Bonus panel discussion: A conversation on building healthy digital habits for youth

Left to Their Own Devices is brought to you by Children First Canada. Welcome everyone. I'm Carrie Marsh. I'm Toronto Star's live journalism editor and today you're joining us for just the latest in a series of live conversations that the Star is going to be hosting all year. Today we're going to be talking about technology and kids, how devices shape kids' development, their mental health, and most importantly, we're going to be sharing some family-friendly strategies for navigating screen time. But first, I just wanted to share a thanks to today's sponsor, Children First Canada. I'm pleased to have with me today the host of the podcast, Left to Their Own Devices, Ava Smithing. She is the Director of Advocacy for Young People's Alliance. Her own experience of going down a dangerous rabbit hole online has shaped her work and you should definitely check out that podcast. Hi, Ava. Glad to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. We also have Michelle Locke, Dr. Michelle Locke. She's a clinical psychologist whose work focuses on supporting parents and caregivers and raising emotionally resilient teens and kids. Hi, Michelle. Hi, thank you so much for having me be part of today's conversation. Of course. Ava, I'm wondering if you can kind of set the stage for us about what is the current state of affairs for kids and technology and the Internet? You know, what is the scale? How many kids are online? What's going on? Yeah. So in terms of Canadian youth, we're seeing about 90 percent of Canadian teens have access and use social media. And out of those teenagers, 82 percent of them are using it every single day. We're seeing very similar trends in America. You know, most of our youth around that same 90% number social media use is very ubiquitous. We're using social media every day. And 47% of our teens are spending up to five hours a day on social media. So the same trends stand in place. You know, they're mostly using YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. That's most of their time online, 87% of it. And we're seeing really similar trends that we've always seen where the young people who report that they spend the most time on social media are also reporting that they have the most adverse effects on their mental health. So even if they don't necessarily know that the survey is going to try to collect this information, young people who are saying they spend less time on social media are reporting that they have less impacted mental health issues. So there has been a lot of news and stir that social media use has been going down since 2022. Instagram engagement released a survey talking about the steady decline of social media engagement overall for young people and adults. And I think that's information that we should be slightly relieved by to see that the movement and the work that everyone has been doing has been working to make more people aware of the dangers of screen time. But it's definitely not a celebratory moment yet, just because we're still sitting around 90 percent of young people using social media every day, up to 20 hours a week or up to five hours a day. Right. And it's not I mean, that's a lot of time. I think we can all agree. But it's not just the time, right? It's it's it's it's their relationship with that time, which I think a lot of people could could describe as addiction. And I don't know that there's a sort of a medical label on that yet. But I think we all know how hard it is for ourselves. and during your podcast, Eva, you met with Dr. Anne Lemby, author of Dopamine Nation, to talk about sort of that addiction quality that screens can create. So what would she describe is going on in kids' heads when they're spending that kind of time online? Right. So Dr. Lemke is brilliant. She's the author of Dopamine Nation, and she explains that what's happening in our brains is social media triggers the same dopamine release that similar substance abuse like alcohol or drugs would trigger. And the problem that happens here is that after you get that initial dopamine surge, spending time on social media and feeling really good about it, the brain responds by decreasing the amount of dopamine that it's naturally emitting. So with repeated exposure to this social media, Dr. Lemke argues that this creates a chronic deficit in young people. So they're constantly in a state where they're not at homeostasis, They're not equal with their dopamine release in their brains and they're actually in a lack. So it makes it harder for them to experience pleasure in their everyday lives when most of the pleasure and enjoy that their experiences coming from social media. And this is particularly hard for young people because a smartphone is such a huge and constant access point to this drug. You know, if we're going to call it a drug, it's not something that you necessarily have to go out of your way to find. It's something that comes with you everywhere you go. It's in your pocket. and it's not only this that's happening right you are there is the level of addiction to the content you're seeing there's also just you know heightened social scenarios you have to be comparing yourself to people all the time and that's just not something that young people's brains are necessarily adapted to do at the scale they're doing it with so a lot of neuroscience neuroscientists including dr lindsey are looking into this as a learned helplessness where there's this really cruel irony that social media often feels good while you're using it you know you're getting that dopamine and you don't feel really, really bad until you get off of it, until you stop preparing yourself. So whereas a lot of people in typical drug treatments will relapse to cure the withdrawal symptoms. So the anxiety you feel about not being plugged in online, you get an immediate cure to that by going online. So that's how she finds those parallels between addiction with social media and addiction with existing drugs. But my favorite thing that she says is it's really hard for us to measure this because you can't give rats little tiny smart. you know we can give rats cocaine we can give rats we can't give them smartphones so there's no way to actually see how addictive it is which is why we struggle as a society to to really name it as that right if i if i can carry please yes so i just i love this because if i if we look at the things that parents are struggling with on this generation of kids it maps on so nicely so things i hear all the time kids can't tolerate boredom right they don't find toys fun anymore toys that are not digital they don't find toys fun anymore they have really poor frustration tolerance right and when you know what Ava just talked about in terms of that expectation of dopamine when you get constant hits of like the best best best feelings then everything else that I just described makes sense right so coloring you're not getting dopamine you know when you have to work hard to the frustration of math and learning and reading in an actual book you're not getting that dopamine and so so many of the struggles that parents of this generation are having, especially of sort of the younger kids map on nicely to this, what I call a dopamine play, right? And it's not just smartphones and social medias. It's on iPads, it's on YouTube, even YouTube kids and all these places that the whole purpose is to make kids want to come back, right? And they do that through dopamine, right? So Michelle, I wanted to ask you, I've been thinking about sort of the headspace that parents are in, and I've been sort of thinking about it almost as like a lack of imagination on parents' part in that, do you believe that parents even really understand the water that kids are swimming in? Do we even know? I mean, I think we have, you know, the idea of like rules and time, but do we really get what they're living in? So I think the short answer is no. You know, so most parents right now, we just didn't grow up in a world where we had these things, you know, and we like to imagine that it's not harmful. We like to imagine that our kids are being pro-social