Welcome back to Become a Calm mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlin Childress

and I am so excited to introduce to you Julie

Scelfo and Julie Fruman, who are

going to talk to us today about the organization called

mama, which stands for Mothers Against Media

Addiction. Julie Scelfo is the founder and executive

director of mama and she has

created a chapter based grassroots movement

of parents who are fighting back against media addiction.

And her goal is to create a world in which real life experiences

and interactions remain at the heart of a healthy

childhood. Her organization is so incredible and I'm so

inspired by what she is doing and what she's created. And Julie

Fruman is the leader of the local chapter of

MAMA in my community. And I had the opportunity to meet Julie

a few weeks ago and I just really believe so much

in her vision and mission for healthier tech and

healthier families and the work that she's doing

locally and connected to this organization of

mama. So today on the podcast, I invite you to sit

back and listen to us talk about the hope

that we all have that there is a way to save our

children from growing up in an environment where

they are media infiltrated and

overexposed to media and screens and screen

time. And we give you a lot of practical

reasons why you want to make some shifts in your family and then also some

encouragement and hope and really simple ways that you can shift

your own family dynamic into a healthier,

more balanced relationship to tech

and screens and media in your family. So I hope you really

enjoy this interview with Julie and Julie of MAMA and

you can learn more about MAMA at their website, We Are

MAMA. M A. M A. We Are MAMA.org

so here we go. Hi, Daralyn.

Hang on, I can't hear you yet. There we go.

I forgot that I need to use my mic. That's okay. Okay, here's

Julie. Let me let her in. Okay. Good morning. Hi, Julie. Good

morning. It's so nice to see you both. Hi, I'm

Darlin. Nice to meet you, Darlin. And I love the

paintings behind you. Very cool. Yeah. Yes.

Well, I'm really excited to have you both. The moms that listen to the podcast,

very invested in being parents that are intentional

and that creates some anxiety for them. And what I love

that MAMA is doing is it puts that anxiety into some action.

And the takeaway I hope everyone has is really being able to

feel not alone and more empowered. So I'm

really happy to have you both here. Thanks for being here. Thank you

for having us. Both. I'm excited to do this. Yeah, I'm delighted to be here.

It's extra special for me to get time with Julie, so this

is super fun. And is the audio okay? I have a mic

and happy to adjust anything you need. I think it all sounds really good.

Okay, great. Yeah. So we'll start with Julie Scelfo. Is that how you

say your name? Scelfo? Yeah. Yeah. If you want to introduce yourself and

then we'll go to Julie Fruman. We both have. We have two Julie's

on, and that can be confusing, but just

introduce yourself really quickly and then we'll go into MAMA in a second. So, Julie

Skelfel, please introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Julie

Scelfo. I'm a longtime journalist. I used to be a staff writer at the New

York Times, and I'm the founder and executive director of mama.

I'm a mother of three. I have three boys who are all teenagers right

now, and I live in New York. Great. Well,

thanks for being here. Julie Fruman, introduce yourself and how you're connected

to mama. So my name is Julie Fruman. I'm a

licensed marriage and family therapist in private practice. I live

locally in Westlake Village. For a lot of the moms that listen your podcast, I

know you have a nationwide audience, but I also do

some work with the Four Seasons at the center for Health and well

Being, where I talk a lot about balance and burnout

and phones and media definitely come into those conversations.

When MAMA first launched, I heard about it and I

knew immediately I wanted to get involved. I

loved the idea of having other parents around

me and not doing this work solo. I,

I just, I know that's a, it's a better, it's a better way for the

message. And it's a better way for me personally, too. I like being

with other parents who want the

same things for our children and for the community, too. I wanted to,

to do this hand in hand and not by myself.

Yeah, it's such an important point of that. Parenting is often

in silos at this point in our history. And we can feel

like we're all just, you know, alone in these little

bedrooms trying to get little kids off their phone and to bed and

outside to play. And we all feel very alone in that.

And what a beautiful thing about MAMA is that idea that

I can be with other like minded parents. So, Julie Skelfo,

introduce us to MAMA and what it is and kind of. Its

mission, of course. So MAMA stands for Mothers Against

Media Addiction, and we are a Grassroots movement of

parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and other allies

fighting back against media addiction and creating a world where real

life experiences and interactions remain at the heart of a

healthy childhood. MAMA grew out of my own frustration as a

parent trying to keep my kids safe online and realizing

that the problem was beyond anything I alone could manage

as a parent. At one point, I signed them up for software that was going

to let me know anytime they were exposed to something dangerous. And I started getting

over 100 emails a day. And I realized there's no

way that I could manage all of that alone. And

as I did research as a journalist, what I discovered was really

frightening, which was that our government had not kept up

regulations, even though we've been regulating mass

communications since the 1930s. So mama has a three

part mission. We first focus on parent education

so parents can understand how all these things work. The second part of

our mission is getting smartphones out of school so school can continue

to be a place where kids learn and make friendships.

And third, we, we advocate for ensuring technology

products have basic safeguards, just like other consumer products.

Kind of like the way we expect our cars to all come with seat belts.

We want our social media to have basic

safeguards to protect kids. Right. Or even possibly the hardware itself.

Exactly. Yeah. That's like my dream. So

Julie Fruman, tell us how local chapters work in the

mission of mama. You know, you think about educating parents, getting

smartphones out of school, bell to bell, and then doing this

grassroots advocacy work. What is the local chapter?

How does that work? How does the connection between the MOTHER organization

haha, go with the local chapters? How do you see that working?

