The Netmums Podcast - S18 Ep1: Parenting in a digital world: tackling screen time and social media with Jonathan Haidt

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

**Sensitive content warning: This conversation explores some very serious themes, including self-harm, depression and sexual references. Please take care while listeningWe’re back for a brand new series of The Netmums Podcast! Meet your new parent hosts, TV presenter and JLS singer, JB Gill, and Netmums Editorial Director Louise Burke.JB and Louise are kicking off Series 18 with one of the hotly debated parenting topics right now: the issue of children’s screen time and the social media ban. How can we as parents tackle screen time and online use while raising a happy family?We’re joined by renowned social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, who helps us explore the impact of smartphones on childhood, the difficult conversations parents face with their kids around social media use, and practical strategies for resetting family digital habits.In this episode of our podcast made by parents for parents:- The challenges of managing screen time in busy family lives – ‘bad’ screentime versus ‘good’ screentime- Insights into the effects of social media on children’s mental health- Practical tips for creating a balanced digital environment at home- The importance of play and outdoor activities in childhood development- Real-life stories from parents navigating these issuesThis episode is a must-listen for anyone looking for support when it comes to parenting your child online. It also provides you with expert insight if you’re looking to gain a better understanding of the current digital landscape such as the impact of social media and its effect on children today.The Amazing Generation by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price is out now at all good booksellers.Read more expert help on Netmums.com and join the conversation on socials @Netmums.We also want to hear your parenting stories, questions and dilemmas! So please share them with us at [e-mail] and we can bring you into the conversations that matter on The Netmums Podcast.This podcast is brought to you by Netmums: backed by experts, trusted by parents. Proudly produced by Decibelle Creative / @decibelle_creative

Just a heads up before we start. Today's conversation explores some very serious themes, including self-harm, depression and suicidal thoughts. These topics may feel distressing for some, so please take care while listening. Welcome to the NetMums podcast, the Parenting Podcast. We're back for a series 18 with a new chapter, but still bringing you the Conversations Parents Trust.

I'm your new host, Louise Burke, NetMum's Editor-Ditor, and I'm excited to say I'm joined by our very first dad host, JLS singer and TV presenter, J.B. Gill. Hey. Yes. I felt like I should have done a drum roll then. Did you know what? You did a very nice

introduction. Thank you so much, Louise. I am of course J.B. Gill. I'm a dad of two and as Louise has just said, your brand new host. And what an honour it is as well. Because each week, we'll be taking and talking honestly about parenting as it really is. Yep, with trusted experts, standout guests, of course, and real life stories from parents who get it.

And to kick things off, we can't get more real than the conversation around screen time and social media. Today we're asking the big question, how do we actually tackle screen time in a way that actually works for our busy families while making sure we're raising happy and confident kids it's the goal right we all want to know absolutely i mean i don't know if we've we've got it right you know i think we're definitely still working through it i do know for a fact that both my children perhaps don't have as much a screen time as as other families and other children partly because they're always doing you know some sort of activity and ace in particular who's my eldest um you know

he doesn't really use an ipad that much but kiara does and i think it's it's just understanding some of those parameters, what's safe to do, what's not safe to do. You're hearing so many stories now about, you know, kids on social media and watching TikTok and Instagram and, you know, even having their own accounts. And, you know, obviously, as they get older, I'm sure it will become, you know, more necessary for them to have them. But, you know, certainly at 11 and 7, which ages of my two children, you know, I would say it's not for them yet.

Yeah. But then ACE is going to be going to secondary school in a year, you know, not even a year. in a few months. And I'm sure there's going to be kids there with their own phones. Yeah, and it'll be dad can have Snapchat, dad can have Instagram. You know? Yeah, my 13-year-old told me last night that not letting her on social media was ruining her social life.

Wow. I had to point out that life happens in real life. You know, she has a brilliant life off screens, but, you know, clearly she's not immune to the peer pressure that's happening online. So it's not an easy one. In this episode, we're talking about the navigating these days. difficult conversations around screen time and social media with your kids and how childhood has changed and why our children are apparently more anxious and also as parents I think plus useful

tips you can use to reset your digital lives in the family home I guess today is jonathan height social psychologist bestselling author and someone whose work has sparked huge conversations about childhood mental health and smartphones around the world his book the anxious generation has really struck a nerve with parents teachers and politicians and politicians policymakers and his new book, The Amazing Generation, speaks directly to children themselves. Welcome, Jonathan, to the Netman's podcast. Thanks so much, Louise. Thanks so much, J.B.

I just want to point out, just in the little opening anecdotes that you gave about your own families, we see some of the major dynamics. We see children, especially once they reach around like 9, 10, 11, they become excellent lawyers, and they are really good at formulating arguments. And in a sense, you're giving them help, learning how. to do that. They need to learn how to argue and persuade. But they have a point. They have a point in both comments. One was that J.B. Euro is on your phone. And we are part of the solution. We don't have to follow the same rules as our kids. But most of us are actually, we have bad habits

too. And so that is a piece. But we need to improve our own habits. The second, even more dramatic, Louise, your child pointed to and put you in the collective action trap, which is, if you don't let you. me do this bad thing, it's going to be even worse for me because everyone else is doing the bad thing and I have to do it with them. Because what kids are afraid of isn't really losing their phones or social media. Studies of older kids show they actually don't like it overall. They feel trapped.

What they're terrified of is being cut off, being alone, being left out. And that's why this is such a damnable trap. And that's why here we are, you know, we're really 15, 16 years into the intense social media period. It started in the early 2010s. And we're so deep into it because it's such a trap. And so we'll talk about that today. What are the dynamics of the trap? And how can you as a family, as a parent, how can you get out of the trap?

I actually want to stay on the conversation of the trap because you're just saying collective action trap. I mean, that just sounds horrific. There's three words. I don't want to be in that trap. It just sounds horrible. Yeah. If you're going to be in a trap, it's better be there with other people. but it's kind of bad when the people in the trap are all the children of the world.

I mean, that's basically what's happened. Yeah. So with social media, because I know you played an instrumental role in the ban of social media under 16s in Australia. And obviously, we're having big conversations and it's all hotting up here on the UK as well. Yeah. Some people are for it, some people against it, obviously. It's not everyone's in agreement. We did a poll on Net Mums in our community on Instagram and 92% of people.

parents were for the ban. Kind of a self-selected group, but sure. Yeah, I'll take it. Well, I mean, I'm with them, to be completely honest with you. I know there's obviously concerns like anything, you know, any rule that you make. It's never purely simple. But for me, simply, I just want that decision taken out of my hand. And I think what a lot of parents find is they just don't want to face the battle with their kids at home.