online. And one thing I hear so commonly is parents who say, well, my kid won't be that kid. And I often say to parents, I'm not worried about your kid. It's not your kid I don't trust, right? It's the internet. It's the algorithm that will find your child, right? The reality is, is that so many of these kids got these apps and are comfortable with these apps long before parents even opened it, right? So if I think about myself, I work with teenagers. They're all on Snapchat. I've never had Snapchat. I have no idea. Like, I've learned about the world of Snapchat. But if I was the parent of one of these kids, unless I was actively engaged in that app for quite a bit of time before my child got it, I couldn't possibly imagine about quick ad, how easy it is to talk to strangers, you know, that they can map each other's locations so they know where all of their friends are every single second of the day. These are features that parents sort of don't think exist. And I think what happened was because these devices developed so fast, we sort of adopted this hope for the best phenomenon. And now we're at this really critical juncture where we're like, maybe it's not the best. And we're having to sort of have these hard conversations and rewind, right? Because when I speak with parents, they're often not aware of the things that are going on online in terms of problematic communications, the like depth of complicated social interactions that are almost always unhealthy, right? Because teens aren't meant to be talking to each other 24 hours a day. That's too much talking. The mood, the anxiety, the self-image issues, and those are like not even the worst ones, right? So I think some of the things I hear that are scarier is, you know, kids selling pictures of body parts to get interact transfers into their accounts. And when you turn to a parent and say this is happening, they're just like, it's their worst nightmare, right? So I think no. And I always think it's poignant to point out to parents, you know, when an app is free to download or when we're when we're utilizing something on a smartphone or an iPad, that's free. But that same company or app is opening at like billions of dollars on the stock market. They are making their money from something and they are making their money from our attention, our beliefs, our attitudes and our behaviors. right and it that is true of our kids too right which often is a good reminder for parents so let's just dive into the worst of it like i you know i think we know that kids being online it's not just about the time that they could be doing other things it's not just about their lack of attention span we're concerned about what they can um come across online you know everything from from porn to predators. Ava, what are your sort of top three concerns about what kids can encounter online, left unchecked? Yeah, I think putting something at the top of the list is really difficult for me. I've always felt most personally attached to the harms we see facing young people in terms of eating disorders because I have personal experience there. And if you look at the hierarchy of needs, right? What people need to self-actualize, that bottom bar is enough food. And when you think one in five young women have eating disorders nowadays, we're not even doing the numbers in the way that we need to for men. It's really scary to think of how that's prohibiting these young women to grow and become their own people. I think the other thing that is one of the most immediately terrifying to me is reports of sextortion. Snapchat gets 10,000 reports of extortion a month. It's just unacceptable and it is very frequent and it's a very, very real threat. I also think something that we don't talk about enough because we're very focused on these acute harms, right? Young people with eating disorders, young people who have been extorted. The thing that really does top my list is the young people who aren't falling into one of these specific harm buckets, but are rather still addicted to the technology and are still spending every day being dragged further into this malaise for life and this apathy for life and are being so inundated with content that they can't build a sense of self and they can't develop properly, even if they don't go down a pathway that would lead them to really acute anxiety or diagnosable eating disorder, it is hurting the quality of their life. It is taking away the amount of time that they have to do other things. And I think that's why we see young people struggling to make their mark on the movement in a way that you think they would. If you look at previous moments of counterculture in our world and where young people have really, really ramped up to solve an issue, you would think that this would be the issue of our generation. But what really concerns me the most is the fact that it's not. And it is because of the influence, the very mundane, every single day influence that these companies have over our lives. So I know that's not the, I can't pinpoint what exactly is the worst, but it's just the lack of awareness that we have, that these platforms are impacting the way that we live every day. And we focus so much on the cases of sextortion, the cases of suicide, that it in a way alienates an entire part of this generation that is experiencing someone robbing their childhood from them, their most formative years. And we're not giving that the attention it necessarily deserves to have and how that's going to impact these young people's roles in civic engagement and how they're going to participate in their democracy and how they're going to participate amongst their friends. And you know, as we, as we introduce AI chatbots, I would ask people to be keenly aware of the way that they're interacting with AI chatbots and the way that they're modeling that behavior to children and the way that their children are, because it is just such a microscopic, like it's such a blown up version of the harms that we see where it's no longer an algorithm influencing you, but it is an LLM that can speak to you as if it is a human. And I think that's the most, that's the thing we should be focusing on the most right now to try to prevent the proliferation and the way that that can, you know, harm the quality of life of these young people at such a mass scale before it gets out of the box in the same way that social media does or did already. You've given me a lot to think about there. Michelle, what if I put that question to you? What are your sort of top concerns for, you know, impacts on kids? Yeah, from your clinical work, from your life's parent? Yeah, so I actually mirror Ava's sentiment in the sense that I think sometimes when we focus on the worst case outcomes, we're missing so much, right? Like when I zoom out, I really think about what kind of humans are we raising, right? Are we raising humans who have the capacity to learn, grow, communicate successfully in the real world, tolerate frustration enough to learn? And to me, though, be connected to their adult caregivers, because I think one of the biggest costs of this smartphone generation is that it used to be, and there's a great book called Hold On To Your Kids. It used to be in generations before this that kids looked to their elders as their North Star. And something happened around 2010 where that stopped occurring. And kids looked to look a lot more to peers because they have such chronic and constant access to peers and to the internet to be their North Star. And so what we have is we have a bunch of kids in their formative years who don't really have a place to turn to to guide them, which is really dangerous, right? You're not intended to turn to your peers to be your North Star. That can lead you down a lot of problems. So for me it sort of the everyday things Of course the major costs suicide eating disorders anxiety disorders those are the most extreme But I just think about the kind of humans we raising and how capable we going to make them to manage emotions persist and sort of exist Right. And that scares me very much, like I would say, out of all the things. Right. And, you know, when we think about kids kind of