Well, I mean, I really just know intimately about my own experience. Although

I have this greater community of other

chapter leaders, I know more intimately

what, what I do. And I think, you know, Julie Scelfo would also second

that her leadership to all of us is

really allowing all of us to do what makes sense for

us personally. For. So for each chapter leader, we get to

figure that out as to what our, you know, what's our comfort level, what are

our desires? And we also, we know our community. So

what, what do we see the needs are and we

get to work from there. So, um, as a therapist, I had started,

you know, feeling really frustrated with trying to work

in a, in a world in which the world is almost set up not for

human flourishing at this, at this moment, when it comes to

how we're, you know, just the, the nuts and bolts of how we're spending our

time, especially for young People, I started to notice

this disconnect between healthy living and unhealthy living. And this,

this. This crux of the media, the media piece and just screens in

general really caused me a lot of frustration as a

clinician. And so I had started

feeling like I needed to do something a couple of years ago

to start to just have conversations around my kids,

friends, parents, to try and get them on board,

to slow down a little bit. That was my original goal. And so I

had been doing some of this work, you know, like dipping my toe

in the water. And then when I was jumped on board

with mama, I felt like a bit more clarity and

with. With these, you know, these three goals. Okay, good. I'm already. I'm already

doing some of this parent ed now I really need to focus on

the other two. So getting phones out of schools and then learning about

legislation and how I can support proper safeguards. The

phones in schools thing came up naturally at every gathering

that I hosted or attended. When I was talking about

device use, the first or second question was always, well, what about

the school? What is going on in the schools? And I

had not initially thought that I would need to talk about that.

I was talking about, how are we as parents doing things in our own homes?

And I realized very quickly that can't be ignored. It's just, you know,

it's so incredibly frustrating for parents, especially parents who have

guidelines and strict, you know, stricter rules at home, to see their kids on

YouTube at school, for example, when they don't allow it at home.

So that kind of grew naturally for me in my

chapter. And so we've been working with the local school

districts to get phones out of schools first. So that's sort of the

first step, and we've had some success there. So that was really exciting.

And now the next thing is really looking at Chromebook, use

iPad, use YouTube access on devices. So it's sort

of grown from there. Where parents in, in my chapter have said, this is the

next step, and they're helping guide me, which is. Which is lovely

because I get to take that feedback and we can.

We can make decisions as we sense what's going on and what the needs

are. Yeah, I think you hear Julie Fruman's one of our star

chapter leaders. People have come to MAMA with a wide range

of experiences and familiarity with the issues

at play. As a licensed therapist, she already really understood

how exposure to media was affecting children's ability to

regulate themselves, giving them access to content that

maybe isn't developmentally appropriate. We have parents who come

to us who maybe are not familiar at all, that, you know, they don't even

realize that social media is showing stuff with their children. Their kids

might be struggling. And then we also have chapter leaders who are very

involved in advocacy. So Mama tries to meet folks where they're at,

recognize that each community might have a different

appetite for advocacy and a different set of concerns that's

most pressing, but give them the tools and the confidence to go

out and meet the moment and work with teachers, work with school

boards. Multiple chapter leaders have given testimony in their communities

about the needs to get phones out of school. So it's something that's sort of

living and growing and breathing all the time. Yeah. And so

powerful to have an umbrella organization that can legitimize

sometimes the advocacy work where

it's not just one crazy mom who shows up at a school board

meeting and acts extreme. It's like, no, this is a movement.

It's not just a movement. It's an important principle

we need to be putting into place, and that is really, really

powerful. But let's talk for a minute about what is the concern?

Like, why should we even care? Because I think what you said,

Julie, is that sometimes parents come with a lot of information.

Like, Julie Fruman has a lot of background as a therapist and working

as a clinician. But some of us just feel off. Like, we just

feel like it's not quite right and we're not sure why. What's the

problem? So where are parents at? And, like, what are some of the

concerns that we have around media addiction? How do you define

it? What are we worried about? Great question. I mean, that's. We call it

media addiction because we as a society right now

are just completely addicted to media and screens.

Think of all the places we have screens. They are in our

restaurants, they are in our cars, our elevators, our gas

pumps. So there's almost no place that you can go anymore and just

enjoy the natural setting without being bombarded with information.

And doctors know our brains and bodies were not meant to.

To get a 247 fire hose of information

coming at us. When I was growing up, my parents read the

newspaper in the morning and they watched the news at night for 30 minutes.

And, you know, the world is a scary place. There's a lot going on.

There are fires, there are floods. It's always been that way. At the

same time, there has actually never in the history of the world been a

safer time to be alive. We have medicine, we have 911, we have

fire departments. And yet, because narratives of

conflict are what makes things capture our attention the

most, journalism is always amplifying conflict.

Entertainment platforms are always amplifying content

that is about conflict. And we know that social media algorithms are

designed for one thing and one thing only, and that's to maximize

engagement. And they do that by showing us whatever is most

likely to create an emotional reaction, especially a negative

emotional reaction. That makes sense. People stay on. And so as a result,

as a society, we have just been

living in this state of really fight or flight where we're

all upset and agitated all the time. And that's not healthy. And

so, you know, I love what you're doing with Calm Mama, because once

you're regulated, once you're calm, you can handle anything. And

yes, emergencies do happen. I've got three boys. I have been through

broken bones. I've gone through, through split foreheads. And that stuff was

scary, but also wasn't catastrophic. And once I learned

that I could manage these things, once we all learned that

life is going to have ups and downs, but you can navigate calmly

through it, it just lends itself to a much more peaceful world. And

so we call it media addiction, because I think our society is addicted

to screens. We're putting them in places where we shouldn't have them.

Today's youth are spending about nine hours a day,

day on screens, which is not healthy or safe for their minds or

their bodies. It's not good for their posture, it's not good for their breathing.

And we also know that we are in the middle of an unprecedented youth mental

health crisis that's been wreaking havoc on kids and families. The

American Academy of Pediatrics declared that we're in a state of emergency for

youth mental health. And that's part of why I started Mama. It was because

enough is enough. I think profit is great.