It's too upsetting. How can they, what would be your advice to those parents? Yeah. So first, we all have to have a very clear understanding of what is called the Commons dilemma or a collective action trap. And the original work on this, I think was in economics. They used the example of an English medieval town on which there's a commons and there's grass on the Commons and everybody has sheep and they're looking for grazing lands. And they put their sheep on the commons. And maybe the – but if they put all their sheep on the commons, it's going to graze all the grass.

There will be nothing left. And then everyone's worse off. So the town says you can only put one sheep on the commons. Okay, fine. And that's sustainable. But everyone has a motive to maybe slip in a second one because they're better off if they do a second one and a third one. And if everyone does that, then eventually you deplete the resource. I guess it's even clearer with fishing.

If you don't overfish, and everybody else does, then they're more profitable than you. They're more successful fishermen. So the point is there's a lot of examples in our common life together in which if we each follow our individual self-interest, we're actually all worse off in the long run. So this is very widely studied in the social sciences. And so I think that's why, you know, when I came along, I'd studied adolescent development in my dissertation on moral development. But then most of my work was on social and political psychology. And I only came back to the adolescent development in 2015, 2016, with the coddling of the American mind when it was clear that, something's going wrong with our kids.

They're suddenly very anxious and depressed. If they're born after 1995, they're different. What happened? What happened? And this was in America more focused. Yes. It was in American college students. But then when I saw that the exact trends, those mental health, those hockey sticks of, you know, steady levels of anxiety, depression until 2012, and then shooting up, it was exactly the same in the UK and

Canada and Australia and New Zealand and Scandinavia and much of the world. So that's when I realized something huge is happening. I've been working on this since about 2016, 2017, trying to track it down. So anyway, I'm sorry, back to the collective action trap. So, you know, it's one thing like with smoking, at the peak year of smoking, only 37% of American high school students smoked because you'd gain some prestige by smoking, perhaps, but you didn't have to smoke. But with social media, it's over 90% everywhere because if most people are on it, you have to be on it. And so this is a trap, unlike any previous consumer product.

We've never faced a consumer product like this. And frankly, there's never been a consumer product that's damaged hundreds of millions of kids the way this is around the world. Hundreds of millions have been affected adversely by growing up on social media going through puberty. Okay, so with all of that said, now back to the question of what do you actually do.

What I'm trying to convey is that don't blame yourself for being in this trap. It is very hard to get out. Now, I don't want to – I mean, look, there are some parents who say, you know, I'm sorry. I don't care if you're cut off. You know, you're – you know, I get to make the rules. That's for your safety. And I can tell you, we've done surveys of parents and of Jan Z. And we say, are you glad that you gave the phone when you did or do you wish I'd given it earlier?

Do you wish you'd given it later? and among the parents, nobody ever says they wish they'd given it earlier. A lot say they wish they'd give it later. And amazingly, among older Gen Z, those in their 20s, nobody says they wish their parents had given it earlier. A lot say they wish they'd given it later. So, yeah. I was reading the case studies in your new book here. So just to be clear, I don't want to say you can't do.

Of course you can do it, but it's hard. It's very hard. You know, my wife was sort of better at being strict, and I wasn't. I was very strict. On social media, I did a great job. Like, my daughter is 16. She still has none. Really?

Yeah. And she's actually okay with it because she sees the damage. She sees how much more productive she is. She sees, as she said long ago, she said, Daddy, I can see how Instagram makes, she said, I can see that the Instagram girls are stupid. Like these girls she'd grown up with, they got on Instagram and then they suddenly got stupid, you know, all about hair and makeup and appearance. Yeah. So it's all quite performative, isn't it? Yeah.

It's all performative. Yeah. So, sorry, I keep going round and around to get to your question. I know, because, but there is so much to talk about it. There is. And you have to situate, that's the thing. Yeah. I'm saying, as a social psychology, you have to understand the social forces around all of us. Okay, and now let's talk about what to do. And so the key piece of advice that I always give is this is a very hard trap to escape

if you're trying to do it just with your family. But boy, does it become easy if you have three or four other families. And so if you have a small community, if you have a small community, if you have, And ideally, people that you live near enough that the kids could walk to each other's houses. So what I'm after in both of the books, in the anxious generation and in the amazing generation, it isn't just get off your phones, don't give your kids' phones and social media. It's keep your eye on childhood. Give your kids an excellent, exciting, social, real-world childhood as you probably had,

or if you didn't, at least your parents had. So the kids know their grandparents had all kinds of adventures when they were young. And our kids don't have any adventures. They just, it's just, I mean, what are they going to say in 40 years? Do you remember that Fortnite battle where you were trapped behind the water tower? I think it was number 47,026. No, I don't remember that one. So to go back to your previous book then, the anxious generation,

you talked a lot about the great rewiring of children's brains, didn't you, around the use of devices? And you talk about a huge shift in play-based childhood and phone-based childhood. Do you want to just sum that up for those people that aren't necessarily? Sure. Yeah. So one of the things I try to do in all in my writing is to be an evolutionary psychologist who talks about human nature and also like an anthropologist or cultural psychologist who talks about how the ways that we live vary across cultures and across decades. I try to always work it all together.

And so the key thing to think about for human development is that we are mammals. And the thing about mammals is that we have this long childhood. I mean, I have no idea how evolution first got an early creature to secrete milk from her chest. Like, I don't know how that started, but however it started, it's set in motion. This really long relationship between the mother and the child. It goes on for a long time. And we nurture them. Yeah.

And so, but it isn't just the nutrition. What the kid has to do is develop all the skills of adulthood. They don't do that when they're with mom. And so the whole point of the attachment system is the infant, of course, is stuck to mom. But as they begin to tottle off, that's where they learn. That's where they try things. That's where they fail. That's where they get in trouble.

