A Better Way for Parents to talk to Teens About Screen Time: Fear Less & Wonder More

If we're focusing on our kids' phone and panicking about that, we risk missing the child that's holding it. That's the message from this week's Wednesday talk with an expert, Professor Candace Odgers. If you haven't heard it yet, don't miss it. Honestly, it kind of flipped the script for what we are being repeatedly told about what's causing harm to our kids. Don't get me wrong, there are dangers. I don't love social media at all. And I love that Jonathan Haidt has turned up the pressure on everyone to think and do something. But looking at what's happened after the teen ban on social media in Australia, where over 80% of 10 to 15 year olds say they're still on the platforms, it's becoming clear that bans don't work to fix the problems we're having. Candace put it perfectly, you can't ban your way out of a mental health crisis. You have to build instead. That's great in theory, but we parents on the front line, we want someone to tell us what to do and how to talk to our teenagers. Am I right? That's what today's Wonder Room is all about. Brilliant Catherine Radice, author and educational consultant and mum of teens, is here again. Hi, Catherine. Good morning. Now you listened to the interview. You have some fantastic suggestions for getting our teens opening up instead of shutting them down. And by the end of this, I'm just going to tell you, listeners, you'll have things that you can try tonight. For the full notes, click the links to find me and Catherine on Substack and don't forget to like, share, follow, and review the podcast. Every single action helps us build this community. Now, Catherine, what was the key message that came through for you?

I think when she said the phones can be a big distraction in the debate, that really struck home. Because as a parent, it's really easy. You know, if you think there's something going a little bit wrong, you're not sure if your teenager is, you know, going in the right path, it's very tempting to look just at the phone because there's so much heat around that phone debate and think, I can see they're on TikTok, that's why school's not going well, the problem is the phone. What I've got to do is take action and I've got to ban it. And if you just go straight to the phone, then you don't step back and wonder and think, actually, what is going on with my child? Because if they're using their phone too much or in the wrong way, it will partly be because the phone is easy and attractive, and we all know that. But it will also be that there's something else that needs attention. And so I thought that idea of we have to pause and ask actually what is the relationship with that tech like and why? That was the bit that made me think, do you know what? Every parent would be benefited by pausing and asking themselves that question.

Yeah, I love that. And Candice said this, Dr. Lucy Fuchs said this when I interviewed her, Catherine Nibbs said this, that actually, if things are not going well offline, it's amplified online. They'll be going online to try and find answers to deaden the pain or the discomfort. So one of the things we can do is we can go, okay, like you said, let's wonder why they are doing this. So, what do you think about this debate between controlling and monitoring versus understanding?

The challenge with the control and the monitoring is that's the thing that every parent thinks they should be doing. And, you know, I'll be really upfront and say when I watch my own teenage boys with phones in their hands, there's a bit of me that thinks, am I monitoring enough? Should I be controlling more? You know, every online safety talk I've been to, you know, either professionally or as a parent listening to what schools are providing, the message typically is as a parent, you've got to be on it, you've got to know what they're doing, you've got to set up the parental controls. You know, so we're kind of skewed in that direction. But the big problem with the controlling and monitoring angle is that if you put your focus on that bit, how many hours, what apps, and so on, what you don't notice is the relationship that they have with those apps. Because the fact is, you know, a teenager could be online for eight hours, or they could be online for one hour. And that data in and of itself, it doesn't show you if their relationship with it is problematic. Because a kid could be on online for eight hours because they have eight hours spare and everything else is going just fine and they're doing entirely innocuous stuff. And a child could be on for one hour and be developing a really toxic relationship with it. So, you know, the apps and the time don't give you the most important information, which is how is your child feeling about what they're doing, what are those interactions like, and what is happening to them in that time. So it's that bit. Can we stand back and think about the relationship that I think as parents, our attention is probably better spent in that direction?

I love that. So it's actually refocusing our attention, not saying that the controls are useless and not important, is actually saying, well, yes, you can have that stuff in place. But actually, what's more important is relating to our kids. And I often ask my kids what they're watching, who they're following, what they like, but in a way that you're just sitting with them and saying, wow, who who do you like? Oh, you're listening to that music. Tell me more, why do you like them? And it gives them a chance to talk about the spaces they inhabit without thinking that we're gonna pounce on them or shut them down. So is that giving that air and hearing what they think? Um, I interviewed both my girls about their screen time use and what they did because I thought, look, I want to model this, I want to show parents what it's like. My daughter said, ask your child or have a look at their for you page. Because that is where the algorithms are pointing for your child. So if you're able to see their for you page, you'll get a sense of the sorts of things that have been pushed at them because that's what they've been looking at. Isn't that interesting?