I think media and technology can be really helpful

and fun. We're certainly not anti media or tech. We just think

it's not always the most important thing and doesn't belong in all

situations. Yeah. I was at an event that

Julie Fruman hosted, and one of my takeaways was listening to

these emergency physicians talk about how

they can fix a broken bone, they can fix your body,

but they can't necessarily fix your heart,

your mental health. And that they're seeing so much more

emergencies around suicidal ideation

or attempts or panic attacks or severe

depression. I'm seeing in my practice a lot of failure to launch, especially with young

boys, young men, and the girls just

really not Thriving and it's hard to

watch that. And of course there's, there's lots of factors that aren't just

media related, but in many ways it can come back to media because

the parents are possibly highly distracted as well

and not necessarily as present. They're highly

dysregulated and maybe not able to access all of the

tools to connect. And we are all a little bored

by real life because it's not as shiny.

I remember turning my phone to grayscale

and I do it every once in a while and noticing how the colors

on my phone did not represent the colors in the world at all.

And it's just really meant to be that way where

the devices and like you said, Julie, all the

emotional energy that the media is feeding us all of the

time, that kind of is sensational and kind of

stimulating. So we crave that stimulation and it

gets us out of being just present. So it's all

connected. And I wanted to ask about.

We have this almost a crisis with adults. There's

immediate addiction or just an

overuse. And I think

about previous generations having a nervous system

wired without devices and how hard it is to

manage our own media use. And I wondered if you could speak a

little bit about what either of you, what it means when

children are overexposed to media and

device. What are we seeing long term? What are the effects on their

adult mental health and like their adult nervous system and.

Well, there's a study actually from Sapien labs that

interviewed 28,000 young people, so 18 to 24

young adults. And it shows that really delaying

when they get their first, their, their own first.

It did talk about smartphones, but I think we could like put a little pin

and iPads as well to go back to that in a minute. It's all the

same to me. It's a, it's an individual device that you hold in your hand

whether it's, if it's connected to the Internet and you hold it in

your hand. To me it's the same as the phone. What the heck difference are

we kids aren't making phone calls? What are we talking about? I'm with you

there. So this, this study, I want to be specific, is about the smartphone, but

I'm with you. So it's 28,000 young adults, 18 to for

and it tracked their mental health positive outcomes. So their mhq, which

is basically just a scale asking questions about resilience and

grit and overall life satisfaction. And

then the second scale is showing levels of distress. And

so every year and so the graph looks like years on the

bottom. So every year that you delay, those positive mental

health attributes are higher, and the struggling is less

with every year of delay. And so when I first started doing these talks,

I, you know, you were talking a minute about adults, but I thought, what do

I want to say to people? How do I want to frame this? My first

talks were very like, red alarm, red flag. And I left.

I left parents with like, no takeaways as to what they could actually do. I

just tried. I was like, be afraid. You know, it wasn't the

most effective message at first. I just was like, ah, this is bad. I'm realizing

this is bad. And we need to. We need to think about that. And over

time, I realized, okay, I really. If I'm going to have people

listen to me, I need to say, here are the harms, here's the potential

harms, here's what we can do about it and sort of hold their hand through.

So I learned my lesson over time, but the thing I came up with

is three pronged. So delay, number one, delay, just

slow down. And then teach is prong two.

That's probably the biggest one where we have a lot to discuss and talk

about with our children through each developmental stage. And then third is

model and modeling the behavior that we want to see it.

It doesn't have to be that we are abstinent as adults.

We are, you know, hopefully our brains are fully formed.

We've already, we have a, you know, a career or a path or a partner

or a home or, you know, in combination, we've. We've achieved some of those

milestones to get to the place where we are. And oftentimes our phones are

connected to those things. So our partner, our work,

taking care of the home. So our, Our relationship

to technology is inherently different.

And we still need to model what kind of home we are. You know, like

Julie Scelfo said, she remembers her own childhood

of, you know, newspaper in the morning, 30 minutes of news at night. I remember

taking the phone off the hook at dinner, like, very vividly.

That was something that we did as a family. And so that set the

tone in a way for me. And so to think that, oh, there are

spaces that. And places in which we are together as a family

where other people aren't allowed in. And so that

that matters. We don't want to expect perfection. We are

so tied to these devices that it is really hard to disentangle. I think there's

work to be done there that we can achieve really small, tangible

things, step by step. At the same time, we can do

something really simple like make sure devices are off at dinner, make sure

devices are off after a certain time of day, or that we leave them off

until after our morning coffee. Like little small things that adults do too,

that teach our children that they have the phones, have a

place, that they're not just the lens that we see the world through.

Yeah, Beautiful. Julie. You both are the parenting experts. I

am not a parenting expert and there is no parenting mistake that I didn't

make three times. A thousand and many years

ago, my youngest son was struggling a little bit with reading.

His teacher mentioned that he was just not taking to books.

And my husband and I talked about it that night and we realized both of

us read for a living. He's an attorney, I was a journalist.

But they only saw us reading on our phones because we weren't really

reading paper magazines as much or books. And we realized this was a

problem because they don't know that we're reading work versus looking at a TikTok

or, you know, a video. So we made an agreement that

we were going to start to have family reading hour on Sundays. And for

one hour a week on Sundays, we would all get under the blankets in front

of a fire, read a book. It didn't have to be a book, it had

to be printed material. Could be a catalog, it could be a graphic

novel, but not anything digital. And of course they

complained, but then I brought snacks and then after a couple weeks they

loved it. And it only lasted like a year, but that was it. Like that

was literally all it took for my son to become interested in reading.

He's thriving right now, finishing his first year of high school.

So, you know, the impact of what we model for our kids is just so

significant. And I think you're exactly right that we as adults are

media addicted too. So all of Julie Fruman's suggestions are things

that we've tried to internalize in our home.

@wearemama.org we have a checklist

that parents can use. Sort of like how to have rules in your home.

