New on Principal Center Radio: Jean Twenge—10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World
Listen at Principal Center.com »
Full Transcript:
Justin Baeder, PhD (00:00):
This episode of Principal Center Radio is brought to you by the Project-Based Learning Network, Dr. Amy Baeder, the director, is a professional curriculum writer and the leading expert on standards-based PBL. She trains teachers how to write high quality PBL units in the project-based learning curriculum developer certification program, and she teaches leaders how to implement successful p PBL initiatives in the project-based Learning instructional leader program. Learn more at Principal Center dot com slash pbl.
Announcer (00:28):
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here’s your host, director of The Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder.
Justin Baeder, PhD (00:38):
Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Dr. Jean Twenge. Dr. Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and is the author of more than 190 Scientific publications and several books based on her research, including 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World, which we’ll talk about today. Generations iGen and Generation Me among others. Her research has been covered in Time Magazine, the Atlantic Newsweek, the New York Times USA Today and the Washington Post, among other outlets, and she’s been featured on television media such as today. Good Morning America, Fox and Friends CBS this morning, real time with Bill Maher and NPR. She lives in San Diego with her husband and three daughters. And we’re here today to talk about a book on parenting, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a high tech world. And now our feature presentation. Jean, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
Jean Twenge, PhD (01:31):
Thanks for having me on.
Justin Baeder, PhD (01:33):
Well, I’m excited to speak with you because you are, I mean, to put it mildly, a serious researcher. You’ve been doing serious academic research in your field of psychology for many years now, and yet you have not shied away from communicating with broad audiences and especially parents. What prompted you to write this particular book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a high tech world? What did you see happening in the data and happening in society?
Jean Twenge, PhD (01:56):
Yeah, so I’ve been doing work in this area around adolescents and their technology use and their mental health for almost 10 years now. So my book iGen came out in 2017. An excerpt of it was printed in the Atlantic, and I’ve got some people talking about smartphones and their effects and social media and how adolescents are growing up differently now. And that’s how I originally got into looking at this because I researched generational differences and started to see some really concerning trends in terms of adolescents mental health that started around 2012, A little bit of delay in that data coming out, so didn’t realize that was going on until about 2015 or 2016, but trying to figure out why was Teen depression going up so much at a time when the economy was doing well and there wasn’t anything else really obvious that was going wrong.
(02:46):
And then realizing that the end of 2012 was the first time that the majority of Americans owned a smartphone. That’s also around the time that teens started spending more time on social media. So doing that research, I started to give a lot of talks at schools to parents, to administrators, to teachers, and also my own kids were growing up. So in 2017, my kids are pretty young, but they’re now all teenagers now. So I was seeing this at home as well, that what happens when that school laptop comes home of what about phones in the classroom of, but mom, I have to be on social media because all of my friends are on social media. When are we going to give our kids phones? All of these things was what I was hearing from parents and experiencing in my own life with my own three kids. So this book is really kind of the collision of the research and that practicality of, okay, we know this is a problem, then what do we do about it? I wasn’t seeing a whole lot of really concrete advice about what do we do about it? So that’s what really inspired me to write this book, to try to make it a little easier for parents to try to manage their kids’ tech use because it’s tough.
Justin Baeder, PhD (04:00):
It is. And I think one of the things that will strike people most immediately when they pick up the book and start reading it is that it is concrete advice. You do not shy away from using, even in the title of the book, the word rules, which we tend to not really default to very much anymore. We like to say, well, we’ll educate children on effective, appropriate social media use. We’ll educate students on how to use technology in school. And you say the education approach is necessary but not sufficient. Why is that?
Jean Twenge, PhD (04:30):
Yeah, well, I mean in brief it doesn’t work. So yes, we should talk to kids. Yes, we should educate them. I’m all for, I don’t really like the label digital literacy, but that’s often what’s used. Let them know what some of the dangers are out there, give them an idea what they’re up against, but they’re up against a lot. So social media is a great example. Those companies have poured billions of dollars into making their apps as addictive as possible. They call it engaging. Other people would say addictive. Basically they make the most money when people spend the most time on the apps and keep coming back to them as often as possible. Children and teens are their best customers because they don’t have the self-control to put that down. And they’re at a developmental stage when their social life is very, very important. Understanding who they are and where they stand is very, very important.
