The Dispatch Podcast - Your Children Are Too Online | Interview: Dr. Jean Twenge

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Mike Warren is joined by Dr. Jean Twenge, author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World, for a discussion about what modern research says about parenting in the digital and A.I. age. The Agenda:—Screen time before sleep—Conversations with children about tech—What phones and at what age—Social media regulation—Wait Until Eighth Pledge—Laptops vs. smartphones—Celebrating parental wins The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Cheers. Welcome to The Dispatch Podcast. I'm Mike Warren. Today my guest is Dr. Jean Twengi. She's a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, and she's also the author of a new book, 10 rules for raising kids in a high-tech world. We talk about that very subject. How do you raise kids in this world of smartphones and social media and unfettered internet access? Her book really dives into the rules of what parents can do to help their kids deal with all of those new challenges.

We talk a lot about rules for no phone zones in places like the bedroom or family dinners. what age kids should expect to get a new smartphone. Trust us, it's not before that they can drive. We also talk about some of our successes in parenting kids and teenagers in this age of smartphones and social media. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Gene Twenge. Okay, Gene, let's dive right in. But actually, I want to, before we talk about your current book, I want to talk a little bit and get some background on you and your interest in the subjects that you've written about because you write a lot about young people, children, adolescents, teenagers, young people, their relationship with technology, the relationship across generations. you actually sort of came onto my radar with IGN, one of your books, and particularly

your Atlantic article have smartphones destroyed a generation back in 2017. And one of the things that jumped out to me in that article that I still think about constantly is your reference to teenagers being disinterested at that time and maybe still in getting a driver's license. And this was, this changed the way. I thought about young people. I didn't feel like I was I was that old or separate from where teenagers were. And I just, it didn't compute with me. So it's a great article and a great book if you want to check that out. I'm just curious how you professionally got interested in

researching and writing about this broad topic. So when I was an undergrad, I was interested in gender differences. And I was doing my honors thesis on that. And I was using this scale, commonly used in psychology and everybody was scoring differently than they were supposed to, according to the 1970s test manual. And this was 20 years later in the 90s. And I realized, well, maybe that's because things have changed. Kind of a passing thought. But then I went to grad school the next year, got exactly the same result with the group of undergraduates at the University of Michigan and realized there might be something going on. It was also around the time the media was trying to figure out Gen X, you know, oh, there's young people and they're not boomers. What's going on?

So it was an interesting topic, and so much of what was out there on it wasn't empirical. You know, people have big statements not have anything to back them up. And I realized there as a grad student, that was a great avenue for research because I was really interested in it. There hadn't been a whole lot done on it. So that first project was on that scale I'd used for that honors thesis, and it just went from there. It's amazing, again, before we jump into the substance, it's amazing to me. how many people I come across in my work and career as a journalist, but also I think about it as a journalist myself,

is those subjects, those areas that are unexplored that seem just open for, you know, why is not, why has no one jumped into this world? Why has nobody asked the questions that I'm thinking about all the time? It's, you know,

we're not here to like give advice to people about what, how to think about, you know, academia or research or journalism, But it does seem like that's always the answer is the thing that nobody has thought to look at or look at a different way. So I don't know what your experience with that was. You got pushback or odd questions, but it is interesting. There are young people who are not boomers.

It seems like a revolutionary idea in the 1990s. Right. Well, I still get that. Just today on Twitter, somebody was like, oh, you know, they were referencing an article of mine. And boomers need to stop saying this. I'm like, not a boomer. Shocker. Shocker.

Well, let's talk about your current book because it's terrific. Ten rules for raising kids in a high-tech world. I told you actually, before we got on here and started recording, that it feels like this book was written for me. I've got three kids. My wife and I talk about all of these questions. I have my oldest, who is 11, constantly asking, when can I? I get a phone? When can I get a phone? When can I get a phone? And I mean, there's so much I want to dive into. And I won't reveal all 10 of the rules, because you have to buy the book for that.

