Change Your Brain Every Day - How to Prepare Your Children for the Internet, with Dr. Lisa Strohman

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

Kids’ brains are still undeveloped when they get access to the internet, so they lack the frontal lobe function to make safe, intelligent decisions on their own. Yet most parents don’t teach them about the internet first, so they don’t know what to expect when going online. In the fourth and final episode of a series with Dr. Lisa Strohman, she and the Amens help you to prepare your kids to navigate the internet responsibly and help them understand the importance of maintaining privacy.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are still here with Dr. Lisa Stroman, and she is just so fascinating. So Lisa, you're an attorney, you're an expert on internet crimes,

you worked for the FBI, and we're just having this great conversation on kids. And our last episode was on predators and how you can prepare your kids. I love how we ended it. It was talking about preparing kids for the real world, sort of what's going to happen as they enter into junior high and even sometimes earlier, what they're going to encounter with other kids,

what they're going to see on their phones. And that's something we were talking about. How can parents initiate this conversation? I'm a trauma nurse. I'm pretty intense. So I threw my kid into the deep end pretty fast and, you know, pulled up crazy articles and pictures and made her watch sex trafficking documentaries and scared her half to death. But that's probably not what you're going to recommend. So how would you recommend? Well, I think that there's probably like the Goldilocks zone, maybe where you can be in the middle and it's just right. I think that when you look at what kids are doing, I think that you can see that they live in this kind of secret world now in their devices. And so you have to really,

to me, love them enough to have an expectation that they're going to go down rabbit holes that will uncover things that you don't want them to see. And that's the most important part as a parent. It's the sex talk that most of us never got because our parents just had no idea how to have it. And then we handed it over to the schools and they did an awful job trying to figure out what it was and the messaging that they gave and not taking into consideration the developmental issues. So, you know, where the kids are, what their needs are. So I think that with technology,

understanding that developmentally they're immature, right? They don't have full frontal lobe executive function, the ability to weigh right from wrong, long-term and short-term decisions. And then you hand them this magical access into the internet that allows them to just kind of traipse along. And so I tell parents, one of the things that I would say is for you to really recognize that giving them access, whether it's a personal device or a home computer or whatever, it is literally like dropping them off on a street, a strange street that you've never been on and hoping that they don't walk down the street and find somebody bad.

And so you're not comfortable with that as a parent, you have to have a conversation and you have to literally describe and create a child, whatever your child's age is, but a description of what that world is like. So if your daughter's going, say, to Miami and you know there's heavy trafficking and there's a lot of prostitution and things that are happening that's going to be in front of her. Vegas comes to mind having been there multiple times for first sporting events with my kids. It's like, you better have that conversation before you get there because you don't have choice once it's in front of you. Right. So that's curiosity with kids. And so that's the, one of the things that I think you need to take into consideration as a parent. Yeah, no, my daughter, after she got done threatening to call Child Protective Services for me making her listen to all of this stuff and scare her half to death, she's like,

I don't think you're supposed to be traumatizing me. I need therapy. But the reason that I did that was because maybe you can answer whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Because we travel a lot internationally, number one, and she goes with us, right? That's a big thing. But also, I didn't trust the fact that just because we're monitoring her phone, I know most parents aren't monitoring their phones. I know parents who buy alcohol for parties. So based on that fact alone, it doesn't matter how much I monitor her phone. When she's with her friends, their phones are not monitored. Okay. So rather than just relying on phone monitoring, I wanted to rely on, is my daughter smart enough when she sees something

to actually for it to trigger, oh, this isn't good. This is scary. This is not a good thing. And so I needed to instill that in her. I wanted that voice in her to sort of wake up and go, it's not nice, honey. The world is not just, you know, it's not a fairy tale. So there's no Prince Charming at the end of that rope. So, and I wanted to be sure that when I'm not there to monitor her, that she can still see the truth. So I don't know. I mean, that's the Goldilocks area. I mean, that's empowering children. And my mission and passion has always been we empower our kids to understand the rules. So if they don't understand, say they're going on, specifically one of my hot buttons is the live streaming apps. And TikTok is another really great example. TikTok used to be Musical.ly. Musical.ly was highly, highly trafficked with predators and people on there that go in there, they look at these videos, they identify themselves,