(05:23):
And there’s the draw of all of my friends are on it. So it’s a really tough battle. And there’s one dad I talked to has five children, and the way he put it I thought was very accurate. He said, look, I’m all for talking to kids about algorithms and all the things that they’re going to experience on social media, but I’m in my fifties and the algorithm gets me and then imagine being 10 or 12 or 15. So you can’t just learn about algorithms, you have to have some protections place. So I sometimes think about it this way with driving is a great example that would we say, oh, let’s just teach 12 year olds to drive and that’s cool. Some of ‘em are going to be ready, let’s let ‘em go do that. No, we’ve chosen an age when we think that most kids are going to be ready 16, 17 in some states, and we stuck with it. And I think we have to do the same for these technologies of not introducing them too early and not going with, oh, we’re going to talk to kids about it and then expect them to be able to put down their phone when they’re being shown video after video on TikTok, which is very compelling. It’s hard for adults to do that. And I just think we can’t expect kids and teens to do that either.
Justin Baeder, PhD (06:45):
Even using a phrase like digital literacy, excuse me. And even using a phrase like digital literacy implies that there is a lot of similarity or enough similarity between say, books, the printed word and technology. And certainly books can have alarming material that may not be age appropriate for all students, but it’s very, very different from the almost kind of intentionally predatory design of a lot of what’s out there on the internet. Books do not jump off the shelf and take pictures of you while you’re naked and send them to other people. That is literally what is happening on some of these platforms. And you share some pretty alarming statistics about just how common it is, especially on social media for kids to get targeted, for kids to get extorted for pretty horrible things to happen. And that’s not to say we need to be totally afraid of everything, but as you said in the book, almost everything in society that is for adults is age gated in some way for kids. We don’t just say, Hey, just talk to your kids about alcohol and then just let ‘em make good choices about alcohol. It’s like, well, no, you’re not allowed,
Jean Twenge, PhD (07:54):
Right, and we’re going to leave. We’re going away for the weekend. And the key is in the liquor cabinet, but you’re not supposed to do that, right? Yeah, we don’t do that.
Justin Baeder, PhD (08:03):
Yeah. So these are, you say probably not everybody’s going to stick with all 10 of these rules successfully a hundred percent of the time, but they are rules, and that is very intentional. And the first rule that I love that is one that we’ve always followed as parents is you don’t take electronics to bed with you at night. Why is that such an important rule? Or it’s actually not the first rule in the book.
Jean Twenge, PhD (08:26):
It’s the one that if you can’t follow anything else, you should follow that one. Rule two, no electronic devices in the bedroom overnight. So for a bunch of reasons. So first, the research on this is so clear. We know of course that sleep is really crucial for physical health. It’s also really crucial for mental health. Not getting enough sleep is a major risk factor for anxiety and depression, self-harm, even suicidal thoughts. So we want to preserve sleep and technology interferes with sleep. Even having the phone in the bedroom if it’s off can interfere with sleep, is what a bunch of studies have shown much less when it’s going off and kids are looking at it in the middle of the night. So common sense Media did this study where they tracked kids’ phone use, so it wasn’t just self-report. They saw when and what kids were doing. And six out of 10, 11 to 17 year olds were using their phones between midnight and 5:00 AM on school nights. Dad shows you the scope of the problem.
Justin Baeder, PhD (09:26):
So the phone is actually waking them up, or they’re waking up and getting on their phone in the middle of the night while everybody else is presumably asleep. And that’s not only allowing them to get into the various types of trouble that you can get into online, it’s also interrupting their sleep. And you say that sleep has a very strong link to a variety of poor mental health outcomes. Is that right?