But there are a couple of rules that I thought we could discuss. The first one, though, before when do you buy a phone? You say in the book that if there's one of these 10 rules to follow, it's not anything sort of big and thematic. It's keep the phones and screens out of the the kid's bedroom. It's a very practical and very kind of, I guess, obvious rule, but it's also really hard to enforce. Tell me why that's the most important rule for parents who are just navigating this brave new world that we live in. This is a rule for everybody, if you possibly can. People of all ages, that's one reason. It's one of my favorites that really works well for everybody. There's a ton of research showing that when people have their devices in their

bedroom overnight. They don't sleep as well or as long. And that goes for all kinds of electronic devices, but especially the phone. And even if it's off, even if it's on Do Not Disturb, your brain knows it's there. And scrolling before bed is a uniquely terrible way to go to sleep. So you got to preserve that time right before bed and during sleep and keep it safe from electronic devices because sleep is so crucial for physical health and mental health. There's something that's somewhat of a through line in this book, which is it's not only important for you to talk with your kids about the dangers of smartphones and the internet, but to set these rules.

I mean, this is the idea of the book, have these actual hard and fast rules. And in this chapter, you talk a lot about how important it is not only to keep those phones out, but also to have those parental controls that keep the phone from basically being a dumb phone after bedtime. It just seems like such an important, you know, kind of one-two set of guardrails that is consistent throughout your rules and your conception of how to do this right for your kids. Why do we need those kind of double guardrails as parents ourselves trying to navigate this. Yeah, so I've seen a lot of advice from folks who say, talk to your kids about technology. I agree with that. I think that's great. You should do that.

The first chapter of the book has seven conversations you should have with your kids, starting, you know, around late elementary school, the most important of which has never sent a nude picture to anyone, lots of other conversations. But the thing is, it's not enough. As just one example, social media companies have poured billions into making their products as engaging, or some would say, as addictive as possible. Those algorithms are really powerful, and you can explain to a kid until you're blue in the face what an algorithm is and how it's going to get you and thus you should put your phone down, but it's not going to really get through because a lot of adults have problems with that, which is, again, by design. And it's also a lesson of parenting that it doesn't have to do with screens. I try to get my seven-year-old to wash his hands and keep himself clean, and I have to, you know, it's not enough to just say, you know, it's really important because you'll get sick if you don't wash your hands and you won't, you know, you kind of have to enforce rules.

It's the same thing. And yet we're all kind of, we're all jumbled up or confused when it comes to technology. I didn't mean to cut you off there, but I do, it just, occur to me. Technology is not that different when it comes to these rules. And yet our brains as parents, we get confused about what to do. Why is that? No, I think that's an excellent point. That's right in line with my philosophy in this book that, hey, we put guardrails and rules on pretty much everything else. Why shouldn't we do that for technology? You know, like, yeah, washing hands is a great example. Another one is bedtime. So we really just,

going to say, okay, to your seven or eight-year-old, or for that matter, your 14-year-old, you need to go to bed at this time. Otherwise, you're going to be tired tomorrow. And you can say, okay, they'll figure that out eventually. No, they won't. They won't. Or, you know, you shouldn't have candy for dinner because it's really not healthy. Oh, let's just talk about that. How about you not let your kids have candy for dinner? And it's really, really similar with smartphones and social media. And I think some of it is most parents. didn't grow up with these technologies as children and adolescents. So some of it is we don't know all the ins and outs of it. I would put myself in that category, to be fair. And I think there's also

this really pervasive belief that that's just the way things are now. It's just the way kids communicate. And we should just give kids free reign. That's really not the way to go. First of all, they don't absolutely have to have social media to communicate with their friends. That's a common belief and it's a complete myth. There's so many other ways for kids to communicate with each other. It doesn't have to be algorithmic social media. The idea that, oh, you know, everybody's doing this, so it must be okay. It's not okay. These, they weren't designed for children.

Children don't have the self-control. A lot of adults don't have the self-control, you know, to put down that phone when they need to. So that's our role as parents is, as I heard one person put it, to be their frontal lobe until it shows up. Which, as we know, and one thing I appreciate about your book is you go through, I would say, with a touch that's accessible for readers, you know, some of that science that we know about that. We don't, you know, get that fully formed frontal lobe, which helps us with judgment until into our early 20s in a lot of cases. And it's, that's, it's remarkable, but anybody who has been or knows or is raising a teenager can can see that. You're not, though, Gene, you're not a Luddite. You're not anti-technology.