That's where they get into a conflict. And they come running back to their secure base. Okay. So that's what has to happen. And that's what happened from, you know, several hundred million years ago until the 1990s, I would say. It kind of stopped then, at least in America. And amazingly, Canada, you know, we had a real crime. wave, you know, things were kind of dangerous in America in the 60s, 70s and 80s. But actually,

Canada and the UK, you also began taking away childhood independence and you didn't have the high crime levels that we did back then. So there were cultural changes that made us much more focused on protect our kids from this dangerous world that I keep seeing on TV and, oh, it's getting more competitive to get into universities. So your childhood is devoted to getting into college. And it's even worse in East Asia. My God, I would hate to be a Korean kid. But, you know, all of us Anglo countries, you know, we're kind of moving that way. And so the net effect is that we stop kids from playing, but play is what they most need to do. They desperately need to play, and they need to play unsupervised. Minimal supervision, you know, obviously heavy supervision when they're

two and three, I mean, because they really can't. But, you know, six to eight, you know, lighter supervision. And by the time they're eight or nine, they need to be having time outside where they become self-supervising. Okay. So, So that's the play-based childhood. That's what's healthy and needed. That began fading out in the 90s and into the 2000s. In America, we have all these horrible cases of parents who are literally arrested or thrown in jail. So he's always the mother.

The mother is thrown in jail because her son was caught walking to school or walking to a store or in a playground. Like, he could have been abducted. You're an irresponsible mother. That's crazy. So we're working on that. We're trying to change. I have a group called Let Grow. We're trying to change laws.

But that's all about the loss of the play-based childhood from over from fears and all sorts of things. But the amazing thing, the interesting thing is that teen mental health didn't collapse in the 90s as we were taking away the play. What it did, I think it weakened them. But at the same time, we were taking them away from the outside world. The internet was coming in. So we said, well, oh, okay, yeah, spend hours on a computer. Maybe you'll be like Bill Gates or Steve, maybe you'll, you know, this is going to be good for your future. Spend time on a computer.

And the kids enjoyed it. And so we thought everything was okay. And then all of a sudden, in 2012, 2013, their mental health collapses. And that brings us to the second piece of the puzzle. Once they've been weakened by not getting the constant, you know, toughening experiences, all that, now they're much more vulnerable. And what happens in 2010, almost everybody has what you call a brick phone, what we call it, like a flip phone or a basic phone. No internet.

You use it to call people and you text people. It's a tool to communicate, which is great. I love technology. If it helps us, that's great. No problem. So 2010, if you finished puberty around by 2010, 2011, you're a millennial and you're probably fine. So that's like, you know, if you were born in the early 1990s, that's what happened to you.

You're a millennial. But what if you're born in the year 2000? So when you're 12 years old, you really want a phone. Your older sister had gotten a flip phone at your age, but now everyone's getting an iPhone. Look, look at all you. It's beautiful. I mean, my dad, I need an iPhone. Everyone's getting one.

And that's not a phone, is it really? Exactly. It's a piece more than that. It's a porn theater. It's a slot machine. It's a drug dealer's outlet. It's everything that children shouldn't have. plus you could make calls and text if you want.

Yes. So if you were born in the year 2000, you're Gen Z, and you begin puberty, at the beginning of puberty, your parents give you a phone, and then they can't stop you from opening social media accounts. You can always open, you know, there's no way you can stop them. I mean, if you could check their phone, but then they can do it onto their computer,

if they have a good, so anyway, in 2012, Facebook bought Instagram, and that's the year that all the girls moved on to it. That's when female social life moves on. Instagram. And so by the time you're 15 now, you've been on Instagram for three years, and you've been a brand manager for three years. You've been managing your brand 24-7. That's all you've done. You stop reading books. You don't see your friends very much in person. You don't laugh with them very much. You don't eat with them as much. You're managing your brand all day

long. And you feel that your life is pointless, and you're depressed. And maybe you got, you're a little anxious. So you go on and you, you find comfort in a group of other girls who are depressed and anxious. And some of them have found that cutting themselves relieves the anxiety. And those that cut the deepest, I was talking with Lata Rubeck, a researcher in Copenhagen, and she was telling me that because the girls in these self-harm groups on TikTok, because the girls who cut the deepest get the most likes, the most support and the most outpouring of love, it literally trains girls by behaviorist methods. B.F. Skinner would love it. By behaviorist methods, the deeper you cut, the bigger the rewards. What do you think happens? Girls cut deeper. So it's

completely insane that we put girls into this mad max world. And that's what happens. For social media, yes. Yeah. So right. So for social media, girls is the primary thing. But the boys actually, I think, are doing worse overall. We'll come to that. Let's finish with the girls now. We'll talk about the boys. Is it such a slippery slope? Because I think that's one of the biggest fears that most parents have. And I think back to my childhood even and growing up and then think forward, of course, to my children. You know, of course, you know, there was TV around. There was technology.

There were games and things like that. And I played those games. And it was probably more social then than it is now. But what is it specifically about smartphones and social media? because as we alluded to right at the top of the podcast, you know, they are tools for good. They can be used for good. Is it by older people? Yeah, for sure.

By older people. It's a case of management. But then also they have to have some sort of exposure to it in order to then be able to manage it later on. Okay. So let me approach this by. Okay. So let's talk about good screen time versus bad screen time. And that will allow me to lay out what are the harmful features.

Okay. So, and you guys use the word screen time before. for. And that's a, you should try to avoid that word. It's useful because there's so many different kinds of screens. But let's keep our eye, not on screens per se. Let's start from the realization that humans are storytelling animals. As long as we've had language, we've raised our kids with stories. Kids need to consume thousands of patterns of social life and a story from the elders or in more modern times a book, a Harry Potter novel. All of these things are tuning up kids' brains. But the tuning up takes time. You can't.

do it with 15 second videos. So what I'm saying is if you want to have movie night with your kids twice a week where they watch a movie ideal. So this is what's really good. You watch a movie, which you selected to have characters that live in a moral world, you know, with conflicts and all sorts of stuff. So movie night with you or with siblings or friends is great. That's a good thing. Don't be afraid of having you. Social viewing. That's right. So that's one extreme, which is a good thing. You should do it. Okay. Now here's the exact opposite. Yeah, honey. Okay. Here, just take my iPhone. You know, I'm making dinner. I've got the baby. Here, take my iPhone. Oh, good. Okay. So now you've got one kid alone with a small screen in his face. He's not watching a movie. It ends on short videos. It mostly goes to short videos. He's watching TikTok or YouTube short.

most likely is what it all gravitates to. And these are not stories. These are not morals. I mean, everybody needs to watch this. It's just weird stuff. It's like drilling holes in wood, followed by people getting, you know, hit by a bucket or, I mean, it's just weird stuff. And that's what's tuning up their minds. And the other thing is that television, which maybe we watch too much of it, but you couldn't take the television with you anywhere else. Where's the phone? You got it with you all the time. And the television was not BF Skinner conditioning you, training you to perform behaviors. There was no feedback, which is crucial. The phone, the smartphone, is so brilliant at giving you stimulus response reward, stimulus response reward, and around and around it goes.

