Something You Should Know - How the Internet Has Changed Our Language & Kids and Screens – How Much is Too Much?

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

Have you ever put a little more gasoline into your tank after the nozzle has shut itself off? If so, you need to hear the beginning of this episode when I explain what topping off your tank could be doing to your car – and it is not good. https://clark.com/cars/why-you-should-never-top-off-your-gas-tank/ The Internet has changed the English language. For one thing, we are all writing more than ever – texts, emails, social media posts, etc. We write so much that we have changed many of the rules for writing to make it more efficient and more expressive according to linguist Gretchen McCulloch. Gretchen writes the Resident Linguist column at Wired, she runs the blog All Things Linguistic and she is author of the book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (https://amzn.to/3eILyqs). Listen as she explains how the rules of language have been bent and shaped to work better in the Internet Age. In the United States, we refrigerate eggs. But in many other countries, they do not. Who is right? Well that’s what so interesting. Listen as I discuss why the way you store eggs is important and what can happen if you don’t. http://www.extracrispy.com/food/2668/how-long-can-eggs-be-out-of-the-fridge For several generations now, children have spent a lot of free time in front of electronic screens – TV, computers, laptops, phones and tablets. Now with the current pandemic, kids are spending even more time watching videos, playing games and doing all the other things you can on a screen. So how bad is this? Is it doing real damage to our children’s brains? Joining me to discuss this is Joshua Wayne. He works with kids and families in schools, mental health facilities and in private practice – and he is author of the book The Simple Parenting Guide to Technology (https://amzn.to/2ZNi0UF). This Week's Sponsors -Stories of Impact podcast. New episodes every other week. Listen at http:www.storiesofimpact.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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including making us better writers. I've had some people report sort of anecdotally that getting on Twitter helped teach them to be briefer and more succinct and more pithy because they had to think about that character constraint. So those are kind of subtle effects. Also, how you store eggs really matters. Every year, people die from bad eggs. And are kids today spending too much time with electronics and video screens? The average kid

spends, by the time they're a teenager let's say, about seven and a half hours a day in front of a screen doing non-schoolwork related activity. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most.

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Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hello. Welcome to Something You Should Know. I'll bet that you and just about everybody else, myself included, have gone to a gas station, filled up the tank, the nozzle shuts off, but you go back and squirt in a little more gas into the tank. Especially if the price of gas that you're paying at the time is really low. Why not? Well, there are a lot of reasons why not.

Topping off your gas tank can cause pressure to build in the tank and flood the carbon filter vapor collection system, which is only meant for vapor, not for actual liquid gas. Subsequently, this overflow can affect your car's performance and even possibly damage the engine. According to the EPA, once a gas tank is full, there's no way to fit any more gas in the tank. Gas stations are equipped with a vapor recovery system so that if a tank is full,

the pump will pull the extra gas that you're trying to pump into the car back into the station's tanks. This is a safety precaution to ensure excess vapors will not escape into the environment. But it's also causing you to pay for gas that's going right back into the station's tank. And that is something you should know. The internet has changed the English language. There's no question. It's changed how we write, how we talk, just how we communicate in general. Gretchen McCullough has studied the fascinating impact the internet has had and continues to have on our language. Gretchen is the writer of the Resident Linguist column at Wired. She runs the blog All Things Linguistic, and she's the author of the book Because Internet, Understanding the New Rules of Language. Hi, Gretchen. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi, thanks for having me. So I can think of several specific ways that the internet has changed or influenced the English language, but in a general sense, what's the change? One of the things that I'm really interested when it comes to the internet and language is how we're all doing so much more writing than people were a generation or two ago. You know, 50 years ago, you could have finished school and not really done any more writing unless you were a professional writer. And now you can't even organize a birthday party without texting somebody.

