DEEP DIVE: Susan Linn on How “Big Tech” Targets Our Kids

0:00Heidi Hedquist:This Monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. The agents wrote the copy and managed the timelines, while our human creative director made sure it all made sense. Easy. Create your own AI agent today on Monday.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy, and today we're talking to Susan Lynn. She is a psychologist, award-winning ventriloquist, and world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of media and commercial marketing on children. She was a founding director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, now called Fair Play, and is currently research associate at Boston Children's Hospital and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

0:45Heidi Hedquist:She is the author of three books, including the one we're going to discuss today, Who's Raising the Kids, Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children. Welcome, Susan. Hi, I'm so happy to be talking to you too. We have a lot of experts on the podcast, but considering your bio, you are a capital E expert. Truly. Talk a little to us about how your career evolved and what brought you to this work. Actually, I began life as a ventriloquist and I earned my living that way for a lot of my life. I did performances for children. I worked in television. I was so fortunate to be able to work with Fred Rogers.

1:28I appeared on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and also made videotapes with his production company about difficult issues for kids, like going to school after you've been diagnosed with cancer or being homeless, or we did a whole series on racism for first to third graders. So that was just a wonderful experience. One thing I noticed early on with my puppets, children talk to them, and if they were using puppets, they would say things and do things that they wouldn't do otherwise. And I was always interested in child development. And so I got a job as a puppet therapist at Boston Children's Hospital doing play therapy with kids who were having bone marrow transplants, had been hit by cars, cardiac surgery.

2:23And so eventually I went back and I got a doctorate in counseling psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I worked in television. It's not that I'm anti-technology, but I began to notice an escalation in the commercialization of childhood. My whole career has been devoted to working with, for, and on behalf of children. The idea that kids were so clearly being exploited for profit was just appalling to me. I mean, I really believe the biggest influences in children's lives should be the people who love them and care about them or who at least care about children's well-being in general.

3:11So I was seeing commercialism escalate in my daughter's school. When she was in third or fourth grade, the school concert was an evening of Disney music. that Disney was really pushing to get itself into the schools. And I was distressed that the one body of music that she was being sold every day was what she was learning in school. That's not what schools should be for. It should be to expand and enrich your life. That's such an interesting example because I think of commercialization as sweet cereal commercials during cartoons. And that's a really good first example. That is something that as a parent, I do not think would put my ears up as this is an example of commercialization.

3:56I would have said, oh, of course, they like Disney. And so they're playing Disney. It makes a lot of sense to me.

4:00Heidi Hedquist:And this is nothing compared to what's going to come in the 2020s. No, commercials are just so 20th century. Sort of the point of this new book, Who's Raising the Kids? It's not, as you said, It's not anti-technology. It's anti-advertising to children. The issue is that these days, anywhere kids are, there's a screen or there could be a screen or there might be a screen or there's a screen handed to them. And so this advertising to children, it's inescapable in a way that wasn't always the case. Right. And advertising is not just 30-second commercials, 15-second commercials, it's embedded in just about all media and technology that's targeted to children.

4:45If your child is engaged with a beloved media character, that character is also marketing toys and food and clothing and more media to kids. I mean, the business model is such a problem. When I began this work, when I and my colleagues founded the advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which is now called Fair Play, I was extremely concerned about marketing on television or in videos, for instance. I mean, that was way before smartphones and tablets. And that advertising was incredibly powerful, but it's nothing compared to what's going on today with the new technologies where companies have huge amounts of information about all of their users, including children, and where there is no regulation that is stopping them from using that information either for them to target children specifically or for them to sell that information to other companies to market.

5:59And that's how social media and games and YouTube, which is social media, that's how they make their money by delivering us and our children to to advertisers. And that the values and the information that kids get from marketing is not beneficial to them. It's beneficial to companies. Most of the topics we talk about on the podcast, I think this is something I'm already spending a lot of time thinking about. And I will say, possibly to my embarrassment, this is not something before engaging with this book that I was spending really a lot of time thinking about. Hearing you talk about Mr. Rogers, I was a Mr.

6:42Rogers kid growing up. That was an interaction that was just me watching this person on TV and this world of characters. And I didn't then expect to go to Mr. Rogers land and have Mr. Rogers applesauce and play with Mr. Rogers toys. Something we talk sometimes is famous speech. This is water about knowing that you're even in water. I feel in engaging with this book and this idea that I'm having a this is water moment of I didn't even realize how much this has changed for myself and my kids over the course of my lifetime. Is that something that you see parents coming to this idea reflecting to you?