Absolutely. And I think the thing that's worth us, you know, kind of pausing on at this point is those conversations about what they're doing online, they can be really difficult to have. Because unfortunately, the conversation is kind of loaded in advance. Because by the time your child is, you know, 12, 13, 14, whatever, they know that the basic adult world already has a view on screen time. They're used to that kind of adult positioning, whether or not you personally are doing it, they're used to that adult positioning being a bit kind of fearful, negative, you know, forbidden fruit, you know, if they had controlled screen time when they were young, which I would totally and utterly advocate. But the fact is, if it has been controlled, then it is in that little bit of a space of, you know, you can only do so much before actually it becomes problematic. And so that really important question of, you know, what are you watching? If by the time your child is 14, 15, 16, it can be quite difficult to get an honest answer. And therefore, actually, it means as parents, we've got to think if we're gonna have the type of conversations that allow us to understand whether that online space is good or bad for our child, we've got to structure them in a way that's gonna make it possible for our children to be honest with us. And that's maybe more difficult than we realise.

And I think it's about dealing with our own fears first. So it because the problem is they'll say things and we will instantly react. We'll instantly think, oh no, that sounds terrible, that's very scary, no, no, no, no, no. And we have to have those conversations when we feel calm enough to not suddenly jump in, to not suddenly say, Oh, that's terrible, why are you doing that, you know, and making judgment calls because they don't need another judge or a policeman, they need somebody who's gonna hold their hand and go, oh that sounds hard, or that's interesting, why did you choose that? And it's this kind of getting into that wonder space in our mindset. And you were brought up wonderfully. I love some of your anecdotes. And one of the things you talked about was the question of lying, because kids will lie. Um, in fact, when I did the research for my episode about lying, it's very, very normal for teenagers to lie. But you have a really interesting thought about this.

Yeah, so so my mum is a wonderful woman. And when I grew up as a teenager, you know, like any teenager, there was plenty of stuff that I didn't tell my parents. But there was never a moment where I told a direct lie. And I got to maybe early 20s and I was thinking about this, and I was having a chat with my mum, and I said to her mum, by the way, do you realise that in all of my teenage years I never told you a direct lie? And I thought what she would do is say, Oh, that's so marvellous, I'm so proud of you, you know, kind of pat on the bat, because no matter how old we are, a bit of praise from my mum's is always, always what we want. Yes. And in fact, she turned around and said, Don't you realise that I never asked you a question that required you to lie to me? Wow. And I was like, whoa, kind of, you know, magician's mirrors suddenly displayed. And it really made me think because actually there are quite a lot of questions that we ask our children that often do force a lie. And if we do that, then there's a it kind of makes the honesty even harder, right? Because honesty to a parent is tricky anyway. But if to be honest, you have to untangle the lies first. It's even harder. So you know, if as a parent you say, you know, you're not watching anything to do with the manosphere, are you? And you ask a question like that, which is so loaded in one direction, the chances are any teenage boy will have seen something, this manosphere adjacent. You know, of course they will have done. So if you ask a question that's really loaded in one direction, the chances are your child is gonna say, no, mum, no, you know, it's fine.

And so actually, And then you stop the entire conversation, it can never be brought up again.

It's closes right down. So I've become really interested in my work with parents and also my work as a teacher, right? Because if you're a teacher, you have to think how are you going to cultivate honesty. I've become really interested in the idea of how can you have a dialogue with your children that doesn't just promote honesty but also doesn't actually drive them into a place of deceit. I think that's really worth thinking about.