going down a dangerous path, whether it's really acute, like sexploitation or sorry, sex diversion, eating disorders, or if it is just something more mild, if you could say that. When, Michelle, do you find through your practice that parents realize that there's a problem? And does it often happen when it's kind of too late? Like at what point in that rabbit hole process do parents come to you saying, I need some help with this, I'm out of my league? Okay, so there's sort of two answers to that question. So the first thing I want to say is parents come to I see parents with kids as young as two, three, four, five, with kids who are really sensitively wired, emotionally intense kids. And one of the first things I screen for is technology boundaries within the house. How often do kids get screens? What kind of screens? Is it an iPad? Is it on the TV? And, and sometimes even at this age, I'll tell a parent, you know what, your kids on the iPad every day, they're four years old, let's try two weeks where the iPad leaves the house and they can watch sort of a Netflix show for this amount of time on a TV. And sometimes they'll come back to me and I'm like, I have a totally different kid. And, and I think it's a really profound thing for parents to realize. So in the younger ages, sometimes I think it's about parents kind of recognizing, wow, this thing matters more than I thought it did. I thought it was doing nothing. Now I've seen it as something. When we talk about the bigger rabbit holes that you're describing there, I think the really sad thing is because those rabbit holes often happen during adolescence, which developmentally is a period where kids crave autonomy, secrecy, they're at the highest risk because their impulse control is low and their yearning for risk is high. Parents don't typically realize until it's really bad, right? Until the police are involved, until pictures have been leaked, until their child's at the center of a cyberbullying incident. And the damage has sort of been done, which is really terrifying for a lot of parents, because I think all the middle ground stuff that we just talked about, you sort of just hear is like, well, yeah, my kid's not motivated. They sort of like, all they care about is their screen. I hear lazy all the time. My kid's lazy. They dropped all their sports and no one kind of correlates that with these devices. Right. And then it keeps going. It keeps going. And then for a portion of kids, it gets very bad. And then it's like, oh, you know what, what's happened here. Right. But often not until it's too late, badly. And what's your advice to parents in that situation where, you know, without them realizing it, it has gone? Yeah. I don't want to say too far because that sounds like it's irreparable, but it has gone far. Yeah. So I'll say what I observe happens. What I observe happens is kids go too far. So they'll post a picture of them doing something like vaping, for example. And the parent says, I can't believe you did that. The device is gone for a month. Takes the device for a month. The kid doesn't have a device for a month. the device gets returned and the behavior happens again, right? Because these devices are meant to be quick. There's not a lot of thought needed before you post things and adolescents are at a period of life where impulse control is poor, right? And so, or lower than sort of adulthood, I will say. So it depends on the age of the child is my point. If your child's doing seriously harmful and risky things, I don't think it's ever too late. I've certainly had parents of kids who are 17 years old being like, this is gone now. I pay for it. It's gone. We need to sort of clean your brain up and get you out of harm's way, so to speak. For parents of kids sort of 13, 14 and under, I think they have a lot more ability to pull the reins in and set boundaries, even if boundaries have not been set to date. So like it's already been given freely. I think you can still pull back. I think parents still have a lot of control and say in those ages. And it's really important to do so. In that middle age, sort of like 15, 16, 17, it starts to get more complicated. And certainly, especially if kids got these devices when they were, you know, seven, eight, nine, 10 years old, and you're now working with a brain that's wired to be addicted, right? And you mentioned earlier that it's not sort of yet a medical diagnosis. And I worry about that, because if we make tech addiction a medical diagnosis, we're really saying there's something within the child. And when we're all addicted to it, it's not within us. It's within the device, right? And so I think that's why we're having this broad conversation about if, you know, someone like me who's, you know, 40 and didn't get these things until my mid-20s and find myself addicted. I can only imagine had I been kind of wired this way since my young childhood, right? So yeah, it's a nuanced answer. kids have been left to their own devices long enough children are growing up in a digital world that was never designed with their safety in mind they are bullied groomed extorted and exploited online every single day children first canada is demanding a safe digital world for all our children. Through trusted research, bold advocacy, and youth empowerment, they're working to make Canada the best place in the world for kids to grow up. But they can't do it alone. Visit childrenfirstcanada.org and join the countdown for kids today. So before we all just throw our hands up and say, you know, it's all doom and gloom and um eva you talked in your podcast about some of the sort of upsides of kids being online um finding ways to advocate for themselves can you share with us some of those findings yeah certainly it was really interesting for me especially someone who came into the space having negative experiences on social media to learn from the brilliant young people around me who had had much better experiences we see and i'll use a report that came out of hope lab a partner organization of mine recently, it was specifically focusing on Americans who live in the South. So I grew up in the South. This means a lot to me. It's a young person who grew up having a political mindset that is vastly different than the political mindset that happens around them. And because they may lean a little bit more left than their right-leaning peers, it's difficult for them to find connection. It's really difficult for them to find community and other people who think similarly to them. So these young people in the South are saying in increments of 10% at a time that social media is a crucial part to their mental health and well-being and that it's a crucial part to their community. They're saying, I wouldn't be able to find a community that I felt supported in in my real physical location. And I rely on social media to do that. So I think that's a really big testament as to some of the positive use cases we're seeing. It allows young people who are typically isolated to reach out and build a community that transcends physical borders and they can feel supported. And that is so, so important. And we typically see that it's the most marginalized communities who are finding the most benefit, you know, but those are also the communities who are the most susceptible to harm. And it's a really, really complicated thing when we talk about balancing youth autonomy online and really giving credibility to the good things that can come online. And that's something that I think we can, is going to have to be a narrative discussion, not something that we're going to have to actively choose as people who are researching and talking about and reporting on this field, we're going to have to actively choose to start framing social media as something that some kids can find benefit in. And framing social media as something that can get better, you know, because right now, so much of the narrative lends a lot of credibility to the fact that Instagram, YouTube, TikTok are even inherently social in the first place, you know. And at this point, that's a big debate. We're not going to open up right now, but I would argue it's not that social because you're seeing, you