Talk to me a little bit about the rule, because you go through rules of kind of what kind of phones kids should have or could have if you want them to have these devices before they get smartphones. And then eventually, why 16 or so to actually get a smartphone? How do you make that balance? It really is about a balance. And I always want to be clear, too, that I do think these, you know, I wrote the book because I wanted to help other parents. It's based on my research and my own experience as a mom and my experience talking to lots of parents around the country. I've given talks to parent groups. But maybe you can't follow all the rules all the time.

And maybe you're going to make mistakes. Hey, I made mistakes. Nobody's going to be perfect. That's okay. We're not talking about perfection. And we're also not talking about giving up on all technology. I think it's a tough thing these days because I think on the one hand, as I mentioned, there's people like, oh, whatever, just let them do what they want and we'll just talk to them about it

and expect good things to happen, which doesn't work. And then there's the idea of let's protect kids from all technology. I actually have a lot of respect for that. I think that's great if you can pull it off. It's just, I think it's really hard to pull that off unless your kids are homeschooled and never get beyond the age of 12. And I'm being somewhat facetious. But still, you know, There does have to be some middle ground. And the middle ground that's worked for our family is, okay, yeah, you might want to get a phone to text your friends and, you know, be able to call when the bus is late and things like that. But it doesn't need to be a full-blown smartphone.

So we've given our phones designed for kids like Gab, Pinwheel, Trumee, are some examples. Those phones generally have no social media, most of them have no internet browser. And no AI girlfriends and boyfriends. That's new and that's a significant concern as well. You give your kid a smartphone with no controls on it. There's nothing to stop them from having their first romantic relationship with a chat box. I remember hearing this from my wife and the sort of conversation she's having with her girlfriends who are also parents is, you know, when should you get your kid a smartphone? It's when you're comfortable with them being able to see.

pornography, not with the ability for them to possibly, in some, you know, way possibly see pornography. They will see it the way that smartphones are set up now. That's a, you know, that's a, that sort of brought me up short when I first heard that. And you get into the book a lot about sort of that maturity level, you know, there's a huge difference between a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old when it comes to maturity, right? Absolutely. You know, so much matured. happens between those ages. So that's why I like the kids' phones. They're a stopgap measure to get kids further along in development. So the rule in our house has become that you get your first smartphone when you get your driver's license. So that's going to be 16 in most states, 17 and

some. And it's not just the maturity. It's also then it ties it to that level of responsibility and maturity to do the work to get the driver's permit and the practice and go take the test and pass it. And I also like that role because you don't really need a smartphone until you start driving. And because it ties it to that real world independence, which is such another really important part about how childhood has changed and how we need to maybe turn things back to how they used to be, have teenagers hanging out with their friends in person. Because when they have their driver's license, then it doesn't have to be the choice of, oh, mom and dad are busy, so they can't drive me to my friend's house. So let's just get on Snapchat. It can be,

no, I can get in the car and go see my friends myself. Right. The meat space, as some people call it, right, the actual place in which, you know, we interact with real human beings. It's one of these things I was thinking as I was reading your book. And it's something I think about a lot. Again, this is something that consumes me and sort of how, what my, wife and I talk about, are we doing this right? Are we doing too much? Are we doing too little? I think that's a common, you know, conversation, ongoing conversation among parents. But it struck me reading your book that the problems that we're facing now when it comes to technology and young people and all of this is we are both, we are too loose about certain things culturally with our kids.

And we are also sort of too overbearing in other ways. We don't allow some of the natural mistakes to be made, the risks that need to be taken, that help you grow. And yet we're sort of, we are okay with that when it comes to the internet and letting kids sort of roam free. We don't want them to roam free in our neighborhoods where we live, where our neighbors live and where they should be riding their bikes. but yet they roam free on the internet.

Why are we like this? Why is this, what's going on with that dynamic? I think there's a bunch of things going on with it. But it, you know, there's a lot of, you know, over emphasis on, oh, my kid, Mikey, kidnap, which blows my mind a little bit, given how, thankfully, extremely, extremely rare that is. So I gave a talk recently where I said,

Hey, one of the best ways to introduce real world freedom is to have your kids go into the grocery store and buy stuff themselves, once they're about, you know, nine or ten. And then you can start younger. You're at the grocery store with your five or six-year-old, and you can say, hey, we're going to get mac and cheese. It's in the next aisle over. Why don't you go get it?

