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--:-- Host: I felt like I needed to keep my kid off of social media and away from phone and away from technology. Kids create much more what we call solitary space around a tablet.
--:-- Host: At some point between the ages of two and three, we decided to give our daughter her first phone. I'm John Gwlin-Hill. this is Explain It to Me from Vox.
--:-- Host: And this is Adam Clark Estes.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: So my wife and I had a kid a couple years ago. And since then, I've not been able to stop thinking about how she's going to grow up in a world dominated by tech.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Adam's been covering our tech-dominated world for years now. He's a senior tech correspondent here at Vox and writes a newsletter called User-Friendly.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: It's generally about how technology works in our lives and works for us and against us sometimes.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But I'm increasingly interested in what tech is doing to the next generation.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Yes, Adam is an expert, but he's a parent first and foremost. And even he's still trying to figure out how his own toddler should be interacting with screens.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Many of you are asking the same questions and coming up with a lot of different answers.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I do let them watch TV every day in the morning. I feel OK about it. I don't feel great about it.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: We are a no-screens household, so we have no screens on our main living level by choice.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: We've been forced to give him the iPad every now and then just so we can get things done.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And we have seen a significant improvement in his math skills.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But if I was really being honest, I believe the only positive relationship between technology and toddlers is them not having any relationship at all.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Not too long ago, Adam set out on a journey to figure out if there's actually an expert consensus on early childhood and screens.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Today, he's going to tell us about that journey, from the history of our concern to a surprising pro-screens argument he discovered.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Plus, we'll talk about how to navigate the overwhelming variety of content made for kids these days.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And finally, whether all Adam's reporting has changed his own decision-making about his toddler and her tech.
--:-- Host: Okay, tell me what your kid is like, Adam.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: My daughter is amazing. She's super curious, very cheerful, and she's interested in tech.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: She's always asking to see pictures of her grandma on my phone.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Oh, she loves her grandma. Yeah, or she might just love the alluring glow of a smartphone screen. I don't know.
--:-- Host: Do I have my finger on the pulse of where we are when it comes to toddlers and phones?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: It's definitely generally frowned upon. Like you hear about iPad kids.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I want the iPad. Take away your iPad. Yeah. Give me the iPad.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Or your friend might roll their eyes seeing, you know, a family of four eating dinner at a restaurant and the kids are just staring at tablets or smartphones.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: People aren't even attempting to raise their kids anymore.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I don't know when it started, but I think the delivery room is just giving out iPads.
--:-- Host: Yo, don't let your kid just be on his iPad. They don't listen. They don't listen.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Yeah, I admit that when I see a kid on an iPad at a restaurant, I judge because I'm like, I'm not going to give my imaginary children an iPad.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But I also don't have any kids. I have not faced that actual hurdle, you know.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I feel like I'm going to be facing a new hurdle every day for the rest of my life in some respects.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But when it comes to tech, I think the big challenge here is that it is constantly changing.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And these are new challenges. We don't have clear answers on what the right thing to do is.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: As a parent, it feels very scary.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: How did we get here? What's the history of, like, kids and this smartphone technology we have now?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I'm tempted to go back to the early 80s and Nintendo, when I think that parents first got worried about technology and video games and screens and kids.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: You could even go back further to the introduction of television. Or even back further to the introduction of radio.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: As long as technology has been around, we have worried about kids using it, especially using it too much, being too influenced by it.
--:-- Host: Yeah, I remember this book, like reading this book when I was little. It was called The Boy with Square Eyes.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And it was about a boy who watched way too much TV. So his eyes turned square.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: So he needed to like read and play outside because the TV was bad and he was watching too much of it.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I feel like I was the boy with square eyes.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But anyways, to kind of like jump forward to this century, smartphones really began in 2007 with the iPhone.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: A big turning point was when Instagram came out. That was 2010.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And then Facebook, which was already a huge social media giant in 2012, bought Instagram and supercharged the growth.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And so Instagram was a platform that young people really liked, very young, teenagers and younger, even though legally you have to be 13 to have an Instagram account, kids find their way.
--:-- Host: Fast forward a few years and a lot of researchers, psychologists, teachers in school, experts got worried about what they defined as a mental health crisis in young people.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: The review of research confirms what many parents have long feared. Social media use is linked with mental distress, self-harm and even suicide.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: For decades, there's been that Surgeon General's warning on packs of cigarettes.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But this morning, for the first time, a new warning about something else. Social media and what it means for kids' mental health.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: The rates of anxiety and depression were really shooting up all in this generation that grew up with smartphones and with apps and with social media.
