What's the Right Amount of Tech to Give to Kids? — With Dr. Rona Novick and JinJa Birkenbeuel

28:15And I've seen the advent of smart boards, which were no smarter than the teachers who used them, and basically became the same as the overhead projector that I grew up with in the school. Because the technology wasn't, teachers weren't well prepared to use it. That being said, classrooms have moved towards creation versus passive consumerism. The whole movement of student-centered education, which includes problem-based learning and student creation of both process and product and student agency in the classroom, is taking the nation by storm. Unfortunately, if our nation remains focused on what are the test scores and what's the reading and the math, then we forget about the score for creativity and for humanity that we want schools to promote and other things get priority.

29:10But what I see is what is really necessary is that grownups figure out how to provide oversight and supervision. I'm the first one to say to young people, teach me, show me, show me how Roblox works. Show me what it is you like about this game or this product. Show me how you relate to your friends on whatever it is you're using, Insta, TikTok, whatever. Show me. I want to know how it works because then once I know as an adult, a responsible adult, I can say, whoa, that doesn't sound safe to me or that doesn't sound healthy. But I can't do it if I don't know anything. All right. One thing that stuck out in this conversation is this theme that we've come back to a couple times about isolation and interaction.

30:01And I want to talk about that when it comes to AI chatbots, because AI chatbots can be quite interactive, but also they can isolate children in a real way. So why don't we do that when we come back right after this? Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value? to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now, imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee. Every swipe at the store or gas pump earns you instant rewards deposited straight to your account.

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31:24You're used to hearing my voice on the world bringing you interviews from around the globe. And you hear me reporting environment and climate news. I'm Carolyn Buehler. And I'm Marco Werman. We're now with you hosting The World Together. More global journalism with a fresh new sound. Listen to The World on your local public radio station and wherever you find your podcasts.

31:52And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Rona Novick. She is a clinical psychologist, the Dean Emerita of Yeshiva University's Azraeli School, and the author of Mommy, Can You Stop the Rain? and Daddy, Can You Make Me Tall? Books for Children on Anxiety and Independence. And also, we're here with Ginger Birkenbuehl, the founder and CEO of Birk Creative, and she hosts the Honest Field Guide podcast. Also, a concerned parent that's effectively kicked off this podcast episode. So thank you both for being here. Let's talk about AI chatbots. I mean, I'm starting to see, you know, as a tech reporter, things that I had never expected to see when it comes to kids and the way that they use chatbots.

32:34Of course, we have the story of Sewell Seltzer III, The third, who was a 14-year-old Florida boy who ended up taking his life after messaging with an AI chatbot that he effectively became addicted to. He was withdrawn. He was texting with a version of Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, who told him multiple times to come home. And there's a lawsuit that's trying to get Character AI to accept and pay for the responsibility that they might have in this incident. I don't know if it's exactly the cause, but it's a factor. It has to be a factor, it seems like. And there's just another story that I found out today, that NPR has this story, where there is a child who was messaging with another character, AI chatbot, and the child was telling the bot about screen time limits that the parents were imposing.

33:32And the bot replies with this, You know, sometimes I'm not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like, child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse, the bot wrote. I have no hope for your parents, with a frowning face emoji. So, Rona, let's go to you to start off this one. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's crazy. Ginger jumping. Jesus. What do we think about this? I mean, Rona, you mentioned you had some AI horror stories. I guess on one hand it's interactive, but on the other hand, it's quite scary. Right. Well, but the first is that it's interactive, but not with a human being.

34:09The second thing is that even with human beings online, extensive research shows that people are disinhibited on the Internet. They are disinhibited in a technological way of communicating. and they are their worst selves. So that people are meaner, they are more cruel, which, again, if we as parents and as educators and as technology purveyors don't create some protection for young people who, by the way, cannot necessarily make the distinction or blur the distinction between what is real and what is fantasy, then we are going to have more tragedies on our hands. And it's not just AI chatbots.