At the end, someone raised their hand and said, well, what if they get kidnapped when they go one aisle over in the grocery store? Are you kidding me? The statistics show that fewer people are getting, fewer kids are getting kidnapped now than 40, 50 years ago. I mean, it's gone down considerably in just the actual stats of the crime stats. It's an interesting. Maybe it's what is it? Is it just the fact that we have more information now than we ever had? And so that does that make us a little

crazy? I think that some of it, you know, I think there's just a lot of anxiety and fear and that's promoted, you know, everywhere. There's, just, there's so many other elements in it. And it is really at odds with how the same parents who won't let their 10-year-old play in the front yard will give them a smartphone without any controls on it. And I think we have this idea, maybe because parents, again, didn't grow up with these technologies that they'll be safe. Then they'll be in their room and they'll be safe. But they're not. Unknown adults, are much, much more likely to contact them through that phone than when they're playing in that front yard.

That's right. That's right. Again, the front yard is in the neighborhood where we know the neighbors, we know the people. It's just a little backwards, but I suppose I understand it. One thing that, because you've mentioned this a couple of times, I think I have been thinking about the ways in which parents of my generation, I'm a millennial, and the internet was something that I, was not born into, you know, but when I was an adolescent, it was all the sudden sort of all

around me. And I think about a lot of parents of my age who are at this point with kids, my kids' age. I wonder if you have picked up on in your talks around the country and talking with other parents, is there a generational shift in the seriousness with which maybe millennial parents are taking this as opposed to your generation to Gen X? simply because we maybe understand the darkness that can exist on the internet with unfettered internet access, kind of like what we had when we were teenagers on AOL, Instant Messenger, and chat rooms and all kinds of terrible things that my boomer parents certainly didn't understand. I'd love to do that analysis if I had the data to find out, you know, given my interest

in both those topics, because I'm not sure. I don't know if there is a generational difference in that. I mean, I can't tell you the last few years has really brought this conversation to the forefront and that there is, I perceive a lot more openness to the idea that we should be regulating these technologies. We should get phones out of schools during the school day. All of those, those, they are more accepted now than they, certainly than they were in 2017 when I first started writing about this topic, when that excerpt of Igen was in the Atlantic. Right. Why do you think that is? Is there more data that, you know, policymakers are making judgments on or parents more informed? What's going on with that shift?

Yeah, I think it's both. There's definitely a lot more data of all types looking at not just the trends over time, but the links between social media use and mental health. I mean, just as one example, we have a lot more experiments, random controlled trials now that there were only a few back in 2017 and now there's a lot more. So it is more definitive now. And there's also just a lot more awareness. And some of that comes from the research, but a lot of it comes from parents looking at the experiences that their kids are having, their kids' friends, what they hear at schools, just all the things, all the problems that have cropped up in the year since. I think it's really been a wake-up call. That's interesting. I mean, you have seen changes in laws and states and local, you know, school districts, right, about phones and schools. One of the, this has happened in mind in the, in the Washington, D.C. area, a change in the policy at the school, in the public school system. It's, you didn't hear much of this in my school

system, but one of the objections you heard from parents, which always baffled me was, well, what if I need to reach my kid while they're in school? And I kept thinking, well, don't, do they not have front offices in high schools where with a receptionist where you can call and ask. I mean, it's, it's a, there's a, there's a, there's a kind of a bizarre social, I don't know, almost parasitic relationship that, that parents seem to also have, right? You talk a little bit about this in the book question about tracking apps, you know, and tracking your, your kids on these apps. Again, it goes to this question of, are you hovering too much? What is going on? How much of this is a problem with parents, you know, relying too much

on technology to watch over their kids and using, say, my kids need a phone for that particular reason? It's really interesting. I think a lot of parents give their kid a phone not for the kids' sake, but for their sake, for their anxiety. I want to be able to call them. I want to be able to see where they are. And the problem with that is it solves one problem and creates 200 others. Yeah, that's right. I keep thinking, I don't know if you saw the Netflix show Black Mirror.