Jean Twenge, PhD (09:49):
Absolutely. Yeah. So it’s a known risk factor, and especially for teenagers, they’re up against a lot of challenges already. Their circadian rhythm during adolescent shifts later, especially if they have an earlier school start time, they’re having to go to bed before they truly feel tired. And so if that phone is there as a temptation on top of that, it’s all over. It’s not just the middle of night, it’s also staying up too late because that phone is so tempting
Justin Baeder, PhD (10:21):
In a way that reading a book makes you sleepy, but scrolling on your phone seems to do the opposite
Jean Twenge, PhD (10:27):
For two reasons. First, that there’s a psychological stimulation to pretty much everything that we do on electronic devices outside of maybe watching a TV show that’s not quite as bad. But the other problem is physiological, the blue light from these devices, especially when held close to the face, they emit blue light that tricks your brain into thinking that it’s still daytime, then your brain doesn’t produce the melatonin, the sleep hormone that you need to fall asleep quickly. So a lot of kids would be like, yeah, but I couldn’t fall asleep until midnight. Sometimes it’s because they were looking at their phone or laptop right before they went to bed, and then they just can’t fall asleep because it’s thrown off that circadian rhythm and that melatonin production.
Justin Baeder, PhD (11:17):
Yeah, absolutely. So no electronic devices in the bedroom overnight. And again, I misspoke. That’s not the first rule. The first rule is you are in charge and it’s, I think absolutely right, but kind of strange that we have to say that today that this is something that parents do need to exert some control over with some rules. And I would say you seem to be a little bit on the forceful side on that issue. How do you see the role of rules and parental authority and tell us about your animal metaphor for the different parenting styles.
Jean Twenge, PhD (11:51):
Sure. Yeah. So psychology research has looked at different parenting styles and the one that consistently is shown to be the best, it’s called authoritative, so loving but firm. And that’s opposed to being permissive, where it’s kind of loosey goosey. You just let things happen. And then the other one is authoritarian, so it sounds too close to authoritative. So that’s why I said, okay, let’s throw it out the window and use a sea animal for each. So some people have called authoritative parenting, the best one, dolphin parenting. So firm but flexible like the body of the skin of a dolphin. So my kids would call that analogy cr, but I like it anyway. It makes some sense. So the loving but firm having some flexibility because then, yeah, you can do all the stuff that modern parents are really good at of talking to their kids and understanding where they’re coming from, but also in some cases having rules because they need that structure as well.
(12:51):
So having those rules in place and standing firm of sure, having empathy, but also saying, that’s it. This is the rule. So that’s the dolphin parenting. There’s another type called authoritarian, which is my way or the highway, and not really showing much love and then having the rules. So I call that tiger shark parenting. So really high expectations and just not being flexible, not having the empathy and having the rules and permissive c sponge parenting kind of let kids do what they want. You don’t have many rules. And then a fourth type is uninvolved, where there’s not the rules or the love. I call that fish parenting. You lay the eggs and you swim away. We know that the dolphin parenting is the best that you do have some of that structure, but you also show the empathy and love.
Justin Baeder, PhD (13:41):
I love that set of metaphors because I mean, obviously dolphins are the best animals, but it shows that combination of warmth and affection, but also boundaries. Speaking as a psychologist, why do you think we’re so uncomfortable with boundaries? I see this in education, I see it in among parents, and it used to be self-evident to everyone that everybody needed boundaries and that there was nothing unkind about boundaries. What has changed in our society?
Jean Twenge, PhD (14:10):
So that’s in my wheelhouse as a generations researcher. And I think a lot of it comes back to individualism, just more focus on the self and less on social rules. A system that has a lot of advantages and it’s become more common. And I think it’s just the idea of being an authority figure for a lot of parents feels weird. It feels uncomfortable. It’s like, why can’t we be equals when you’re not going to be equals with your kids until they’re a lot older, and you have to accept that. That was hard for me at first as a parent, just realizing that I had to be an authority figure. I’m like, wait, what’s going on with that? I’m a Gen Xer. And that just seemed a little odd, but quickly that that structure was super important to kids. And even teenagers, having structure really helps ‘em.