And we're doing all of this, this writing on a daily basis. And so trying to figure out what we're actually doing and analyzing that is what I'm really interested in. And how are we doing? I mean, it seems as if the internet has created, if not another language, another style of language that is much more informal, much briefer, has new rules. So the letter U stands for the word U, and we've all agreed upon that. So now we know if we see the letter U by itself, it means Y-O-U. So is that it, basically? Is that the Internet has forced us to write more, and so we're briefer and more informal. Well, what's interesting is that in speech, we've had distinctions between formal and informal

language for a long time. You know, you are, as a host of a program, probably don't go home and talk to your dog exactly like this. You know, there's different sorts of styles that we have in formal context, like a job interview, or if you're an actor or radio host, than if you're in an informal context, like hanging out at a pub with your friends back when we went to pubs. And so the interesting thing is that writing, which historically has had, you know, a very large representation of this formal context where it's edited and it's long and it goes through all these sorts of processes to reach the public, hasn't had as visible of an informal side. People have written informally, things like postcards and diary entries,

but it's been harder to make them public. Well, clearly one of the big changes that the internet has brought to language and communication is that you can have a real-time conversation in writing, whereas in previous generations, you would have to speak, you would have to talk to have a real-time conversation. Now you never have to talk to anybody. You can just text them and they text back and you text back and it's all the written word. You know, to have a real-time conversation in writing, it's easy to forget how revolutionary that was. Before the internet, the way to have a real-time conversation in writing would have to be something

like passing notes. Let's say you're in class, you're in a boring meeting, and you're passing notes between other people. That's the only way to have a real-time conversation in writing, because otherwise, you're facing this problem of how do you get the writing back and forth to somebody in something that resembles in any way real time? I mean, maybe a telegraph, but most people didn't have telegraphs at their homes. So other than being interesting and noteworthy that this has happened to the language and we can shine a light on it and say, isn't that interesting? But what's the big so what here? Well, what's interesting about this is that doing informal writing means we need to change the way we're actually communicating because informal writing

has different priorities than formal writing. So one of the places we can see this is in how we use acronyms. Acronyms are a very writing sort of thing to do. It's a lot more efficient to write an acronym in writing, but they're not actually that much more efficient in speech because saying each of the letters out loud isn't always that much faster. terminology or organizations or stuff like this. In informal writing, acronyms tend to be for common social phrases, you know, things like OMG or WTF. Those are phrases that already existed, and they're not sort of, you know, technical bodies or, you know, technology. They're, you know, common social phrases that people want to say. BTW for by the way, that's just a common phrase that you might want to put in a sentence. And so what kind of efficiency we value is we value a lot more the sort of direct communicative stuff and the social stuff and the ways that communicate our tones of

voice and our gestures and the other kinds of things that sort of make us truly who we are. Well, clearly one of the things the Internet has done, particularly the smartphone, is move people away from talking on the phone to texting on the phone. I mean, it used to be when you had a cell phone, you used it as a phone. Today, many people just use it as a device to text a lot of the time. And one of the criticisms of that is in texting, you're not able to hear inflection. You don't know the, you know, the tone of my voice because you don't hear my voice and that that can cause a lot of miscommunication. And I guess there are ways though to, while you're texting, to put emphasis on certain things so your meaning is a little clearer.

It's happening a lot more, and people are using things like creative re-spelling. So, you know, writing something in all caps to indicate that it's emphatic, or, you know, repeating the same letter to indicate that sort of emphasis or drawn-out tone of voice. And all of these things can contribute to being able to more accurately express our emotions and our attitudes towards things in writing in a more precise way than we can do when we're all writing in the same sort of formal way. think about sometimes is when you write an email, you generally start the email with, hi, Gretchen. But when you write a letter, you don't use the hi. But if you don't use the hi in an email, it almost seems too formal, like you're breaking a rule almost. Yeah, it's really interesting to see sort of what our perceptions are of formality. And formality is a shifting target. You know, what is

considered formal is also sort of constructed by our societal expectations. You know, you can see this in clothes, like there was a period when a suit, what we think of now as a conventional suit, was considered informal because it didn't have tails. So, but now a suit is considered very formal. So the same thing may happen with something like deer or high, you know, maybe another generation or two high will start seeming formal and like the normal thing will be hay or something like that. Yeah, but I actually was writing out or typing a letter to be a letter and started it with hi, Bob, and realized, oh, no, you don't do that. You're mixing and matching here. That's not allowed. And I went back and made it dear Bob instead of hi, Bob.

But I would never put dear Bob in an email to the same guy on the same subject. I just wouldn't. Yeah, it's really interesting how certain things are associated with different formats. And I have seen some people try to give, especially sort of younger people, the advice of like, oh, you need to use Dear in email. Some people use Dear in emails to me. I have a sort of ongoing analysis of my own emails that I receive to see what's common in the sense.

