Change Your Brain Every Day - Should Parents Monitor their Kids’ Cell Phones? With Dr. Lisa Strohman

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

Many children’s main source of social interaction happens virtually, whether through texts, apps, or even gaming platforms. Unfortunately, this often leaves them vulnerable for exposure to a variety of online predators. So what can parents do to avoid this? In the third episode in a series with Dr. Lisa Strohman, she and the Amens discuss how a parent can monitor their children’s online activities, thus protecting them from both addictions and from dangerous people.

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. We're here with Dr. Lisa Stroman, a psychologist, attorney, author, has a great TED Talk. We also did a podcast with her before. We loved her so much,

we wanted her back. We're talking about technology and kids really not just kids it's technology and all of us and how do we protect ourselves people get so excited to get their new Apple device or their Samsung or their gaming device or their iPad and their gaming devices but you know a lot of I mean people don't even think about this but people communicate with other people through these gaming devices and certainly through all the online platforms well in isolation so I've seen a lot of Asperger kids over the years, and the only social interactions they have are on the gaming devices. That's the predators you talked about, but also these international corporations that are desperate to increase the mindshare that, you know, we talked about Kellogg's and sugar cereals, and you've talked for a long time. Well, where do they put the most expensive cereals?

Not the most expensive ones. Sugar. They put the most, not the most expensive ones. The lower third shelves in the grocery store are the most expensive for companies to purchase that share of that real estate in grocery stores. Why? Because your kid will throw a full-blown temper tantrum if they see something and you don't buy it. And that is the reason. And so they're going after the baby. Stomach share. Yeah. So they want heightened stomach share. But what we're talking about with these technology companies is they want mind share. They want

to plant their company in this child's brain, whether it's Apple or Google or Microsoft or FaceTime. And it seems like one of the ways, we need to let her speak, but it's Apple or Google or Microsoft or FaceTime. And it seems like one of the ways, we need to let her speak, but it seems like one of the ways they do this, maybe you can speak to this, is they play on our desire to keep our kids safe. I know that's why I have it, right? And the kids in my family know that phone isn't really for you. Yes, you use it for things other than for us.

But if I find that you are not on my Life 360 app for any reason, or your phone's not charged when you're out, you need to be home. Like that phone's for me. You don't answer it. You don't have it. That's the rule. Oh, that's the reason they have the phone. The other stuff is sort of secondary, but I feel like companies play on that. Like we can keep our kids safe. Well, and you feel safe as a parent, certainly when you're doing the right thing and you're using apps that are monitoring your kids and things like that. And so what it officially does is it creates kind of a security for parents to feel like it's okay to let them kind of go in here without the education and without the information because it's like, well, it's a reputable company. Like we all are using Gmail. You know, we're using these platforms to, you know, communicate with one another. I think right now in the COVID situation where we've got kids quarantined and millions upon millions of kids are at home,

they don't have the six hours, seven hours of social time, maybe sometimes nine hours a day if they're involved in sports or music or things like that. So we're starting to put them online in order to interface with one another. And what I'm seeing is that you're getting servers hijacked left and right, you're getting companies that are looking at how do I create an opportunity in this. And I think that time we were talking about the predators on how they're going after this, they're literally going and hoping and assuming that you're going to let them

go into these platforms and feel pretty safe about it because, you know, honestly everybody else is right now. And we want our kids to be social and it's not unlike our kids tantruming in the store. Like how many times do you have to be asked? I just need to go on for 30 minutes, just give me 15 more minutes, extend my time. You know, it's, it's really hard to parent today with technology and understand what the dangers are when maybe you didn't live in the world that I lived in, which was behind the scenes in, you know, the FBI looking at, you know, 150 agents that were working 24 hours a day,

pretending to be young kids, and never unsolicited. And that was two decades ago. Now, Internet Crimes Units, ICAC, Internet Crimes Against Children Units are in every city. And what you have to remember is that literally like the playgrounds or the bus stops or, you know, I was always terrified because we had multiple cases of the ice cream men where line up, right? And they all they have to do is grab their belt loop and shove them in a freezer and like drive off. You'd never hear a scream.

So those days are over. Nowadays, you've got kids going into these platforms that are bored, that are curious, that are needing social interaction, and they're finding availability to do that. And so that's what these online predators like, who aren't necessarily always, I want to be really clear, they're not always the, you know, the person in a dark hoodie that you think looks super sketchy. And you can tell right off the bat that it's not somebody you want your kid talking to. allows people to have these sexual predilections to explore that world. And kids are curious and they're going to have conversations with people. So, you know, I put predators in two piles. I put the ones that are, there's, there's a group that are intentionally going after our kids.

The cappers that go out and capture photos, like really lure, groom and do that. And then I think that there's kind of this innocent predator, which sounds really weird coming out of my mouth, but they're really normal people that just have these desires and interests that are behaviorally inappropriate, that feels like they can go into these worlds safely because it's behind a computer in a private area. But does that grow? Does that often grow if they start that behavior, then does it turn into something else? I mean, I think we talked a little bit about this last time and we had talked about doing one on pornography. I really think that we're growing a culture of young boys into pedophiles because we have such an early sexualization of young boys now. So

average age is eight of first porn exposure and chronic use is at 11. So if you're, you know, the same way a fetish attaches to say a tire or to a shoe or to feet or things like that. These fetishes attach during these highly sexualized experiences for anyone. And so for young boys to have early exposure via technology and devices, I think we are going to be developing a culture of pedophiles because they're attaching that sexuality at such a young age to such a young population that's among them. Yeah. So what does it do to these young boys' brains? I mean, you're really talking about pre-adolescent development. What is that going to do for them developing a healthy sexual relationship as adults? Are we really going to make it dramatically hard?