(15:00):
And having some boundaries and rules and guide rails really helps ‘em. And you have to have that, and you can also have that loving relationship with your kids, but you do have to have those rules. And I think a lot of parents are reluctant to have rules because they don’t want to fight with their kids and they want their kids to be happy. But there’s a couple aspects to this. First is you have to think long-term, not just short term. You don’t want your kids just to be happy in the short term. You have to have them be happy in the long term. When my kids were really young, somebody said to me, remember, you’re not raising children. You’re raising adults. And I had that was so insightful, and I’ve thought about that almost every day since. That’s what you have to do, think long-term about what’s going to be good for them as they grow up in the longterm.
(15:48):
The other piece is, and I know a lot of other parents have had this experience too, when you have set rules, you actually have to fight with your kids less. So for example, one of the rules in the book is you get your first smartphone when you get your driver’s license. So that’s one rule. It’s a line in the sand, it’s a clear event, and then you don’t have to fight with them every day about it. If you have a squishier rule or not even a rule, just like, oh, we’ll get you on one, you’re ready.
Justin Baeder, PhD (16:19):
Yeah,
Jean Twenge, PhD (16:19):
You’re going to be fighting with your kids late every day, if that’s what you’re saying. So that’s the whole, it depends. And I don’t know. It’s actually easier in many cases to have a set rule.
Justin Baeder, PhD (16:31):
Absolutely. And some of those rules will strike readers as extreme. The idea of not giving a cell phone or a smartphone to a child until they’re 16, that’s far later than normal. What’s the average age these days for getting the first smartphone?
Jean Twenge, PhD (16:46):
I think the average age is 10 or 11, which is just way too young. And I have to be clear, I am seeing smartphone, an internet enabled phone, so you probably are going to need some sort of stopgap. Most parents want to be able to contact their kids mom by the time they’re in middle school, maybe they start taking a bus or they have sports practice or there’s some kind of reason. So what often happens is parents want to solve that one problem of school pickup or sports practice pickup or something like that. Or I really want to be able to get in touch with my kid, and that’s not what your kid’s going to use that phone for. You have to know that going in, you’re solving that one problem and you’re creating 200 others. So what I’m a big fan of is having something as a stopgap metrics.
(17:32):
So you can wait a lot longer to give them that full internet enabled smartphone is have something that’s more like the training wheels of phones. So there’s phones designed for kids like Gab, Tru, me, pinwheel, and they can have that, which generally you can call and text maybe a few other apps, but there’s no social media. There’s usually no internet browser. And importantly for today, there’s no AI boyfriends or girlfriends or AI sexy chat, which is the whole big thing now. So you can’t do that on these phones. So it’s easing them into having a phone in a way that makes a lot more sense for a 13, 14, even 15-year-old than a total smartphone
Justin Baeder, PhD (18:17):
And almost like a learner’s permit for driving. Right? There’s a little bit of ability to communicate, but it’s progressive. It builds up over time, and it’s not just hitting kids with the full internet and all of social media and every app in existence right out of the gate. Exactly.
Jean Twenge, PhD (18:33):
Yep.
Justin Baeder, PhD (18:33):
It really is remarkable having just been in an airport to see how much kids are on phones, even as babies. Kids are kind of glued to the screen from infancy Now in a lot of cases, and I know your book focuses primarily on students having their own phones, which you say 10 or 11 is far too early. We’ve got to phase this in and at much later ages, but phones are not the only technology that you talk about. You talk a little bit about gaming consoles, and especially for our purposes in schools, laptops, often school laptops are a major way that students are getting online. Talk to us about some of your thoughts on school laptops and what happens during the school day with cell phones.
Jean Twenge, PhD (19:14):
Okay, well, let me rant a little first to get it out of my system. As a parent, the school laptop is the bane of my existence. You can’t put parental controls on it. Many of them, you can access YouTube. I just found out two days ago that my 13-year-old, she was able to access Disney plus on her school laptop. And that sounds like, oh yeah, they’re going to watch some Disney cartoon. It’s all a BC content. So she ended up watching some cop show where women got kidnapped, and I will stop there. There was a lot of gory details on the school laptop where I can’t, she’s supposed to be doing her homework.