And that's what a slot machine does. So once everyone has the two extremes in their mind, movie night with someone else, good. Touchscreen device alone. short content, the worst. I think that people should have zero minutes of that, and that includes adults. Nobody should be watching TikTok. Yes, yes, there's lots of useful stuff that will happen on TikTok, but it could happen on other platforms, too. We don't need TikTok and Instagram reels to get us there.

So I hope that sort of explains why, you know, television when we were kids wasn't particularly harmful, even though it was kind of stupid, but it didn't, it doesn't seem to have hurt us. But it's really clear. Lots of time on a touchscreen device is really, really messing kids up and depriving them the ability to be self-motivated. Hearing you sort of clarify that in your terms makes this next stat from Offcom recently, even more shocking about nearly one million preschoolers are on social media.

Obviously, that does include YouTube, which is probably the most watched thing by preschoolers, and in fact, probably more than the BBC at the moment. and so you can see that shift shift in behavior and more young people at a very young age are now having smartphones in their hands their own device as well so J.B. You said before it is like

use the term slippery slope because it feels like we've all gone down a very big slippery slope with it. I put my hands up. My 13 year old has a smart. smartphone. She doesn't have social media on it yet. And I've got 10 year olds who don't have a phone, but they do have access to an iPad. And J.B. and I talked about this, and I want to ask you, Jonathan, because there's lots of conflicting advice for parents. We're told to manage the screen time, or the device time. So some parents will say, well, I let my kids do 10 minutes a day, or I only

let them do it at the weekends. I've heard you speak on other podcasts and Ted talks about, then doing that 10 minutes a day is creating a daily bad habit in your eyes based on all the research that you've conducted. What's then the sweet spot? Do you know what I mean? Like what it says so much advice out there and and like I said the horse is bolted for a lot of us how if we are in a place where we're like actually yeah okay let's have a family reset or actually I need to switch this up and manage it. What is the best thing to do? Is it a daily? limit? Is it a weekend only limit? You know, because we do have to manage it somehow. Sure. Okay. So first, okay, first let's talk about iPads. When I was writing the book,

I didn't have enough evidence. I didn't talk about iPads very much because I knew it would be a big deal to say, you know what? You shouldn't give your kids iPads either. So I started just, we're really clear about the smartphone because you take it with you everywhere. We're very confident about that, that you should delay until high, what we say high school and we've said, or age 14 in the rest of the world. So, but now it's clear that everything you can do on an iPad, I mean, everything you do on a phone you can do in an iPad, it's just a little less portable. So what I've started hearing, I remember heard a story recently or a few months ago, a preschool teacher. She said, you know how kids sometimes cry at drop off, you drop off the kid and then they cry, because mom's leaving.

No, they cry because the iPad is leaving. They had it at breakfast while mom was trying to get everything together. They had it in the car while mom was driving. them to preschool. And now they bring you in and they sit you down and they take away the iPad. And these same teachers say that, we're seeing this in America. I'm sure you're seeing it in Britain too. The number of four and five-year-olds coming in beginning school who are not potty trained, who have language delays, who have no dexterity recently. All they've been doing for their whole life is this on their iPad. So iPad, you got, I mean, I hate to say this because I know how much we all

depend on iPads. iPads are very much like phones and we shouldn't be giving them. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying you can never let your kid watch a movie on an iPad. If you can make it that they watch a movie, that's okay, especially if they do it with other siblings. Because sometimes we need those devices. Some parents would argue, some parents would argue, like on a long car journey or on a plane journey and things like that. Yeah. So I would say on a long journey, if you can set it up so that they get an hour of movie time, or if it's a very long, two hours. But first of all, there is some real advantage to not having stuff coming in all the time. The three of us, when we were young, did you ever look out a car window for more than a minute?

Yes, absolutely. Of course. Or char window. The boredom. Right. The eye spy. It was endless. Yeah.

But that's what, because there's a wonderful book, Christine Rose, and the Extinction of Experience. And there's all kinds of research on dopamine. We need stuff coming in, but then we need time to reflect, to think. We need what are called the interstitial moments, the moments in between other things. All of that has gotten filled by touchscreens, all of it for kids. For my students at NYU, for a lot of them. And so on a long trip, I think it would be great to say, okay, we got a five-hour trip. You can have two hours of movie time.

Just movie time. You can't. It's not just like, here, take the iPad. It's your iPad. You've customized it. You know your way around. You've gradually developed a preference for YouTube shorts. So, J.B., I'm not saying you shouldn't let your kid use an iPad.

But the general advice is don't give your kid their own iPad because once you start doing that, they're going to beg for it, beg for it, beg for it. And that's the rest of your life is that conflict. So, you know, yes, I'm sympathetic on long trips. But if you could possibly keep it to just long things or high quality TV shows, you know, at least 20-minute episodes, TikTok and Instagram Reels are terrible. You should never let your kids on those. YouTube is more complicated because so much good stuff is on YouTube. we can't have school without YouTube, we can't raise our kids without YouTube, unless you really, you know, move away from society. But the thing about YouTube is that it's moved towards YouTube shorts.