--:-- Host: Yeah, you know, I think we think a lot of the time about, like, teenagers when it comes to smartphones and social media and stuff.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But what about toddlers? What's going on with them in these screens?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: As I've seen with my own kid, toddlers are developing the basic skills of life.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Their brains are in a very early stage. They're learning vocabulary. They're learning basic social interaction.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And what researchers have consistently found is that time just spent staring at screens is time when they aren't working on those skills.
--:-- Host: What kind of brought this conversation about young people and technology into the forefront? Is there a particular book or study or something that really set this off?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: There is a book that has become a movement. The book is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: He's an NYU professor who wrote about that mental health crisis that researchers picked up on a few years ago and really connected it to the rise of social media and how that also is coincided by a decline in traditional play, playing outside, being friends with people in real life, the kinds of interactions that he had or maybe you and I had growing up.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: He really argued that those are disappearing and it's doing tremendous damage to a young generation.
--:-- Host: I should say that that book was very, very popular. It was on the New York Times bestseller list.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And that movement has really taken off.
--:-- Host: Well, in less than a week, Central Texas students will be heading back to class and they'll have to deal with some new rules. Put your phones away. That's the new law impacting every kid in every school in New York.
--:-- Host: OK, so I'm curious where all of this leaves you as both a tech reporter and a parent.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Like, where do you fall on whether to give your kid a phone or not and when to give your kid a phone?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Well, I read The Anxious Generation when it came out, and it blew me away.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And I felt like I needed to keep my kid off of social media and away from phone and away from technology and only playing in the woods for as long as possible.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But then I started to do my own research, and I started to report on this a little bit.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Then I started to report on it a lot and talked to a lot of experts about this.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And I started to see a different picture.
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--:-- Host: Have you ever had one of those workouts where you finish and wonder, did that actually make me stronger?
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--:-- Host: Okay, we're back. This is Explain It To Me.
--:-- Host: And before the break, Adam left us with a cliffhanger about his reporting on toddlers and screens.
--:-- Host: I just talked to so many researchers who had a more nuanced idea of what was happening with kids in tech.
--:-- Host: And those researchers largely disagreed with Haidt in this idea that you should keep tech away from kids as long as possible.
--:-- Host: Then I talked to this professor, Andrew Shabilsky.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I'm a university professor of human behavior and technology at the University of Oxford.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I've been pretty keenly focused on this idea of how do you actually raise kids around tech in a way that, you know, doesn't give in to kind of all these stories about tech being either amazing or terrible.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And he told me something really surprising.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: We decided to actually give our kids access to tech quite early.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: This is something that my wife and I talked and thought a whole lot about.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And really kind of at some point between the ages of two and three, we decided to give our daughter her first phone.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Three? Like a three-year-old, like one, two, three.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Yeah, and not tablets, but specifically phones.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And he explained to me that, you know, you don't put your kid on an adult-sized bike and roll them down a hill where they don't know how to ride.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Like you get them a small bike with training wheels.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: In order to have an idea of kind of what kind of journey our daughter would have and later our son, we reflected on our own experiences, how we kind of encountered technology in the 80s and 90s.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And it was a bit of a gradual drip, drip, drip.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And so, you know, our daughter, she didn't get a phone with all of its features on day one.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: She was curious about our family.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: So at the start, it was a photo gallery of her, you know, members of her family that live here in Europe. and all across the world.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Then it became a camera so they could take pictures of their own.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And then he added podcasts and music.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And eventually, when they were older, they got the ability to text and make phone calls with select people, with their parents and grandparents, and eventually friends.
--:-- Host: Okay, podcasts. All right. Yeah, you should totally let your baby listen to explain it to me.
--:-- Host: But okay, a practical question. Is it easy to tweak a smartphone's settings to limit what kids can access?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: It's work. I would like to say it's easy, but it does require effort for the parents to go in and do it.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But Apple and Google have parental controls built into the operating systems that are on 99% of the phones in the world.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And they're designed to do just this to make it easy for parents to take apps away or limit time on apps.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: You can even buy phones that are designed to have even more flexibility.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Like there's a company called Pinwheel that sells phone software that gives you really granular control over what's happening with your kid's phone.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: It makes it easy to actually like turn stuff on as they get older and sort of need more tools.
--:-- Host: I can kind of see, you know, your kid wants to look at pictures, take photos, and that's great.
--:-- Host: But given the option of like looking at pictures of their grandparents are going to play outside, shouldn't we push them in the direction of that second option?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Why not both? It's a great question.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And I think that this notion that all screen time is bad is incorrect, but it also doesn't mean that only screen time is good, if that makes sense.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Like, you don't want to give your kids unlimited access to really anything.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: The central idea here always is you know making sure that like tech is part of your larger parenting agenda It part of those larger hard conversations that you going to have
--:-- Host: I'm happy to say we don have screen time rules really in our house because we've got lots of other stuff going on.