And some people do use Dear in emails. It tends to mark them as being of a certain generation, but that's fine. But younger people tend to resist the advice to use dear in emails, not because it's too formal, but because they parse dear as too intimate. And the idea being that if you send me an email that says dear Gretchen and you're 18 or something, you feel like you're calling me like your darling or something. It feels very intimate, which dear kind of is if you think about it in a literal sense. Although, of course, in the letter writing context, that meaning has been bleached out by conventional use. And so it's interesting to see the resurgence of the literal meaning of dear by people who haven't encountered it as much in the letter writing context. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think of deer as being so not that, and I think what's helped to wipe out the intimacy of deer is things like deer homeowner. You know, well, clearly that's not very intimate, you know, deer occupant. But, you know, but that said, if you're, you know, you've encountered dear homeowner or dear occupant or, you know, dear, like, person who uses our banking app. But, you know, if you're a little bit on the younger side, you might not have encountered that as much. something similar to dearest or darling, which people used to start emails with something like

dearest or to the right noble and valorous or sign them things like your obedient servant or most humbly. We don't use those anymore, and those seem uncomfortably literal to us. It's interesting to think about language and English from this position of we're in the middle of its history. We're not at some sort of end point where everything that ended up here was inevitable. There are all these things that could be different and may well be different, will probably be different in another hundred years or more. We're discussing how the internet has affected the English language and continues to do so. And we're talking with Gretchen McCullough.

She is author of the book Because Internet, Understanding the New Rules of Language. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series

about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. We'll see you next time. to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Gretchen, understanding that there is some back and forth. It does seem that the rules for internet writing and the rules for formal writing

don't move in and out easily into the other. Maybe occasionally, but again, you don't usually start a real letter with, hi, Bob. It's more likely to be, dear Bob. But I would never in a letter use the letter U for the word you. You just don't do it.

Yeah. And I think that's something that people miss sometimes when they say, oh, you know, the kids are doing all of this stuff. And it's really that, you know, you can have multiple registers of language and we're all used to this happening in speech. And so the idea that there's a different register for how you write a letter versus, you know, or a resume versus something like an email versus a social media message. If you're writing a tweet or a text to somebody, you generally don't start that with like, you know, hi, mom, do you want to chat

sometime this weekend? Love Gretchen. I don't write my texts with any sort of greeting or signature at all. And I don't think most people don't. Well, I've also heard people say that, you know, in the name of efficiency, that an email doesn't need a hello and goodbye, that you don't need to say hi, Fred, because you sent it to Fred. He already knows who he is, so you don't need to say that. And since your email address is in the from box, there's he already knows who it's from. So there's no need to sign off on the email. You could definitely make that argument. And I think with emails, it's interesting because there's sort of this maximally formal email that you can send to somebody who you don't email very often or who maybe you're emailing for the first time, where you do have the sort of hi, Bob, and the signature, you know, thanks, Gretchen. Whereas somebody who you email a lot, if you're

emailing somebody every other day, you might start dispensing with the greetings and salutations because you're always kind of part of this bigger meta-conversation. Especially if you're forwarding something to somebody who you talk to a lot, you might say, just wanted to make sure you got this, and not put any sort of greeting or farewell. Or if you're emailing back and forth with the same person in the same email chain, after a couple back and forths, people often stop, you know, they often drop the salutation, they drop the closing, because they are just sort of treating it more like a conversation at a certain point. So there's even within what seems like a single genre of email, there are different ways that people do it once they've been emailing with

the same person for a little while. Do you think that or is there evidence to show that these little quirks of internet communication and texting and emailing and all, that they are affecting the language in general somehow? Or do they remain in their silos that, yeah, that's a quirky way we kind of email back and forth, but it's just email or it's just text, but it's not really affecting the language, the English language. Well, it's interesting because, of course, hi was common offline before it became ubiquitous in email.