That's what the kids are watching. And I've mentioned this to the people at YouTube. We're hoping to push them. It would be ideal if someday you could turn off YouTube shorts. And so you could like your kid watch YouTube. Or if you could say, you can only watch things that are 10 minutes or longer. You can't watch any videos that are under 10 minutes. Because the attention fragmentation turns out, I think, is actually a bigger issue than the mental illness.

because the mental illness is only affecting 20 or 30% of our kids, which is unbelievable to say that. Is that in America or global? Well, in the U.S. and U.K., we've both seen huge increases on the order of, you know, between 50 and 150%, depending on what you're looking at. These are not small increases. And I can't say that all of that increases due to smartphones and social media, but I think a lot of it is. And what I can see from my students at NYU and from, you know, survey from everything,

is that the great majority of people are affected. Like 70, 80% are diminished because they grew up this way. Their ability to focus, their ability to think, the amount that they've learned of complex patterns as opposed to short videos. So be careful about giving them unlimited time on iPad. Now, more specifically to answer your question, when you think about daily habits,

think about addiction. And here, let's talk especially about the boys. Okay, let's get into the. the boys. If we check in on kids when they're 14, it looks like the girls are doing worse. They're more anxious and depressed. They just hit puberty. And at puberty is when you get the big increase in girls and they become much more anxious, depressed than boys. That's always been the case. So at 14, their lives look terrible. I remember it well, by the way. Imagine if when you were at that age, you had to do this brand management all day long,

Yeah, especially if I had a big Zet on the end of my nose or something. And then people are talking about it. And they're making memes out of your Zit. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So at 14. Thanks God there's the memes now.

That's right. So at 14, it looks like the girls are doing worse. The boys are watching a lot of porn and video games. And they enjoy that. So they're doing okay, it looks like. But now let's track ahead to say 28, age 28. What's happened? Both in Britain and America,

and actually around the world. There's a wonderful British, well, now he's American, Richard Reeves. We all love him here. He has a book called Of Boys and Men, which helped me write my boys chapter in my book. So boys have been going down relative to girls and in absolute terms on some measures since the 70s. And, you know, Richard's very clear. It's great that girls have made so much progress and everything. That's all good.

There's no problem there. But boys have been withdrawing from the real world. school is increasingly designed for girls, longer class time, sit in your seat, less recess. That's what we did in the US. So boys are dropping out, but they're finding a lot more pleasure on online activities, video games, porn. And now gambling. I cannot believe we are legalizing gambling. 15-year-old boys are betting on not just who wins the game, but will the next pitch be a ball or a strike? $5 says it's a ball.

I mean, it's that quick, quick, slot machine. And they're doing this independently, probably. in their homes. And so they're not going, because going back to what you were saying about that play-based childhood, I mean, I remember like coming home, ditch my school bag and running back out again.

And I guess, and I was talking about it with my husband last night. And the difference is when you go running back out again, you now don't have that crowd of 15 kids around the swings like I used to have because everyone, not everyone, I'm generalizing here with board brush strokes,

but people are in their bedrooms, gaming or social gaming. So exactly. So that's the, other collective action trap on both sides on the phones you have to be on and on outdoor play if no one else is out there you can't go out and if and that's what everybody thinks so nobody goes out so that's why what it takes is coordinated action and that's why one of the most exciting concepts in the book that i mean the one that i love to hear about when it's implemented the world is called

a flavorhood so um if you so anybody listening families that have kids anywhere around your age they don't have to be exact mixed stage play is actually better than everyone the same age If there's kids, and I think really sort of, you know, 8 to 12, 8 to 13 is really the sweet spot when you want kids out playing in groups and gangs and figuring out what games and, you know, oh, well, he's only eight, so we'll pitch underhand to him or whatever it is. Like they learn to accommodate all of that. So if you can find a few families that are walking or bicycle distance away from each other, and then you say, okay, we five families, we're a playboyhood. What that means is that the kids can meet up as they, we don't tell them where to meet. They just, you know, and maybe it's only every Friday or maybe it's every day or maybe it's only on Saturdays. But we agree.

What are the parameters here? And at that point, the kids, they can call each other on their landlines. That's getting very popular in America. A landline phone that is actually free because it uses the Internet for the connection, but it is a wired phone. Yeah. Or they can have a flip phone or a phone watch. So they have ways to communicate. The kids decide, okay, this week we're starting at Tommy's house because he's got that ping pong table.

Okay, so they start there. And then they say, oh, you know, let's go over. let's go, let's go get ice cream. So that's amazing. Like that, if you do that, you've given them back a childhood. So we have to do both. If everyone's on their phone on social media, they're not going to go out. But if there are clear rules or if they don't have a smartphone or social media at the age of 10, 11, 12, then they'll go play.

Do you think there is, I suppose, a confusion that's brought about by the fact that as parents, we utilize not only these platforms, but of course our phones, I certainly do. As alluded to at the start of the podcast, you know, I use my phone a lot as a tool for work, but also doubles as a tool for, you know, interaction on social media and so on. But even for me personally, through social media, I do utilize Instagram, for instance, as a way to make income, you know, and various brands, of course, advertise on there. And that's part of sort of, you know, how I feed the family and how we do what we do. So my children see that example and of course then aspire to doing similar things.

Yeah. Well, now hold on a second. Well, first of all, if you really think that your kids want to be like you and whatever you do, they will do, boy, you are a good father and the rest of us want to be like you. I don't think that's what's going on. He's a great father. So let me, J.B., let me suggest an alternate reading of that situation. We are all using our devices too much. We are fubbing our kids.

You know, Daddy, yeah, I'll be there in a minute. You know, we are, so we are all doing this, and that is bad for family dynamics. And our kids are using that like lawyers against us. But kids don't want to copy you. They are desperate to fit in with their peer group, not with you. So here's what I would say. Technology makes things easier in general. Technology is a tool that adults use to make things easy.

We can accomplish a lot more with technology. children need to do hard things every day thousands and thousands of times. We use a calculator to do long division, or, you know, but does that mean that my child should use one in class? No, he needs to do the hard thing over and over and over again. That's how you learn. We use it to network and to sell products or put ideas out. What need does a 12-year-old have to network using a platform that uses addictive algorithm? None. None.

So the first thing, so two things. So the first is don't believe that your kids are necessarily going to copy you, but they will use it against you because they're very good lawyers. They're very good arguers. Now, when the kids are little, it's different. When you've got a baby or a toddler, it's really important for them, for their brain development, that they get that. It's called serve and return interaction. Like, you do something, she laughs. You do something.

It's that back and forth is really important. And when they're very young, they're making a big. like they look at you and they want that return. They smile. They want the return. But you don't even see them because you're on your phone. Yeah. So that's really bad.

So when the kids are little, it is very important that you not be on your phone much. I mean, it's not that it's going to point. I'm just saying to be present for them to develop a model. You're there for me. Yeah. If I do something silly, you'll laugh.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because let's face it. Let's remember that the parents will be on their phones at some point. You know, because we're all busy. We're very busy people juggling supermarket deliveries and dental appointments and all the rest.

