iPhone.
• 7:17
  Christie: And I remember I heard, you know, friends paying thousands of dollars for them.
• 7:21
  Christie: And I thought that is absolutely insane.
• 7:23
  Christie: That is never going to take off.
• 7:25
  Christie: Why would people want to carry such a fragile thing in their back pocket?
• 7:29
  Christie: You know, it just seems so absurd to me.
• 7:32
  Christie: But obviously, we
• 7:33
  Cheryl: are.
• 7:33
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 7:34
  Cheryl: Well, and now, of course, AI is the new thing.
• 7:37
  Cheryl: And it's very interesting, because of the subject that we're talking about, that I spent more time on the internet, researching, finding out even using AI on this particular topic, trying to figure out how in the world, what direction do we go?
• 7:56
  Cheryl: How do we help our listeners?
• 7:58
  Cheryl: What can we say?
• 7:58
  Cheryl: Then I have.
• 8:00
  Cheryl: Anything else, all total, that we've worked on.
• 8:03
  Cheryl: So it's a little bit like, I don't know.
• 8:06
  Ellen: And they announced, Cheryl, this morning that AI will be able to speak, understand, Wow.
• 8:13
  Ellen: and interact with you.
• 8:14
  Ellen: That's where the next steps come.
• 8:17
  Christie: Yeah, I mean, they're really working on having to reel it in and figure out how to regulate things.
• 8:23
  Cheryl: This is the problem, is the enormity.
• 8:27
  Cheryl: but I mean, it's here.
• 8:28
  Cheryl: Right.
• 8:29
  Cheryl: It's not like, I remember, uh, 15.
• 8:34
  Cheryl: Years or so ago, what people would say on a lot of parenting teaching and a lot of parenting, uh, pod, well, we didn't have podcasts then, but parenting teaching or blogs, and they would say, well, just protect your children from it.
• 8:49
  Christie: Protect, protect.
• 8:49
  Christie: Don't allow it.
• 8:50
  Christie: Keep them
• 8:50
  Cheryl: away.
• 8:52
  Cheryl: That's an ostrich head in the sand.
• 8:54
  Cheryl: Right.
• 8:54
  Cheryl: It's just not
• 8:55
  Christie: realistic.
• 8:55
  And
• 8:56
  Ellen: I think people didn't know, though.
• 8:57
  Ellen: People didn't know what was out there.
• 9:01
  Ellen: Yeah.
• 9:01
  Ellen: And that's what scared them.
• 9:02
  Ellen: Because all of a sudden, for parents.
• 9:05
  Ellen: That was a whole brand new world of, Wow, you can do
• 9:08
  Christie: this?
• 9:09
  Christie: Well, there was definitely a learning curve time there.
• 9:13
  Christie: My older kids were...
• 9:15
  Christie: You know, coming into preteen years when social media was revving up and we entered that world way too quickly because it just seemed fun, you know, it's neat that they could share their pictures with people and on instagram and before we knew it, it was like a snowball.
• 9:31
  Christie: We were like, wait, there's some unhealthy factors in this.
• 9:34
  Christie: And I mean, I think my youngest was like five and we had an account made for her.
• 9:38
  Christie: And so, you know, then the olders are in a place where we're like, it feels awkward to take This privilege away.
• 9:45
  Christie: But then the younger ones were like, Well, we don't really want to move forward.
• 9:48
  Christie: Yeah.
• 9:48
  Christie: And so yeah, in those early days, nobody really knew what we were getting wild wild west.
• 9:53
  Ellen: Yeah, you know, you didn't realize there's really bad people out there that are producing content that your kids
• 10:00
  Cheryl: can get ahold, right?
• 10:01
  Cheryl: And Two things, I want to address both of these.
• 10:03
  Cheryl: One, a little bit, that's what we want to walk with our audience, with our parents, because we want to help to make them mentors.
• 10:13
  Cheryl: Right.
• 10:14
  Cheryl: And I want to come back to that.
• 10:15
  Cheryl: And then you said, You know, there's all this evil stuff out there.
• 10:19
  Cheryl: Well, but there's so much out there, it's not even necessarily evil and addiction is real, and you can fill your 24 hours a day with mindless...
