Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy:
Talk to me a little bit about the origins of this book. It's called, Slaying Digital Dragons: Tips and tools for protecting your body, brain, psyche, and thumbs from the digital dark side. What inspired this? Where did it come from? Why did you think this book was so important to write? And where'd you find all this information?

Alex:
I wrote the book because of my increasing concern about the impact on growing bodies and brains and social beings of living so much of one's life through a screen. And I've spent most of my professional life working with young people and I wanted to empower them to take charge of their digital lives. What I think happens is, we don't make decisions about how we want to relate to the digital world. We just grow into that from the youngest age, and I want kids to become mindful of it and to understand how spending so much time on a screen and how the digital world can affect them socially, emotionally, psychologically, affect their relationships. So that's really why I wrote the book. I didn't feel there were any books out there that really got into the nitty gritty, the dark side of it, that big tech and social media is really digging around inside you to manipulate and influence and even addict you to their platforms.

Andy:
And so the idea then is this book is for young people who want to learn more and get a handle on their digital lives.

Alex:
Yeah. It's aimed at teenagers, but a lot of adults have already told me that they've read the book and have had fun and learned a lot. The information is valuable for anybody. And people sometimes say to me, kids are never going to want to read this, what makes you think they're going to listen to a message, phones are like their significant other and you're going to just turn them off and they'll get defensive. And I couldn't disagree more with that because what I see is teens are concerned about phones.

Alex:
In two different surveys, 40% and 50% of teens said they feel addicted to their phones. And 90% believe that it is a problem for people their age. So I think there's receptivity. They know that it distracts them. They know that it compels them to constantly be online to keep up with things. I think they are open to learning more about how this might affect them and ways, the tips and tools that they can use to protect themselves.

Andy:
Yeah. So you say you've been working with young people for a long time. What do you mean by that?

Alex:
Well, I'm trained as a psychologist and an educator. And for many years I was the head of an alternative middle school for kids. And then for, gosh, I think about 11 years, I ran leading nonprofit provider of substance abuse, prevention, and education for schools around the world. So I come at this from many different angles and I probably spend eight to nine hours a day on a screen. I'm not coming at this from some judgmental holier than thou position, my position is the digital world is a miracle. It's absolutely unbelievable what we can do with it, how it enhances our lives, but as much as it's a miracle, it's a monster. And we have to be aware about both sides in order to take charge of our digital lives so that our phone is our tool and we don't become its tool.

Andy:
And so that's something that you've been seeing with young people more recently is a difference in the way they relate to digital devices or their relationship with their smartphones and their relationship between their offline and online self is becoming more reactive or less proactive or what?

Alex:
Well, I think the pandemic has revealed a lot to teens and all of us about the role of the digital world in our lives because on the one hand it was life saving. Where would we have been all locked up in our homes if we didn't have the internet so that we could work remotely, go to school remotely, connect with our friends. So to a great extent, I think it really saved lives quite literally. And it kept people from just going totally bonkers.

Alex:
At the same time, I think kids realized, adults too, that remote learning is just a shadow of face to face in person learning. And you can have all the zoom parties you want with your friends online and it's nothing compared to being together with your friends. I always got emotional during the pandemic when I saw videos of birthday parties where kids would walk by someone's house or teachers would drive by and drop diplomas on kids' porches because they couldn't do it in person.

Alex:
And the joyfulness of people even if they're waving from a distance at their friends and their teachers, it reminded everybody of the essential nature, the need for in-person human communication. And in the most recent survey I've seen about this, the number one preferred communication method of teens is texting. So maybe that survey was pre-pandemic. I'll be very curious to see if after the pandemic, maybe it changes, but talk about a warning sign, kids prefer to text their friends than to be with them face to face. That concerns me.

Andy:
What do you think is going on there?

Alex:
Well, many things. I think adolescence by definition is a very difficult challenging time especially socially and teens are compelled to seek popularity. There's even an evolutionary basis for, if you think back thousands of years, earlier humans once they developed communication, they discovered that working together, banding together, forming alliances, sharing food, sharing shelter, made them safer.