And I think what's so interesting and what makes you such a good person to talk to for me is my parents didn't ask me questions I had to lie to because they didn't ask me mostly what I was doing. And so it's trying to find that fine line, like being a loving parent who guides your child, isn't it? And I think parents, what they're worried about is what are my kids seeing that I don't know about? And behind that phone is this sense that their kids are online lives or a black box that we can't see into. And the question is, if something goes wrong, how do we get them to come to us? How can we guide them? And and that's a tricky path to tread, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. And I think, you know, if you are a loving parent, and the chances are if you're listening to this podcast, then you know, you absolutely are, right? Because you're in thinking, you know, you kind of you want to be that good parent. Um, if you are a loving parent, sometimes the honesty actually gets a little bit harder because my parents were great parents. I was so blessed in them. But as a result, I really cared what they thought of me. And still to this day, you know, if I have to, if I think, oh, I might do something and it might disappoint my parents, you know, it's like there's something in my stomach that crunches up, you know. So actually, if we are loving, committed parents and you know, we know we're trying to do a good job and we know that our relationship with our children is basically good, then we've also got to be really alert that that in and of itself can create a barrier to honesty. Because one of the biggest reasons why teenagers don't talk to a trusted adult is because they fear it's gonna change the relationship in some way. And often teenagers feel highly ashamed if something's gone wrong. They are really worried about their parents' response, and that response doesn't have to be, you know, anger and punitive punishment. They might just be worried that their parent will think differently about them. So, in that calmness, as a parent, your child has to believe that they could put something out there that is ugly, and that you as a parent wouldn't think that they are ugly as a result, but there's just something that they need help with. And that is a really important bit of the dynamic. How can we encourage honesty that allows our children to know that if something does go a little bit wrong, we still love them just the same, and we are very realistic about the fact that really good people still make mistakes sometimes, and our role is to be there and help them through.

Oh, that message just gold. It's so, so important. And I think about it as um holding up their North Star until they can see it themselves and believe in it because our kids are going to fail time and time again. It's part of being a teenager. As do we, and being realistic about it and not panicking, what sort of parent behaviours do you tend to see that shut down that honesty? I think there are a couple.

I think I think the first one is whether or not your child thinks you'll listen. So I open one of the chapters in my book actually. There's a chapter about constructive conversations, and I open with the idea that as a teacher, whenever someone has shared with me in a pastoral capacity something that's really very difficult, and I say, Have you told your parents? Typically the answer is no, because they're telling me. And when I say, Well, why not? Often what they say is, oh, they wouldn't understand, or it'd be pointless, you know, they wouldn't listen. And actually, the parent really does want to understand, but the child might feel there's no point in telling you if conversations don't routinely have the space for them to explain. So the behaviors are things like if your child tells you something and you instantly respond and you go into action mode as opposed to let's listen a little bit longer, then that creates a dynamic where your child might think, oh, they're probably not going to listen because whatever I say is gonna suddenly snowball into a reaction. So that would be kind of behavior one, you know, being too quick to respond.

This is why I don't tell you anything. Yes.

Exactly. You know, too quick to respond and not listening for long enough. But the second behavior, and this is the bit that's really relevant to screens, is when a situation feels prejudged. So, you know, I'm a mum of teenage boys, like any mum of teenage boys, you know, I'm thinking online porn, manosphere, you know, what's coming their way. I know the sort of stuff the algorithm might be pumping just because they are teenage boys. And if I spend too long saying, I hope you'll never ever, you know, watch the manosphere, I hope you'll never, ever, ever, it would be appalling, you know. If I prejudge it too much, then I make it really hard for my teenage boys to say, oh mum, actually I have been getting this content and I've found that I've spent longer on it than I want to. Um and therefore, although it's really important to kind of be clear about your values as a parent and so on, we have to be quite realistic about actually at some point some of this content is going to come their way. And if we prejudge it as a I'll be cross with you if you engage with it, as opposed to has it happened yet and do you want to talk about it? There's a country mile difference between those two stylings because one is full of advanced judgment and the other has the openness of as and when it happens, if it does happen, you know, as and when someone offers you drugs, which probably will happen at some point, as and when you find yourself a bit drunker than you're meant to be. You know, all of that stuff is very likely. If we are very alert to the fact it might happen and say, How can I help you with that situation? Because it's probably going to arise, that's the sort of framing that avoids the type of pre-judgment that closes a conversation down.

Oh, I love this. And I think talking about the manosphere, I did an entire episode where I looked into Andrew Tate because one of my listeners has three sons who were really getting enamoured. And I think what's so, so important, following on from what you said, is they're looking for answers to problems that they've got. And I've heard Andrew Tate quoting Nelson Mandela. And some of the things he said has been have been amazing because they've been taken from other people who are brilliant thinkers. And if you say that all of what he says is just nonsense and and terrible, then your kids are gonna think, Well, what do you know? You're you're just prejudging, you don't understand. And that's the that's that's really disconnecting, isn't it? So what we want to do is we want to try and be like, oh, that's really interesting. So what is it about that person that's attracting you to that material? What do you think it's fulfilling that you're not getting elsewhere, maybe? Yeah, exactly.