There's an episode. This is sort of a sci-fi, all of the dangerous. It's a little too anti-technology for me, for my taste, but it's an anthology series. And one of the episodes featured a sort of near-futuristic technology where a mother could control everything that her daughter saw, you know, through some kind of eye implant, could black out anything that was violent or sexual or anything like this. And, you know, the sort of fable lesson of it was that her daughter was so unprepared for the real world when the, when the technology broke and all of a sudden she's confronted with things that she had never seen before. I think about that a lot as I think

about that kind of anxiety that parents have about their own kids. Our parents didn't have those anxiety's didn't they didn't do a little bit i mean and you know there's there's a balancing act because you do want to protect young children you know from seeing too much violent and sexual content i mean i think we know that from a lot of research but we also want to make sure they have time to play to be with friends in person maybe go to camp um have some freedom to walk or bite to school or a friend's house, where they learn how to live without the parent hovering over them all the time. aura frames are my favorite gift to give. I gave one to my mother several years back,

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and exclusive features. Their best gift, our lowest price. 50% off ancestry DNA, only until December 2nd. Visit ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. Hi there, this is Ross Anderson, editor of the morning dispatch interrupting your listening experience with a shameless plug. I believe that the morning dispatch is the best morning newsletter on the market by far, and I want to prove that to. So, I pull some strings with the powers that be of the dispatch, and I'm happy to announce that we're making TMD free for all readers this week. You can get the full edition of the morning dispatch for free when you sign up at www.thedispatch.com slash TMD, and consider this our way of saying thank you ahead of Thanksgiving. Whether you want to read our daily article or

just hopping in for our quick summaries of the most important news, we've got something for you. and if you're already a dispatch member, you can help us out by forwarding one of our newsletters to a friend or loved one. We can only grow if people read us after all. Sign up for the full free edition of the Morning Dispatch at www.thedispatch.com slash TMD. I'm proud of the work we do every day to deliver clarity, sanity, and understanding to our readers. And I can't wait for you to read it. Cheers. I want to turn to something else you've written. This is an opinion piece in the New York Times. The screen that ate your child's education. It's a great evocative headline. And it

touches on the ways in which technology and screens have infiltrated schools. This is something I've seen firsthand. I don't love it about my kids' public school experience where my oldest was a kindergartner during COVID. I'm sorry. And so let me tell you, it was. I mean that sincerely, I really do. Yeah, it was rough. Everybody had it rough in different ways, but the kindergartner in COVID, the laptop at home, all of that. I mean, you've never seen something so sad and frustrating as kindergarten PE on a laptop at home. It makes no sense.

It made no sense. And, but the introduction, I mean, this is sort of made this introduction of the laptop, you know, which was already there, I suppose, in public. school. It's just every kid gets one. It's a problem, not for all the reasons we've been talking about alone, but it seems to be having negative influences on test scores or knowledge. It seems to be at least the correlation and maybe some causation. What is being done on this issue where there's been a lot of leaps and breakthroughs on the idea of getting smartphones out of kids' hands while they're at school. Is there any hope for maybe lessening the amount of laptops being used by public schools? That is the hope. And that's why I wrote the

op-ed was just realizing, okay, phone-free schools, that's great progress. But how much progress is that when every kid has a school-issued device, which doesn't just have, say, canvas classroom pages and Google Docs. It often has... Usually it has YouTube. It has, sometimes it has Roblox. As I shared in the piece, I found out

that my eighth graders' laptop had Disney Plus and other streaming services. So what's to stop her from watching TV instead of doing her homework? Nothing. And I can't put parental controls on it. So that's the other huge problem with the school laptop from a parent's perspective.

And in response to the piece, a lot of the comments section was from teachers. And teachers talking about how kids are constantly distracted by these devices. So I think that is the next frontier. I think we introduced that policy of every kid gets a Chromebook or a tablet without really understanding what impact that would have on education, just with the assumption that it would be great and fine. It has been great and fine. Over the time, those policies have been in place, yeah, standardized test scores are down. And there may be several reasons for that, but I think this is one of them. It's interesting, you mentioned the teachers.

