The Phone Isn’t the Problem! Social Media Rules For Parents!

Sincerely,

Transcript: The Phone Isn’t the Problem! Social Media Rules For Parents!

With Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D. and Senior Master Laura Sanborn

@0:39 – Chief Master Greg Moody

Hey everybody. Thanks a lot for being here at the success training today. We’re really excited.

This is Master Sanborn’s topic that she wanted to cover. So, Senior Master, good to have you here. This is a common thing that people talk about. Some people, you know, are totally against people using their cell phone or their kids using their cell phone, which is our topic today.

But there’s a little lack of guidance in what to do about it. So we’re going to hopefully help you out with some guidance today on what to do with the cell phone issue.

You know, you guys are probably like us, seeing kids that are constantly on their phones and constantly on their phones and they can’t operate. I feel like saying in the old days, when we were kids, none of those things happened. You had to figure out what to do.

And now it’s really, really easy for a parent to hand their kid an iPad or a cell phone and then not worry about it.

Hopefully we’ll demystify a little bit what the dangers of that are, what to do, and kind of how to have a good strategy with your kids.

We have Senior Master Senior Master Laura Sanborn here, as well as Mr. Dwayne Flees, who should be joining us shortly.

I wanted to start out as we always do with the KarateBuilt Charter. This is something that guides us, and how to manage social media and screen time is part of this, being a discipline. We’re a disciplined martial arts school, and we want that to end up translating the discipline with our students.

We’ll talk about discipline, even for you guys as parents. So maybe some numbers, I’ll read these off and we’ll talk about them a little bit. 

These were pretty shocking to me, even though I was expecting pretty high numbers, but 40% of teens say they’re constantly, that means 100% online, as in they don’t put the cell phone down. They can’t even remember when they put the cell phone down. To me, that’s both not surprising, but scary at the same time.

AI isn’t really our topic today, but 64% of you used an AI, and I don’t have anything against AI.

The challenge is whether they spend a lot of time on it that maybe could be used for other things.

But this one’s the most important one. This statistic about three hours a day, which honestly, for a lot of teenagers, or even junior high kids, or even elementary age kids for that matter, doubles the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms. If they’re on three hours a day, three hours, again, doesn’t seem like much.

@5:33 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

You know, if I think about it as a block of time, a three-hour block of time that they just get on and are not interrupted to do some kind of movement or something else.

@5:46 – Chief Master Greg Moody

But that’s not what three hours.

@5:49 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

So they’re just talking over a day, any time during the day.

@5:53 – Chief Master Greg Moody

Yep. Imagine, you know, that adds up pretty fast. After dinner, they might have a couple hours, and they’re on their phone.  

Along with watching TV even, that still counts. Three hours a day, boy, that doesn’t seem like much to me at all based on what I see.

Not just kids, but us adult behaviors too. These apply to adult behaviors as well. For those of you that sit around and doom scroll on your phone, it’s compelling.

I mean, that’s why these companies made it that way to be compelling. And three hours isn’t very much. So something called the Great Rewiring.

This came from a guy named Jonathan Haidt. If you haven’t watched his TED Talk, I highly recommend his TED Talk.

And this is where, in this area, this is right around when the iPhone came out, a little bit after the iPhone came out, that most childhood, instead of play-based, which was also physical, became phone-based or social media-based.

Um, so most of the time we don’t really protect kids from this. think it’s just recently Facebook had restrictions on, you can set up an account for your younger kids, but that’s really now because Facebook’s losing business to some of the other platforms.

It wasn’t because they were, in fact, I was at a bullying prevention conference for educators because I’m a certified bullying prevention trainer.

And one of the things, one of the meetings was with Facebook. Facebook was there, and the actual Facebook people, and they were talking about cyberbullying.

And Facebook, even the representatives there, kind of threw their hands up and said, well, we really can’t restrict anybody because we can’t tell how old the kids are.

@7:45 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

That was interesting.

@7:46 – Chief Master Greg Moody

Jonathan, again, it’s pronounced height, like high altitudes, but this is how it’s spelled, H-A-I-D-T. I recommend all his books, but if you haven’t again watched his TED talk, he’s got a couple of them that are really, really good.