• 10:32
  Cheryl: Yes.
• 10:32
  Cheryl: Innocent.
• 10:33
  Cheryl: Mm hmm.
• 10:33
  Cheryl: Nothing.
• 10:34
  Cheryl: Mm hmm.
• 10:35
  Cheryl: And so the problem is exponentially a different animal than what it was when everybody was warning about it back in the day, protect your children from the dark, evil web, which is real.
• 10:47
  Cheryl: Yeah, very real.
• 10:48
  Cheryl: place for that.
• 10:48
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 10:48
  Cheryl: But now there's innocent, mindless trivia.
• 10:53
  Cheryl: And that can be an evil in
• 10:54
  Ellen: itself.
• 10:55
  Ellen: Right.
• 10:56
  Christie: Called time wasting.
• 10:57
  Christie: Yes, exactly.
• 10:59
  Cheryl: Do either of you struggle with mindless time?
• 11:02
  Cheryl: Oh my goodness.
• 11:03
  Christie: Yes.
• 11:03
  Christie: Yes, I can get sucked in looking at a recipe and the next thing I'm Yes.
• 11:07
  Christie: Googling how fast cheetahs can run or Yeah, it's very easy to get And I'm not even on social media anymore And I, I mean I've been off social media for a while But just the internet in general is Why did you go
• 11:19
  Cheryl: off social media?
• 11:21
  Cheryl: Uh,
• 11:22
  Christie: let me say the real reason I decided I wanted to love people in real life, and when I see them in social media, sometimes I don't.
• 11:30
  Christie: It's a little harder to love them.
• 11:32
  Christie: That's the real answer.
• 11:33
  Christie: I mean, the pandemic just kind of did a lot of things to us.
• 11:36
  Christie: You know, I
• 11:38
  Cheryl: am.
• 11:38
  Cheryl: And we said the word mentor, and I want us to really develop that.
• 11:44
  Cheryl: What would y'all say?
• 11:45
  Cheryl: If we're telling our parents, we want to walk with you along here and make you the media mentors in your home?
• 11:51
  Cheryl: What does a mentor look like
• 11:54
  Christie: Well, you know, I was thinking about this.
• 11:56
  Christie: Like I said, when my kids were young, we didn't have these things to navigate yet, but we did have television obviously and my my kids had developed quite the TV addiction and I remember When I realized this is not healthy for our family and backing off on that some it was wow I mean they they did not like that the kids pushed back on that a lot, but from that point forward I just remember helping them Start learning what's healthy for our brains what what's healthy for our time?
• 12:30
  Christie: when we do watch how to pick and choose the things we do watch and You know, I saw that in them develop over time that they're like, Oh, I quit watching this show.
• 12:41
  Christie: Even now they're like, Oh yeah, I didn't like the way that was influencing me or, and so I think just verbalizing the processing for them and starting to help them understand, okay, just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
• 12:53
  Christie: And let's think about why we're spending our time this way or consuming this
• 12:57
  Ellen: material.
• 12:57
  Ellen: And I think we need knowledge as, as parents.
• 13:00
  Ellen: We actually really do need to know.
• 13:04
  Ellen: Not just what our kids are looking at, obviously, but we need to know what it's doing to your brain.
• 13:09
  Ellen: Because TV's similar, but the internet and computers and smartphones are just so much farther ahead of what they do to us.
• 13:18
  Ellen: Because they hit the pleasure centers of our brain.
• 13:20
  Ellen: You know, and A simple thing, I was joking about how I got addicted to this bubble game, where you're bursting bubbles.
• 13:27
  Ellen: Uh huh.
• 13:28
  Ellen: And then my phone tells me, and you spent this much time, and you're like,
• 13:33
  Christie: oh.
• 13:34
  Christie: You
• 13:34
  Ellen: know?
• 13:34
  Ellen: My husband said the same thing, too.
• 13:36
  Ellen: Are you still playing that stupid game?
• 13:37
  Ellen: Well, I'm on the
• 13:39
  Christie: 200th level.
• 13:40
  Christie: And
• 13:41
  Ellen: it seems harmless, but if you kind of step back and I look at, you know, I could have really done better.