I love this whole kind of idea of as a parent try and you know fear less and wonder more. It's because, you know, whenever we have an emotional reaction to something, it's never nuanced. It's always just kind of headline. So, you know, here am I talking about the need to, you know, be open and calm about the fact that your child, you know, if they're a boy, even if they're a girl, whatever, might engage with something like the manosphere. You know, I sit here and preach about it, but I walked into the sitting room the other day and I saw that my son was watching YouTube, you know, on the TV, and I recognised an influencer from the manosphere. And I heard myself screech, he's in the manosphere, and my son's like one, getcha. He's like, he's gone. I'm watching the Louis Thoreau documentary. And so he was taking this really considered interest in what people were saying about the manosphere. But my headline reaction coming out of fear closed down that nuance. Whereas actually, if I'd walked into the room and said, Oh, who's this influencer? What's he talking about? What's your response? Then actually it would have been a much better moment because my son wouldn't have thought if I even get close to the manosphere, my mum throws her toys out the pram. You know, we have to be really wary of when our emotional response, particularly fear as a parent, means that we don't pause to think about the nuance of that situation.

Yes, and I have been looking a lot into positive psychology, and one of the things that really struck me was that we have four negative emotions. They are fear, sadness, anger, and disgust. And when we experience those emotions, millennia have bred us to have very closed, focused reactions so that we can fix the problem because it's something that could damage us or hurt us. So we get those three for free, the flight, fight, freeze, and we will use one of those things. The thing is, if you can just pause and allow that really negative emotion to dissipate, you can tap into the positive emotions because the negative emotions actually narrow your point of view and make it really hard to ask those interesting questions. So it's all about stopping. Just pause and just go, okay, I'm feeling this emotion. Where's that coming from? Let me just sweat before I say anything that's going to blow this whole thing up. And I did mention in my interview with Candice that my daughter told an example of her friend who had finally admitted to her mother that she was watching online content which was about eating disorders because she was struggling with her own eating disorder. And her mother's immediate risk response was to take away all her devices. And this is tragic because this is a loving mother who really cares about her child. The problem with that is now the daughter said to my daughter, Well, I'm never going to tell her anything ever again. Because what you do when you take away the devices is you're not just taking away, you know, access to social media, you're taking away access to their friends, you know, the things that they like to do to relax. And they don't see it the way that we see it. So we do need to be a bit more nuanced about that. It's not just about the time, it's what they're doing. And I had talked a lot to my daughters about the way that they use their devices, and it differs between different children. So there's not a one size fits all. So my older daughter, the conversations have really landed, you know, from day dot, I've talked to her about how influencers work, how social media works and things. And she's recently deleted Instagram because she just doesn't want it, she thinks it's a waste of time. The other one, not so much. She's a very dedicated um user of social media, TikToker, all that sort of stuff. So it's also that we can't just say there's here's how you do it, because children will vary enormously in their response, won't they?

Yeah, totally, totally. Which means it's a parent, we've got to think how can we generate conversations about social media or about screen time that help us actually understand what your child is doing and build the trust that means if things start to go a bit wrong, then you can sort it out. Because if we just assume it's gonna go wrong in advance, then we're not gonna have constructive conversations. We've got to actually think, okay, how can we scaffold talking about screens in a way that helps us help our children navigate it, as opposed to just assuming that if we snooze on the watch, something is going to be disastrous.

So let's go into some questions that we could share with parents that might scaffold this process. Um and you've you've come up with some lovely examples. One of them is what's attracting you to this? Um, and Catherine Nibbs says it's really important to actually, if your child's playing a game or wants to play a game, sit down and play it with them. I mean, just shoot me because some of these things are just so tedious. Right?