they create fake accounts, they start messaging with the kids. And again, it's like picking off the weak zebra in the pack because it's playing upon their vulnerability to need that attention, to want to know that they're good. And again, we've taught them what a good zebra looks like, right? Like we teach them like if somebody is nice to you. And so they're very trained to go into these platforms and pull that data and do that stuff. So I think it's really important to teach them the realities of it and to understand what the rules are. Because we would never sit down and play,

say, Monopoly. And if the three of us sat down and I was like, let's play, we all pretty much understand we all get the $200 when we pass go and we all get a certain amount when we start. But if I told you I get $2,000 every time I pass go and you guys only get $200, you would say I'm not going to play. So one of the things that I'm very strongly an advocate of and what I do anytime I go and talk to families or kids is teach them the rules. So I pull the privacy policies off of these apps and I go through them and I highlight those areas. I put it in a slideshow. I go through and I talk about it and I was like, here's what this means. And I did, I basically take the legalese because nobody's reading the 23 pages of agreements that we're downloading. And I, and I translate it for kids, depending on whatever age they are. And I was like, here's what they do. They own your content.

They can redistribute it anytime. If you think it's cool to work at the FBI, or I've done some cool stuff in my life, I'm pretty sure had I been on TikTok when I was 12 or 13, I wouldn't have had that opportunity, right? Because I can't control that data once I give it to them. And then I teach them, how do you pull it back? How do you clean that up? And so for parents, it's monitoring is part of it. But you do have to go in and you have to be honest with your kids and you have to trust them. They're good. Kids want to be good and they want you to be happy with them. They ultimately do, but they don't recognize the difference between right and wrong if we don't tell them. Right. So one thing I tell Chloe is I trust you're not.

So let me tell you why I'm nervous. And so it's, I trust that you did the right thing, but you could end up doing the wrong thing, not even knowing it. Is this what Digital Citizen Academy does? It's 100% why I founded it, was how do I take this from family to family, kid to kid, and how do I create a scalable model that allows families and kids to take back the control and to understand what those rules are. And I think that's so important. You just mentioned that you take that 23 pages, you boil it down to something that a kid will understand. Do you have something like that in a book or in a slideshow that, I mean, I would love

to see that. Yeah. So I haven't, I'm trying to think we're just finished the copy on our second book. I don't think it, I don't know if I have an image of it in there. I'm for sure my, one of my webinars has it. And so we're trying, I'm playing catch up of like you know i've avoided putting a lot of stuff on technology or on platforms and things like that but i'm i'm starting to to figure out how do i create this in a sustainable ongoing um mechanism so creating a youtube channel like how do i put these little tidbits out like i just found out from another app um some of the things that they were doing and going on there and checking like ages

and how they're live streaming and how they're sharing content and data and they're monetizing it through these microtransactions. So of course, the minute I popped in to do a webinar, there was like an underage kid on there and she was getting, you know, gummy or they create these like silly stickers

and they're worth money through PayPal. And so she's literally becoming this online prostitute for unknown people. And I can tell she's in a room like hiding behind a door and talking very quietly because she doesn't want her parents to know. So how do I, how do I alert people as, because they come out every day. So that's what I'm trying to do. So how do I, how do I alert people as, because they come out every day. So that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to figure out a way to get that information out on a regular basis. Because to me, like catching those people and like unveiling the truth behind it, we have to do it together because otherwise it's, it's not, it's never going to stop. And we're going to lose all of our kids to this really unfair,

addictive potential that these platforms are giving. Well, we need your work more than ever before. So thank you for being with us. So interesting. And for people who want to learn more, dcakids.org. They can learn more. And also, and I'll have you spell it. Is it drlisastroman.com?

They can find out more about your practice and so on. So spell that for everybody. So Dr. D-R-L-I-S-A-S-T-R-O-H-M-A-N. Great. Thank you, Lisa. What a joy to see you again. It's so interesting as always. D-R-L-I-S-A-S-T-R-O-H-M-A-N. Great. Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. What a joy to see you again. Thank you so much. It's so interesting as always.

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