Alex:
So in a sense, seeking popularity, being popular, increased your chances that you would be included in those alliances of security. So you fast forward to today, well, teens don't have to worry about charging lions or going out to hunt every evening for dinner, but that need, that desire to bond and belong and communicate and form friendships, that continues. And if you think about it, that is the currency of social media, becoming popular because it's almost too in your face, think of likes and shares and favorites and retweets and thumbs up and followers, you are getting a 24/7 report card. And for teens, I think that is a huge stress. And all the research on popularity has revealed that basically, and I'm simplifying here for my own brain, but basically there are two types of popularity.

Alex:
One is status seeking and those are the cool kids in high school. They've got the coolest clothes and cameras and iPhones and cars and they're the trendy ones. And they're constantly seeking that status and having to maybe even fight to maintain it.

Alex:
The other type of popularity is what you could call likability. And those are people who are likable because they're friendly, they're warm, they show an interest in you. They're responsible. They honor their commitments. And what the research shows is that teens who had status popularity during adolescence do much worse later in life. They have poor friendships, poor intimate relationships. They make less money. They have more health issues, whereas the likable kids carry that into their adulthood. And on those similar measures, they do much better.

Alex:
So what I see happening to tie it back to the digital world, I think social media for many kids is putting status seeking popularity on steroids. And they live and die based on how many likes a post got. And so I think not only is it creating in the moment, a great deal of stress and for some kids, depression, low self confidence, but I think it is setting them up for later in life, you carry those same filters with you and they make you more aggressive, more suspicious, more stressful, you're focusing on things that don't contribute to your happiness and fulfillment.

Andy:
Well, so you talk in the book about a lot of different ways that screen time really affects us, affects our body, our sleep, our eyes. It can affect different aspects of our body, our reproductive system, and risk taking even, behaviors, our brain gets affected by it. What do you think are some of the most surprising things for teenagers or if you're talking to teenagers about this stuff, what are some of the effects that they maybe don't know about or that are most interesting to them in order to start having discussions with them about this stuff?

Alex:
Well, I think it's easiest to think of these possible effects in categories. You mentioned a number of them. Just any repetitive physical action is going to affect your body.

Andy:
Sure.

Alex:
So you have the eye strain from staring at a tiny screen. What we call tech neck, you can have aches and pains in your neck, in your shoulders, in your hands and fingers, poor posture, because you're constantly bending over and looking down at your device. And maybe the most troubling of all is disrupted sleep because so many kids spend hours on their phone right before sleep. And not only the blue light that comes from the screen, but the stimuli that assault you. Most screen use is not meditative. It's not focused. You're being assaulted constantly with all these sounds and colors and flashes and stropes. And let's say the last thing of the day, you're looking at your social feeds and there's disturbing stuff that comes your way.

Alex:
So right before going to bed, your being is filled with emotional arousal or upsetment, or somebody said something mean. So that all can disrupt your sleep and poor sleep is one of the most significant potential health problems for all people. So then we can move over to the brain as a category of possible effects. And I was just talking about this assault on your brain from your phone and the prefrontal cortex of your brain, that's where all the higher functions occur. So good judgment and learning and remembering and being able to focus for extended periods of time. And adolescence is when your brain is really prime for a major period of growth.

Alex:
So you want to be bulking up the prefrontal cortex, but what happens is all those stimuli coming your way and studies show that young people switch what they're doing online like every 19 seconds. So this constant back and forth, instead of bulking up the higher functions, it is triggering your fight or flight response because your brain doesn't know when it suddenly receives an assault of sound and fury, it doesn't know whether that's an elephant charging at you or whether it's, oh, another TikTok video.

Alex:
So that puts you in a constant state of nervous system arousal, that can leave to chronic stress. Think of if you're watching an incredible car chase in a movie, your body is responding as if it's real and you can measure your heart rate, your blood pressure, all sorts of things. It'll be responding like it's a real event, even though your brain knows it's all fake you're seeing it on a screen. So that's a lot of what's going on in the brain. And if it's affecting you that way, it can lead to poor grades, poor academic performance, forgetting a lot of things. So you can just see how... It's like ripples that extend out in many ways.