know, for every one piece of content teenage girls are seeing of their friends, they're seeing five times as many pieces of content from top accounts. You know, there's not really that much that's social about that. So I think it's really important for us in these conversations to start to lend credit to future iterations of what social media could look like and how social and beneficial those are and really pull from the research that's showing that young people are finding community, that young people feel like they can express themselves creatively and meet friends and that it's helping them protect their mental health because they're feeling related to. And we need to bring those aspects into that new iteration, you know, while not getting too swept up in the idea that all social media is bad and any future iteration of it is also going to be equally bad. And I think it's a very fair place to get to. What's happening right now is really scary. And the companies who are in charge have proven time to time again, that they do not care about children. And I understand where this anxiety and restlessness to really put social media in the bad box comes from. But it's really great to look at kids who feel like they can organize politically through Instagram or find a community that supports their mental health. And we can ignore that. That's cool. And while we're talking about the bad box. I think, you know, people call the internet the Wild West. And I think when it comes to social media, that's certainly true. They certainly, a lot of them do deserve to be in the bad box because they have been allowed to just basically do whatever they want without regulation. We do see some governments, some communities, some organizations pushing for more restrictions. Most famously, and most recently, the bill in Australia, which bans social media for kids under 16. And you can see lots of countries, including Canada, considering what kind of take they're going to have on that. What happens in the absence of that? Like, you know, you mentioned the 10,000 reports of sextortion per month on Snapchat. Like, What are some other things that happen in the absence of regulation? Michelle, do you have an answer for that one? I mean, I think if we don't, I have a lot of thoughts on sort of what has to happen to make these platforms at all safe for children. We're going to get to that. Yeah. But I think in the absence of accountability, what we're going to see is we're going to see a progression of what's already happening. Right. like 10 000 monthly reports of sex extortion on snapchat probably is a low estimate am i do am i crazy but that's probably a really low estimate unfortunately yeah and so and if it keeps trending that way um and and and the saddest part about it is that kids don't recognize what it is um when when when these things are presented to me when an adolescent sitting in my office and they're talking about these things they're like happy like they're like they're making money or feel loved And I think about the long-term damage on the psyche and self-image and worth. And to me, that's terrifying. Because to Ava's point, these companies, they have shown us that they don't care so far. Although I do, I think we'll talk about it in a minute, have some ideas about what needs to happen in order for this narrative to shift. And, you know, a lot of people, plenty of people out there think that just a mere social media ban does not go far enough. There are a lot of governments and groups who think that it should go further, that these businesses should be responsible for the content they put out, not just for putting up sort of a wall, an age-based wall to that content, but that they should be responsible for the content. But when you think about all of those regulations and rules, how do they support parents, Michelle? Like, I do think it's really hard for parents to be the sort of lone bad guy in the house. Like, do those rules help kind of back up parents? Yeah, so let me tell you what I think has to happen and then how that will help caregivers in such a profound way. So I think it's sort of a three-pronged approach that's ideal. So firstly, I think we want companies to have onus to make sure that the products that they're putting into the hands of kids are safe. right? In addition to that, we want the government to regulate things with an age minimum, similar to substances, driving cars, et cetera. You know, I often think about something like road safety, right? Road safety is a huge issue and it takes a three-pronged approach. We engineer safe cars. We make sure the companies that make cars are making safe cars, right? That's platform accountability. We set ages for driving. We have age minimums and those are based on the brain, right? We say at 16, we believe in Canada that kids' frontal lobes are developed enough to drive a car. And then we teach drivers education, which is digital literacy. And that three-pronged approach is probably what we would hope. Children's First Canada actually has an amazing call to action on their website called Countdown for Kids that really prioritizes the Online Harms Act, which has been put into legislation. And in fact, actually, as of today, the Online Harms Act, which focuses on the content, has also added a part of the bill about an age minimum. So I think that's going to be really, really powerful. And I think this would be a massive benefit to parents. I come back to that driving analogy and imagine there was no rules. There was no age. There was nothing. There was no system to help kids drive. And parents just had to decide when my kid ready. How do I teach them? What do they need to know before they get in behind the wheels of a car? Right. Parents right now, especially in Canada, they are looking for feedback from systems and from people who understand child development to say, this is what has to happen to help kids be safe in this world, right? And so for them to have that to lean back on, I think is going to make it so much easier for them to hold boundaries from a young age, start to have early conversations with their kids, etc. Right? But right now, it's sort of just like everyone's guessing. And it's just shifting and changing so fast that parents feel largely unsupported, right? I think that driving analogy is so powerful. My mind is blown. Yeah, it just seems so obvious when you frame it like that, that it's, of course, we would never do that. So what are we doing? Ava, what are the ways that parents and caregivers and different organizations can lobby for more of this kind of change on the part of governments on the part of these social media platforms? What can we do to make that change happen. Yeah, narrative storytelling is a huge propeller on all of this work. The parents in the United States, the parents in Canada as well, that have showed up time and time again. I think of Carol Todd, who tells her story over and over again. And as drilling and draining as that work is that narrative is what is most valuable to policymakers I also think co and including young people in the development and design of legislation is so incredibly important I have a fellowship with the Center for Media, Technology, and Democracy at McGill, and we have this incredible project, Gen Z AI, where we go all across Canada and bring together 100 young people at a time, and we teach them about what's going on. We teach them about data privacy, about age verification, about chatbots. And after we teach them, we ask them to deliberate with one another. What do you think about this? What do you think about that? And then they all come together and they build our recommendations. And I think one of the most important things that parents can be doing in their own advocacy is going out of their way and taking initiative to read those reports, read those Gen ZI reports. Such as one example of the great youth involvement there is in policymaking out there. There are so many resources. It's if you just look for them, you'll find amazing amounts of information that are directly from young people on what they think they need to make it safer. And that partnership, we've gotten into a really great