That's right. Right. So the way we affect our kids is not necessarily by modeling our own personal behavior. Again, they're not going to copy. You know, if I start reading The Economist very publicly, like, that's not going to make them want to read The Economist. They don't care what I read. Okay.

But what you change their behavior by setting their habits and patterns. And so the two clearest of all are no screens in the bedroom overnight. That really has to be an absolute. Now, again, I haven't enforced it myself. But if you start early, it's a lot of easy. I've done on those screens in the bedrooms. Me too, to be fair. And that's actually, that came from my headteach, one of the headteachs at the school because

she said bedrooms are a child's safe space. And if they take phones into their bedrooms and then they see things on their screens that doesn't feel safe or there's a bit of bullying or whatever, then their bedroom, their one place in the world that should be their safe space is no longer than a safe space. I hadn't thought of it that way. I was just thinking that the worst things like the sextortion, like the really worst stuff tends to happen late at night in your bedroom. But anything, even like if they're not getting enough likes on a post or something, it conjures up feelings that are negative and low self-esteem

in what should be a very safe, warm, loving environment in their bedroom, their one place. That's beautiful. I like that. So here's the parenting rule that I wish I had done with my kids. This is perhaps the most important one for getting order in your house. it would be no screens of any kind in the bedroom ever. Now, it doesn't have to be the parents' bedroom because, look, kids and parents live in different worlds, but the rule has to be no screens of any kind in your bedroom ever. You know, yes, we have a lap of family computer out in the living room

or the kitchen or somewhere. Of course, there's reasons to look things up. You're going to be exposed to the internet. You're going to learn your way around. But there's no way you're going to be watching porn for an hour a day if it's in the living room. You know, there's no way you're going to be getting sex store did or sucked into buying illegal drugs or whatever if it's in a living room.

Now, when the kids are, you know, at least in America, by the time they're 11, 12, 13, they got so much homework, you might have to say, okay, here's, you know, the family laptop or your laptop maybe and say, okay, yeah, you can take it in for two hours for homework. But it has to, it's out by 8 p. You know, if you want to do homework after 10 p.m., do it in living room. So I wish I had done that. That was my big mistake. Yeah. Based on your research in your latest book where you interview lots of young people you said before, lots of Chen Zs, but also younger as well. Is there anything that you'd say that you discovered in that research that would, I know things, well, I don't know whether things surprise you, but would they surprise?

I say that because you've done so much research on this topic, but surprise parents. I know you mentioned already that many of them said, I wish I'd never had. a phone when I was 14. But was there any other surprising anecdotes or stories from those young people around phones and social media that you think would surprise parents today? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. The main one is that while we all think that the kids love this stuff, what they really love is playing with other kids, especially outside. So we have surveys showing, you know, what would you rather do?

Would you rather play video games with your friends online? or, you know, play with your friends online like video games, or do, you know, see your friends in, like, soccer practice and other adult supervised activities, or just play unsupervised outside. And by a big margin, kids choose to play outside. Secondly, while the kids do want the devices when they're, you know, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven years old, they desperately want them because everyone else has them. The big surprise for me has been how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how. young people are responding to the book. So, you know, we wrote this book for kids. Catherine Price, my co-author is really, she was an eighth-grade teacher. She knows how to write for kids. But the danger was this was just, come on kids, eat your broccoli. Don't have, you know, don't get a phone, you know, go out and do hard things. Like, come on, you can do it. But the book came out on December 30th. And if you look at the Amazon reviews and you hear from what we're hearing, what's happening is kids, kids see the book. We're talking like eight to 14-year-old kids. They see the book.

They pick it up. And then they read the whole way through. And they come to their parents to say, Mom, I don't want a smartphone anymore. Just give me a basic phone when I turn 10 or 12. And I'm going to wait until 14. And they want to, because they're so excited about a vision of childhood that they've seen in movies. All of our kids have seen movies about the 90s.

They know what kids used to be able to do. And they can't do. So the big surprise for me has been that the kids are becoming self-motivated. And this is something we see over and over again. Kids are still kids and they still really, really want to play. But the technological environment around them blocks that and they don't get a chance to play. Other than like a very narrow kind. I mean, video games is a kind of play.

I'm not saying it's nothing, but that's the only kind. And, you know, liking things and putting up memes on Instagram when you're sitting alone in your room, that's not play. It's brand management. No. And you've, I wasn't, I was going to say hint it, but actually, you know, you've made this very clear that there is an impact on children's future based on their growing behaviors and dependency on technology. Do you want to explain those concerns that you have? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'd say, you know, look, if you want to have grandchildren,

you should not give your kids a phone-based childhood because they're not likely to grow up and get married and have kids. Now, obviously, I'm a social scientist. I'm talking about trans. I'm not saying. Of course, they might still. But one of it, but, okay. But so the girls are growing up much more anxious and neurotic. much more self-focused, much less interested in having kids. And this is happening especially on the left. There is an interesting political thing in both of our countries

where girls who grow up in intensely progressive environments, you know, climate collapse, overpopulation, you know. It's a difficult world. Yeah, very good. Yeah, it is. So, so there, but my point is just that we have a, you know, what now we're, I don't know if you're talking about the UK, but there is a fertility crisis.

There's just very few children coming. And all over. all over the developed world. And so it's already the case that our kids are much less likely to have kids than we expected. And the ones that grow up with a phone-based life, the girls are going to be more anxious and neurotic and difficult. And the boys always have had worse social skills and now it's much, much worse. And the ability to approach a girl, the ability to flirt.

And so what now we're finding is a lot of young men, they say they're pornophile. They're, is it, pornophiles or pornaholics? What is it? That's a pornaholic. I mean, both of them sound horrible. The point is, what they say, that they actually prefer porn. They don't have no interest in a girlfriend because porn's so much better. And the porn is going to get a lot more enticing.

And it's going to be put in robots very soon. It already is in China. Yeah. So young men. That's what I worry about. You know, for my child, he's not got to that stage yet. You know, and I'm pretty sure of that. But, you know, he's about to go to secondary school.

and that's sort of the version of high school here in the UK. And, you know, I know that there'll be others who will be, you know, perhaps even demonstrating that to him, showing that to him. Of course the courts are showing it around. Yeah. We would have, too, if we had it when I was that age. Yeah. But that's the other thing I find sometimes with the phone,

no matter what I do for my children, they will still go to secondary school. And if someone wants to shove a phone in their face and it's harmful content that I wouldn't necessarily want them to see, I don't control, I can't control what goes on outside the home. And to be honest, the free play, yes, I'd love my kids to go out and do that free play and organize free play or whatever, however you want to call it. But the chances are that those kids that they're going out to play with will have phones on them.