We advocate for parents never ever allowing their child to

take a WI FI enabled device into their rooms at

night. They'll tell you that they turn it off and go to sleep. That's not

true. We know from Instagram's own data that

12 and 13 year old children are still awake at midnight, 1am,

2am on school night. Scrolling. And it's not their fault. Right, because

it's designed to be Addictive, So even it's difficult for adults to get

off. So, yeah, and back to your question about the long term

effects. I mean, I think what we already are beginning to understand,

although it's almost impossible to fully measure it because it's

so pervasive, is that all the time spent on screens

during early childhood is actually displacing

the critical real world experiences that every

single other person in human history for millennia

has used to acquire the building blocks they need

to become socially proficient, to become

emotionally proficient, and to have the early tools for academic

success. So that's why we think media addiction is a

problem. We want our kids to develop real world relationships

and friendships, learn how to look people in the eye, learn how to recognize

emotional cues. There was one study that came out a few years ago that

showed when they took kids off of screens and they put them in

a, in the woods, in a camp, a supervised camp with no screens,

it took almost seven days for them to begin to recognize

facial cues normally, like as most kids

should when they're not on screens all the time. So there's serious, serious

consequences of media use that sometimes you don't realize until

it's already affected a child in a permanent way.

Yeah. And that's where I think I feel like I have like an

ick or like a gross out factor. If I'm on my device too long. I

can kind of feel this longing to be in relationship, to be outside,

to do something a little more creative or

interesting. And I know that's because I have

an historical experience of those times

and I crave that. And I do think if we don't

give our kids enough historical experiences, non

media based, they will not necessarily crave it the same

way. And it's one of those things I think

about, of how much the opportunity cost of being on a device

and what you're not doing. And you know,

I appreciate, Julie, how you said, you know, you were an alarmist

and on this podcast, because we talk a lot about being calm,

it's very important to me that we don't scare everybody.

But at the same time, I do want to be really honest about the fact

that. But if you put an iPad in your 3 year

old's hand for, I mean, I don't want to say at all because I

know parents are busy, they're frustrated, they're like, I can't get a shower in. It's

like, just recognize that that is time they're not spending with you, which

is fine, or they're not spending playing or they're not spending outside or looking out

the window or being bored. If that's

just don't over rely on it. That's what I would say. It's like

as much as you can. I wanted to talk about

tips, but there's in this podcast, there's thousands, thousands of

minutes spent on this topic. So we're going to link all these

past episodes in the show, notes for everyone of how to manage

screens. But it's just really thinking about creating a boundary

for yourself, what works for your family, about how much time. And then

using instead of an individual device, just using the television.

It's so much more valuable than an individual

device. If you need to have a babysitter, having a

kid, have the distance from the television,

it's one show. You turn it on, it ends. It's not a scroll,

it's not an autoplay, those kinds of things. That

shower example is good though, because I think what

I hope your listeners know is if your child is growing up in a

nurturing environment, is exposed to a lot of books, has healthy

food, gets a lot of love, a lot of outdoor time, and

they watch one video that is age appropriate

for 30 minutes while you're in the shower. It doesn't matter. It's

fine. What's not fine is if you hand them the

screen while you're in the shower, while you're cooking dinner, while they're bored in the

car, while you're waiting in line, while they're going down the sidewalk, while they're at

the park. Well, you know, all of that, that's dis,

displacing all of these. I mean, I love that you said opportunity cost,

but the opportunity to learn how to entertain

themselves, to become creative, to tolerate frustration.

And as hard as it is to tolerate frustration when you're nine months old

or a year and a half or three or five, just wait till you're an

adult. So you need to have those early childhood experiences

to give you the building blocks for future growth. Yeah,

yeah. Boundary boundaries are important for

resilience. Right. Having a limit is something that

creates stress tolerance. And we often think, as in

parent education. I do a lot of work around being okay

with our kids stress and being okay with their

distress because we want to help them co

regulate with us while they're in that frustration. And

the week after your episode airs, I'm having Molly Defrank on, who wrote a book

called Digital Detox. And we talked about it last

summer on the podcast and I did a whole episode on Digital Detox

but what we often don't talk about is the

frustration. If you do start to put boundaries on your kids and you

recognize, oh, they're having some struggle with the, you know,

we're overusing media, we're overusing devices

and you want to put some limits. Well, your kids haven't maybe built up

that stress tolerance and they're going to have even

bigger emotion, more overwhelm. The

longer they've been using those devices, the more

reliant they are on self regulation. That's their co regulation.

And so we have to really kind of create a capacity to step

in and that can be challenging. That's why being in a community like

Mama or you know, being in my community is important because

otherwise we're not able to manage all of

that distress for ourselves and our kids.

So also too, when it comes to handheld devices

versus a big screen, it's

especially with littler, with littler kids, we're talking about iPads.

As a parent, you hold the remote to the television.

You know, there's something about that that you get to say, hey, okay, it's

time and you hold it versus there's so much

struggle in people's homes right now fighting over these devices

literally physically, like trying to pull them out of their children's hands.

It's like the opposite of, you know, the idea of like we all want to

be a calm mama and then we, you know, end up doing these things. We're

like, what is happening here? It is really difficult if a

child has their own, their own device. And so like

delaying that first iPad. You know, a lot of, I mean

there's a study from I think Common Sense Media and Julie, maybe you can correct

me here, I think it's 40% of 2 year olds have their own iPad.

So I just think that is 40% of homes who are then

daily fighting about this. For sure. Yeah. I mean

the, the thing is, I don't want to shame anybody because when I

had three kids, you know, with my first child I was like, he is never

watching tv. I never put the TV on the first time

when he was like two or three, I let him watch a video of Sweet

Honey and the Rock singing. Like it was all really age appropriate.

And then I had that second kid and I needed to change the diaper and

I had a three year old who I couldn't sit still and I put on

the video. So I don't want to shame parents for looking for

help. We're living in a time where there is huge

economic inequality it's very hard to get childcare.