• 13:46
  Ellen: Something much more interesting in the two hours, maybe that day that I gave to this, it didn't seem it wasn't in one big chunk.
• 13:53
  Ellen: It was 10 minutes here, 10
• 13:56
  Christie: minutes there.
• 13:57
  Christie: Well, and I think in the mentor mindset, eventually those choices are kids choices to make, you know, maybe depending on the age of your kid, it might be a year from now, or it might be Fifteen years from now, but eventually they're going to be making the choice of how much time to spend on the bubble game, probably not a bubble game by the time they're adults, but, um, you know, making a holographic, right, right, but helping them.
• 14:23
  Christie: Understand decisions do need to be made and how to decide, you know, how much of my time I wanna give to this.
• 14:31
  Christie: Yeah.
• 14:31
  Christie: If the, is, is this something I wanna give my time to?
• 14:35
  Christie: Just starting to work towards self-regulation.
• 14:38
  Ellen: And you, and you mentioned when you were talking about television, and I think this applies to smartphones and the internet, um, when you realize kind of what it was doing to you mm-hmm.
• 14:47
  Ellen: And I think that's one of the things we're gonna probably talk about today is helping our children be aware.
• 14:53
  Ellen: of what all of this does to them, so that they can go, Oh, the reason I like the bubble game is because it stimulates a part of my brain, the pleasure center, I'm getting pleasure out of it, so I lose track of time and it seems pretty innocent, but when I could have been doing other things that would have been maybe a little more productive.
• 15:13
  Ellen: It's true.
• 15:15
  Cheryl: And you can just be sucked into it.
• 15:18
  Cheryl: And we haven't even touched on the social media aspect.
• 15:21
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 15:21
  Cheryl: Social media is a force in our world, right?
• 15:25
  Cheryl: Itself has become a true force for social transformation and the impact on people.
• 15:32
  Cheryl: And we don't want to talk about it from a fear base.
• 15:35
  Cheryl: Right.
• 15:35
  Cheryl: But we want to talk about information and We want to equip you, uh, listeners, so we're kind of just giving a general intro here and different aspects, and considering these areas Christy was talking about and how to oversee and regulate ourselves and our kids We have some fantastic resources that we're going to show you.
• 16:01
  Cheryl: As much as you want to use them to help you kind of rein in the monster a little bit so that it's manageable as we always talk about here that aligns with your family's philosophy and We want you to prepare your children for becoming adults.
• 16:18
  Ellen: Right.
• 16:18
  Cheryl: I had a friend and their child was 16, going on 17, and did not even have a phone.
• 16:28
  Cheryl: And she said, so, you know, I'm thinking about maybe getting her phone.
• 16:32
  Cheryl: Well, we had a long conversation because It's true she was protecting her child from so many things.
• 16:40
  Cheryl: However, she was not preparing that child for adulthood and what we want to do is Of course, there's a protection, supervision aspect of parenting, but our job is to prepare them and to prepare
• 16:54
  Ellen: them well.
• 16:55
  Ellen: Well, I mean, we really can't be without a phone unless you don't really want to communicate with the outside world.
• 17:01
  Cheryl: Right.
• 17:02
  Cheryl: And like you were saying, It got away from you.
• 17:05
  Cheryl: And that's what's so easy.
• 17:06
  Cheryl: And, um, we want to prepare, be realistic, and then offer you resources and conversation here so that you feel equipped to make decisions.
• 17:19
  Cheryl: And emboldened, maybe, that you, our listeners feel the confidence and have some information to maybe reclaim, some territory or like how yours got just out of hand.
• 17:32
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 17:33
  Cheryl: Right.
• 17:33
  Cheryl: Well,
• 17:33
  Christie: also giving your kids.
• 17:35
  Christie: Yeah, building confidence and then you're transferring that confidence to your kids where they are making these choices for their own health out of the confidence that you've given them to do that.
• 17:47
  Christie: And I think, you know, like you said, it was out of hand for my kids for a while because we were still navigating how to.
• 17:56
  Christie: do all these things.
• 17:57
  Christie: And I think parents today now have a lot of resources, a lot of tools they can apply if you know, if they choose to do so.
• 18:05
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 18:05
  Ellen: But it's also hard to get away from it because everywhere you turn, whether we're in school, that's how they get their information.