They seem to be, shockingly, you know, on the front lines, in the classrooms, they see these things. They recognize, they are seeing every day what you are picking up and recognizing. I'm wondering, I was thinking about as I read your book, about the pushback you might get. I would imagine that there are people, parents even, who read what you say, hear what you say, and think, well, Gene Twangy is being really judgmental about me. I'm curious, sort of your response to, I don't have a specific one. I think you're spot on. But it's interesting that, you know, there's a lot of resistance to somebody saying to parents,

you know what, this is the right way to do it. And the way you're doing it may not be best for the child. What kind of pushback do you hear and how do you deal with pushback from the people you're trying to help? Yeah. I was actually pleasantly surprised that that didn't really happen with this book. You know, I researched generational differences. I'm really used to push back and you're being judgy and all of those types of things. And with 10 rules, that didn't really happen. And, you know, I think part of it is that parents are drowning and they want anything that might help. And maybe they can't follow all 10, but I'm clear in the book, you know, hey, take out of this.

what might help you. And I think because it's so hard to raise teenagers around technology these days and raise kids around technology, just let's throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And I think that's the situation most parents are in. And so I feel like that's maybe why there wasn't as much pushback as I might have expected. Well, that's a pleasant surprise, frankly. I'm sure it was for you as well. But it's good to hear that I do think it reflects it, well, you know, it does reflect a little bit of despair, I think, that's happening on parents. There is so much, you talk a little bit about this, but my wife is one of the ones who has signed the, and I wish I could remember the name of the pledge. It's the, it's essentially no phone.

Does it wait until A's? Wait until 8th, yes, the wait until 8th place. She has signed it. She is, our elementary school has not had a critical mass of signatories. I think people just don't know. One of the neighboring districts does, however. And so, you know, for that reason, parents are able to know that who else has signed the pledge once they've reached that critical mass within their communities to have those conversations. I do feel like that kind of pledge.

And just to explain what it is, it's basically not you're not getting your kids a smartphone until eighth grade or later, I think is what we're doing. but the benefit of it is to help parents feel like they're not alone, and it's quite isolating. That's an awkward conversation to have with people, you know, parents do all kinds of things differently. You never want to be judgmental about your kids, friends, parents, and say, well, you're doing it wrong or have them feel like you're doing something wrong. What can be done about this? More pledges, obviously. How do we kind of broach those subjects within our, within, our peer groups of parents. Yeah, I think you're totally right. I mean, those are tough conversations to have. That's why those organizations like Wait Until Eighth are so fantastic

is then it's a group. It has a more natural way to bring up that conversation. But I think even that is changing. I hear more and more about parents whose kids are, you know, say fourth grade, fifth grade, where they're talking to each other about smartphones and when to give their kid a phone and finding other parents who don't want to give their kid a phone that young and who want to put that off. And then their kid doesn't have to be the only one. I mean, I sometimes say that if your kid is the only one who doesn't have a smartphone and their grade you won, but that is admittedly a somewhat unusual perspective. And I get it. I mean, It's developmentally right on that teams are going to want to do what their friends are doing.

I've experienced that, certainly with my own kids. That's some of the pushback I've gotten, particularly from one of them. But all of my other friends have an iPhone, and I don't. So that's hard. And you have to stand your ground as a parent. And I am not going to stand here and tell you that that's necessarily easy. It's not. And it is easier if you can do it.

it with other parents. Well, it would be a first if this was an aspect of parenting that was easy, right? It's not like it's ever that easy. Exactly. I hear even when they leave the house, it's somehow even... Oh, yeah. I have a 19-year-old, so I can tell you all about that. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's... I say I don't want to think about it, but I've got to start thinking about it because it's closer than I think or am comfortable with. There's the... It's it's funny that you, so much of your book does feel like it's telling parents to sort of remember that they're in charge. I mean, that's literally your first rule is you're in charge. And in sort of remembering some of the lessons that we should have learned from our own parents