And one interesting example that also comes from technology is the greeting hello, which these days we don't really think much of, but was actually introduced with the telephone. So before the telephone, hello as a greeting was not common. People said, you know, good morning, good afternoon, these types of things. But the problem was when they answered the phone, people didn't have an obvious thing to say when they picked up the phone. Hello at the time was used as a sort of summoning or attention-getting device. And there were various proposals for what should be the case for this thing you say when you pick up the phone. One of the proposals that never caught on that much was ahoy hoy. But hello was being used very similar to ahoy in the sort of attention-getting function. And it took on the

functions of a greeting after it became ubiquitous for the telephone. And some people, you know, even a few decades later, people like Miss Manners and so on were really disputing whether hello was like a reasonable thing to say if you weren't on the phone. And it's really funny to look back at these sort of controversies at the time, because now you think, what's wrong with hello? Hello is fine. You know, people, it always takes a certain period of adjustment when you get a new greeting like that. Do you suspect that or is there a reason to believe that the brevity that seems to be required in things like text messages and to some extent email, that that is leaking out, that people are just more inclined to be brief because we're conditioning ourselves to be brief online? I think that's an interesting question. I've had some people report sort of anecdotally that, you know, getting on Twitter helped teach them to be

briefer and more succinct and more pithy because they had to, you know, think about that character constraint or things like, you know like if you write an essay on Twitter as a series of tweets as a thread, then you need to make each tweet in the thread be able to stand alone and be retweeted. So I've noticed myself, anecdotally, sometimes I repeat concrete nouns more in a thread than I might in a longer paragraph essay because I can't guarantee that someone, instead of using a pronoun, so instead of saying it or they or the committee or the person, I'll have to repeat whatever thing it is that I'm talking about because if someone retweets this tweet out of context, they're not going to know who they or it or this refers to. So those are kind of subtle

effects. I think in terms of length, it's really hard to tell, right? Because in another sense, electronic communication gives us the potential to go longer because pixels are cheap and paper is expensive. So one place where you see that is in the increased use of line breaks in internet-mediated communication as compared to just spaces and paragraphs in text-based communication. So one interesting area that I've compared a lot is postcards versus things like captions on Instagram or text messages or other types of informal genres, because in some ways postcards are very like a sort of proto-social media post. They're not like a letter where you write this long thing and you have this

expectation of privacy. You're writing something and you're aware that the post carrier, the people who work at the post office, the letter carriers and so on can read it. Anybody can read it. You can stick it up on a poster board or something and people can read it. And in postcards, when people are demarcating between lines, they have to use this very rigid space and use it very economically. And so they write short stuff, but they use periods to – or sometimes dot, dot, dot, or a dash to hyphen – to break up between different remarks. Whereas the equivalent type of thing on social media or in the internet context in general often involves a lot more line breaks or message breaks to break up between different utterances. Because in a text-based, in an electronic format, new pixels are cheap.

New lines are cheap. It's not like you're going to run out of paper in the same way that you put on a postcard. But here's something I've noticed that has changed the way I write emails a long time ago. If I write a letter, if I write a two-page letter, that's a long letter, but the recipient, if he gets it in the mail and takes the time to sit down and open it, is probably going to read it. If I write an email that asks somebody three questions, 90% of the time I'll get an answer to one of them but not the other big others because people don't value i think the email as much as they value a paper letter well there's an interesting

sense i've seen some people make this proposal like one thing that's really interesting about electronic communication is that it makes it so cheap to send somebody a message anywhere around the world you. You can call someone for free on Skype or Zoom or any of these video call platforms. You can send someone an email for free. Whereas a letter, you had to spend 50 cents or whatever on the stamp, on the envelope, on the paper. And imagine if you had to spend 50 cents every time you wanted to send someone an email. There have been some proposals, and none of them have caught on. But they're interesting proposals that there's some sort of email platform that actually charges every time you send an email.

Maybe it's just a couple cents. But the idea being that people would therefore be a lot more responsible about which emails they send and not bother people unnecessarily, because eventually it would add up. If you're a spammer, you can send out thousands and millions of emails trying to get people to buy your, like, cheap knockoff Rolex watches or whatever, and it doesn't cost you anything except maybe the time to do it. Whereas if you want to send that out as direct mail, you have to pay a lot more money to transport physical objects. So there's the one side that the recipient values it more, but maybe they value it because the sender also has to express this sort of value. You know,

it's harder to send a letter. You have to go to the post office and send it. You have to buy a stamp, whereas you can just fire off a bunch of emails and bother a whole bunch of important people who didn't ask to hear from you. So it's, you know, I think we deal with a lot more emails than we might have done with letters because it's cheaper to send them. Yeah. Well, because we get fewer letters, we get fewer paper documents, we give them more value, we give them more attention, whereas emails, I mean, I get a lot of emails that I never read. I mean, I can tell it's spam and off it goes, and I imagine that there are times when I'm discarding emails I probably should have read, but they just get caught up in the junk.