It's so true. And the the reason why pausing to say, tell me what you love about it. Tell me what brings you most joy when you're online, tell me which bits are most important to you. Because there's some things that teenagers do online that don't necessarily bring them joy, but are really important, like being part of conversations or being available to their friends. We really have to ask that question because the difficulty with screens is that if we think things are going wrong, and if as parents we are in a place where we do have to start really regulating what access they have. Have and why. The easiest way to control use of screens is to take the device away. I mean, that's basically the only way to properly control it, you know. And once you take the device away, everything goes. So if you start saying, I'm going to keep your device between these hours, your child might be protected from the bad stuff, but they also lose the good stuff. And one of the reasons why children are often teenagers kind of fearful that their parents are going to overreact in their response to how they're using their screen is they don't trust that their parents understand why that screen matters to them. Yes. And therefore creating space to say, tell me the good stuff, what does it offer you? What do you find useful? If you show you are ready to understand that a screen is not just a risk, then you're going to have a much better dialogue overall because your child will know that you are balanced in the way you think about that screen, as opposed to just fearful and ready to swoop in and put some sort of big kind of parental edict in place.

I think that's brilliant. And I like the question how are you showing up as your best self? Natasha Devon talked about that in uh her book, I think it's called Clicks, How to Be Your Best Self Online. And we can talk with our kids about everybody trying to be their best self online. And some of that's really positive, like being respectful of other people and asking questions when something confuses us rather than just reacting. And then there are some negative things about it where all you ever see is all the really gorgeous people having gorgeous lives, going on wonderful holidays, and you don't see any of their messy lives behind it. You were saying one of them is what's the algorithm feeding you right now?

Yeah. When we're trying to understand the relationship our children have with screens, we tend to ask, what are you doing? What are you watching? What are you spending your time with? And the problem with questions that are framed that way is it puts all of the responsibility on the child. Because if the answer is actually, I find that I'm being fed more kind of porn than I was expecting, which again will happen, right, at some point. If you say, What are you watching? It implies that the child is responsible for everything that we see. And that makes it harder to be honest. But if instead you say, What's the algorithm feeding you? What's coming your way? What's getting pushed at you? What are other people sending you? Then you open up exactly the same conversation, but with a much better framing of responsibility. Because, you know, yes, kids do go looking for stuff, but an awful lot of stuff online just lands on their screen. Yes. And actually framing that conversation with what's the algorithm pushing at you, you know, you can then talk about why is the algorithm structured in that way, what's likely to come that way, upsides and downsides of stereotype profiling, you know, and it allows a conversation where your child can talk about difficult content, but without fearing that you are then going to say the problem is you. And for most of our kids, the problem isn't them. The problem is the structure of what the tech companies are doing to keep them sucked in. So out of all the sort of questions I've found useful about screens, what is the algorithm pushing your way? I would say is the most useful question for shifting the temperature of that conversation.

And I love that because now you're sitting side by side with them looking out at the bad guys rather than being the bad guy looking at your child, uh, you know, complaining about what they're doing. Another way of approaching that is as a parent, you can say, Oh, I looked at this thing and now my algorithm's sending me all this horrible stuff. I'm gonna have to fix my algorithm, looking at other things to try and fix it, right? Because then that shows that it happens to you too, and that you totally get how this feels and how to pick up on the negative things. So, you know, I also talk to my kids about how every now and then I do an audit, you know, any of the stuff that's on social media that's not making me feel good about myself, that's revving up my anxiety, any of those things, I just go through once a month and just delete everything, get rid of them, don't want them, you know, block any of it. And I think that's a really good practice and it's something we can discuss with our kids.

Actually, sometimes in those conversations about how, you know, we as parents want to sort out our feed, it's a really great opportunity for us to own our own ignorance. Because actually, our kids are more dexterous in how they navigate the online world than we as parents are, even if we think we're tech savvy, you know, our kids have grown up with it. And one of the best ways to open up a conversation about anything is to make your teenager feel that their viewpoint is valuable. And I am totally pro, you know, the adults and the adults, the kids are the kids. We have to remember that we fundamentally are in charge. But just to maintain that doesn't require that you have to be authoritative over everything. And sometimes being willing to say, I have no idea how to fix my feed. I'm getting all of this stuff. Like I never want to wash kittens. You know, can you please like stop all the kittens in hats, you know, feed or whatever it is? Yeah, actually saying to your child, here's what I'm getting, what do you think I could do to shift what the algorithm is giving me is a really, really good way to help your child think, actually, could they make moves on their own online life that actually means their feed is what they really do want and positive as opposed to attention grabbing, but maybe negative.

Oh, I love that. And what about family screen rules and explaining them to other people?