--:-- Host: And if we take a long flight, yeah, if we're visiting our family in Japan, our kids are going to play video games for 12 hours.
--:-- Host: And that's okay because it's a horrible long flight.
--:-- Host: That's not the same as being permissive, right?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Like the hope here is this isn't about like saying no to the online world.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: It's about teaching our kids how to say both yes and no for themselves because there's going to be a time when we're not going to be around and we've got to help equip them so that they can equip themselves.
--:-- Host: I'm curious what positive screen time actually looks like.
--:-- Host: Like, I don't know. I watched a lot of TV growing up.
--:-- Host: Like, I was also the girl with square eyes.
--:-- Host: And I would be sitting on top of, like, the big box television.
--:-- Host: And my mom would tell me, like, stop, like, sit back, go read a book.
--:-- Host: And I did do a lot of reading.
--:-- Host: I also wore glasses, probably also in part because I would read in terrible lighting.
--:-- Host: But I just but I do know that there were positive ways like I don't know I also watched a lot of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues and things like that and I just wonder what positive screen time looks like for kids nowadays if you can picture the opening screen of a Sesame Street episode that's what it looks like still sunny day sweeping the clouds away On my way to where the air is sweet Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: There's a ton of research that goes back decades, thanks to Sesame Street, that it's good for kids.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Kids that watched Sesame Street showed up to kindergarten better prepared.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And that was true in 1970, and it's still true today.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: So it feels like a bit of a cop-out to say that what can kids do on a screen that is good and for me to say education.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But it's also true.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And there's growing research that actually even just the design of phones and tablets helps kids learn in a different way.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Like having a touchscreen where they can interact with what's happening on the screen is helpful, especially for learning vocabulary and language building.
--:-- Host: You should handpick what you want your kid to be able to watch.
--:-- Host: You can make a YouTube playlist and give them access to just that.
--:-- Host: Handpick it. Pick it with your kid.
--:-- Host: And don't give them access to infinite anything.
--:-- Host: Don't expose them to algorithms that are designed to keep them watching.
--:-- Host: Because, again, their brains aren't developed.
--:-- Host: They have a hard time putting stuff down.
--:-- Host: Especially when they're young, kids should have a limited amount of content available.
--:-- Host: Coming up next, what about all that content for toddlers these days? How to separate the good from the slop.
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--:-- Host: When it comes to content to watch, kids have way more options than I did when I was little.
--:-- Host: There are the classics, of course, like Sesame Street, but there's also YouTube.
--:-- Host: According to Pew Research, over 80% of parents with children between two and four say their kids watch YouTube, and that number is a little over 60% for parents with kids under two.
--:-- Host: To get a better sense of what those kids and their parents might be running into out there, we brought in an expert.
--:-- Host: I am Jenny Radesky.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: I am a developmental behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan Medical School.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Jenny's also a media researcher and one of the directors of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: She has a pretty good handle of the children's media landscape these days.
--:-- Host: So what are the kids watching?
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Well, it's really different. Like, I grew up in the 80s when, you know, we would go watch Saturday morning cartoons all huddled together while my parents slept.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: It was usually a bunch of fun, entertaining stuff like super friends.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: In the great hall of the Justice League, there are assembled the world's four greatest heroes.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Superman, looks like you flew all this way for nothing.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Wrong, Wonder Woman. I flew all this way for you.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: And it was not on demand. There was a time and a place when technology could be watched.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: And that's what's really different about today.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: That's one main difference is now we have on demand, just like endless content.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: And we have marketplaces and platforms where these pieces of content are competing for kids attention.
--:-- Host: That's so interesting. Can you rank the best for children's media out there?
--:-- Jenny Radesky: You know, I'm thinking everything from TV to that YouTube algorithm.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: What is good content and why is it good content?
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Our research team at the University of Michigan and I collaborate with folks at Georgetown, University of Wisconsin, Brigham Young University, we've gotten together to try to create a coding scheme that means just what are the reliable aspects of kids' media that meet definitions for quality.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: And it could be quality around educational, like this can teach you something.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: It could be quality just for like lovely storytelling that's like meaningful to a child.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: But we also code for things like designs that just try to capture attention.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: We call this bedazzling. Like it's just this extra stuff that's on a YouTube video, but it often is kind of shallow and it's really just gimmicky, you know, attention grabbing content.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: We have now watched thousands and thousands of YouTube videos ranging from Sesame Street to AI generated slop.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: And I say AI generated slop is definitely at that bottom
--:-- Jenny Radesky: You know if you ever see a video that just looks like a computer like, bunch of cars being driven by Spider-Man and Elsa and the Hulk crashing into a bunch of soccer balls, like, that's the worst.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: and not worth your kids' time and attention.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: But it's just all the sort of gimmicky things that kids want to click on.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: So that's why it trends in the algorithm in those sorts of videos have just billions of views.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: The really best stuff, the stuff that is clearly made with some care and some thoughtfulness is still the Sesame Street's, the PBS Kids stuff like Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: And then there's some newcomers like Bluey and Miss Rachel.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Hi, friends. Who wants to play a game? Okay, bingo. Let's do this. Try to magic my ears.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: They are showing signs of really meeting kids where they're at.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: They might be slower paced. They might have a good sense of humor.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: They tell stories that are meaningful to a child's experience.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: And that is one way that we define good content.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Like it is reflecting back the world that children are in to children and helping them make meaning of it.