It's an interesting sort of conundrum, right? The, you know, if you make communication cheaper, on the one hand, everyone can communicate. On the other hand, everyone can communicate. And so there are good and bad effects of that. I read some interesting studies about early developments of both memo and the telephone. And it's really funny these days because a lot of people romanticize the telephone. You know, why couldn't we just pick up the phone? Or, you know, romanticize sending out letters. You know, why can't you just send a letter? People used to do

this. But at the time, people who were living in those eras criticized them a lot. So the criticism that people had about the telephone was that so many phone calls turned into this game of telephone tag. You know. You call someone, they're in a meeting, they're not in their office, they don't pick up. Maybe you leave a message, but before answering machines exist, you couldn't even do that. So you just try to call again, or they get your message, and they call you, and then you're not available. And so you're trying to call back, and you're playing telephone tag. There are all these papers from the 70s about how much of a drain on productivity playing telephone tag was. Now, some of them were authored by voicemail

companies, to be fair, but it seems like they were speaking to some sort of real frustration. And the same thing with the development of the memo earlier in the century, in the previous century, which was saying, you know, sending business letters is very inefficient. People write these long greetings and salutations, these very long letters. We should instead standardize on a memo form that's half a sheet of paper so people can't get too long, that has these to fields and from fields so people can't do these long greetings because letters are too long and they're very inefficient. So every era has these complaints about the communications technology of the era. And now we're complaining about this.

But it really is interesting to see how technology and the internet and smartphones have really altered the way we communicate and how that has kind of become very acceptable. My guest has been Gretchen McCullough. She writes the resident linguist column at Wired, and she is author of the book Because Internet, Understanding the New Rules of Language. There's a link to her book in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Gretchen. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks.

And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture.

Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show,

we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Since television first came into consumers' homes, there have been all kinds of dire predictions and concerns about how letting kids sit in front of a television screen will rot their brains,

desensitize them to violence, negatively affect their schoolwork, affect their weight and physical health, and cause them to be less social. Well, today, with smartphones, laptops, computer games, YouTube videos, as well as television, kids are spending a lot of time in front of screens. And the coronavirus has certainly made this an even more likely place for kids to go. So how concerned should we be? Joshua Wayne works with kids and families in schools and mental health facilities and in private practice. And he's author of the book, The Simple Parenting Guide to Technology.

Hey, Joshua. Hey, happy to be here with you. Thanks. So how concerned should we be? I mean, kids are obviously spending a lot of time in front of screens. What is it doing? Is it really that bad? What's the lay of the land? What do we know? The average kid spends about seven and a half hours, by the time they're a teenager, let's say, about seven and a half hours a day in front of a screen doing non-schoolwork related activity.

So that is video games, as you're suggesting. It's also Netflix. It's social media. It's YouTube, where a lot of teenagers tend to live right now. There's varying data out there about what the actual negative impacts are on the brain from video game usage. I think at the end of the day, though, this really just becomes a parenting decision around what kind of lifestyle do you want your child to have? Do you feel good about your kid being in front of a screen seven and a half hours a day? And by the way, that just does not even include time spent on schoolwork. So I really think that it just comes back to a personal decision around what kind of values do you or do I have as a parent and how do we want to raise our kids? What is the right amount of screen time that feels right for our family? I think that's really the place to begin the conversation. So I get that. I understand it's

a personal decision. It's a parenting decision. How many hours do you want your kids sitting in front of a screen? But what I don't know, and I think what a lot of parents don't know and would like to know, is what is the harm? I mean, it seems like letting your kids spend hours in front of a screen, you know, playing video games and blowing things up or watching endless hours of YouTube videos. Seems like it's probably not a great idea, but I don't know. I mean, maybe it is a great idea. What's the evidence say? What is the known harm or the known benefits of a lot of screen time for kids?

Listen, there's all different. Here's the thing. We're still early in our understanding of what the long term impacts are around kids being on screens. Let me give you and this is somewhat anecdotal because I'm not going to sit here and try to hang my hat on a particular study because I think there's studies all over the place. And I think there's a lot of personal people opining their values all over the place. So partly what I can give you is my bias as a parent myself, but also somebody who works with families and has for 20 plus years. I think that when it comes to tech, I think the key thing from my perspective is that we have to make sure that our kids have a meaningful life apart from technology.