stride with this in the U.S., where we have parents and young people taking meetings together. And although parents and young people don't always agree, you know, I was a 17 year old girl once and me and my mom did not agree all the time. And that's totally OK. But to be able to demonstrate to legislators that parents have considered that youth perspective and that young people have also felt supported by and considered the parent perspective and presenting that unified front is so valuable because it's impossible, nearly impossible, especially when you bring in the mental health and that specific expertise. it's nearly impossible to poke holes in that. And so many of the narratives we see legislatively are this paternal push. I'm sorry, I live on a messy street. So many of the narratives from the first parental perspective are, we need to make sure our kids are safe, no matter what. And a lot of young kids will say, wait, please don't take that away from me. You know, I really, I need that. It's important to me. It's so cool because, you know, medit comes out and they say well if you want to do a ban that's taking access to information away from young people and that's true and all these things can be true at once but when you have a young person and a parent acknowledging what's true from their side and what's not true what is an industry plan and a parent coming forward and acknowledging what's true from their side and what's not true and with a narrative that was pushed forward by the millions of dollars that these companies have to influence our media and legislators it's it's pretty magic so that part I think that, yeah, I think that buy-in piece is so important, Ava. And in your podcast, you also highlighted the work of Maddie Freeman in the States and the campaign. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that that's sort of a youth-oriented campaign called NoSo. Can you explain to us what NoSo is and the kind of work that Maddie's doing? Yeah, Maddie's incredible. So Maddie is a young leader that I like to say didn't wait for anyone to give her permission to do something, you know, whereas I really got pulled into this legislative system and working alongside institutional knowledge and power and moving slow and methodically. You know, we were even moving fast at some points for them, but Maddie just went straight to the source. So NoSoNovember is a social media detox. So Maddie met young people where they were at. She said, I know you're not really ready to delete your Instagram completely, but I deleted my Instagram for a month and it made me feel way better. And it started as such a small idea like that. She was going out and she was talking to students and she was saying, let's just all cleanse for a month. And the whole idea, too, is it's demonstrating consumer power directly from young people. But it's also bringing out so much solidarity. It's a lot easier to delete Instagram if your best friends are not on it, too. It's a lot harder to delete it if you know your best friends are going to keep DMing and you're going to feel left out. And that is what Instagram was designed to make you feel. So when you bring that collective action piece into it, it's so much easier. And Maddie has developed her product and her service so many times over the year to make sure that she is staying in step with how young people are feeling. You know, when you find that not even all young people are ready to delete their social media for a whole month, she has levels. If you want to come in and just do a couple of days, you can. If you want to just do a couple of weeks, you can. You know, and she really has so much incredible research back evidence to how deleting social media just for that short period of time can make you feel better. She's kind of like, you know, I'll show you I'm not going to convince you that you need to do this, but I will show you that I can do it. And then they've gone off and created these just incredible education materials. And, you know, we've been talking about digital literacy and the importance of it. And these young people are so much more willing to take the risk of being socially isolated for that month after they can read materials that are not speaking down to them and telling them about their experiences online, but that were created by young people. Well, and they've chosen that, right? They've chosen to take the detox. It's not like mom took it away and it's not punitive. I think it's really, really brilliant. and I just want to pick up on that collective action piece because I love that right it's like when all of them decide to stop for a month it makes it so much easier and it reminded me of what we're trying to do over at unplugged around the parent piece of things right if a group of parents comes together and says we're delaying the provision of smartphones for our kids until the end of grade eight the relief is immense you know my child's in grade one and there's 52 kids in his grade and at his school 30 parents have agreed not to give smartphones to grade one and We can all breathe because we know that our kids won't be in this situation where everybody has one and they don't have them. There's 30 of 52 kids who are not getting these things. And so I think that collective action piece, whether it's in parenting or in youth, is such a critical piece of changing how this all goes. Right. When we all come together and kind of say there is power in voices. The reason this has gone so like off the rails, so to speak, is because everyone has one. So when you talk to parents about adolescence now, like I have to give them one. every single one of their friends has one they can't be the only one so we really think a lot about how do we make it such that they're not the only one right and it just takes a few friends to sort of shift that so i love that maddie is doing that i think it's such a brilliant brilliant idea and that she can like show people that they feel better right which is what i was kind of saying happens in that three to five year old age range when we take the ipad away for a month let's say and see that kids act and feel better right brilliant so is it possible and and hopefully you know, the Canadian government will push towards some, some norm, some norms and regulations that people can start to live within. But until then, what do you both feel are some best practices for, you know, for kids and technology and social media and devices? Right. And we've got some, you know, attendee questions. We'll get into the nuts and bolts, spread? Just sort of top line. My top line is to lead the conversation with what the young person feels positive about on social media. You know, I've experimented on this with my little brother who gets so mad when I tell the story in public places, but I tried for so long to go to him and get him to delete his TikTok, telling him everything that I hated about TikTok and everything that I was doing in his brain. And he would get so defensive. He has never been exposed to social media that did not exploit him. So it is much harder for him to imagine better, safer social media than it is for those of us who are old enough to remember when the internet for a short period of time was kind of fun and games and wasn't so commercialized and wasn't so you know condensed and there wasn't you know whatever but I go to Lennon and I ask him what do you hate about it delete it delete it he won't respond he won't respond and I'm not a parent this is my child brother but he's not a kid anymore but when I went to him and I said what tell me what you love about your TikTok tell me what makes you happy when you're spending time on your TikTok he was so much more willing to engage in that conversation with me. And then 10 steps later, 10 minutes later, he started telling me about what he didn't like on his own. And it was his idea. He had ownership, he had buy-in. And then he was like, wait, you're right. You know, these things we talked about earlier, I remember now that's what I don't like about it. And did I successfully get my brother to delete his TikTok? No, I'm not going to lie to you and say that I did, but I helped him be more