Yeah, so so this one is interesting because another challenge in the parent-child screen dynamic is that screens are likely to be one of the pressure points for resentment. And it's entirely possible as a parent had to put rules in place that your kids don't agree with. It's quite hard to find out if it's breeding resentment if you just ask directly, because on the whole, when children are giving their opinion directly to a parent, if they are cross about something, it just comes out as an angry shout, and that's not going to be a mature debate. So if as a parent you say to your teen, if you had to describe what we do to one of your friends, how would you describe it? That's a really interesting starting point to see how your child, in their own words, describes what you do. And then if you say to them, how do you think your friend would respond? Do you think they would think what we've got is constructive or not? Then your child's got this safe space to kind of try and put something out there and see whether or not you react badly to it, knowing that they can backtrack. Because a child says, actually, I think I think my friend might think it's a bit unfair. That's much safer than saying, I think it's unfair, because they can gauge your reaction first. And if actually what comes out is actually, I think, I think my friend probably wouldn't agree, then you could be curious and say, you know, why would they think that? Would you think they were right or whatever? And provided you are calm and curious about the hypothetical friend's response, then what you're doing is you're role modelling that actually when your child gives you their response, you're probably going to be calm and curious about that. And that is basically giving permission for a mature, considered conversation, which is going to give you gold dust in understanding where your kid is, both with what they think good rules might look like and whether or not yours are those good rules.

Yeah, that's brilliant. Uh it's it's the classic, I'm asking for a friend. Um just take it all away from the personal. I asked my kids this question actually. I think they compare with their friends quite a lot. And I'm probably on the more strict, isn't the right word. I'm much more involved in their online life and discussions about what they're doing and taking their phones away at night than any of their friends. But my kids are older, but they like it. They secretly like it, like they don't tell their friends that they're just like, Oh mum, my mum takes my phone away, I can't talk to you. Um, but they actually like it because it means that they can just switch off and actually enjoy their evenings. So I think it's also worth remembering that when they're talking about it, you can say, and how does that make you feel? Do you do you think this works or doesn't work? And what are the goods and the bad about it? Because don't forget that either your kids may feel that they should push against it, but they may secretly really like it. Um maybe not, I don't know. Exactly. What about yeah, and what about using the phone to escape or avoid things? I mean, I made my my kitchen a place where they could just come and hang out. So my kids hang out in the kitchen a lot. But I would see them on their phone and there's this kind of glazed look that they get, or you can see there's a scroll going on, and I would just go up to them and say, Hey, are you stuck? And it was just a gentle way of saying, Do you want some help with that? And actually, it became a very warm, loving way of saying, get off your phone. And they didn't they didn't read it like that way at all. Because I said to them, you know, like I I get stuck too, and it's really nice if someone just interrupts that flow, you know, how how long have you been on? Are you okay? What about you? How do you ask that question? It's a really important question, right?

Because if we go back to that idea of you can't really diagnose if phone use is going wrong by looking just at the number of hours, you have to think about what that interaction is like. How stuck they get, or what they're trying to avoid, are two of the things which would be a sign that the phone use might be tipping in a way that's problematic because being online is one thing, but if it's taking time away from something else that's more valuable, then even if the phone use is sort of innocuous, the loss of the more valuable activity is a problem. So I think it's really helpful just to have those non-judgmental ways of framing that and saying, you know, are you stuck? is so much better a question than saying, How long have you been on for? Because if you say how long have you been on for, what you're implying is that your child should be noticing the time as it runs. And as we know as adults, the problem with doing this role is you you can't answer that. You don't know how long you've been on for because you've been so absorbed. And so actually having a way of talking about the situation as opposed to the fault is going to be much better. And then the other kind of interesting question to ask, because I quite often talk to my own kids about, you know, what what pulls you in the most? You know, what content are you finding like grabs your attention? You know, what do you find it harder to put down? And again, I try and ask in a very curious, non-judgmental way, because if they say, Oh, actually, I find that whenever I go on Instagram, suddenly like I'm lost for hours, then you can say, Oh, okay, is there something we could do that would help with that? You know, would it be useful for me to pop my head around the door a bit more often and say, Are you on Instagram? Oh, let's let's see, you know, what within a minute total is and you can work as a partner and a supporter as opposed to a a policeman.