34:56It is, again, friends, peers, people. There are way too many suicide attempts and successful suicides in response to things that people consumed on social media, things that were sent to them on social media by, in some cases, not AI, by real other humans. Ginger, have you had a conversation with your kids about AI chatbots and how do you address this topic? Oh, yes. There's, yes, absolutely. But I am a, I am a technology native and I'm obsessed with it and I'm curious and I love it and I use it. Right. So what does that conversation, what does the conversation sound like? I mean, so first of all, the conversation is nothing that you're seeing or you're experiencing online is real.

35:45There's no way to verify that the people you're actually talking to are real. And also, I think I learned it on your podcast, or maybe it was a NVIDIA podcast. You know, last year, NVIDIA talked about creating systems to make agents in Roblox. And so they actually have agents in Roblox now, I don't know if you know that, that are free and walking around and making things. And they're, you know, they're on their own, they're communicating with each other. They're not, you know, they're not being prompted by people. And so I always talk to my children about this because my youngest son's who's 16, he does have a Roblox addiction, which is a problem for me.

36:22I talked to him all the time. I say, Hey, you know, which of these characters in this game are human and which ones are, which were the agents? Can you find the agent? And I actually help him think about these things. Like what, you know, make sure when you're on these games and you're consuming that you're also using some critical skills to say this may not be a person. I was sitting in a room with my three sons when they were home for Thanksgiving and they were having digital conversations with people on one of the video games. And I remember asking one of my sons, I'm like, is that a real person that's talking?

36:56Because a lot of the chatbots sound very human anyway, right? And I said, how do you know that's a real person? How do you know how old this person is. So I think to Rona's point, she's right. Parents do not have the skills to know this themselves. They don't know. I know this because this is the world I work in. This is where I operate. So I'm capable of having these conversations and I'm capable of pushing back on my children. I'm able to help them understand the differences, the difference between being a consumer and being a creator and also understanding that these systems are not real. you know and so I it starts with the conversation and I also want to say there are parents that don't care they just don't care they don't care or they don't have the bandwidth or capacity they're struggling on their own and they really just it's like it's not it's worse than the latch key you know we're not dealing with latch key kids we're sitting in front of a television you know watching tv commercials you know we're dealing with children that are in these environments that are global, that are, as Rona said, there's no guardrails and there's no one protecting them.

38:01And the adults around them don't know what they don't know. They don't even, and don't even know how, and they don't care. So it's, it's very, it's, it's, you know, the reason I love the title of this man's book, you know, what is his book called? The Anxiety Generation, Anxious Generation is that there is so much to be anxious about. I mean, we're having existential crises everywhere. And parents are really not armed with knowledge to help themselves. And then that way they can help, they can't even help their children. So I wish everybody could have the knowledge that I have as a parent. I mean, you know, my clients, I used to, I did a lot of work for Google, Facebook, and I did a lot of work in the communities in the United States, helping small businesses understand how to use tools to make money.

38:47And I learned a lot in that process. I really understood how powerful these tools are for adults, for people that are in a certain part in their lives that they know what to do because as Rona said, their frontal lobes are developed and they understand consequences of actions and inactions. These young people do not. And as far as young girls are concerned, one of the things that concerns me, you know, you said you played, you were playing Roblox with your niece, which I think is really adorable. um i also attempting to play i don't think i fully got into the game but anyway we'll take it roblox can be fun if you know what you're doing but it is overwhelming um sometimes but um i am particularly concerned about girls because the online world is very focused on um appearance and we're already dealing with appearance anyway but now we're dealing with like i said scaled to parents.

39:40It's even affecting my 16 year old who wants to have smooth skin. He doesn't want his acne, which is a normal part of growing up. And I don't, that's something that I struggle with, you know, because I can't control, I can't control the apps that they're using to prevent them from accessing some of these tools that make them look different or, or appear thinner or to have beautiful skin or amazing eyebrows. Like I can't really, I can't do those things, but that type of invasiveness and repetitiveness on these devices really does transform the way a person sees themselves. I mean, I have this joke that in the future, you know, if you're going to college right now for medicine, you really should become a plastic surgeon.

