Ash Brandin is an innovative public school teacher who uses their educational expertise and technological knowledge to empower families around the world. Since beginning their public school career in 2011, Ash has found innovative ways of using student interests- including video games- to increase engagement and create student-centered, immersive experiences. Since February 2021, their Instagram page @TheGamerEducator has helped tens of thousands of families understand the appeal of video games and screens, and how they can be a part of a child’s life without being the center of their life.
567: How to Approach Screen Time
Ash Brandin
Screens are everywhere—but how do we manage them without constant battles?
In this episode of the Mindful Mama Podcast, Hunter explores how parents can approach screen time with balance and mindfulness, creating healthier family dynamics and less conflict.
You’ll learn:
Why a neutral view of screens helps reduce power struggles
How to balance your child’s needs with your own
Practical routines that make screen time smoother
The importance of modeling healthy tech habits
How to shift from restriction to collaboration with your kids
Ep 567- Brandin
Read the Transcript 🡮
*This is an auto-generated transcript*
Hunter (00:00)
You're listening to podcast episode #567. Today we're talking about a new way to approach screen time with Ash Brandin.
Welcome to the Mindful Mama Podcast. Here it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have. And when you have calm and peace within, you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clarke-Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children. Practicing mindfulness for over 25 years, I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting Course and Teacher Training. I'm the author of the international bestseller, “Raising Good Humans”, “Raising Good Humans Every Day”, and the “Raising Good Humans Guided Journal”.
Welcome back. I’m here with Ash Brandin, an innovative public teacher who uses their technical expertise and technical knowledge to empower families. Ash has a wide experience teaching, including endorsement in K-12 music, secondary math, secondary arts, and currently works as an endorsed K-12 librarian. And we're going to talk about why having a more neutral view of screens helps really power struggles, balance your own child's needs with your own, and there's a very practical routines that make screen time smoother. shifting from action to collaboration. So I think this is a very helpful point of view. We've had a lot of different points of view on the podcast about screen time and Ash brings a perspective to reduce struggle, how to be your own. This was so practical.
Well, Ash, thank you so much for coming on the Mindful Moment podcast. I'm so glad you're here. You book, it takes this sort of balanced approach to time, I guess I would say. And I wanted to know what inspired you to write this book that focuses on time in a way that benefits the whole family.
Ash Brandin:
Yeah, you know, I didn't realize that having sort of a more neutral view of screens as like an activity, I didn't realize how unique that was necessarily until I kind of stepped foot into this world. I think that view, that neutral view was something that I kind of just brought with me from my own childhood because video games and screens were a part of my life and they were a part of my life like other parts of my life and they didn't feel better or worse or of more or lesser like moral value than other parts of my life. And so I kind of inadvertently brought that into my parenting but most of my teaching as a classroom educator and just didn't really realize that that was perhaps a more unique view until I started navigating the world of education and seeing that other people didn't really see it that way. And about four and a half years ago when I kind of stepped foot into the social media world, I originally thought I'd really mostly be speaking to educators and then quickly realized that the majority of people who were engaging with me were people who were in some way raising kids at home, whether that was homeschooling, that was the COVID era, so many people were doing that to some degree, or if they were just navigating these things at home in their own lives. And that's when I realized more and more that this does seem to be something that seems to be different in how I view these things and allows me to manage them very differently. And I think more sustainably than coming from more of this sort of fear-based or restriction-based approach.
Hunter:
I like that point of view and I feel really heartened by talking to somebody who has some point of view at the same time. Don't you feel like it's changed a lot, like say in the last 20 years or so when smartphones have really become this ubiquitous? Like the way we interact with screens in general has changed. I mean, to me it feels like it's changed a lot or it's changed the way people offer a lot.
Ash Brandin:
I mean, I do think it has changed. think that more and more, particularly smartphones, although that's not really something I focus very much on my content, but I think more and more smartphones have become essentially a requirement, almost a public utility that is almost required in order to be able to access the world. And I have feelings about that. I don't particularly like that. And at the same time, I don't really think there's much unringing of that bell to be done.
So yeah, I think it has changed very much. I think we see many things throughout our lives, our kids' lives change in terms of their presence or their purpose or their utility in our world. And I think that that's part of why I think we can be really empowered by having sort of a more neutral framing is that it allows us to really look at how something is being utilized in our world or how much we might want to utilize it in our world and how we can make it work for us as our needs change and also as the role or function of that thing changes as well.
Hunter:
So can you share a story from your own family experience that helped shape this perspective and this guidance that you offer in “Power On”?
Ash Brandin (06:15)
I include this at the beginning of the book, but it is a really great, I think, snapshot of what kind of cemented that view for me and also shows how hard it can be sometimes, even when that's a view that I try to have, how hard it can be sometimes to navigate that. So the beginning of the COVID lockdown in like March of 2020, I was still teaching and I was teaching online synchronous classes.