I don't think tech is the enemy, but I don't think, from my experience, it's not healthy when that's all kids do, when they sit there 12, 13 hours a day, and that's all they do. So the way I like to frame it is that the issue isn't tech, the issue is moderation. And as parents and people in the lives of kids, we have to make sure that they have at least some kind of meaningful life apart from devices. That that's not the only thing that they're doing and that's not what they're spending all their time doing. Fair enough. Right now, especially with the coronavirus and staying home and not being able to socialize, a lot of the things that kids would be doing when they're not in front of a screen, like playing with their friends, going to school, getting out, going to the skating rink, hanging out downtown, whatever it is they're doing, they're not allowed to do. So then they come back and say, well, but what can I do? I can't do those other things. And playing video games or watching TV seems like a good idea. Well, I'm going to push back on that a little bit because there are other

things to do. It may not be the things they want to do, but they can read books. They can hang out with you. They can do stuff outside. They can go for bike rides with you. They can go. I mean, there are things that they can do. It may not be their first choice, but it's not that there literally is no menu of options for them. But I would say this, especially with this coronavirus lockdown period that seems to be now prolonging for a lot of folks. I do believe that we should be more relaxed around device use for our kids. I think we have to take a deep breath, relax a little bit and realize that the big picture priority here is to get them through this in one piece, physically, mentally, I mean, physically, you know, obviously being healthy,

but also psychologically, right? We, we want them to be healthy and balanced. And I don't think we should be going crazy and starting world war three in our living room about every minute of, of screen time that they have. What I generally say to parents though, is that even though you're, you're, it's, it's reasonable to be more flexible with your rules during this time. There is one rule that I do think that parents should adhere to, and I really encourage them to do so, and it's to make sure that devices go to bed at night too. Meaning that there's a set time at night, whether that's eight o'clock or nine o'clock or midnight, whatever the time is that is right for your kids and

the, in based on their age and maturity level and all those other factors, that there's a time when you shut everything down because kids need to go to bed. And during times like these, a lot of them will just become nocturnal creatures if we allow them to. And when they're not sleeping, it throws everything else in their life off. It throws their moods off. It throws their whole circadian rhythm off. It throws their, their, their, just their normal day schedule off. So if you can do nothing else, I say to parents right now, at least have a shutdown time and stick to it. Well, I think though we have to have a conversation about the addictive nature, especially of video games.

I mean, I know you're saying, you know, turn the devices off at night, but I know kids who get in trouble because they take their phone to bed with them and they stay word, or maybe it isn't, I don't know. But there's something about video that really sucks kids in. For sure, which is why also when I say turn screens off at a certain time at night, I mean all screens. I don't think kids should have their phone in the bedroom overnight. Because for most kids, it's an unbearable temptation to have that phone within arm's reach. And tech is kind of like sugar for a lot of kids. Once they get a taste of it, it's all they want. And it is addictive.

You know, there's different people that have different – there's different studies out there around is this truly an addiction in the same way that alcohol or some other substance can be. And, you know, I don't know. I spent a lot of time working in the substance abuse field earlier in my career, and I saw how that truly wrecked people's lives. So it's a little hard for me personally to make that correlation. But there's no question that it becomes this very, very compulsive behavior for kids in a way that they have real trouble hitting the brakes on for themselves, which is why, where I think we have to come in as parents

and parent, you know, it's hard to sure when they're 16 and they're more autonomous and they're on social media and they're, and they're more sophisticated, but we're not done with our job of, of setting limits. You know, we didn't, we don't, if your kid comes to you and says, hey, can I eat a whole bag of Oreos today? You're probably going to say, no, you can have three or four Oreos, but this is not how you're going to eat in my home. And in a similar way, we have to be willing to step out there and set some rules and really draw a line in the sand. I think, again, it can be flexible and there's room to be reasonable and even negotiate within certain parameters. But a certain point knows a complete sentence. No, you have to turn it off. It's 11 o'clock at night.

We're shutting everything down. I'm shutting the Wi-Fi down. I'm gathering up all the devices. That's how we're doing it. Yeah, Well, it seems so reasonable when you say it. And it's hard. I get it. I get that it's hard. You know, that's why I say I don't know that you, it's a harder sell to say, hey, it's six o'clock. You've been on the thing for six hours already today.