7:21Yes. And, you know, the companies that target kids are counting on that. I mean, they're counting on nostalgia, for instance, you know, and one of the reasons that companies target children is because what they want to do is inculcate lifetime brand loyalty. That's extremely lucrative for a company. In fact, there is research that suggests it really works, that the things that we use in childhood, we may tend to use them as adults. What breakfast cereal do you buy? What toothpaste do you use? And what programs do you want your children to love? I mean, so they're counting on that. And what I think parents don't realize is how things have changed.

8:13There was marketing to kids starting, actually, it escalated in 1980. And that's when what little regulation we had in the United States was that media companies were deregulated. That's when it began. And that combined with the fact that it was the 1980s when the technologies really began to escalate and become more sophisticated, miniaturized, more powerful. It's that combination. And that's what parents are dealing with today that I didn't have to deal with when I was raising my daughter. We are talking to Susan Lin, the author of Who's Raising the Kids, Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children.

8:59We'll be right back.

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13:22when you're trying to sign in for apps or websites. I mean, I lied about my age all the time. I was pretending to be a child. Nobody questioned me. I was interested in Alexa for kids. The Echo Dot for kids is the Amazon smart speaker for kids and the way that you can get to Amazon for kids, which is supposed to be commercial free. I bought an Echo Dot, which, by the way, is incredibly cute. I mean, honestly, when I unpacked it, I went, oh, you could buy a little baby panda or a little baby tiger. And I got the tiger. And it's cute for a reason. It's cute because we're wired to respond to cuteness.

14:09What Amazon wants is for kids to love the speaker and to think that the speaker is fun and for parents to think that it's harmless. How could this cute little tiger harm children? But the first thing that I did was they have a feature that's called I'm bored. If you say I'm bored to the Echo Dot, it will suggest things for you to do. That in itself is problematic. Boredom is useful for kids because what it does is force them to rely on themselves, to look around the world to find something interesting. I mean, there is a function to boredom. I know that it's hard for parents to deal with. I understand that.

14:55But I think it might be helpful to know that saying to your kids, find something to do is useful to them. Back to the little tiger echo dot. I said, I'm bored. It proceeded to list five things that I could do, all of which were commercial brands. SpongeBob SquarePants, American Girl, Star Wars. Basically, everything that Amazon was recommending was an ad for that brand, every single one of the things. And that, you know, basically that's advertising. Amazon is not commercial free in any way if their go-to suggestions are all brands. And what we don't know is why they're suggesting those particular brands.

15:46Are the companies paying them? Are kids getting suggestions that benefit companies but don't necessarily benefit them? So that was my first experience with the Echo Dot. My second experience was even more troubling. I have a chapter in my book on racism and bias in commercial media and technology for kids. There's a book called Algorithms of Oppression by Dr. Sophia Noble. And she wrote about how when she typed into Google three black teenagers, you got mug shots. If you typed in three white teenagers, you got rugby teams. That's horrible. And, you know, Google fixed those individual instances.

16:34I mean, it's possible to fix them. So I said to Alexa, I said, what are African-American girls? and it said African-American girls are the fastest growing segment of the juvenile justice system. I was so stunned that I couldn't even believe my ears. So then I said, what are African-American boys? And it was garbled a little, but basically what it said is that many of them were having trouble with learning and reading. So basically what Alexa was telling me is that African-American children were either bad or stupid. And Amazon markets Alexa as being able to help kids with homework. And so this is, first of all, these personal assistants, they aren't screens.

17:27And when we think about kids and technology and advertising, we can't just limit our concerns to screens, because basically what the personal assistants are, are the precursors of personalized robots, which sounds like it's science fiction, but there are robots already on the market that are claiming to help kids feel less lonely, to help kids with homework, to teach kids social skills. So what big tech is doing, basically, is wanting to replace parents and caregivers and teachers, librarians with devices. And the thing that is so scary about that is, first of all, children, young children learn best when they're in relation to human beings.

18:22Babies can't learn language from a machine. That's what research is telling us. Certainly during the pandemic, we saw a lot of these studies about learning through screen versus learning in person and how different they were. Right.