in the way that they, that they taught us things. It's funny you mentioned, you know, all my friends are doing this or whatever. Yes, there's the, there's the, you know, the old saw of, you know, well, if your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you do it? But, Also, and I can say this as a former teenage boy, a lot of times what your friends say they're doing or have or have experienced is not as much in reality as what they're saying. I think that's also, you know, it's that kind of aspect of where teenagers are exaggerating things that we need to remind them of because we, of course, know that ourselves as adults. So much of it is that, right, remembering that we're the ones, we're the adults, we're the ones in charge. And we do have to remember that. And, you know, I always want to be clear what we're talking about here is not what

psychologists call authoritarian parenting. We just say, these are the rules. That's it. We're not going to talk about it. And I'm not going to really show you that much concern or empathy or love. No, we're talking about the happy medium, loving but firm, having empathy, but saying these are the rules and we're going to follow them. I've also found that having a set rule really cuts down on.

arguments, you know, for both kids and teens that if you say this is the rule. So the smartphone one is a great example of this because I've heard a lot of people say, oh, you know, okay, the answer to you, when should kids get a smartphone is when they're ready. So if you tell your kid that, well, okay, I'll get you a smartphone when you're ready. They're going to tell you every single day and every minute of every day that they're ready now. So that's why I love the idea of having a set age or a milestone like a driver's license, because then it's a set goal. And we age gategate everything else, alcohol and voting and driving, and we should do the same with these technologies. Do you think there should be laws in regard to this? And what would

they look like? Because we have laws for those age gated activities. What should they look like from on smartphones and screens. Well, my hero is Australia. They passed the nationwide law, raising the minimum age for social media to 16, and they're going to require the companies to verify age. I would love to see that in the U.S. How likely is that to happen? You mentioned in the U.S., very unlikely, very unlikely.

Is there no sort of, again, because of our federal system, we've got states, the laboratories of democracy. Is that happening anywhere? At the state levels, it's starting to happen. But every time a state tries, they're immediately sued by the tech companies. So does this need a federal intervention then? Do you think that's the answer? Well, I mean, I don't want to get two in the weeds.

However, there is a specific federal intervention, which would help a lot, which is to repeal something called Section 230. And that's the piece of law that says that tech companies are not liable for anything published on their place. platforms. So the lawsuits have been able to say, okay, it's not just the content, which is what 230 covers, but it's also the design, which is right on. And just for full disclosure, I am an expert witness in some of these cases. So I've learned a lot about the ins and outs of the law that I didn't know before. So that's, that's the argument right now is that it's the design. And that, and it's true when you think about it, you know, yes, content is there, and yes, we have to be concerned with content, but it's the algorithm and the push notifications and the gamification that keep kids

on TikTok for two, three hours a day or, you know, scrolling through Instagram for an hour when they meant to spend five minutes. Right. You know, it, in my world, a lot of what I do reporting on, you know, is politics in Washington. And it does seem that, uh, what you're describing, there is no political constituency or will for it at the moment. There is a lot of, for reasons that have nothing to do with what we're talking about, you know, repealing Section 230, for instance, has got a lot of pushback. I would say from kind of both parties for different reasons. And it seems like there's no, there's no sort of path for something that is specifically designed

to protect kids. don't limit the sale of alcohol for adults, maybe in some specific instances with control laws, but we do, we do limit it for people under the age of 21. It seems like there ought to be a middle ground where we're, you know, sort of not impeding on, so, you know, requiring social media companies to be responsible for things that adults see, but are responsible for children who are on there or, you know, who are breaking the law if there were to be a law and getting on and using their services when they shouldn't be. Well, that's already happening because the minimum age is 13 and it's broken every day. You know, 10, 11, 12-year-olds are routinely on social media when they're not supposed to be.

And the sad part is there is bipartisan agreement that we need to do something to protect kids online. Just there hasn't been any success getting those bills passed yet. It's one of the few issues that is truly bipartisan, though. I mean, that pretty much never happens these days. It's just Congress is kind of frozen and can't do much of anything. So I just did not. I wish I were optimistic. I'm not.