Families no longer live intergenerational, which makes it so

lonely and hard as a parent, and you need a break sometimes. So I understand

that. But it's also, I think, really worthwhile

to spend a few minutes, seek out content that you

think is appropriate. For example, one of the things I really don't like,

even about children's cartoons, is that they're constantly changing the

image, and it's so fast, and it's really

overstimulating. And I found these incredible construction

videos. I think they're called Mighty Machines. They came from. From Canada, and It

would be 30 minutes about these amazing machines. And my boys loved

them. And it was just the. The video was calm,

but it was really smart, and it explored all of these machines. And

I feel great that they saw these and it led them to have questions, which

led us to go to the library and get more books. So I think that

if you invest the time and you find something that's safe

and appropriate and healthy for your kids, that can be a solution.

I also think that part of the reason we have Mama chapters,

as Julie mentioned, is so that you can come together and be in community.

It is so hard when you're the only parent who doesn't allow your child to

have social media, but when you make agreements in your community, and you know

that other parents are also taking the phones away during play dates, they're

also taking the phones away during sleepovers. You know, my kids were

mortified when they had friends over, and I would feed them all pizza, and then

I would. Would walk around with the basket, and I would say, okay, the phones

are going away now. And they would say, mom, how could you do that? There's

nothing to do. And I was like, yep, there's nothing to do. You're all going

to be bored. And they would laugh, and they would be bored for 30

seconds, and then somebody would get a ball, somebody would take out art supplies,

Somebody would go in the yard and start a soccer game. So I think that

it really is up to us to sort of set appropriate boundaries and

then allow the kids to figure it out. I mean, that's something that Jonathan Haidt

has written about in the Ankle Generation. It's not only limiting their

screen time, but it's giving them more opportunities for free play. Not

that we're micromanaging everything, putting them in all the classes, which,

again, I put my kids in all the classes. I thought it would be so

good for them. And then I realized I was actually Creating more pressure

and not giving them time to just be bored and relax and, you know,

take out the, the plastic sticks and

the glue and make something, you know, right. Or I had

boys and they would take their, you know, Hot

Wheels track and just build these contraptions and try to

run the cars down the stairs. And they, my boys

played and we definitely delayed. They weren't all

allowed to play any video games till 10 and

12. I felt like 11 or 12 was around the right age, but then

my kids are so close in age, I was like, well, with one does it,

the other is gonna do it. So that was really

frustrating because it was the Minecraft era when that first

launched. And most, even though we were at a slow tech school,

the kids were still playing Minecraft. And it was really

frustrating for my son. He felt socially isolated. He felt

like he wasn't connected. He wasn't able to play

with the kids, that we didn't let him watch VG13 movies and things

like that. So they wouldn't be able to talk about the Marvel movies.

And there is some social cost

when you do it if, especially if you're not in an environment where people are

like minded. And it's interesting when I talk, I. My sons are 19

and 21 and we talk about their results

of having a slow tech family. And

they did say there was some. They were behind

a little bit because they had phones later

and they went to middle school and there was a lot of

kids who already had a lot of chat experience and they were

in conversations and had had social interactions that my

sons were not part of. But they also said it caught

up super fast. Like it was a slow,

a short delay, not anything significant. I mean, you have to

remember all of these folks in Silicon Valley

who created all of these products, they didn't grow up with these screens, they didn't

grow up with phones, they didn't grow up always being connected. And it

was Steve Jobs himself who told the New York Times that he wouldn't let his

kids use the iPad. He wanted them to be creative, he wanted them to

have time online. And he understood that once you start using this,

it takes other real life experiences and it renders them almost

more boring. And so, you know, with my own kids,

with three boys, it was so hard to civilize them. When they were young, you

know, they would be doing something and someone would say, will you pass that to

me? And they would throw it and it would broke the Lego. And before you

knew it, they were at each other's throats. And if I let them play video

games, I noticed that as soon as they

finished, they were so quick. And the opposite of

calm. Right. I had spent all this time trying to make them calm. And the

video games are actually designed to reward responding as quickly as

possible. And responding as quickly as possible is the opposite of being calm.

It's the opposite of being patient, of pausing before

responding, of thinking. And so that's what technology is

good for. It's really good for acceleration. It's good

for crunching large amounts of data quickly. It's not

good for teaching you how to human. And so even though

there was a cost to them too, my kids insisted they

were the last kids in New York City without a phone. To which I said,

yes, you are the last child in New York City without a phone. But they

still, they somehow survived that. They somehow survived not being allowed

all the social media. And just like your kids, once they had it, it was

very quick and easy to learn. And I also think that

by not having it, they avoided some problems that unfortunately too

many kids have had. And, you know, happy to talk about that if

you want, because there are negative effects of use and overuse.

Yeah, let's talk about. I was going to say one thing just anecdotally, that

my sons feel very

disappointed when they hang out socially with their friends

because they're all so quick to go on their devices

and just scrolling on these reels, you know, just

video, very short videos. And

you know, they use Snapchat and stuff to connect and find each other and those

kinds of things. They use that. But then. And that works. But when

they're sitting around and there's a lull, just a small lull

in the conversation, their peers are

so quick to go to their phones. And even my son,

he is in college, is finishing his second year and

he is home this summer and he was talking to me about even in his

college apartment with his friends that most of

the year they spent a lot of time in a living room together on their

devices. And he came home and he said, you know,

he's looking at his phone, he's like, I don't want to do this anymore. I

just want to have a conversation. And because I'm

open to having a conversation, we're having all these amazing conversations. But it's

unfortunate that he's not necessarily being able to do that with his

peers. And it's just sad. So,

yeah, let's talk about the negative effects of

overuse. But I think sometimes to me it just seems like

Loneliness. I have seen that my 20 something clients have regret

for how much they spent. Well, I think we could

organize the negative effects in a couple of categories.