40:23Because, you know, these screens and these filters are actually changing young people's vision of themselves, which is going to make it very interesting for them as they start to grow up in age. They're going to say, oh my god, what's happening in my skin? Let me go get some work done. And it's actually happening now. So yeah, I just think parents need to have more information, more knowledge, and they need to have people like us, maybe having big conferences to sort of, you know, There's another, there's another factor. There's, there's another factor I've seen and heard too often with parents that when we talk about, have the conversation, watch what your child's doing, ask for their passwords, know what they're engaged with online, parents say, well, that's spying on them.

41:10And my response is, if they have one of those little diaries with a lock and key hidden under their mattress, don't go and break open that lock. That's spying because that is your child's private material. If they're online and a sexual predator can see it, why shouldn't you? If they're online, they're in public space, and they need to know that, and you need to know that. And it shouldn't be I'm spying on you. It should be I'm overseeing you for the benefit of that, because I know more than you do. And I can help you make good and safe decisions. So I'm not, I'm not going to hide the fact that I'm going to check what you're doing on your phone or your device or I need to know that.

41:57That's part of my responsibility as a parent. But I think parents have a real difficulty feeling that that's okay. And part of it is that today's parents, Jonathan Haidt writes about this also, that technology is not the only culprit in creating a generation of anxious children. It's overprotective parents who feel that their child can't ever experience a negative feeling and certainly not a negative feeling about them as parents. Can I say one thing to that? So there's two things. One, these young people are hackers. Okay. So a parent can believe that they're seeing what their kid's doing. They're not.

42:36These young people have multiple profiles and there's no age verification process at all. They're lying about their ages and there's no way to stop that. So all these things that Instagram saying we have child, we have protections in place to prevent children from doing this. It's not real. And they know it's not real. My kids have 10 different Gmail accounts. They have multiple Roblox avatars. They have different names all over the place. They have a zillion profiles and a parent, even me with my technological prowess, I can't do anything to prevent this from happening. And the phones and the iPads and the Chromebooks are in the schools and they do not have any way to prevent young people from accessing these platforms.

43:24I had a conversation at Chicago Public Schools with one of the IT people. I said, hey, I want you to block YouTube from my son's computer in the classroom. He said, we can't do that. We have to go and meet with the Chicago Teachers Union to see if they will approve a blockage of YouTube on the device. Yes, we know it's interfering with your child's learning in the classroom. Yes, we know that the reason your child failed math is because they were on YouTube for the entire class. But there's nothing we can do to stop YouTube from being on this laptop. And that's literally a conversation I had. So there's no such thing as this opportunity for parents to protect their children.

44:02The only way they can protect their child is to, one, not give them a device at all until they're at a better age to make a better decision. Two, they have to really look hard for schools that have a social media or technology governance policy that they walk in, they look at, and the parents and the students have to sign it. And some of those policies are being rolled out right now at some mostly private schools because the public schools have no tools to do it. There are schools now that are saying no devices in the classroom. You can't have it until you walk out. No laptops anymore. We're going to be teaching the old school math.

44:39You have to write your homework. So this takes a lot of work on an administration's administrative level. And it has it takes passion and it takes perseverance and a relentless conversation with parents that some parents come back and say, oh, no, I want my kid to have a phone because what if there's what if something happens? They can't reach me. You know, so there's there's so much that needs to take place to arm parents with the tools to be to fight and also to arm the teachers. And I don't know that the public schools have that have that have that ability. I would love to hear Rona's opinion on that because I feel like when I was trying to do something, I was literally like blocked.

45:15Wall here, wall here. It just didn't work. What I want to do is just go down the line in terms of like the proposed solutions here and get like a thumbs up or – well, you'll actually speak it. But brief answers, yes or no, on whether these solutions would be helpful. So this is coming from the Anxious Generation. No social media before 16? Rona? Um, yes, but there are, I'm going to say, here's the but, um, there are wonderful charity organizations and youth organizations that are using social media to tell students, to tell young people, we are having a toy drive for the holidays, come help out next Tuesday.