(19:56):
So yeah, please administrators work with your IT departments to block Netflix and Disney Plus and all of these things, and YouTube, if you can. Now, I know YouTube can have educational purposes. I use it in my own teaching in college, but maybe that video can be incorporated in Canvas or something or some other link because kids are watching that one video for social studies class, and then it’s video after video after video on there. It’s terrible. So yeah, really, really hard to manage that school laptop where they’re supposed to be doing homework. So I think that has to be on administrator’s radar that that’s a huge, huge problem. And I know I’m not the only parent who has had that experience either, unfortunately. So I did get my kids’ personal laptops with the idea that, okay, most of the time they could do their homework on that.
(20:53):
That’s worked out for my high school student. But my middle school student, they, and I don’t blame the administrators for this, they banned the personal laptops for taking them to school. I totally get why, but then that at least you can put parental controls on it, which I strongly recommend because most of the time, if you follow the rules as I have them roughly laid out, your kid’s not going to have an internet enabled phone until they’re older. But for homework and other things, they’re going to need some access to the internet. But if you don’t put parental controls on it, they can very easily open social media accounts, access, pornography access, all kinds of other sites. There’s a bunch of sites out there that tell girls how to starve themselves. Anorexia websites, they’re everywhere. So you’ll need to have those parental controls in place to block those. And I think a lot of parents think of the laptop, oh, they’re going to do homework, not really processing. I certainly didn’t at first that you got to have some filtering on this, otherwise it’s going to be a big problem.
Justin Baeder, PhD (21:52):
Let’s talk just briefly about some of the other platforms that are out there, because often we think of video games as just a thing that comes on a cartridge and you just are playing it by yourself. But that’s often not the case anymore with gaming.
Jean Twenge, PhD (22:04):
So most games kids these days will play them on laptops, sometimes on consoles, but they’ll play them with friends. So that’s very common. So Roblox works that way. Minecraft does too. And so it’s not as obviously toxic as social media say, because those games, they’re often playing with friends and interacting with them usually through voice in real time, and that’s kind of cool. However, you still got to worry about time limits because that’s fine for an hour a day or so. But if you let a kid do that unlimited, you’re going to have a hard time getting them to do their homework or see people in person or go out and exercise or do anything else for a lot of kids. So I recommend that if that is something your kid enjoys, especially if they enjoy doing it with friends, that’s cool, but put a time limit on it, maybe an hour a day at most on weekdays and two hours on the weekend. That part, the exact role is going to depend on the kids. My kids, it’s 30 minutes on weekdays and one hour a day on weekend days,
Justin Baeder, PhD (23:09):
And hopefully it is friends. I think that’s worth looking into as well.
Jean Twenge, PhD (23:12):
That’s the other piece. Yeah, right, because right. The other thing, those platforms, unknown adults can enter Roblox, and there’s all kinds of predators. Social media too, a lot. I think a lot of people don’t realize just how easy it is for unknown adults to contact children on most social media platforms.
Justin Baeder, PhD (23:33):
I wonder if we could close by talking a little bit about the school day, because you point out in the book that there’s a little bit of hypocrisy among Silicon Valley tech executives who send their kids to extremely low tech schools who don’t give them devices, who have them interact in the real world and do work with pencil and paper, and yet they’re the ones developing these platforms that absorb so much of our attention and so much of our kids’ attention. What do you think the school day should look like and what is happening in schools with electronics that deviates from that vision that you have?
Jean Twenge, PhD (24:05):
Yeah, so let’s start with smartphones. So a lot of states, school districts are increasingly coming around to the idea that we should not allow phones during the school day belt belt. So not just classroom to classroom, not just during instructional time, but the whole school day, including lunch and breaks and so on. So the benefits there are then it’s more consistent. It’s kind of like some of the other rules in the book that you have one simple rule, it’s actually easier to enforce, and then it’s also not teachers love it, then it’s not, oh, the cool teacher lets me have my phone, and then the not cool teacher doesn’t let me have my phone. And then what some of my teachers have done, oh, you can use your phone if you finish your work. Oh my God, really? Because how’s that going to go with your average 15-year-old?