--:-- Host: You got your bluey, you got all these things. I got to ask about Cocomelon.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Cocomelon! Autumn veggies start out small.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Where does Cocomelon fall in the spectrum of children's entertainment?
--:-- Jenny Radesky: You know, to speak like my 16-year-old son, Cocomelon's pretty mid.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: It's like, and it gets middling scores from our team of coders because it is, you know, kind of surface level educational content.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Everybody's happy. We're helping each other in the house. You know, we're going to the beach and the popsicles never melt and I never get sand in my toes.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: There's no friction. And life is full of friction for little kids.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Even kids need conflict. Even kids need conflict in their media.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Every developmentalist all assumed there'd be a little bit of developmental friction in kids' life.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: And that's both how kids grow skills, but it's also how they grow their sense of self.
--:-- Host: We don't need to spoon feed kids.
--:-- Host: We've talked about what kids watch, but what about how kids watch?
--:-- Host: You know, we got a question from a listener. Hi, my name is Liz. And I'm going to quote it for you. When we go on vacation and we're using the iPad instead of the TV, the reaction when we turn it off is so much more amplified and so much more emotional.
--:-- Host: And I'm wondering if there's any data behind small screens like iPads and phones versus big screens like a TV.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: That's a great question. What we have found, we've done a little bit of research comparing when kids read off of a print book versus a tablet, or when they play physical games versus digital games.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Kids create much more what we called solitary space around a tablet.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: Like it's just it's just me and this tablet me and this little sensory cocoon hanging out you know playing this game they don't see it as a shared object the same way that a tv or a deck of cards um you know or a print book is seen as a shared object by young kids
--:-- Jenny Radesky: And when I say it's seen as there's so much informal learning that children do in early childhood informal learning means I'm observing the world around me and I'm learning what the unwritten rules are about the way things work.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: And so we can really teach kids media is for sharing. It's for sitting around a TV. It's not for when each of us is stressed out and doesn't want to talk to each other.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: We all ignore each other by staring at our phones.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: We can set those norms, make it predictable, make it shared if you can, or at least in like a shared space so you can monitor and also make it not just whenever your child is fussing.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: If your child is, you know, used to being calmed down or managed behaviorally by media, that could create a dependence on like every time I feel stressed, I need media.
--:-- Jenny Radesky: And really in early childhood, it's such a great opportunity for kids to learn other emotional awareness and coping skills.
--:-- Host: Dr. Ginny Radesky and her colleagues at the University of Michigan have a toolkit coming out for parents all about kids' media.
--:-- Host: You can find a link to it in our show notes.
--:-- Host: Okay, y'all, we are back with senior tech correspondent Adam Clark-Estes.
--:-- Host: Adam, you set out on this journey to figure out what's the deal with kids and phones.
--:-- Host: You have your own toddler. And at the beginning, you were a little like, probably not going to give her a smartphone.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Where do you land now?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: It would be great if I had a clear answer, but I actually think that I've got a great foundation for a conversation that we have to have in our family.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I need to talk to my wife about this, see what she really thinks.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I need to let my daughter grow up a little bit more.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Will I give her a phone at age three? I don't think so.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But will I wait till she's 13? Definitely not.
--:-- Host: Is this like a roundabout way of saying your wife is going to make the call?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Because that's how it kind of was in my family.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I'd be like, Dad, can I have such and such? And she'd be like, let me check with your mom.
--:-- Host: Yes, this is a roundabout way of me saying that I need to ask my wife.
--:-- Host: That's real. You know what that is? That's partnership. That's marriage. That's healthy.
--:-- Host: That's what, I know that's right.
--:-- Host: We have an upcoming conversation about medicine and AI.
--:-- Host: We want to know, have you used ChatGPT to self-diagnose? Was it right or did you get it all wrong?
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--:-- Host: This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, and it was edited by Megan Kanan.
--:-- Host: Fact-checking was by Melissa Hirsch, and it was engineered by Adrienne Willey.
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--:-- Host: I'm your host, John Glyn Hill.
--:-- Host: I'll talk to you soon. Bye! Bye.