There are acute effects. So for

example, you know, parents know what the dangers look like in

the real world. You know, if your child doesn't have a helmet on, you know

that's not good. Or if, you know they're having too many brownies, they're not

gonna feel very good after afterwards. But you don't always see what's happening

online. And in the online space there are a

number of dangerous things happening. We know that social media

algorithms promote content that

includes eating disordered content, unhealthy beauty

standards. They share violence, they share

hate speech, they share racism. They also

share. According to

internal documents that have come out, Instagram

says that it recommended 22 million

children's accounts to peop to to other accounts

that they had identified as belonging to groomers or pedophiles.

So, you know, there are some really serious harms happening there. They

also include things like sextortion. I don't know if you're familiar with that crime,

but it's when a stranger approaches a young person

online, it's usually a boy, and they pretend to be a girl the

same age, engage them in chat, ask for a

nude image, and then once they get it, they say, by the way, I'm not

a girl and you're going to pay me $500. I'm going to send this to

everyone you know. And unfortunately, when that happens, children panic.

And the FBI has identified, I think, 22 cases of

children who died by suicide after they were sex stored.

Also there is drug dealing that goes online.

Fentanyl pills are sold online. So

everything from grooming, brainwashing, pornography, those are some

of the more extreme things. The other negative

effects fall into a category of what

I would say we could think of as sort of the

normalizing of dysfunction. So,

you know, when you are looking at content of people talking

about being depressed, of being suicidal, of

self harming, of having an eating disorder, and it's showing up in

your feed right next to birthday party photos, cat videos,

our kids have begun to think about this stuff as normal and it's not

normal. I did an interview last year that was kind of

fun on the Oprah show. And she had a couple

teenagers in the audience and she asked this one young man, you know, what do

you not like about social media? And this boy was 15 years old and

he got up and he said, you know, sometimes I just want to see what's

happening with my friends or my favorite teams. But this one guy always sends me

these terrible videos. And one time I watched a car crash,

another time I saw dead bodies. He said, once I watched an

execution and it just took my breath away

because that's one child. And all of these things are happening at

scale. So our kids are just being exposed to a

volume of inappropriate content

that is displacing their ideas that

they get from you as a parent, that they get from your community. And

that's kind of teaching them what the world is like. And that's part of why

we're seeing a rise in hate groups, a rise in,

what do we call it, the manosphere. And all of these kind of

crazy over the top macho ideas that are certainly

nothing that my husband thinks is what being a man is about or what we

want our boys to see. And also the last

thing is the habits that these addictive designs train your

brain to have are really no different than the way other addictive

products work. So the reason people sit at slot machines are for hours

is because the click, click, click and the spinning and the bell,

it tells your brain like something great is about to happen and hasn't

quite happened yet, but it's going to happen. And so you don't want to leave,

you want to sit there and keep going and keep going. And that's how social

media is designed. It has an endless scroll and whatever video you see,

you're like, oh, well, that's not that great, but you think the next one is.

And even we as adults are not immune to this. So we too

are media addictive and we too can have some of the harms, at least

for us. We hopefully, most of us here have grown up in an age where

we didn't have this, so we were able to get all those basic skills. But

what we're seeing now, you know, as you mentioned at the top of the show,

there are this failure to launch, this, this inability to cope with the

regular world, this inability to manage going to the grocery store and

talking to strangers because your whole time childhood, if you were looking

down at the screen and never interacting with a stranger, and if your idea of

what a stranger is comes from YouTube videos where it's all kind of over the

top and ridiculous, it really doesn't prepare you for real life.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's hard to

hear, you know, and that's not even about their ability to learn

critically. Think

is sad. And I think going back to Julie

Fruman's Recommendation of delay, teach and model is

so helpful because otherwise we can go ah

right, like just freak out. And I

just did today, like a deep dive this morning on the Manosphere and

the red pill matrix and all this stuff that's out there

because I just want to be informed for myself of what's happening. But

you can see how it's very

polarizing and normalizing, that polarization

and that we're all so different and that everyone

is out to get you or that you know, that conflict on the

Internet is so heightened because that is what gets

clicks and yeah, just normalizing that is,

it's discouraging. But I think going back to that

delaying model, teaching and modeling and I

was thinking about alcohol use how

I don't think it's strange at all that I don't let my Twitter

12 year old drink alcohol. Like I, I'm not

saying he, he, I don't have a 12 year old but like that they should

never drink alcohol. I just don't think it's appropriate for a 12 year old to

drink alcohol or I don't have an 8 year old driving a car for really

good reasons. And when we think about the,

all the things we delay, we delay sex, we delay

drugs, we, I mean you know, drugs being alcohol and,

and responsibility and having a credit card and like so many

adult type things. It's very normal to delay those.

What we have done I think is normalized

the tech use as not for adults. And

thinking about what you said Julie Scalpel about Steve Jobs,

when they made the iPad, it was not for children,

it was for work and for you know, adults.

And we've just normalized that this is something that we give kids and

I. And it still isn't. It still isn't. And, and you know,

sometimes I feel like the grim reaper. I show up and I tell everybody all

this bad stuff. But, but I think parents deserve to know. I mean

even when you look at the app store, there are apps that have been rated

4 + and who is doing those ratings? It isn't

transparent. And it's not a family therapist, it's not a

pediatrician, it's not even a school teacher. It's someone who works for the company.

So you know, as a parent, I

believe that I deserve to know if a product's available to my children and

being marketed to children that it's safe. It's my job to feed my kids

healthy meals. But no one expects each of us as individuals

to make sure the baby formula on the shelf is safe. We count on

our systems to make sure the safeguards are there. Our

food supply is checked. Nobody wants that to go away. We have to

have our license renewed. We have to

have our car inspected once a

year. But nobody expects each of us to put out stoplights and stop

signs to make sure the roads are safe. And so that is why our

last surgeon general called for warning labels on social

media. That is why he said he would not even consider giving his own

daughters a smartphone or social media till they were in high school and maybe not

until after that. And we meet folks from the tech world all the time who

say no way until they're after 18. So delaying

is the first thing. Again, I think teaching and modeling is

absolutely right and I think what you said is also right. The

teaching comes in at different

stages and there's different things to teach them about. It's not

fair to give a 10 year old a product that was not designed for them

and expect them to be able to manage it. There's nothing you can teach a

teenager that's going to overrule their

biology, which makes them inclined to take risks, which makes them

inclined. Kids are going to be silly, so they're going to

do things they shouldn't do. And if you give them access to the Internet and

social media where they could photograph and share those things online,

inevitably more people are going to get hurt than need to get hurt.