18:36Heidi Hedquist:Is this what you call divisive devices? Susan, is that what you mean when you talk about a divisive device? When I'm talking about devices, I'm talking about whatever is enabling the companies to target you with marketing. Tablets, phones, Echo Dots, you know, that kind of thing. I think we have a category in our mind of screen bad, but that we're not seeing the teddy bear or the tiger that has a helpful speaker that, you know, we've seen our kids maybe play 20 questions. And it's amazing. How does the machine know to get to the answer? It's so cool that we're not expanding to think about what that relationship with that device is and how it may be encouraging kids to seek answers in a place that we're not really thinking about.

19:24I feel like I have a very strong awareness of Google that my kids might be typing in Roadrunner bomb or whatever because they're thinking about the Roadrunner. And that I know, like, don't ask Google that. That's going to bring up really disturbing results. but that you're not making that connection to the like tiger who does 20 questions that might be in their room. You're encouraged to have Alexa.

19:46Heidi Hedquist:Alexa can help your kids with your homework. Alexa can read your kids a bedtime story. Like, isn't that wonderful? This is a wonderful day we live in, parents. And it's also I mean, it's hard to be a parent today. You could say that again. I will. It's hard to be a parent today. I really feel for people raising young children today. They're dealing with things that people my age certainly never had to deal with. And the companies are taking advantage of that. Parents are stressed. I mean, being a parent, you know, it's the most wonderful thing in the world. It's also one of the most stressful things in the world.

20:23It can also be boring. I mean, I think we need to acknowledge that all of those things are true. And the companies take advantage of that in their marketing. I mean, devices are marketed as making your life easier. There is something so compelling about handing a baby or a young child a smartphone, and all of a sudden, they're not crying. They're not, you know, they're just so focused on the screen. And it's convenient. I mean, I did things for convenience when I was raising a young child. I mean, we do that. But the problem is, it's not that handing a smartphone to a baby once is going to hurt the baby.

21:08It's that once we start doing it, it's hard to stop. It's hard for the baby and the toddler and the preschool to stop because the devices are designed to be addictive. And it's hard for parents to stop, first of all, because their kids start wanting the device and also because it's a relief. But I think what parents don't understand is that what they're training children to do is turn to devices for soothing and amusing instead of looking to themselves and what the tech industry calls IRL, you know, in real life around them. In real life. Yeah. We have a pretty good handle on the problem. It's a big problem and it's a pervasive problem.

21:53But in part three, we're going to turn towards solutions. We are talking to Susan Lin, the author of Who's Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children. And we will be right back.

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24:13Heidi Hedquist:Let your hair be one less thing to worry about. See visibly thicker, stronger, faster growing hair in three to six months with Nutrafol. For a limited time, Nutrafol is offering our listeners$10 off your first month's subscription and free shipping when you visit Nutrafol.com and enter promo code laughing. That's Nutrafol.com, spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L.com, promo code laughing. Susan, I did want to make sure to have time to talk about solutions because this book is full of them. You devote a good portion of your book to really walking through what we can do to change course. And I wanted to start with the point that you make overall.

24:55Heidi Hedquist:This isn't about parents, you should feel guilty. You need to fix this. It's on you. It's bigger than that. Tell us why. Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things that I write about in the book is when I give talks about this topic, I notice the people who are my age or people who have kids who are already grown start to look very smug. And the parents who are raising young children at the time start to look green. It's important to me that people know I'm not trying to make parents feel guilty. As I said earlier, it's never been harder to be a parent than it is today in a lot of ways. So I think it's important, first of all, for all of us to recognize that this is not a problem for individual families.

25:43It's a societal problem, and it needs to be fixed by society. And in that sense, I'm more hopeful today than I ever have been. There were bills that made it through committee in the Senate that had bipartisan support that came very close to being passed. Close isn't enough, but as an advocate and an activist, that's a really big deal that it got that far. And this is the first time in decades that there have been bills in Congress focused on limiting commercialism in the lives of children. So that's encouraging to me. And also, there are organizations all over the country that are working on this issue that are helping parents limit screen time.

26:31There's an organization that's called Wait Until Eight, in which parents can band together and decide to postpone getting their kids a smartphone until eighth grade. I mean, I think that's really encouraging. There are local and national organizations working on helping parents limit screen time. I think that's really encouraging. But I also know that social change takes time. And meanwhile, parents need help now. And there are things that parents can do to have more control over the marketing that is targeting their kids. And one of them is to make sure that except for video chatting with adults who love them, to make sure that people remember that there is no benefit to babies and toddlers to being on screens.