So, four big things that happen when people are using social media. People, not just kids. Less sleep. We know that less sleep is a big problem.

And also, interactions with other people. That is one of the big problems with using a lot of these social media tools, which again, I’m not against them.

It’s just pay attention to what’s happening. They tend, the research has shown us now that when kids use more FaceTime more, or not FaceTime, screen time, when they have more screen time, that their attention habits are lower.

Some people have even said it sort of emulates ADHD, even when they aren’t diagnosable with ADHD. So, these are four things.

It looks like two. So, one, less sleep. Two, less interaction with other people. Three, fractured attention. And four, a habit that’s hard to build, to break.

If you’re letting the kids use social media a lot, use, I keep saying social But really just use their phone, whether it’s to play games or iPads, any of those electronic devices, it’s hard to break them out of that to do other things like do their chores around the house or do homework or, you know, any kind of other activities that aren’t that because these devices are so compelling.

Those are four harms. We just listed them in two sentences. Here’s a couple recommendations that did you want to mention anything there, Master Sanborn?

@9:30 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

No, I’m surprised by these numbers as well. I find it shocking. It’s not that I didn’t know there were dangers and that they’re fairly rampant in that everybody has to have it.

And I know people that get on their phone at night and they turn off the light, but the phone is still on for an hour or two after that, even with reports that the blue light is going to keep you awake.

And if you turn it off, you’re more likely to get sleep. And they’re like… Thank Oh, but not on me.

Yeah, yeah.

@10:03 – Chief Master Greg Moody

And the fracture of attention, yeah. 

@10:07 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

Yeah. Kind of makes me wonder about things. Yeah.

@10:10 – Chief Master Greg Moody

Yeah, there’s a lot of statistics about like this, like 46% of teens have said that being on social media makes them feel worse about themselves.

You know, interesting, right? I mean, there’s some developmental psychologists that argue that the rewiring claim isn’t really true, that they’re not being rewired, which is Haidt’s claim.

But there are other factors, even if it doesn’t like rewire your brain and you can still function normally without the social media, there’s still the dangers.

And what you just said about circadian rhythms get broken if you’re watching screens too late at night. A couple of things that Haidt recommends, which I kind of like his guidelines, so we’ll share with you, and then we’ll combine them with some other work that we’ve done, is his guidelines, and he did this with his kids.

Smartphone before high school. You can get a basic phone that can handle texting and emergencies and, of course, GPS-ing your kids so you know where they are.

You can get a standard phone for that. There’s no reason for them to have a smartphone. And then another norm he has is social media needs to wait until they’re 16.

What we know with cognitive behavioral theory is that from 5 to 10 years old is a time in your life where you’ve got enough understanding to know what’s going on.

You have enough understanding to understand that bad things are happening or good things are happening, but you don’t have the understanding to process it.

And then, for example, in this example, if you saw a lot of images on social media that are very negative or you saw, let’s talk about body image, the images you saw on social media were all skinny people and those are the ones that get a lot of attention and those are the ones that get revered, then those are messages.

That sink in in a way that after 10 years old, your brain can start to process them better and understand that’s not realistic or that’s, I’m not going to look like a supermodel.

I’m not going to, those negative things I can kind of make critical decisions about after 10 years old. So five to 10 is a really critical time.

And he’s suggesting even later for social media. Three and four. So number three is school is not related to phones.

I think a lot of kids probably object to this because all their friends are on phones and who are they going to talk to.

So, but we would like to see, and he would like to see that phones go in the locker or pouch.

We’d like to see, honestly, our parents at the school put their phones away during the classes. If they’re either participating in class that they can do with their kids, or if they’re watching class, then they get to see and experience what their kids are going through so that they can talk to them about it later.

And the other suggestion he has is literally have more independence, which is something we’ve talked about a lot. We’ve talked about this in the context of parents of adult children that haven’t launched yet, that are still living at home when they’re 35 years old and don’t really have a job and don’t have anything to do, and that’s very frustrating for parents.