Okay. Okay, but here, a really important principle we get from the scholarship of the television age, because when television came in, it transformed everything so much about life. So Marshall McLuhan famously said the medium is the message. And Neil Postman had similar advice. And what they were pointing out was everyone focuses on the content. Like television, oh, they're going to see violence and sex. Okay, that's an issue.

But it's not the main issue. What they were trying to say is when a new technology comes in, it changes everything about our habits. And that changes our lives. And so television, yes, we were probably more sedentat. than our parents or grandparents were because we watched a lot more television. Okay, so that was a change. Don't focus on the content. Focus on how life changed. But we'd still go out and play. With the smartphone, I'm just saying, don't give your kid a smartphone. Don't give them social media. Yes, they're going to see porn. People are going to show them porn. But don't worry so much about, like, they saw it, you know, once a month at school versus your son every night is masturbating because he's got his own phone in his room. And now if he's masturbating every night with increasingly graphic content,

Good luck to him finding a girlfriend ever. I'd like to hear your thought, as we'll close a conversation about going back to the social media ban for under 16s, because I know you do a lot of work behind that, and obviously it's a hot conversation in the UK right now. One parent said to me, I don't think I'm for the ban because what's going to happen when they get to 16 and they're let loose on social media? Okay. So first of all, it's not as though they're not going to have seen the issue. internet or anything else, they're already drowning in it. We're talking about removing it, so they're not drowning in it from age two through death. So it's not as though they're going

like, oh, what is, what is it? How do I use this thing? So first of all, that's, that's nonsense. Second of all, some things are just wildly inappropriate for children. And at least in America, we make laws if something is addictive, if it's going to have graphic violence, especially actual like real world violence, like you see actual people getting their heads cut off. If it's graphic sexuality, especially, you know, well, I won't even say it. And if there are other kinds of physical dangers, those are the reasons we put age limits on things. Social media has all of them. And if you didn't, you know, if you had any doubt, just look at Elon Musk's recent nudify button.

Yes. Really? Yes. You think that an environment in which any boy can just click, nudify this girl and then I can post her picture. So, I mean, you know, this is not close. Like, this is not a hard decision. It's not like there's a lot of arguments on the other side that kids. kids should be on social media.

So it comes down to a question of just, can we do it? And the main argument we've gotten at every step is, oh, it'll never work. Oh, kids will find a way around it. Look at the school ban. Look at the phone bans. So 20 states in the United States have done a full-day phone ban. Oh, it's going to be terrible. The kids are going to take their phones into the bathroom.

What are they going to do if they have anything? All these terrible things are going to happen. Guess what? Nothing happened. The kids themselves, within a week, the kids said, I live in New York, city, New York State. We went, all our schools are phone free as of September 1st. My daughter said to me, two or three weeks in, she said, Daddy, lunch is so much better. We're talking to each other. We're making up games. We're having a lot more fun. And this is what we always hear. Laughter in the

hallways. Kids are playing. So what I'm saying is this is the major problem, the major development, one of the major development problems facing humanity. And putting an age limit on, as we do for alcohol, driving, and gambling is a reasonable thing to do. Now, are some kids going to drink underage? Of course. Does that mean we should get rid of the law? Of course not. So all of the arguments I hear for why we shouldn't have an age limit,

you know, in practice, they just vanish in reality. So let me just say, I'm so thrilled. I just saw the recent announcement that Kirstarmer is coming out in favor of a much stronger position, both on phone-free schools. And again, the phone-free school, it has to be the whole school, They don't do it just in class because then you get no social benefits. It has to be the whole school day and on doing an Australia-style bill. So look, if the UK follows Australia, it's going to be a done.

So many countries are looking into this. The UK has a chance to be a leader and be the one that solidifies this. It's a much bigger country than Australia. If the UK does it, it's going to go global. Yeah. My kids' secondary school has a no-phone policy. How's it working out for them? What does he say about it?

Perfect. So my daughter in year seven, just didn't even take her phone to school. So she was so scared of getting disciplined. Because he made it very clear at the beginning of the year. He was like, the worst thing you can do for your kid is call them during the day on their phone because they will reach for their phone and they will get disciplined. All right.

That's how it starts. I mean, he was very. Okay, but do they accept it? Do they feel like actually it has made school better or what do they complain about it? Well, I think he's never had phones in the school. So he's always operated like that. Oh, that's good. For that head teacher, he's, for our head teacher on that school, he's very, yeah, zero tolerance on it and won't accept them in.

She will take it now, but she keeps it turned off in her bag. And then sometimes she takes it sometimes. It depends what she's doing after school. But, yeah, I think, I think, like you said, if everyone's doing the same thing, it's much better. And it's easier for parents, to be honest, if everyone's working together, I think. Yes. Yeah. What advice would you give to parents who think to themselves, okay, you know, I've got an older child perhaps or, you know, a teen and we've all, they've already had this exposure to social media, supposed to to their phones and so on.

Would you say the damage is done or is there a key piece that, a key piece of advice that they can take away to help them reset things within the home? Yeah. Well, so, so you only get one child, you only get one in puberty. And so if you made it all the way through puberty, watching, doing video games and porn for hours every day, there is a chance that some part of that is irreversible. So that's the bad news. For heavy use over a long period of time during brain development,

there would probably be some, not full, but there will be probably some residue of sort of reduction in ability. That's the bad news. The good news is that even at the age of 19, My students at NYU, I teach a course called Flourishing, and it's all sophomores who are around 19 years old. And most of them have been on intensively ever since they were 10 or 12. And some of them are on TikTok more than five hours a day just on TikTok. When they get off social media, their lives flower.

They bloom. Amazing things happen. So that's the most beautiful thing as a teacher to see, like, you know, it's like they've, it's like they're like pinned down. And you take the pins out and they're. they thrive. So it's definitely not, it's definitely not, not too late. They can recover. They can recover, you know, most of the lost, the lost joy of living, the lost energy development that they, that they could have had. I mean, what we're finding out is that with the amazing generation, you know, we thought it was for eight to 12 year olds, but people are saying, you know, my 18 year old

read it, like I read it, like parents are enjoying it, older kids. So, so the amazing generation is turning out to have, to really, it does seem to most. motivate young people to get their lives in order. Which wider audience, yeah. I was just going to say one of the netmoms team said with her four-year-old, she's banned the iPad with him because his behavior was cracking. And she said just in a week, she said watching him play with his toys in the house. She said it's just so much nicer for, like, A, his mood's better.