Incredibly hard, if not impossible. I think that you've nailed it on the head. I think that they don't know how to communicate in person. Nobody's looking at each other in the eye. I think that we look at kids oftentimes and say, oh, they're just shy. And we're missing that level of anxiety, maybe that, you know, technology-induced ADD, if you want to call it that. And we're looking at the outside as parents, and we don't really want to go in and say,

sure, my nine-year-old has a sex addiction, and that his anxiety is related to how awkward it must feel for him to be looking around sexually now at other people that's not that's not what's happening parents don't want to think of their little boy that way right and so it's it's you know it's hard it's it's understanding that you know if you have a nine-year-old that's detaching um from a mom specifically and is like all of a sudden saying, you know, please give me privacy and do these things. There's probably been an exposure that's happened. And there's things that are going through that child's brain.

You have to sit down and talk about it. And that's really hard. Parents aren't as comfortable doing that. Protect them from a... Does putting rental troll on a child's phone protect them from early exposure to pornography? I think it gives you a fighting chance it because if you have a parent who's decided to put on parent monitoring it tells me you have a parent that's thoughtful there they're engaged and understand

that there are things out there that we should be concerned about. And that to me is the number one thing. The monitoring part is hard, right? Because as a parent, we have busy parents, we have parents that don't know how to use the monitoring. We don't, we're not really sure if kids, you know, I've got kids that are jailbreaking their phones left and right now, and they're disabling Life360. So it looks like it's active and parents have no idea. You know, there's, there's all sorts of ways that kids can kind of can navigate around that. But if you've put that device or that monitoring system on their device, then you know that you've had that conversation with them. So it helps. But it is about having that conversation over and over again.

Yeah, when my daughter started middle school, there was a very large, she's home school, a very large school that she was attending. It was 7th through 12th, which right there, I did not like 7th through 12th. I just thought that bothered me. But she was very open. She and I are very close. And she came home and I had a sense it was not going to be good when she started a seven through 12 school anyways. So I sort of prepared her for a lot of stuff. But I didn't realize that she came home and she most of the boys are looking at porn on their phones at school. And I was like, she's like, No, it's just normal. It's normal. And so I'm like, Oh, so I and so we have to have been like, okay, there's so many things.

I mean, we started from the beginning, went through all the problems with it. But I said, ultimately, honey, one of the biggest problems is that's going to be the expectation that they have for a female long-term girlfriend, for a wife. That's going to be what they expect. And that's not real. How do you ever measure up to that? It's ruining this whole generation of boys. It's ruining intimacy. It's ruining men cherishing women. It's ruining that, you know, this idea that we are, we are not perfect, but we love each other.

You know, it's, that's not what it's about. And so they're starting this, but for them to, for it to be the norm, for them to be having, she's like, no, they just all walk around with it on their phones laughing and they think it's hilarious. And, you know, yeah. And the porn challenges where they show each other it and try to get the most grotesque

response and things like that. So it escalates it into areas that are like bestiality and it's, it's just, it's a, yeah. And it's not normal, but you, but you're that parent who's having that conversation and not everybody has the comfort and doesn't really always know how to do that. Yeah. It's so important. I had a 14-year-old patient and he was completely hooked on pornography. And when I had the parents, they sort of thought, well, it was normal. And all the kids were doing that, which just horrified me.

And he ended up going into a technology addiction program. And I think those are just going to increase as time goes on. Yeah, no, it's sort of frightening that we're raising this generation that has these unrealistic views of people, relationships, you know, wears out the brain's pleasure centers. And then it takes more and more to get the same dopamine response in the brain. So you're basically deadening the pleasure centers in the brain. And that's a disaster. Right. And that's why it takes more and more to become stimulated

and one thing you know you keep mentioning um we should be having these talks with our kids and i think a lot of parents have no clue how to have that talk or how far to go i probably go to the opposite extreme so i mean i watch documentaries on sex trafficking and i mean i scared her to no end like i totally instilled an anxiety disorder because of the way I grew up. I didn't even grow up with technology, but I grew up in such an unhealthy environment that I'm like, you sort of live in a bubble and you need to know what the real world is like. Cause she's like, nothing's going to happen to me. I live in Newport. I'm like, okay, we need to have a chat. And so I, I burst through a bubble.

Now, cause my wife is a prepper. I'm going to because I'm like what bad thing is going to happen we live in Southern California. I told you so. Yes now you can't find the toilet paper and paper towels. I have toilet paper. I did not go hard if I already had it. You have a childhood like that. Like, we were totally fine. Right, exactly. Yeah. So I think knowing how to initiate that conversation, knowing how far we should go would be important. Well, let's talk about when we come back. When we're here, we'll continue with Dr. Lisa Stroman and her website.

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