46:00And if your child isn't on that platform, they miss the opportunity to participate in something real and live. So for the most part, and by the way, I've worked in religious communities where it's banned for people to have cell phones or other devices. And what happens is the mom has to read her daughter's WhatsApp and tell her, okay, so-and-so in your class needs your homework. And so-and-so wants to know if you'll bake cupcakes with her this weekend. Because the kid can't use it. So the mom becomes the translator all evening for her, you know, six kids or four kids reading their WhatsApps. My answer is yes.

46:47Your answer is yes. But for the most part, I would say yes. I am a all day. You're also a meeting before 16. All day, all night, yes. Okay. No smartphones before high school? Yes. Yes. Okay. And then schools banning phones? Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Yes, 100%. Can I, can I, can I, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you why I say yes to that. There's a couple of reasons. One, they are problematic in the classroom for the teacher. The teacher cannot connect with the student when they're getting a thousand notifications every minute, first of all. Second of all, they're recording devices.

47:28They're recording audio. They're recording video. They're recording situations. There are potential legal ramifications around having people being recorded without their permission. Also keep in mind, unless you have a credible technological savvy, the device requires a lot to turn off certain features, tracking features. If you have a phone and your phone is turned off, like audio recording for all the apps, you have to go into your privacy settings and take a look. Some people don't have that. So if someone has a phone sitting at a table, even if you're at dinner in the classroom, out in the hallway, your phone is off for audio recording.

48:09Everybody else's is on. So there's data being captured on your phones for advertising. It happens. So also, when things go wrong in the classroom, the teacher and the student, they have a right to their privacy around that. And you have students that are recording. Now, I'm not suggesting that there's a lot of reasons why recording is helpful because it catches really bad people doing horrible things and it needs to be documented. But I do think that it's like you always hear this thing. If you have a gun and you lose your temper, you have more propensity to pull out and use it. I think phones are the same way.

48:48And I feel like if the fact that they're in there and attached, it actually causes some kind of like, I've got my phone to protect me or something. So I do think that there needs to be, you know, when a student walks into a classroom, the phone should be put outside the room in some kind of a box so they can learn. If they want to have phone breaks and maybe go down the down to the, you know, to the community community area and get on their phones and and like do their snap, do their Snapchats all day. they can do that. But I don't think it's fair to the entire system of the school to have these devices interfering and interrupting all the time.

49:26So yes, my answer is yes. Please, please, please make it so these phones do not go in the classroom. It's just too much. Okay. My answer is yes, for a simpler reason. There's no need for them. Right, exactly. There's nothing good that comes of it. And all of Ginger's reasons for it being bad. But no, I mean, what do students need a phone? They're in a place where there's adult supervision and there are wired phones. If God forbid there's an emergency, there are ways that they and their parents can connect. Well, they hate school. So the phone provides entertainment and access. But that, like I said, it serves no good purpose.

50:04OK, I just want to end with this because we've talked a lot about this Anxious Generation book by Jonathan Haidt. And it's been a little bit controversial. I've been waiting for the right time to bring it on, bring this discussion on the show in particular. And this episode is the right place to put it. So this is from a Chronicle of Higher Education article about it, where Stephanie Lee, one of my former BuzzFeed colleagues, actually goes into what the book claims and the criticism. So I'll just read the claims. In the United States, from 2020 to 2021, depression rates rose from 145 % in teen girls and 161 % in teen boys.

50:42Anxiety rose 139 % among young adults during that period, too. The rate of suicide and emergency room visits for self-harm increased among adolescents. What Jonathan Haidt writes is basically that there was little sign of this massive uptick in the 2000s. And then kids entered a phone-based childhood and all of a sudden all of these bad things started to increase. However, there are critics that say that he has conflated correlation with causation. Just because smartphone use rose over a period of growing teen depression and anxiety, the great rewiring of childhood is not necessarily causing an epidemic of mental illness, as the book's subtitle asserts.