Shut it down. I get that that's a tough sale. But at 10 p.m., at 11 p.m., again, I think we just, we have to assert our role. It's our right and our responsibility to set limits around this stuff as parents. And it doesn't mean that they're going to be happy about it, but if we are firm and we have a sense of science, that it's all over the place, that there are studies that say all kinds of different things. And I think that's a concern for a lot of us because we don't know how bad this is. And, you know, I remember hearing when I was a kid how bad TV was going to rot our brains and, you know, if we sat in front of it for hours, we were going to turn into zombies and all. And it seems that that didn't really work out too well.

And there's a lot of advice, you know, so many hours for a kid at such and such an age. And so what do we know? What do we know, if anything, about the effects of this on kids long-term, short-term, any term? There is data showing that the more time they're in front of screens, there's a good chance that their schoolwork is going to suffer. Because what we know happens is that a lot of kids will multitask, you know, where they're toggling constantly back and forth between, say, their math homework and YouTube videos. And there are studies that show that the more that they are doing that, the more their grades are going to suffer. There is some data out there showing that the more hours they spend in front of screens, the more their social

skills become impaired. So there's, again, there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of studies and we're in the early stages of it. I also think that parents can just look at their, draw their own anecdotal conclusions. I mean, when your kid is sitting in front of a screen for 10 hours and then you try to get them off, is your kid communicative? Are they easy to be around? Is it easy then to transition them into some other activity, some kind of family activity? It's usually not. You know, that's the thing. That's the thing that is so alarming to me. If I get wrapped up in work or whatever and the kids are home because there's no school and they spend a lot of time and they have to come to dinner or whatever, I see a definite shift in their mood, in their behavior, and not in a good way. And it's pretty short-lived, but it's certainly concerning.

And so the assumption is, well, watching all these videos or playing all these games is doing something to their brain that makes them do that. Or maybe it's just the difficulty in transitioning from one thing to another. But I see it, and I bet lots of parents see it. And it's not just kids. I think anybody, young adults who get hooked on this stuff, the same thing happens. They get grumpy and cranky and impatient and it's a little scary. And adult adults have problems. There was a study that came out of common sense media

i'm not going to nail the percentage right off the top of my head but it's something like 41 percent of teens complain that their parents are distracted by their phones when they're together it's something it's something to that effect right so you know if you walk into just any starbucks i mean obviously not so much now but under normal circumstances you walk into any starbucks or a restaurant these days what do you see you see whole families sitting there together at a table and they all got their phones out you know so it's the other thing we have to look at is what is the modeling what kind of modeling are we doing for our kids? Because if we have a hard time putting our phones away, if we have a hard time not posting every single thought and every single moment of our day on Instagram or Facebook, it's pretty much a guarantee that our kids are going to have the same challenges.

So we also have to look at ourselves and our behavior and what we're modeling for them. Are we able to put our devices down and walk away for three hours and not be pining for it? If we do those things, it's very hard to insist that they do the same thing. So it sounds a lot like what you're saying is that it's not necessarily, or maybe we just don't know, it's not necessarily the specific harm that the screen is doing so much as that it's keeping kids from doing other things. If you're doing this, you can't do that. If you're watching and playing on the computer, you're not out with your friends, you're not socializing, you're not getting exercise. You're not doing the things that kids need to do. sports, that they're being active, that they're hanging out with friends, that they're going to band practice, that they're hanging out with you and going on a hike on Sunday afternoon. If you're doing those things and you're making them more balanced individuals and you're rounding out their life with those other healthy non-digital things, by definition, they're just not going to be in front of their device as much. So I think part of our responsibility is to make sure that they are

balanced. Again, to me, tech isn't the issue. Tech's not the problem. The problem is moderation here. And I just think that that is really where our responsibility comes in is we have to set this tone so that, sure, they can play video games, they can be on YouTube. They can talk to their friends. They can tick tock, Snapchat, all of it.ed in some very specific number. Now they said, so it doesn't, it doesn't eclipse other healthy activities they're doing or something like that. So I think every parent has to make that judgment call around what that right number looks like. But again, my, my, my hypothesis is that kids do better. And again, we're still early in the data gathering around this, but I think the data supports it, that they do better when tech is not all that they do.