But if you want to avoid that, start helping them be independent when they’re young. This is very congruent with our, a couple talks ago, we talked about our main job as a parent is not safety, it’s safety, it’s capacity, so they learn the different things, and it’s connection with other people, and then finally growth, so they have a growth mindset.

This is very congruent with that, so helping them have more opportunities for interacting with other people, that’s how they learn interactions.

They’re not learning it because they’re watching TV.

@13:58 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

Yeah, I kind of want… I as a grandparent, the free play is, you know, I keep buying what I think are amazingly cool toys for the grandkids, and are they, do they play with them enough to get free play, or do they automatically turn to a screen because that’s what they’re used to seeing.

Their parents love my daughter to death, but she’s on her phone, and modeling the phone behavior, I, frankly, it feels like 24 hours.

Like, she’s never off of it, and her husband’s never off of it. They’re, they’re having conversations, they’re comparing things back and forth with each other a lot, but they’re modeling, oh, but we’re on our phone, no matter what else is happening around us, we’re on our phone.

@14:39 – Chief Master Greg Moody

Yeah.

@14:41 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

Go ahead. I kind of wonder, as a grandparent, when I buy all these toys, am I just, like, inundating them with things that don’t get used, or am I trying really hard to be the one who doesn’t tell them what to do but suggest it strongly with a toy?

Yeah.

@14:55 – Chief Master Greg Moody

Yeah. And some of the, some of the, hopefully the, the idea here is. Parents, you’re watching this, is to get the idea that it’s okay to have these restrictions.

It’s okay, but the hard part for a lot of parents is, what you just said, is modeling it, which we were going to talk about a little bit here.

So this, again, is what we recommend parents kind of have a mindset of is, of course, you want your kid to be safe, but our real goal by the time they’re out the door and on their own is that they have these other characteristics, which is they’re capable, they have lots of capacity, that they’re connected, they talk to other people, and that they are in a growth mindset.

And that’s not really congruent with spending with the three hours a day of being on their connected devices. This goes along with, we talked about just a little bit ago, but a while back, about adult, parents of adult kids that haven’t launched yet, that haven’t really gone on their own.

Now, your kids are fantastic. They’ve both got careers and got things going on. My son is… He’s got that happening, and I think a lot of that is because I try to give him independence when he was young, guarded independence.

This goes along with that. As time goes on, if you remember our other chart, your authority is decreasing.

When they’re infants, everything is, they’re dependent on you for everything. When they’re 16, they’re not really dependent on you for very much, you know, a place to live and food to eat.

But a lot of that, you don’t really have authority to get them to do what you wanted them to do.

Although we’d like to have authority over our teenagers, but as authority goes down, then you can start giving them more independence.

This is Haidt’s rules of stepping up their, what you allow them to do, as your authority steps down.

So, when they’re young, when they’re little ones, under, you know, under three years old, there could be a family.

old, under Thank Device in the living room. Maybe something everybody shares. When they’re in their middle years, I mean, I understand if they’re in school, you want to be able to get messages to them from them, find out where they are.

If we decide we want to give them independence, we also might want to monitor them to some degree. And we have the technology to do that.

I’m sure our parents would have liked to do that if they could have. And then some limits on smartphones in high school and then limiting social media.

And one thing that didn’t get mentioned here is that one of the rules that he talks about is the parents have access to their social media accounts.

@17:34 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn 

Yeah.

@17:35 – Chief Master Greg Moody

And if the parents have access to social media accounts, then it prevents both negative influence on them, but them negatively influencing other people.

And they can kind of see what they’re doing. I mean, we’re not trying to be big brother on our kids, but we, we, if they, if they don’t have any, there’s independence with some boundaries.

@17:54 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

Yes.

@17:56 – Chief Master Greg Moody

And then after 17, 18, then they’re on their own. But we’re just in the background, finding out what’s going on.

So this is when your authority goes down, what they can do moves up. And ideally, by the time they get into this area where you don’t have any authority, they have capacity to do it on their own.

So this goes along with what we just talked about. You can share a family device, high school, a smartphone, but some limits on the smartphone, which nowadays you can limit things on the smartphone.