• 18:14
  Ellen: You know, nobody goes to an encyclopedia anymore, right?
• 18:17
  Christie: Well, yeah, I mean, they spell it anyway.
• 18:20
  Christie: I remember, you know, my Older three kids had phones, and my youngest didn't.
• 18:26
  Christie: And the older three created a group chat.
• 18:29
  Christie: So they would chat it up on their group chat, and they had all these little inside jokes that the youngest one was not part of, just by nature of the, you know.
• 18:39
  Christie: Yeah, and so and it was kind of earlier than we were planning on giving her a phone, but because of the relationship with her sisters that she was missing out, we bumped that age up, which, you know, of course the older ones had opinions on that, but it was worth it to us.
• 18:55
  Christie: So you say it, you know, like you're saying, it's a necessary thing.
• 18:58
  Christie: There's no getting away from it sometimes.
• 19:01
  Christie: We do things like that for the payoff and we have to learn how to navigate it well.
• 19:06
  Christie: Now she had the advantage too of, or maybe she would have called it a disadvantage for her, that we were then more wise than we had been with the older ones when they first got their phones.
• 19:16
  Christie: So she had more restrictions and more incremental freedoms that the olders, we might've just thrown them to the wolves and then regretted it later.
• 19:25
  Christie: When
• 19:25
  Cheryl: this is what parents and even school counselors are saying to me, is the kids without phones have no social relationship.
• 19:36
  Cheryl: They're excluded and ostracized and this is the reality that we can't go that direction in it.
• 19:42
  Cheryl: Well, you hear
• 19:43
  Ellen: the...
• 19:43
  Ellen: stories of them getting bullied and then their friends show them, see, look, you're being bullied online.
• 19:48
  Christie: Well, and even if it's not out of ill intention, I feel that as an adult, not being on social media, I miss baby announcements and wedding announcement, you know, there's lots of things you miss.
• 19:57
  Christie: It's a hard road to ask your kid to walk, but necessary.
• 20:02
  Cheryl: Well, and the way we want to approach it is equipping our listeners so they can have the conversations with the children.
• 20:10
  Cheryl: So they're helping them walk through it, like everything else.
• 20:15
  Cheryl: Then there's a point where they start making their own decisions.
• 20:17
  Cheryl: Right.
• 20:18
  Cheryl: You know, and that's what parents are always saying.
• 20:21
  Cheryl: At what point do we give them more?
• 20:23
  Cheryl: Well, we ask that in every area.
• 20:25
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 20:25
  Cheryl: And so we're always talking about this, cars, money.
• 20:29
  Cheryl: But you know, Cheryl, the
• 20:30
  Ellen: difference is, we can stay knowledgeable about social media and the trends, whereas before all of this, you kind of found out, you know, now you can stay ahead of the trends.
• 20:45
  Ellen: There's different parental groups you can belong to that can say, Hey, this is the trend.
• 20:48
  Ellen: If you hear your kid talking about this, this is what they're talking about, you know, before you found out after the fact.
• 20:54
  Cheryl: and the truth is going to be parents, your kids are going to be such.
• 20:57
  Cheryl: Much more tech.
• 20:58
  Cheryl: Yes, just without even studying it.
• 21:01
  Cheryl: There's just something intuitive about it And now a lot of our audience grew up with more technology, of course, but it's just going to be Vertical that they're your kids are going to be in it.
• 21:14
  Cheryl: They're gonna know more so one of the things we're going to talk about is how you can Stay up.
• 21:20
  Cheryl: Yes.
• 21:21
  Cheryl: Stay on top of everything.
• 21:22
  Cheryl: On the news things.
• 21:22
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 21:23
  Cheryl: And not to be afraid of it, but the newest to just know chat, G B T, then all the ai, this entire world that's now been unleashed.
• 21:32
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 21:32
  Cheryl: To know what to do about it and how to do about it.
• 21:34
  Cheryl: So you can, with education, with information, know yourself and have the conversations to equip your children rather than, They're operating in a whole world that you don't know anything about.
• 21:46
  Cheryl: Because it's, and it happens
• 21:47
  Ellen: so fast.