And actually having a conversation with them about how much they would like you to support them. Because once you do it in this non-judgmental look, it happens to me too, where it makes it so much easier for them to come to you and say, actually, would you take my phone away? Would you do this? Um, because they know that you're not going to suddenly crack down on them. And I remember with my girls when they were younger, uh I would say to them, What have you, what have you learned? Like what you know, what great memories have you got? You know, tell me because I I'm really interested. And I would be genuinely interested, like what's and they would have nothing. And I'd say, Oh, that's such a pity. And then I'd, you know, I'd also ask them other times, like if they'd been out for the day, I'd say, What was the best thing about the day? What's the what have you learned? And they slowly started to understand that when they were on their phone, they got almost nothing. Not always nothing, because actually sometimes you can learn things and it can be great because then they share it with me and I'm like, oh, that's really amazing. Wow. And you've learned all this stuff. Because that's the other thing, isn't it? It's not the amount of time they're spending on it. Is is it constructive? Are they if they're learning things and they're following a hobby, or like my daughter uses it for artwork to grow, those are not bad things to be doing. So it's more about like, what did you get out of it? And then being genuinely interested. Yeah, absolutely.

And being really, really calm about the fact that because your teen's relationship with their screen is evolving, there may be things that take them by surprise. So, you know, a bit like that framing of, you know, are you stuck as opposed to how long have you been on? There's a similar kind of framing. If you want to sit down and you know, when you review the time spent totally, you know, you can get the metrics off the phone, you know, which apps you're on the most. And some parents kind of go into that thinking, right, I need to police and say, you spent far too long on TikTok. But you can frame it differently and say, let's see if there's any surprises. You know, what's your estimate for how long you were on different apps? Let's now check the metrics and see if there's anything that kind of catches you by surprise. Because that framing of, is there anything that's catching you by surprise? again allows you then to have a conversation about, oh, it turned out you're on TikTok for like, you know, 25 hours over the weekend, to have a conversation which is, I are you happy with that? Is that actually giving you a return on those 25 hours that you're pleased about? But if you just go into it as a and have you spent too long on it, then you're not gonna have a conversation because there's gonna be that flavor of pre-judgment that we were talking about earlier in this uh episode.

And I think that's absolutely brilliant because the response to my kids been on TikTok too long, that you've outlined, is a me problem. That's a, oh, and I'm panicking now because as a parent, I'm thinking I should have shut this down, I've done something wrong, my child's broken, and it's my fault. It's actually their problem. What we want to do is we want to create children who grow into people who take responsibility for their devices. So our job is to scaffold that. It's not to step away, it's not to tell them it's your fault. What you do is you you you make it their problem. So it's like, well, so what would you like to do about that? Are you do you feel feel you're getting value for your time? And are there other things you'd rather be doing? So slowly easing them into taking responsibility for what they're doing with their life. Because this is a whole life that they're spending online. And is that how they want to spend it? And if we ask it honestly and say, did do you feel like that was worth it? Did you grow? Did you enjoy that? You know, then then it gives them time to reflect for themselves rather than thinking you're the person who's responsible.

Yeah. And actually, you know, we as parents, I suppose what we're trying to do is we're trying to build the skills of self-review because that screen is going to be with your with your child right through their life. And if we try and regulate such that we're just leading the whole time, we're not building those critical skills in being inquisitive and reflective about whether or not that dynamic is going well. You're helping your child upskill in the sort of thinking that's going to allow them regularly just to take stock and think, actually, is my phone use healthy? Because that question of healthy phone use is not just a 16-year-old issue. It's a question that's relevant for all of us, and it's going to be relevant for all of us right through our lives. Yeah, I love that.

Well, that was a fascinating discussion. I think there's some brilliant questions uh that we've put together there. If you want um an entire breakdown of all of this, just come onto our Substack and you can find both both me and Catherine have lots of stuff on Substack about this. I think that's it. Is there any particular thing you want to leave parents with?

I would say calmness. It's really hard to be calm about the online world. But if you're not calm, if you react too big, then your child is going to feel wary about being honest. And the calmer you are and the more open you are about your need to listen to them, the better the quality of the conversation, and then the easier it is to actually feel genuinely calm about whether or not you understand if it's going okay.

Yes. And am I asking questions that are making lying necessary? I love that. From you. Right, Catherine, thank you so much. I'll put the link to Catherine's Substack where you can find her and her actual website as well in the notes. Uh, you know where you can find me. It's teenagersuntangled at gmail.com. Message us, ask us questions. We're open to answering any of your questions. That's it for this week. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you. Bye-bye for now.