Alex:
I'll just say a few things about the social aspects because that's where it's harder for teens and what seems to be happening is that because teens are leading so much of their lives online, they're not developing social skills to the same extent or at the same pace in a pre-digital world. So a lot of teens are uncomfortable face to face. They don't really know how to deal with people. How to solve conflicts. How to express themselves. And that's why they are drawn to socializing online. You have the protection of, oh, it's just a text. Or I can say it in six seconds, that kind of thing. And we're seeing that teens are much more sheltered now than they used to be. They don't volunteer as much. They get drivers licenses at later ages. They don't go out as much. They don't date as much because they can just sit at home and do so many things.

Andy:
Why do all that effort? I can just flick my thumb.

Alex:
Yeah. So a lot of basic street smarts are not developing. And then you've got a reinforcing cycle where if kids are feeling socially uncomfortable, it makes them even more want to socialize within the realm of their devices rather than offline. And then of course for some kids, we're getting into a realm where they're really addicted to their phones. And I know it's controversial using that term addiction, but my preferred definition for addiction is the psychological and/ or physical inability to stop compulsive behavior despite harmful consequences. So I think when you think of it that way, many teens just can't put their phones down and once you're addicted, that can really take over and become the tail wagging the dog of your life.

Andy:
A lot of that lesser forms of addiction are habits and it becomes just so habitual. And you talk in the book about identifying habits and triggers when it comes to phone and technology use, what does that look like? And how do we do that? Why is that important?

Alex:
It's important because the way teens can take charge with the digital lives is to recognize what they're doing essentially, to become self-aware. And even though my book goes deep into this dark side of big techs manipulations and data tracking and all of that, it's a very funny life hearted interactive book. And your question gets right to the heart of some of the interactivity. So let me talk about that a bit.

Alex:
The first part of the book is called reflect, and that's where I present kids with nine pretty wacky challenges, they're research based, but they're fun to help them discover their own screen scene. And that's where we get into what you were referring to. I ask them to look at their digital habits, how do they use their phones? Do they always have it with them? Do they keep it on when they sleep? Is it right next to their bedroom? Do they have it on when they're having lunch with friends. So getting them aware of what those habits are and sometimes there might be specific triggers, they might realize when I'm upset, I go to my phone or when I'm bored, I do it. Or maybe they tend to use their phone, external triggers like a text, a phone call, but then they're captive every time that notification comes. And I plead guilty to this as well, if I'm next to my phone and I hear the sound, I just grab it. It's a reflex.

Alex:
So I ask kids in this reflect section, what apps do they use and how much? Get a sense of what proportions of your screen time are spent on what apps or doing what activities. And then how do you feel right before and right after spending time. And a kid might discover, gosh, I feel pretty crummy every time I go on that app or I feel wonderful every time and that's valuable information. So as they're taking these challenges, they can either fill out in the book or they can download from the publisher's website, the forms where they can record their answers.

Alex:
Another big section for becoming self aware of your screen scene is where I present them with potential warning signs for problematic or excessive use. And that gets into what we were talking about, what our potential consequences. So it can be everything from some of the physical consequences, my eyes hurt, my neck hurts, or it can be I feel awkward when I'm face to face with people or my screen time keeps increasing or I've tried to limit how much time I spend without success. There's like 20 different warning signs.

Andy:
Okay. Yeah.

Alex:
And I ask kids, how many notifications do you get each day? So you put all of that together and it gives them a really good picture of their screen scene. Then, in the next section of the book, that's really the tips and tools section where I describe in great detail, but I hope very funny detail, how big tech is sinking its clause into every aspect of their existence. You really can't think of an area nowadays where big tech isn't trying to influence you or get you to relate to that area of existence through technology. So if I'm talking about the ways in which social media could harm your self-esteem or could create these negative thought loops where you're always saying to yourself, oh, I'm not cool. I hate myself. I look so terrible. Everybody else's life is better than mine, you may recognize that in your own life.

Alex:
And then all that leads to the final section which I call reset. And that's where I present a process that I call giving yourself an appendectomy. It's a guided self intervention designed to help you cut out those aspects of your digital life that are causing you harm or imbalance or discomfort so that you can create a more healthy relationship to your devices and the time you spend on a screen. So the book is not a screed against these devices, it's empowerment so that you take charge of them and use them to enhance your life.