You can configure it so that they can’t just do whatever they want. Okay, you mentioned this, ma’am. This is going to be the biggest argument, or you mentioned something coming up here.

The biggest argument is, well, everybody’s got one. Okay, everybody’s got one. So you’ll have to be able to tolerate that complaint from your kids.

You know, you could, you have a choice, you could give in. And because everybody’s got one, then they get one.

And an eight-year-old gets a fancy iPhone that they, number one, probably don’t need, but number two, has some of these challenges.

And they’re going to get used to these relatively addictive behaviors. But the other thing that’s coming up here, well, here’s an example of what to do, is make sure you’ve got other families that are involved with you like this.

So everybody’s phone, this is a couple ways to deal with this, a couple other rules, is all phones charge in the kitchen.

So they don’t take them to bed. They can use books or they can do other things to wind down for bed.

But not screens. Screens tend to keep us up late, all of us.

@19:53 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

Yeah.

@19:55 – Chief Master Greg Moody

No devices at meals. You know, that’s… I’ve been at even business meetings where I’ve been at lunch with somebody, and they’re on their cell phone while they’re having a conversation with me.

And to me, that’s very off-putting.

@20:11 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

Yes.

@20:11 – Chief Master Greg Moody

I don’t feel very respected if they’re on their phone. Whatever’s going on, can that wait till the end of the meal?

And the answer is almost always yes. It’s almost always yes, but it’s a good indicator that people are kind of stuck in this behavior.

@20:31 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

Well, it’s the lack of connection. If we’re on our phone during dinner, we’re teaching the kids that we don’t need to be talking to each other or looking at each other even when things are going on.

So we’re not teaching our kids how to have connection because, again, we’re not modeling connection. We’re modeling, I’ve got my thing, this is my thing, and I’m doing my thing, and yep, you’re here.

If you’ve got something to say, okay, I’ll look at you for 10 seconds to see what it is, but I’m going

I’m go back to my thing because it’s in my hand still waiting for you to finish talking, so there’s a lack of importance given to connection when the phone is there.

@21:13 – Chief Master Greg Moody

A hundred percent, and you said the right thing. You’re not modeling it. I mean, how are they going to learn connection if you’re not talking to them and you’re on your phone?

So this is the hardest part, and I get that it’s hard, you know, because some of us get sucked into being on the phone.

If bored, it’s such an easy way to not be bored. But if you model this in front of your kids, and honestly, better to model it all the time so it’s not just in front of your kids that you’re behaving.

One of the things in our Karate Built Charter is Karate Built Black Belts live with integrity. And integrity means I’m congruent.

I’m the same way when I’m at home, I’m the same way when I’m at school, I’m the same way when I’m at work, I’m the same way with my friends, I’m the same way with my kids.

@21:59 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

back at in need miss

@22:00 – Chief Master Greg Moody

Yes, and so that makes that behavior a lot easier if you’re consistent. So what to do instead? So a couple things about this, and this comes from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

You know, stop counting minutes, just start handing those stairs up as the stairs go up. Here’s the things we can do, a family device, all the way up till when they’re 17, 18, they, you know, have pretty much full control, but you’re going to be monitoring them a little bit.

You’re going to be coaching them on what to do. So the whole house has got to run the, have the same rules.

Yeah, your rule, if you ask them to charge your phone in the kitchen, you got to charge your phone in the kitchen.

And that’s tough. And we want to be adults that can put the phone down even if somebody else isn’t in the room.

That one’s hard.

@22:59 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

Yes. Yes. Thank you.

@23:00 – Chief Master Greg Moody

And it’s one of the things that all of us can have challenges with because it is so compelling. When there’s nothing going on, it’s easy for the phone to replace it.

But then other things probably aren’t going to be in your attention space. This goes, again, along American Academy of Pediatrics, Jonathan Haidt, who I recommend, the Surgeon General, Pew Research Center.

All the data comes from all these places. So we’re trying to get you some ideas, and hopefully by the end of this, you’ve given yourself permission that it’s okay to monitor their phone time, monitor their social media time, to take some control of that.