(24:57):
Then they’re going to rush through their work and then be on their phone. So if it’s the whole school day, then they talk to each other at lunch. Then there’s not the drama of the social media during the breaks that gets people going and fighting. There’s not, and you mentioned this earlier, there’ve been all kinds of discipline incidents at schools too, where kids are filming each other in the locker room or under the stall in the bathroom and then posting it, thinking it’s funny because they’re kids and they’re going to do dumb things, but let’s not give them the ability to do those dumb things. If they don’t have access to their phone during the school day, that problem should go away. Then if they have the phone, then you already know something is going
Justin Baeder, PhD (25:40):
Wrong. So the way for the day is the way to go. And I certainly have appreciated from the school perspective when states step up a little bit and say, alright, we’re not even going to leave this up to the individual school. We’re going to back you up and not make you the bad guy. We’re going to be the bad guy and say, statewide, we’re just going to have phones away for the day. I think that’s not always a popular policy, but I like it for that same reason that it takes the heat off of us and allows us to just have fewer arguments, just do what we’re here to do, which is just teach and learn, and that’s what it’s about. Speaking as a parent, and particularly a parent who remembers being a kid or a teen in the eighties, early nineties, what is some of what we experienced in those decades that you wanted and want your kids to experience Now, even though we’re completely surrounded by technology?
Jean Twenge, PhD (26:30):
Well, for one thing, speak of no phones during the school day. It would be great if kids and teens could have the experience that Gen X kids had in the eighties and early nineties where they got a break from their parents during the school day.
Justin Baeder, PhD (26:47):
Not what I thought you were going to say, but I see where you’re going.
Jean Twenge, PhD (26:49):
Yeah, because heard about this a lot from both students and parents and also teachers. There was an op-ed by a teacher, which was very eyeopening to me. I think she teaches freshman English at a high school, and she said she’s had students where the parents are texting all the time of, Hey, how’d that test go? Did you get your grade back on this? And you asked most parents, most of whom are Gen Xers who have kids that age, would you have liked it if your parents could have contacted you at every second during the school day? And the answer is usually, heck no. I’m really glad that that wasn’t going on, because it stresses kids out a lot of times. And it can also be, even if they’re stressed from something else and then they’re reaching out to mom or dad, then they’re not learning how to deal with that on their own, which they’re going to have to do eventually.
(27:36):
And some of this perspective too is from teaching college and talking to a lot of people who work on college campuses, everywhere I go, they say, I have more and more students who can’t make even simple decisions without texting their parents. And these are adults, but that’s set up during high school. And some of that is the phone. Some of it is that parents have not given their kids the same freedoms that they had when they were children and teenagers. So rule eight in the book is give your kids real world freedom because you’re going to raise an adult. It’s not just reasonable limits around phones. It’s also that they need to have those experiences of being independent to build resilience. So when they’re really young, that could be you’re in the grocery store and you say, Hey, I need the mac and cheese. It’s the next style over. Can you go grab it for me? Or having them help around the house when they’re older, they can go into the grocery store themselves, pick out a few things, and pay with the credit card and talk to the cashier. Even though that’s cringe. And I know that from my own kids, walk or bike to school, get that driver’s license when they’re old enough, go out with their friends, have those independent experiences so they’re not getting to college like I heard about this recently and not knowing how to use a washing machine among other things,
Justin Baeder, PhD (28:55):
More experience in the real world, less online. Love it. So the book is 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World. Dr. Twenge, if people want to follow your work or learn more about your many books, where’s the best place for them to go online?
Jean Twenge, PhD (29:10):
So I have a website, jean twenge.com, so J-E-A-N-T-W-E-N-G e.com. And that has a little bit about each of the books and the speaking engagements that I do, some of my op-eds and videos, podcasts, and so on.
Justin Baeder, PhD (29:27):
Thank you so much. It’s important work, and I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you today. Thanks for your time.
Jean Twenge, PhD (29:31):
Thank you.
Announcer (29:32):
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at Principal Center dot com slash radio.