What happened to, remember there was all this discussion about, you know, when teenage boys, adolescent boys play violent video games, it's going to make them violent just as watching violent movies and TV shows. I don't hear that so much anymore. Yeah, I don't either. You know, I'm sure if you were, if you were to start really mining around on Google, you could find some studies. I don't, I don't think a lot of that has really panned out from the latest research that I've seen on that. I think that's a lot of that has been somewhat debunked. I think it also, I think, I think a lot of that is tied to other factors in their life.

You know, what's going on in their family life? What's going on? Are they socially isolated? Do they have friends? Do they have other activities going on? I think those end up being more reliable predictors of kids engaging in violent antisocial behavior, more so than video games? Well, one of the things that I don't really get is my son, who's 10, loves to watch those guys who play video games. So he's watching somebody else play the video games that he plays. Now, I don't understand the thrill in that at all, because why not just play the game? Why watch a guy play the game? But he loves that.

You and me both. I don't understand it either. Somehow that, I don't know how that became a thing, but that's a thing. Well, we do know certain things that when they play these games, and probably when they're watching other people play it on YouTube, there is a massive amount of stimulation that's going on in the brain, particularly, I believe, in the neocortex. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I believe it's particularly in the neocortex. There's a very intense amount of stimulation that's releasing little bits of dopamine, and it's very exciting to them. It's super little bits of dopamine and it's very exciting to them. It's, it's, it's, it's super fun. There's little, there's little hints of adrenaline and dopamine. These, these chemicals that our bodies naturally create that in the right amounts,

create some, some sense of pleasure and excitement and anticipation. So I get it. Um, I don't fully understand it. It's not what I want to spend my time doing. My son's six, so he's not quite in that zone. At least I've been able to keep it at bay. At some point, that may be an issue I have to contend with, with him. But again, it just comes back to what are the limits that we are going to choose as individuals to set for our children around this stuff? Right. Well, I think that's a really important point you just made, that it's not that it's out of their control, but it isn't just because they like it because they like it.

There's a chemical thing going on there, that it's a reward-satisfaction thing in the brain that makes it kind of like an addiction, like more, more, more. And it isn't just a choice they're making and they, they could go clean their room, but that's not going to give them quite the thrill that this does. For sure. For sure. And, and, and, you know, again, coming back to the whole parenting point, if we don't insist that they go clean their room, they're definitely not going to go clean their room. You know, if we don't tie the use of clean their room, they're definitely not going to go clean their room.

If we don't tie the use of the video games to other things like cleaning their room or doing other chores or spending some quality family time together on a weekend or whatever it is, then of course they're not going to do the things we'd like. They're just going to sit there in front of the game. This is one perennial parenting maxim that I always come back to. And so whatever you permit, you promote. So if we let them sit there for six, seven, eight hours watching these videos or playing these games, if we allow it, we're essentially promoting it. Yeah. So we have to decide as parents, what behaviors do we want to promote? Well, it's good to get your perspective because, well, like many parents, I worry that the kids are spending too much time in front of the screen and should I be overly concerned?

Should I loosen up a little bit? So it's good to get some insight. My guest has been Joshua Wayne. He works with kids and families in schools and mental health facilities and in private practice. And his book is called The Simple Parenting Guide to Technology. You'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. I appreciate you being here, Joshua. Yeah, take care. Thank you for having me. Most of us refrigerate eggs here in the U.S., but in many other countries, eggs are not refrigerated.

And if they're not, they can sit at room temperature for about a week. But once they are refrigerated, then they have to stay refrigerated. In the fridge, eggs can last four to five weeks after their packaging date if you store them properly. If you do take them out of the fridge, the rule of thumb is you can leave eggs on the counter for about two hours at room temperature, or an hour if the temperature is 90 degrees or hotter. After two hours, you'd be safer to throw those eggs away and get a fresh dozen rather than chance it. The fear, as usual, is bacteria, particularly salmonella bacteria, which can make you very

sick. The FDA estimates that about 79,000 people become ill and about 30 people die every year from bad eggs. And that is something you should know. One thing that helps this podcast, as it does with every podcast, is ratings and reviews. First of all, it impresses people because if you've got zillions of them, people think, well, it's a pretty good podcast if all those people left a review. I'm told it also helps our rankings in the charts, and I like to read them.

So take a moment and leave a review. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers

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And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type.

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