intentional about how much time he was spending on his TikTok. I helped him exercise control over, you know reporting the videos that he didn't like on his tiktok and saying he liked the ones that he did want to see and i we had a great conversation about autonomy online and how he could control his algorithm at a very limited capacity they haven't done that much for controlling algorithms but i taught him how to do what he could and the only reason we were able to have that conversation is because i entered it positively so my advice that i always give to parents is to start on a positive note ask your kid what they like about social media ask your students what they like about social media. A, to bolster your understanding so there's not as much frustration when they won't just delete it, but B, to allow them to have agency in the conversation and tell you what they don't like on their own time. The biggest thing and what was so challenging for me as a young person who faced harms online was the amount of shame that I felt. I thought it was my fault. I thought that I was supposed to be seeing the eating disorder content that I was seeing. I thought that every young person was seeing it. I thought that they sent it to me because I asked for it. You know, I didn't know that they were tracking my data. So it's so important to lead with that curiosity so that we don't have defensive kids who are feeling really shameful, who don't want to be spending five hours a day on Instagram, but are doing it anyway. And pushing them into that further defensiveness is not productive. I will also say for us adults out there who can regulate our brains. Modeling behavior is the best thing to do. And I would recommend that in my opinion, you delete the bad app that is Instagram, that is Facebook. You know, there's so much to be said about exactly what Maddie's doing, which is leading by example and showing people that it's possible and dealing with that discomfort because we are old enough and developed enough to deal with that discomfort and then modeling that behavior for young people. And Michelle, how do you recommend that parents sort of at different ages and stages collaborate with their kids to come up with? Yeah, so what else is all, since I even did such a nice job of talking about the ones who already have it, I'm going to talk a little bit about sort of how do we set kids up for success here. So, you know, first of all, I think it's up to parents to sort of figure out what's the right time for my kids. Certainly there are ages that we're hearing out there, 16 for social media, unplug says 14 until you get a smartphone. But there's a psychologist, Lisa Demore, who says the thing you really want to think about is how old is my kid at the age that they're at ready to manage a high school party? Would they send them to a high school party today? And expect them to be able to keep themselves safe, make smart decisions, et cetera. And if the answer is no, then they're probably not ready for social media and smartphones. And for some kids that might be at 14, like 14, I probably was ready to go to a high school party. I would have brought my book and sat in the corner. but for some kids they would say no and actually they're not at 16 really um i don't know that they're ready developmentally we really want to think about brain preparedness you know i come back to the driving age there's a reason we picked 16 it was not arbitrary right we picked 16 because at 16 the frontal brain is starting to refine enough to be able to make some active choices even in the face of addictive technology although it's harder um and to sort of like hold back on impulses and think through the decisions that we're making, things like that. But then I'll come back even earlier to those people listening who have kids who are sort of 1 to 12 and don't have these devices yet. And I think a big thing that we can do, I hope that there's sort of digital education that's put out there, literacy for parents. But in the absence of that, we have to start talking to our kids about this, right? We have to start teaching them as they're in their formative young years about technology. You know, I have a kid in grade one and he asked me, what's AI. And, you know, this dates me, obviously, but I was like, Oh, I better chat GBT and figure this out, which also it says my age. And so I was like, let's talk about this. I said, you know, it's sort of like an internet robot. And he's like, what do you mean? That sounds so super cool. So I was like, let's open it up. So we opened it up together. And I said, let's do something fun first. Like maybe you can write a poem about poop. And so we said, write a funny poem about poop. And all of a sudden it pops up and he's laughing, you know? And then he said, okay, now let's ask say, I'm a seven-year-old and people are bullying me at school. So he says, I'm a seven-year-old and people are bullying me at school. And this whole thing comes up and I read it to him. And it says, thank you so much for telling me. I'm here for you. If you can tell me a little bit more about yourself, I can help you through this. I'll always be your friend. And he's like, oh, that's a person. And I'm like, so interesting, hon. That's not a person, right? That's AI. And he's like, but it sounds just like a person. How would a kid know that this is education, right and having these conversations when kids are young you know oh if you are a parent who has social media saying do you notice that sometimes when i'm walking in the grocery store i'm just on instagram do you know that i didn't make a choice i'm just on it and he's like what do you mean you always make choices i'm like i know but there's something about this app that makes it really hard to make a choice i didn't even know i was scrolling when you're in the cart that's really scary that's why we're going to wait until your brain is more ready to handle of these devices. So I think really for the younger ones, starting these conversations, setting the bar, you know, I have my kid already knows there's no chance of a smartphone until at least high school. And that those decisions might change and adapt as I learn more because my job is to keep him safe and his brother safe. Right. So that's sort of the short answer. I could talk about it forever, but I think it's really important. And then I'll just say the setup of the device is important. So that day that you give your kid the device, how you set that up is really critical. You know, when they, when they first get it, if you say you get it for one hour a day in the living room on a full moon, they'll be like, okay. Right. Cause they want it so much. So I always recommend parents own the device. They are lending it to the teen or the youth who is getting it. It has a set of rules or a contract around its use. There's clear parameters about whether it goes to school or not, whether it's in bedrooms or not, how many hours a day. And that's kind of the setup. We don't sort of give it all, wait for bad things to happen and then back because then it gets much more complicated. Okay. So what about parents who have, you know, let it gone too far? You know, we didn't realize how bad it was. And now we've got teenagers who are, you know, using their phones all the time for God knows what. How do we pull back phone use, online use, social media use for 15, 16, 17 year olds? So I think it's tough. I think it's a lot harder in that age range. I think to Ava's point at this developmental stage, it really is about understanding the world and saying, listen, if you're going to be on this thing for this many hours a day, I got to sit beside you and see what it's all about. I got to know what you're looking at. I got to have some, because I care about you and I gave you this thing before I knew how bad it was. And now I feel like we need to have more conversations about this. I think if adolescents that age don't feel attacked, they're so much more willing to listen. And so when I'm working with parents, I'm always sort of prioritizing the parent-child relationship because if it strong and if it loving and if teens feel heard and seen in the world that they