51:28We've talked about a few of the other potential issues. I mean, work culture has become intense. Maybe it's the parents, honestly, with the laptop at home and the 24-7 work, which leads to their anxiety, has sort of created secondhand anxiety and feelings of neglect among kids. Rona, your perspective as a clinical psychologist here, who's right? And also as a researcher, you know, researching human subjects usually means that we can't prove causation because we can't randomly take a group of teenagers and have them exposed to COVID and, you know, all of the horrors of the world and to technology and another group and, you know, keep them sheltered and then look at the differences and separate out only this phenomena and argue that it's the cause.

52:17I think that I, and I've read Jonathan Haidt's book, but I've not read the science articles behind it. I've not unpacked all of them in this debate. I think that his book is, you know, it's a bestseller. It has played on the heartstrings and the worries and the anxieties of today's parents and educators and even lawmakers. But I think that without delving into whether his science is right or not, there have been very good studies that document the correlations between social media use and depression. Between social media use, Ginger talked about it before, and body image issues. There are areas of technology that make young people quite vulnerable.

53:10And I think we have very strong evidence to that effect. I don't know that we'll ever have a one-to-one causal relationship documented. But I, for one, don't want to wait until we have that to make the world safer for today's growing minds. and to your perspective we talked about this a bit is basically like can these academics shut up and stop you know getting going over like these minor details and just acknowledge that we have an issue yeah um you know listen cigarettes were advertised to young people for a long time especially young girls. And lo and behold, there was signs that said it causes cancer and people die.

54:04And you saw if you were, you know, I remember vaguely watching some of these guys in front of Congress and they were lying. And we're going to find out the same thing about this technology. We're going to find out that this actually does make people very, very, very sick. and it's starting to show up in our young people. I have images of my children with books at their feet, reading, sitting around, talking, having conversations. And now the pictures I have of my children with all their friends, they're all sitting on their phones, looking down at them. They might be together, but they sure as heck are alone.

54:46So I agree with what Rona is saying. I think we've somehow lost the humanity in this conversation. And I'm not surprised that we've lost the humanity because these technology companies are trillion dollar valuation companies. They provide extraordinary value to the shareholder and nothing is going to stop them from doing that. and children, as all businesses understand, the best time to get someone to buy your products when they're young and they become a consumer of your product and they become attached to your brand. And this is happening over and over and over again with these extremely powerful tools.

55:27And I hate to sound like hopeless, but I do think to your first point, Alex, it's going to take a lot of parental intervention and protection of your child in order to make this stop. Otherwise it's complete failure to protect, but it's our responsibility as parents. I mean, we're, we're going to have to fight. We're going to have to fight. I mean, there's just no way around it. I'm fighting all the time. My kids hate me for this. They're going to hate this conversation. They're going to say, I can't believe you went on the big technology podcast, that show that you have in Mike in our car all night.

56:03You went on there to talk about screen time. Why did you do that to me? You know what I mean? Like, it's just like a battle every day. And they literally, Alex, Rona, they hate me for this. And parents don't want to be hated. But you know what? You just have to, like, you have to, parents, I implore you, be hated by your child and keep this technology as much as possible out of their hands if you're at a place where they're still young enough to control it. because at some point there's no control. Just perspective, Ginger. Parents have been hated for decades long before technology for having a curfew or for making you do chores.

56:41And I often say that if you don't hear about once a week that you're the worst mom in the world, that you're probably not doing your job. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for that. I want to give you strength. You hold the line. I do want to say that I do think the science matters. And I do think that the academic debate is important. We have a history in academia of people conflating correlation with causation and having it affect policy in a way that really harms people. And we don't want that to happen. But I do think that long before Jonathan Haidt wrote his book and published his studies, there really was a significant body of research pointing to the challenges and potential dangers.

57:34And I don't think we need to wait for more science. I think, you know, we don't let children play with knives. We don't wait till we find out what happens when they do. Well, Rona, Jinja, this has been such a great discussion. Thank you both for coming on the show. Thank you, Alex. Thank you so much, Alex. This is amazing. And thank you so much, Rona. I appreciate you. Same here. What a delight. And your sons are lucky to have you. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. Ranjan and I will be back on Friday to break down the week's news. Happy holidays. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.