So that's why waiting is so useful. Yeah. And maybe even

framing tech as an adult tool

for all of us to think about. Well, this was made for adults. This is

designed for adults. Even though there's Paw Patrol on

YouTube or whatever it is, it's like the, the device

itself was not made for children,

and maybe the content is made for children, but it was meant

to be distributed on a different type of platform,

like on a television. And when we think about

the. If we could think about it that way, we may be able to come

to more intuitive decision making that doesn't. That feels more

aligned instead of, I'm doing it wrong, something's

not right, something's wrong with me, my family's messed up. It's like, well, how can

we really kind of frame this conversation so that there is

a little bit more intuition and then maybe there's a little bit more movement

towards best practices that feel right to everyone. Not like,

what do I need to do? I need to listen to seven podcasts to find

out what my kids should be watching or using. It's like, well, what. Let's just

think about it. For a hot minute. Yeah. Julie, you were gonna say something?

Yeah, I. And I also want to. Want to name that

while the digital world is not made for children,

the real world is. And

it. It almost goes against our intuition as

parents, because we've been brought up in the land of anxious

parenting, and a lot of us do see too much

media, so we've been exposed to stories, and

it has caused a lot of parents to think that it's unsafe for our

children to go outside and do what they're really supposed to do. And so that

takes some. That takes a little bit. That's a hurdle that I've had to

jump. I even had a friend of mine who works in

marketing, and when I first started doing these talks, she was. Was like, I think

this is going to mess up your message if you talk about this, because you're

going to lose everyone. You cannot talk about people letting their children

go out into the world. And I was like, well, but. But you have

to, because otherwise, what are they going to do? And we're not going to have

kids who launch and kids who are healthy, who have healthy bodies

and healthy, you know, even eyes, like, our eyes are meant

to develop our eyeballs, like, in relation to exposure and experience.

And we don't get that if everything that we see is close up. So

we need to be outdoors seeing different. You know, we need to be outdoors for

mental health. We need to be outdoors because we need to be with our friends.

And, you know, there's just, like, so many reasons why this is

really part of the conversation. And I just want to say that sometimes it goes

against our, you know, our gut feeling if we go, oh, you know, I'm not

sure if they're ready. And so we come together as a community. And

so when I started, you know, hosting these mama

gatherings, this has to be part of what we talk about is, what are. What

can we do? How can we, you know, tiptoe ever closer

toward having communities that let children be goofy

and let them take risks, knowing that that

type of a risk, like falling, you know, off of a fence that you maybe

shouldn't have climbed, is something we can heal versus

constant exposure to violence and manosphere.

Seeing pornography before you've had your first kiss, I mean, it's. It's

heartbreaking, isn't it? It is. It is. I had to really

overcome a lot of anxiety raising my boys because I grew

up with one sister, and I was a ball, and I read books all the

time. And then I had these three wild young things. Who just

were kamikaze. They would run straight into the ocean before they could swim. There was

no wall they wouldn't try and climb or launch off their scooter.

My husband grew up with really a free range childhood in the woods. He

has a chainsaw scar. He and his buddy

once built their own log cabin in the woods without anyone knowing which they got

into trouble for. But. So he really helped me take a deep

breath and understand the difference between an

appropriate risk and a not appropriate risk. And I also, I mean, it took

a solid 10 years, but at some point I finally

recognized that they would heal from these and that every injury wasn't

catastrophic, that it was important that they trust themselves and

they learn how to test their limits and that they practice, practice,

practice before they attempted the flip on the, on the

trampoline. And now they can do a double backflip and all of these kinds

of, you know, milestones. But what I wish someone had said to me

was that as hard as it was to deal with that when they were 2

and 5 and 8, it was so much easier than trying

to confront these problems as teenagers if they didn't

have those building blocks, you know, I was

moved to start Mama after reporting on the youth mental health crisis and

hearing getting calls and letters and emails from

neighbors, from strangers about all of the children

nationwide who are struggling. I mean, this national health emergency,

mental health emergency for kids and teens is happening, and

there's not enough providers to take care of them. There are kids who are

unable to go to school anymore. There are so many kids who their

norm now is being in a dark room, being on video games. So they don't

know how to go get a job. They don't know how to go talk to

people. And that's not good for anybody. So that's why we're all

working together and fighting back. And, you know, we could also talk about some of

the wins we're having because it's been a great year for Mama and we're really

seeing a lot of progress. Yeah, tell us about the wins and then just kind

of wrap up the best way that people can connect with you and connect with

the local chapters. I'd love that. Sure. Well, you

know, the biggest win we've had is recruiting people like Julie Fruman. I

mean, she's such a gift to her community and to Mama nationwide

because we are seeing parents, and it's not just moms, it's dads too. It's

grandparents who are like, enough is enough. We don't have to convince anybody

about the problem of media addiction. Everybody feels it and everybody wants to

go back to something healthier. It's also completely a

bipartisan issue, which I love. It's not about politics.

Right. It's about kids and keeping kids healthy. So whatever side

of the political spectrum you identify with, there's a place for

you at MoMA. We're seeing lawmakers on both sides of the aisle come

together and that's one of our big successes in the last

year. We're seeing schools go to Bell to Bell phone bans, which

is very exciting. Virginia just announced last week. New York was

last month. More and more states are saying, okay, school has to be a

place that's preserved for in person learning, for socialization.