That’s kind of our job as parents. And I’m not saying that to make you feel guilty as parents, but I think the bigger thing a lot of times when my kid was young is, what am I supposed to do?

Is it okay to do this or is it okay to do that? What kind of movies? And so we’re trying to help you with some guidelines about that.

So you can feel comfortable with the guidelines that you’re going to then impose upon your kid. And I guess don’t be surprised if nobody else does it.

@24:08 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

That’s for sure.

@24:09 – Chief Master Greg Moody

Yeah, you may be the only one and your kids will feel, well, everybody does it, so why don’t we get to?

And you’ll have to be able to tolerate that complaint that your house might operate differently, but then maybe your kids will operate differently when they’re adults.

Anything else to add there, ma’am?

@24:27 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

You know, part of that is the ease of getting information. There’s no struggle to go find anything out. You’re watching a movie and it’s, oh, where do we know that actor from?

Bam. Oh, well, we saw that one and this, this, this, this, and this, and this. So we’re telling them that everything can be answered in seconds, even if it’s not important to what’s actually happening, even if it’s not an important question.

It’s just a casual, hey, do you recognize that person? I thought I’d seen them on something else before. Oh.

Well, here it is right now. I’ll give you their entire bio and everything about them. It’s that ease of, you know, they, we all expect to be able to get all of the information immediately whenever we want to know anything.

And how, you know, how do these rules go with that where, well, my kid is the one who doesn’t know the answer to everything because I didn’t let him use the phone.

Well, did you teach him to go to the library? Did you take him to the library and say, here’s all these books?

Can you figure out which one has it? Let’s, let’s, let’s have a game. Let’s see who can find the answer to this question at the library.

Can you find your way around town with a map?

@25:50 – Chief Master Greg Moody

This, this reminds me of The Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies, best movies of all time. And, um, who’s the Fred Savage?

He’s the kid that’s. It’s in the bed, and Grandpa, Peter Falk, comes in, and he’s going to read him a book, and he goes, what, a book?

And I remember Peter Falk’s words were, when I was your age, they called TV books.

@26:15 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

And it’s the transition, right?

@26:17 – Chief Master Greg Moody

I mean, when Peter Falk was a kid, when his grandpa was a kid, they had books. Then the kid has TV in his room.

He can watch himself and play video games on it. was playing like a baseball video game at the time.

And then now it’s transitioned. So when we heard that, we might have thought it was silly, but it continues to evolve into where you get more disconnected, more disconnected.

And that’s really our concern, is are we going to lose capability? Because remember, we’re going to keep our kids safe.

It’s the safest society we’ve ever known. This is by far the least risk your kids have for any kind of danger of serious injury or anything, any major problems like that.

This is by far… Far the safest society worldwide that we’ve lived in. So safety is not that much of an issue.

We have to build capacity. You can’t build capacity if you’re connected to a device all the time. Other than maybe there’s, I mean, you can learn Spanish with your device.

So there’s things you can do, but there’s a lot of other capacities that require you to interact with people.

Because the next one’s connection, being able to be connected to people, and the last one is have an idea of growth.

And none of those things go along with spending time on the phone. And hopefully we’ve gotten everybody cleared up on the problems with spending too much time.

That stat of three hours doubles anxiety and depression. So that’s something to be really concerned about. So we’re not trying to be doomsayers.

Technology is going to keep moving and we’re going to use it just as much as everybody else. But we want to use it in a responsible way.

And hopefully this can give you guys and parents guidelines for what to do with your kids. So that’s it.

I think a good place to wrap up, ma’am.

@28:02 – Senior Master Laura Sanborn

Yes, sir.

@28:03 – Chief Master Greg Moody

Okay. Thank you very much for being here as always and bye everybody. We’ll see you next time. Okay. Stop share and stop.

Okay. I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to, um, stop the Fathom recording. Oh, no.

Dr. Moody is also a licensed psychotherapist and maintains a practice at Integrated Mental Health Associates (IntegratedMHA.com) where he specializes in couples therapy and men’s issues.