But she said she's absolutely loving watching him play as well. It's really like joyful as a parent. That's right. And that is a very powerful example. because what that shows, if when you take a device away, a kid gets really irritable, that's proof that their dopamine neurons have adapted and they now have lower dopamine when you take it away. The next day, they're going to beg for it and it's going to be even worse. But if you wait five or six days, the dopamine circuits recover and then they play. So that's a trap that I want everyone to be aware of.

So some amazing ground covered today. Thank you. and I know just now I know exactly what I'm going to go away and do and that's, I'm going to, I'm going to look into the playboyhood vibes. I don't know how easy it's going to be, but I'm definitely going to try and do that. And even if it's just once a week after school, like Friday, once a week, yeah. And get some of the kids out for an hour because I'd love that. And also selfishly, it sort of reminds me of my childhood a little bit.

Yes. We all like our kids to have similar things like our childhood. That's a good question. J.B, what are you going to do? Um, that's a good question. I think for me, I, I can be guilty of the, here you go, here's my phone, because I'm doing something. And I don't do it very often. I'll be honest. Um, but I think just reinforcing some of those boundaries, which I know are necessary and I enforce 75% of the time. But I think just sticking to those guns and trusting that that is actually the right thing. And I think, I think, yeah, I think just being a bit more interactive. because we all know how valuable that is and just as I say stick into those guns. And I'm going to finish off with our parenting question of the week from six-year-old Ellis from London. Oh, okay.

Why the grown-ups always take their phone to the toilet? Brilliant. That's great. Are you guilty of that, Jonathan? then? I don't want to say on a global broadcast, but I'm not going to deny it either. Okay, yeah, and there's an answer, because adults are addicted to their phones in two different kinds of ways. For some adults, it's a dopamine addiction. They are truly addicted to their phones, and they are uncomfortable when they're away from them. For others, and I guess I put myself in the

second category, we're addicted to efficiency, and we've accepted the idea that every three-second block, not a one-second block, but every three, I don't know, every 10-second block, if you have a 10-second block, you should use it to consume something. And that's a really bad recipe for living. That means you will never be fully present in anything you do. And so, okay, I think I know what my resolution is. To leave the phone when you go to the live. To just never do it, to never take it. Oh, I love that. I was talking about it with my 10-year-old this morning at breakfast.

And she said, but, but, Mommy, you do it. And I said, because I played her, the clip. And I said, I know, but why? And I'm partly of that productive group that you're talking about. And especially between Monday to Friday, if I sort of highly productive agenda. But also, I'm very aware that I don't always want to be on my phone in front of the kids. Oh.

So I know it's not necessarily hygienic, but I can catch up on some messages or do some jobs or read the news quickly when I'm not in front of them. And whether that's because I lock myself in there for an extra 60 seconds just to do some WhatsApping or whatever. But that's usually because I don't want to stand there in front of them with my head, you know, at the top of my head. Right. Everything and me in my phone. And how about you, J.B. Are you guilty?

I'm not as guilty as perhaps the two of you. No, I totally, I totally get it. And I'm guilty of doing it as well. And for me, it's less sort of scrolling and enjoyment, you know, personal enjoyment, but it's definitely more a case of get that email done. And that person sent a message and I've got to reply straight away. And actually, you know, if I think if you email someone or reply to someone the next day,

it's not usually the end of the world. If you're trying to do something really big and it's going on immediately and fine, but actually it's not the end of the world. You can send it in the next day and it's fine. Or 30 minutes later, it's fine. Exactly. You know, that's the other thing sometimes.

I think we're in this headspace where it's like, that's just landed reply. That's just landed reply. But actually 20 minutes, 30 minutes. We're all scattered. Our attention is fragmented whenever fully present. So yeah, this isn't just about the kids. This is a, and that's part of the reason

I think why these rules and laws are spreading so quick. because this isn't just, oh, think of the children, think of the children. This is like, wow, this is affecting me so strongly. I can't imagine what it's doing at 12-year-olds. Yeah, yeah. Well, I do think there's been some research by childnet actually in this country where they did some research with young teenagers, and they said the problem wasn't them, the problem was the parents.

Because quite often the sort of gen X's didn't grow up as digitally native. So whereas the younger generation has, and they can sort of navigate it, They felt that they could navigate it better. They might feel that they can, but they're doing worse because of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll just say, look, if you want to prepare your child for success in the digital world,

don't think you need to expose them to the digital world early. What you need to do is protect them from the digital world until they're most of the way through puberty, so they'll be able to focus and think. If we're raising generations that can't think, all they can do is ask chat, GP, to solve problems for them, then who would want to hire them? So don't give into the myth that being a digital native prepares you for life. It doesn't. It damages your brain and makes you less suitable for employment or marriage. I think that's the thing, isn't it? Because people will say, we're never going to escape screens.

Screens are part of our life. There's no point. It doesn't mean that it has to be every time our eyes are open. Yeah. And that's it. And that's the thing for me. I think, you know, that management is really, really, really key to understanding. Certainly as an adult, you know, I'm not talking as a child now, certainly as an adult, the management of use is really, really key. And again, that's definitely something I'll be taken away from this. Thank you very much, Jonathan.

Yes, thank you very much for your time. J.B. and Louise are a pleasure talking with you. Good luck to the parents of Britain. Thank you, because we need it. We do. We all do. Look, we're all in this together. That's the way we get out of it. Jonathan, thank you that's been such a thoughtful and grounding conversation.

I definitely have my work cut out now. How about you, J.B? Absolutely. I think we both do. But thank you. Thank you very much, Jonathan. And thank you so much for listening as well. We cannot wait to be back with you next time.

We'll link to Jonathan's books in the episode notes. And as always, you can find support, reassurance and real-life parenting stories at netmoms.com And on the netmum social. If you enjoyed this episode, hit follow, share, leave a review and join the community. And get involved in the conversation by dropping us an email with your questions and stories at the Netmums podcast at netmums.com. And we will share your messages on the podcast. Thanks, guys. See ya.