And when you get phones away, Bell to Bell with which means the beginning of

the day and to the end of the day. Once again, the hallways

are loud and joyful. The cafeteria is loud.

When phones were there, kids just are like this, looking down. It's

quiet and nobody likes how that feels. The other thing that we're

happening that we're seeing in the states, which is really wonderful, are state

lawmakers standing up and putting new protections in for

kids. So just last week, the state of Nebraska joined Maryland,

California, California, and they passed something called the kids Code. That's short

for the age appropriate design code. And that's legislation that

requires social media platforms to be safe by design.

There are really simple things they can do in the design of these products that

keep kids safe. One example is putting privacy settings at the most

private. That way strangers can't contact your child. I mean, so

obvious, right? And that way your child's not being contacted by strangers,

someone who could attempt to sextort them or sell them drugs or

solicit child sexual abuse material. So all of these things

are really positive. We run something called the Expert

Insight series where we bring on guests like Julie

and other folks who can talk about different facets of the issue,

whether it's the legal part of it, whether it's how to

implement phone free schools or what parents need to know at home. Just

last week we interviewed Lenore Skenazi from a wonderful

group called Let Grow. And on their website you can find tips

for how to give your child more independence, challenges, how to do it through

your school and give the kids opportunity for free play.

And you know, I won't say there aren't challenges.

With all of the work to do to make social media safer, we're now contending

with AI and AI chatbots are coming, coming out just like

social media, where there's no regulation. And so we're already seeing new

harms to children. Children are falling in love with AI Chatbot, which really

confuses healthy relationships. There is a

lawsuit that's been brought against character. AI the mom alleges

the child fell in love with the chatbot and became

suicidal, which the chatbot encouraged. And the child did take

his own life, which is heartbreaking. And

there's a provision right now that was added to the budget bill which would actually

prevent states from introducing or enforcing any

laws to limit AI in any way for the next

10 years. This is absolutely crazy.

The 40 attorneys general have come out against this.

250 state lawmakers from both parties wrote a letter to Congress saying

this is a bad idea. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene

last week said, I had no idea this was in the budget bill, and if

I had seen it, I never would have voted for it. So hopefully it will

come out, but we're still not sure of that yet. And that's why we invite

folks to join mama. We have a letter you can send and all of that

information to sign up is that we are mama dot org.

Yeah, we are Mama. M a M a Just like call Mama. We are mama

dot org. Yeah. So good. And then, of course, joining a

local chapter. And I wonder, Julie, if you could just speak about

real quick, like, how it was to create one. Like, how'd you

find that? Because I would imagine that some people are like, oh, I'm

into it. I want to join a chapter. And then they go, look. And they're

like, mine is 800 miles away. I don't know how

prevalent they are yet, but I would imagine they're not in every single community.

Definitely. And I think this really applies to places like Southern

California, where Even if it's 40 miles away

or 30 miles away, that can be an eternity, depending on the time of

day. And just feasibly, you want to be able to be in community

with the group. And so ideally, we're going to just have more and more.

When. When I started, I just found that there was such an

appetite for people to. To want to

come together, and I wanted to offer solutions

like this. This whole concept of, you know, letting our children

let grow, you know, the Lenore Skinniese, I love her work

and I tried to get something together with our schools,

and it's challenging. Our school districts are really big. And so, you know,

with. Within the framework of mama, I could say, hey, like, this is something

that we can do. We can. We can have our own play club,

which is one of the things she recommends. It's just free play and just having

a structure for that. Let's pick a day of the week

that. That we can get the kids together. Because I. Part of the reason I

wanted to do this is because I grew up in community with people, and I

want that so badly for my own children. I want it for children worldwide.

And so I think I was. I am super, super motivated to do this.

And a lot of the chapter leaders, I mean, they all are. When. When

I. When I get nervous, this is something I visualize in my mind. If I

get nervous, if I'm going to talk to an administrator or if I'm about to

have a really difficult conversation or even do, like, a big presentation.

I picture a lot of these moms who developed relationships with. Including you,

Julie Scalpo. I picture you standing behind me, and it sort of. It

like, gives me this feeling of I've got this, you know, like, I need.

If not me, who. If not now, when. You know, that sort of thing. But

they are all standing behind me. They all. They all agree with me. And

we, you know, we want to have more. I just want more people

in this crew because it's. It is necessary for each community to sort

of look to somebody and go, hey, what do you think about this idea? You

know, what do you think? And to have those normal conversations, like on the softball

field or whatever. It's. I think we're. I think we

are trending in a. In a good direction, and we just

want to keep that growing. Yeah, I love that image

because even your website is we are Mama. And really, that

idea of I'm here representing not

myself, but a whole group and a whole

bunch of parents who are invested in grandparents and aunts and

uncles and lawmakers and just we. Right. There's enough people.

You're not alone. And the work that you're doing is vital.

So I just really want to say thank you both for being on the podcast

and all the work that you're doing in this space. Thank you

for having us and thank you for the work you're doing. I mean, it's all

interconnected, right? Because what's happening with the. Internally is the

energy that we're bringing to our communities, and there's been a

lack of calm in the last couple years. And what I hope your

listeners take away from this is that by design,

someone made the algorithms that way, and they're

making a lot of money off of promoting conflict and

promoting anxiety and promoting this idea that we have to

be connected. And the number one and best way to

break that cycle is to say, enough. I'm not gonna

be on devices all the time. I'm not gonna let my kids be on devices

all the time. And I'm gonna insist that these products are safe. Otherwise,

I'm not giving them to my kids. Yeah, yeah. We're very empowered.

So thanks for that message and, yeah, thanks for your work. So we are

mama.org join, join, join. You know, reach out to

the organization. Watch those expert insights, join a local chapter,

and, yeah, get involved. So thank you. Thank you again.

This was so much fun. Yeah. All right. Have a great day. You too.

Bye. Julie, nice to see you. Thank you. So good to see you. Bye.

Bye.