in they more likely to open their ears and take in those little nuggets and messages And then I would encourage you to see if they can buy into some changes right Like what if we all tried to like meet at the dinner table at six and no one touches their phone till eight? Do you think we can do it? Let's all do it. Me too, right? Obviously, if there's higher risk behaviors, I think you can be a bit firmer and do things that your kids really are mad about. But that takes a hit to the parent-child relationship sometimes, and we always want to come back to that for kids' long-term health, obviously, and wellness. So let's turn to our attendees' questions. And this is something that Ava brought up. A lot of our attendees had this question. You know, how are we communicating the dangers of social media and online when we ourselves are glued to our devices so ava you spoke to this before you know what do you think we should be doing i mean i think i know the answer but let me have it i think modeling behavior is is so important and i think that gen z is so gen alpha is so awakened in a way that's really really hard for people who didn't grow up online to understand when you're consuming all of the content in the entire world and you're reading everything as it happens, you have a much different, you're situated in a much different place than teenagers of the past have been because you feel like you do know a lot. And young people today are also super in tune with their own mental health. And they have the language and the vocabulary to describe their own mental health. And all of this awareness makes it a lot easier, unfortunately, for us to call BS. And we already have a lot of trouble with institutions and power. You know, young people nowadays don't even trust therapists to not judge them. So it's, you know, you read about the Gen Z stare. And it's like, if you want to get out of that, then you have to be really honest with yourself about your screen time use. And you have to be setting me an example because I would never let my mother and, you know, I would never let my mother tell me anything about my screen time use because I could always go to her phone and open her settings and say, look at yours. And it just, it was, it was a stalemate. There was nothing to do about it. So it is really, you got to track yourself a little bit there, unfortunately. And it'll make you, when you build a better relationship with your own digital technology, you'll learn more about the feelings and how to describe those feelings and what it changed in you. And you'll be able to communicate that to your kid. And it's, it's, it's much better to lead by example than to tell someone what to do and not to do it, especially when you're dealing with a generation like Gen Z who does think that we know everything and in a weird way is slightly entitled to feeling that because we were the guinea pigs of this new information ecosystem. You really were. Sorry about that. Let's talk. Another question that attendees had was about school. And I think this is a really tough one because so much of school now happens online. Kids are just handed Chromebooks. I'm not saying that the school doesn't do anything about digital literacy. They do. I'm not sure how great it is, but, you know, and a lot of teachers don't want the responsibility of confiscating phones. I think it's a little bit complicated. Kids will argue, oh, I have to have a device to do my homework. have we created a school system that is kind of an impediment and not part of the solution to this issue I would say yes I mean I first of all I just want to say the data is unbelievably clear that since we've started relying on ed tech within schools test scores have plummeted kids are reading more poorly their math is more poor it's not going well for their actual learning but you know what I think actually the U.S. is farther along in Canada in terms of things like bell to bell phone free schools where they're basically saying what I think the beauty of schools is, is it's eight hours a day where we have kids in a place that's social, right? Social and learning. And so if they just didn't have devices, we would be protecting them for eight hours from constant scrolling, cyberbullying, plus giving them the opportunity to communicate in real life the way we did before before smartphones, right? And so I really think that we need to focus so much on, you know, the government supporting the idea that bell to bell phone free schools is probably the best way to help kids out. In terms of Chromebooks, it's a complicated question. I mean, certainly kids have to figure out how to use these devices to learn. Do I think they're essential? Probably not. And certainly we're seeing more and more parents opting out of these and having to, and boards having to revert back to using kind of paper and pencil type learning. And then there's the parent layer where you also as a parent to build your own feeling of being empowered about what happens with the Chromebook when it comes home. So it's one thing for a school to send a Chromebook home, but once it's in your home, it can be your decision whether the Chromebook goes into a bedroom or not. How many hours the Chromebook's allowed to be out for? Because kids have to do homework for four hours and they're in grade five. It's like, no, you don't. You probably have 25 minutes of homework and so we'll sit at the dining room table up to dinner and you'll get your chromebook and you'll do your homework and then i'll take the chromebook and you can get it to go back to school tomorrow so i think it's a combination of sort of boards taking action and also parents feeling empowered to sort of still have rules in their home even if these things come home right yeah i would also if i can add something there encourage people to look at what new york state is doing with the phone free bands right now so new york state in collaboration with an organization called Half the Story set up a team tech council and all of the enforcement and guidelines for how they're going to take phones out of schools are being co-created with a group of teenagers. And what we see happening here is that the young people who really did not want you to take their phones away are feeling much better about it because they had a role in creating the rules and enforcement. And they will provide insights into how young people are actually using their phones that teachers would never be able to know. So that's a great model that exists out there for school boards and for individual schools who are working on it. They have great resources. And just as I've been a broken record saying all day, it really lends to how important that co-creation is and how much more likely the kids are to buy in to not having their phones if they felt like them or their peers that they elected or designated was in that room representing them. That makes a lot of sense. Sophie N asks, what advice do you have for parents with children who are several years apart, in our case, eight, five, eight, and 13, preventing exposure and reducing screen time for the younger sibling, particularly when they share a bedroom or space is limited in the home? Yeah, this is, I think this is probably a very common situation. Yeah, it's really difficult, right? So first of all, I want to say, like, have some self-compassion. This is a hard thing to do, right? You share space, you have kids who are different ages. So something I like to say to parents is when it comes to screen time in general, there is guidelines about how much is too much for sure. But the thing that is more important than that is, is it consistent and predictable for kids? Like, is there consistent predictable times where screen time is allowed or not allowed? So sort of like, you know, screens can be on from 530 to 630 and then they go off And then maybe for your older child, after the other two are in bed, they can have a little bit more screen time or something. And also the type of screen, right? So when we're looking at screens, you know, movies and shows with plots and stories and characters are actually great for kids in moderation, right? There's nothing wrong