• 21:48
  Ellen: I mean, literally, every week in the tech industry, there's something new that's getting, you know, you can have an AI girlfriend now.
• 21:55
  Ellen: Right.
• 21:55
  Ellen: You know, and that's, and you can program that AI girlfriend, how she looks, what she says, I mean, she, She talks to you and has a relationship with
• 22:05
  Cheryl: you.
• 22:05
  Cheryl: Well, they've had avatars and all that for a while.
• 22:08
  Cheryl: But They
• 22:11
  Ellen: haven't been intelligent.
• 22:12
  Ellen: You had to do things.
• 22:14
  Ellen: You had to move them.
• 22:14
  Ellen: This can
• 22:15
  Christie: interact with you.
• 22:16
  Christie: And it's those kinds of things, the dark things that you hear, that make it really tempting to just want to...
• 22:23
  Christie: Put your head in the sand and run away and say, Oh, my kid will never have, I have a phone.
• 22:28
  Christie: I was at a dinner the other night and it was a variety of parents, different ages of kids.
• 22:33
  Christie: And there was a whole group of maybe young school age kid parents, um, saying that saying, Oh, my kid will be lucky if she gets a phone and she's 18.
• 22:44
  Christie: But then there were some parents there who had had teenagers, you know, then now young adult kids and said, Okay, I know that's the temptation, but it's really important that you teach your kids how to navigate this at an appropriate age.
• 22:58
  Cheryl: And that's the mentoring part of it.
• 23:00
  Cheryl: And one of the big part of mentoring is role modeling.
• 23:04
  Cheryl: And so in all areas of parenting, we want to role model.
• 23:08
  Cheryl: Not being afraid, right, getting information, talking about it, and then determining what is our philosophy in this, and that we're going to live out of our philosophy.
• 23:17
  Cheryl: So our time is out just this beginning conversation.
• 23:23
  Cheryl: So let's come back.
• 23:25
  Cheryl: Okay, and we're going to get more practical parents, and then, uh, ask a few hard questions to you, but hopefully give you some tools where you can begin to do this, that you and your spouse decide your family's philosophy and what you're going to do, and then in bite sized chunks, reclaim some territory maybe, or the younger they are, this is establishing who we are.
• 23:53
  Cheryl: With the reality of not saying run, turn it off, live up in Montana,
• 24:00
  Christie: which sounds lovely.
• 24:02
  Christie: Well, they still have Wi Fi
• 24:03
  Ellen: in
• 24:04
  Christie: Montana.
• 24:05
  Christie: I can find a place they don't.
• 24:08
  Christie: I can
• 24:08
  Cheryl: find it in town too.
• 24:11
  Cheryl: So we don't want to do any of this.
• 24:13
  Cheryl: We want to not bring fear.
• 24:15
  Cheryl: We want to bring some reality.
• 24:17
  Cheryl: So let's come back next time and talk about this again.
• 24:20
  Cheryl: Okay?
• 24:20
  Cheryl: Yeah.
• 24:21
  Cheryl: So parents remember, hang in there, keep loving, keep persevering.
• 24:27
  Cheryl: Because it's worth it.
• 24:34
  In closing, remember that the digital age can be an amazing journey filled with opportunities for growth and learning.
• 24:44
  And T P P is here to help you navigate it by being media mentors for your family.
• 24:50
  You're taking some first steps towards empowering your children in this screen saturated world.
• 24:57
  And together, you can make informed decisions.
• 25:02
  We've explored the importance of verbalizing the thought processes behind screen choices and the significance of understanding not just what your kids are viewing.
• 25:13
  But also, what it's doing to their young minds.
• 25:18
  Here's something for you to consider.
• 25:20
  What digital habit do you think your children will carry into adulthood, based on their current experiences?
• 25:30
  And, are you satisfied with those habits?
• 25:34
  We'd love to hear your thoughts.
• 25:36
  Connect with us on our website, social media, Or drop us a message at contact at the parentingpodcast.
• 25:44
  com.
• 25:46
  Stay tuned for our next episode where we'll continue to break this topic down.
• 25:51
  Remember, the Parenting Podcast is here to give you hope and help you flourish in the ever changing world of parenting in the cyber universe.
• 26:07
  Music