But we'll see. I mean, I would be extremely happy to be wrong. Well, Gene, before I let you go, one of the most charming parts of your book and the way that you write about these topics is you don't present your own family and your and your children as perfect angels who you have you have crafted into you know perfect model citizens of what happens which I feel like is a lot of what we hear from people who have specific rules about here's how we're running things in our family you kind of show the warts and all about your the mistakes that you've made the mistakes that your children have made is there one either from the book

or maybe not from the book that you feel like really you've learned the most from when it comes to your kids and technology that you want to share with them. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans.

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It's just that this stuff, this stuff is really hard and the controls don't always work. And, you know, there's always another device popping up that you have to worry about. And kids are kids and teenagers push boundaries and that's their job. I would say the biggest mistake that I made was with laptops because I kind of made this assumption that laptops are for homework and didn't fully process.

I was way too much of a Gen Xer, I think, or something about this, that actually they're entertainment devices. And the school laptop, I can't do anything much about other than complain to the school that it shouldn't have access to Disney Plus and YouTube. But the personal laptops, for my oldest two kids, I did not have the controls on them I should have had. And I think it's really easy to forget that. At least it was for me because we've done really well, I think, overall with phones, but laptops is where it like it kind of snuck in. And I had my husband set up the controls and I think they just didn't work that well. So, but then, you know, I set them up on their Mac laptops. I gave them last Christmas and found out that, you know, setting up the controls is really hard.

So we got third party software. And that, again, isn't perfect. It doesn't catch everything and the time limits seem not to work. But it does seem to do a pretty decent job blocking pornography and social media. So I'll take it. And it was easy to install and it wasn't that expensive. And I'm reluctant to conclude that you have to spend money to protect your kids online. I didn't come to that conclusion easily.

But fortunately, it's but 60 bucks a year. It's less than a streaming service. And it's really, really necessary. We, I have in this room that I'm recording in the new family laptop that is a Christmas present for our kids so that we don't have to keep using the, like, I think it's like a 15 or 20-year-old family laptop. And I'm hoping that that can be something of a. of a reset button for sort of our family's use and particularly our older kids' use of the laptop

as well as sort of a conversation starter. It can't end with the conversation, but it does sort of operate. I hope it will operate in that way. Is there anything that I haven't asked about regarding your book or this topic that you want to say or you wish you were asked about The piece of real world freedom is, I think, really important. That's something that, you know, again, that we are overprotective, that we really should be thinking more about letting our kids do what we did when we were children and teens, of dropping them off at the amusement park with their friends, of. of sending them into the grocery store to buy a few things, sending them off to camp, giving them these experiences in the real world,

so they'll be prepared when they become adults. Even so they'll be prepared when they enter middle school or enter high school, and they just have to take more responsibility for their own actions and planning their own time and all of those things. I've shared some of my mistakes. I will also share probably my proudest moment as a parent to close this out, if you don't mind.

My oldest, who is now 19, she graduated high school early and went off to Navy boot camp. So she's in the Navy Reserve. She's a corpsman, which is their term for a medic. But she went off to boot camp, barely 18, and she wrote me a letter. And I'm going to, like, lose it. I'm sorry. She wrote me a letter from boot camp because that's the only way you can communicate with your kids in boot camp. It's crazy.

They, you know, they get like three phone calls. the entire eight weeks. We didn't hear anything from her for the first three. She wrote me a letter a month or so in, and she said, Mom, thank you for raising me to be an adult. And she said a lot of the other young people here, like they haven't been away from home. Their moms did their laundry for them

and just managed their lives and everything. And she said, you know, you gave me that freedom to do these things on my own, and it's really paying off now. And that was like, you know, as a parent, that was just like, wow, oh my gosh. Well, I am all about celebrating those wins because they mean so much. They do because there's so many losses and there's so many fights and so many things where you're like, oh, my God, I screwed them up for life.

Or I just screwed up this one particular thing or I forgot the school fundraiser. I mean, this is like every day, right? This is my life. It's like you've got a bug in my house and paying attention. So, yeah, you got to take the wins when you have them. Take the W. Absolutely. Take the W when you get a Manda. And this is great.

Well, this whole conversation has been a W for me. I've really enjoyed it. And I really do. I really mean this. Every parent should buy this book because I will be like referring to this over the next few years and just like underlining things and being like, oh yeah, that's right. We should implement that rule. 10 rules for raising kids in a high tech world. Gene Twengie.

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