with those. The things we want to kind of be more wary of, which in this person's case, like the 13-year-old might want to be on YouTube, which is one of the worst platforms of the platforms. And I would say that for the five-year-old, that's going to lead to some of the problems that we spoke about earlier in terms of poor frustration tolerance, dopamine, like big tantrums when it turns off, things like that. So just really asking yourself, what content can all these folks enjoy? Is there ways I can separate things out? And then also having compassion that third-born child is getting more TB, and that's okay. And just sort of thinking about what's your boundary around what they can't be exposed to and setting that boundary with the older child. I think just like the youngest child has more sugar than the than the firstborn. I think an important insight to add here is when we talk to teenagers, they're significantly more concerned about how their younger siblings are going to use screen time than how they are. So a lot of times I think that an honest conversation with your oldest kid about what you're trying to do for your youngest children will go a long way. because most of the time that teenager is going to share the same concern that you share and is going to want to prevent that for their younger siblings and you guys could be a really great team in doing that and it could help them yeah and i've heard teenagers say look i've heard teenagers say you cannot take it from me but i will never get into my kid exactly which i think is really powerful um and and the other thing i just want to say because this comes up a lot is those parents who maybe have a 13 year old and they got a smartphone when they were 11 and now they're listening to this conversation today and reading. I'm like, Oh no, I have a five-year-old and an eight-year-old and permission to change the plan, right? As we learn more, we do things differently. And so it's not always fair, right? Maybe when you gave your sort of 10 or 11-year-old a smartphone, you didn't know, and now you know. And so for your eight-year-old, you're like, listen, I'm going to delay for you. And for parents to really get comfortable tolerating their kids being upset by that, right? It is okay. We have to sometimes make decisions in parenting that make our kids upset. and so I just want to sort of give parents permission to sort of change the plan because that makes sense given what we now know. I want to jump off of something that you mentioned Michelle about different kinds of content. Robin H asks is all screen time created equal? Is there some you feel better or worse about? Does changing devices or platform change any of your recommendations? um yeah so there's some I feel a lot worse about so I tend to recommend if it's at all possible and it is not always possible that we sort of try in the younger ages to stay away from personal devices so for example we know that kids have a bigger emotional reaction when they watch coming off of watching a show on an iPad versus an actual television it's very close to them it's manipulatable um and so it's it's like a big smartphone it's also harder to monitor content on those smaller devices. And then when we're looking about the quality of like what's actually out there, not everything is created equally, but I say watch your kids. So for example, if you give your really young kids something like, I'll talk to really young kids, Coco Melon for those parents who have really young kids. It's this bright, loud, changing, singing. It's so you actually feel anxious watching it. You'll notice that kids actually do worse after than something that's slower, more muted. has a storyline, et cetera. And so I'm often asking parents to really consider how do your kids act when they come off a certain show or another show, like pay attention to them. And of course, we always like things that are kind of long and require sustained attention. This generation of kids actually really struggles to watch movies. And some of the reason why they struggle to watch movies is because you actually have to sustain their attention for a period of time. And they've grown up on these like short, fast clips where it always is changing. And that impacts learning, of course, but it also impacts your ability to just like sit and watch a movie, which is fascinating. And another sort of thing I have parents do is go back and watch something that you watched when you were a kid, like Full House. I watched an episode of Full House the other day and I was like, this is painfully slow. And it wasn't. It's just compared to what we watch now, it's painfully slow. And so just keeping these kind of things in mind and then watching your kid. But I tend to like to stay with personal devices as much as possible for kids screen time and YouTube. What about you, Ava? Are there kinds of screens that you feel better or worse about? Yeah, I'm actually really glad to have a chance to talk about this. I would say turn off the autoplay. Anything that has the bottomless bowl, the infinite scroll is where we get into. It's not as much about whether the screen time is created equal, but how is the content being delivered to the young person? So the reason why endless social media feeds are so addictive is because they're able to collect data on us that allows them to know what kind of content we like and what kind of content we don't like aka which kind of content we're going to engage with and which kind of content we're going to scroll past so then they pull from the vagus book the slot machine book and they say okay if you make the reward random then just the anticipation of that reward is enough to release a low level of dopamine so what's happening with these endless feeds is that you'll get two pieces of content that you like, one piece that you don't like, one that you don't care about, another piece that you like, another that you don't like. And because of the variability of when you're going to get that positive reward versus a negative reward, it monkey brains you and it tricks your brain into wanting that next thing into anticipating that next thing because you don't know when the next positive piece of content is going to come. You're just, you want to see it and you want to keep scrolling until you get it. And that's what makes it hard to put these screens down and to turn off of these screens is the sheer anticipation of being able to see something else that's going to make you happy. So I would definitely second the short form content fact, and especially when you're getting it in that endless scroll. So all of the design of it is intentional. You know, when you're scrolling on Instagram and you start to scroll and you can see the bottom of the next piece of content, that's intentionally addictive. You know, all of these things on the autoplay play into keeping you for as long as possible. They have genius behavioral scientists and designers who creating this. So I would turn off that autoplay. You can turn it off on YouTube. And I just would stay away from those feeds of short form content because it's really hard to regulate when to stop and when not to stop. Oh my gosh, how did an hour fly by? So if I had to sum up the sort of key takeaways that I have had today, it's that it's never too late to sort of reconsider your kids online use and your own online use, that we need to model better digital hygiene, and that the very best outcomes come from collaboration with kids. Does that feel like a good summation of this conversation? Yes, and that we need to count on the companies who make these products and the government to help us do this, right? Because I think in the absence of that, we're really going to get stuck. Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. Amazing. Thank you both so much for joining me. This was just so mind-blowing, and I hope that we can have you back for more conversations. And another thank you to Children First Canada, our sponsor today. Please check out Ava Smithing's series, Left to Their Own Devices, and check out Dr. Michelle Locke and Unbooked. And thanks to everyone for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.