And my spouse was working at home, was already working at home and had a job that really couldn't be done in fits and starts. So kind of had to be continuously attended to. And my child at the time was a relatively newly turned three-year-old. And so now I know, At the time, I said like, oh, I'm just so glad that they're not like one and a half, like two, that age where they can't really understand like danger, right? And at least I was at an age where I could say like, the park is closed or whatever. But looking back, I'm like, no, that actually, it was very hard. Better to say it now, right? But anyway, we were all kind of at home. And I had tried to make it so that in these moments where I'm having to live teach to 30 13 year olds that my three year old would be present but not like present in my teaching. So it could be like occupied doing something else. And I set them up with, I'm pretty sure something that I saw on Instagram, some sort of like, podler activity and had given them like these this bin and the fine motor skill activity of these Easter eggs to fish out with a spoon and there were jelly beans inside and I thought like okay this is gonna buy me some time because it was like a 25 minute lesson we're not not a huge amount of time and my students are all logging in and I'm trying to get them started and start the lesson and I'm like probably 45 seconds in and already my child off-screen is saying “Muffin”-that's my parent name- Ifound a jelly bean in these Easter eggs. And I'm thinking like, no, no, you're supposed to be quiet, right? Like you're supposed to be quiet and occupied. And I tried for a few minutes in complete vain to like try to keep going. And my students are getting scurrilous distracted and I am getting frustrated. And ultimately like no one's doing anything wrong, right? Like my three year old is being three in their own home that they have lived in their whole life. Why would they suddenly know that they need to be doing something very different?
And I heard my spouse's office door open and basically just saw this like streak of blue pass by my eyes as my spouse basically like threw a tablet and headphones at my child and then like ran back to the office. And my kiddo put on the headphones and used the tablet and it was all stuff that I knew was safely curated, et cetera. And I taught the rest of my lesson and my initial feeling was failure. My initial feeling was I shouldn't have had to do that. I would have been doing that for me, for my own self, to make it easier for me, and that is therefore not a quote unquote good use of screens. And the fact that I couldn't get through this or find a way for them to do this without a screen is a failure of my parenting. But what stopped me in that sort of spiral was recognizing that my spouse did not feel any guilt about that. My spouse viewed it with this sort of factual objectivity of like, “what is the need? Ash needs to work”. My spouse needed to work. We need our kiddo to be quiet and occupied for 20 minutes. That sounds like a use of a screen. And it really helped me realize like, well, my spouse didn't feel any guilt. If the situation were reversed, I don't think I would have felt frustrated if my spouse had done that for my spouse's needs.
So like, am I doing that to myself? And it also made me realize, you know, if I had tried to keep a screen out of that, what would have happened, right? Like I would have become increasingly frustrated. My students would not have learned as effectively, if at all. And my kid would have ended up probably getting like a pretty grumpy, dysregulated parent for being three, right? Like my child would have been doing nothing wrong, right? Would have been being a three-year-old and not even a particularly trying three-year-old in that moment, just like existing in their own home. So that use of screens really helped me realize, everybody benefited in that situation, right? Like my child was not being like corrected constantly. I was able to focus. I was able to teach. My students all benefited. Everybody benefited in that instance. And that's not a failure, if anything, that was a sign of a success. And that really helped me think about whose needs are re-centering. What does it look like if we're really considering everybody in the family when we're talking about the use of technology?
Hunter (11:21)
Stay tuned for more mindful mama podcast right after this break.
I really appreciate that because, that's one of the things I've talked about a lot is the fact that parents' needs are just as important as kids' needs. Like, when you have an infant, obviously your infant's needs are more immediate. They must be tended to more immediately and we can often put them for needs, but we can't put them off forever. And eventually we, you know, our needs matter just as much as everybody else's matter. But I can totally relate to your story of that feeling of like I would have felt like I'm failing because I have to use this screen, because I feel like I'm like somewhere along that crunchy continuum where my project during the pandemic was to make my own kombucha and I do actually make my own granola. So I guess I'm a crunchy granola mom.
Ash Brandin (14:14)
Dude, I have some issues with a lot of some of those things and I'm influenced and aspired to that idea of like, I want my kids to, you know, I love our, had screen free Sundays for many, many, many years. And like the most creative projects would come out of that. And I would want, ultimately I would want the kids in my neighborhood to like have that so that there would be kids out in the neighborhood to play with, you know, when I was like, no, just leave the house and go play outside, right? So I I aspire to that. I guess I, I don't know, I aspire to that idea of like fewer screens and like, guess, giving kids, you know, fully three-dimensional world in their childhood where their own imagination is really given free rein and they have time to be bored restricting them.
Hunter (15:13)
I love all that, yet at the same time, your story is exactly, one of the reasons why we need to be real about these are these things that are in our lives. We can't just pretend that they aren't in our lives and have kids, you know, grow up and maybe shock and all. Like we have to walk in that messy middle because parents have needs, kids are in this world, we live in this world. So we have to walk into this messy middle somehow and navigate it. I like that you're offering us some guidance for that navigation.
Ash Brandin:
It's recognizing that there is not a mutually exclusive aspect to the ways that we may spend our time. Sometimes there's a phrase that sometimes people will use in relation to screen time where they'll ask like, yes, screens are going to happen, but just ask yourself, what is it replacing? And I've always taken a lot of umbrage with that phrase because if we are not coming from a place of moral neutrality, and most people are not, most people do think of if I'm relying on a screen, I'm bad in some way, right? So if they're coming from a place of thinking of screen time as lesser than or not as worthy of spending time on, then if I'm asking what is screen time replacing, I'm going to come up with 75 things that screens are replacing, right? They're coming up, they're replacing reading a book, they're replacing sitting in silence, they're replacing being bored, they're replacing, I don't know, repainting the banisters. Like I can come up with everything- that they're replacing because the assumption in that phrase, what are they replacing, is that it's not okay to use a screen if it's replacing something that theoretically has more moral value to you. And that, for many people, is like almost everything. And sometimes their screens might be replacing me becoming a dysregulated mess because I'm doing too many things at one time.
And we could say, well, yeah, it's replacing them going outside. Have they already been outside? Right? Like, did they go outside this morning? Okay. So it's not really replacing that actually, right? They're not mutually exclusive ideas. Or like my kid always an outdoor camp this week. It's 99 degrees, right? And I'm like, actually I would rather they were on a screen for part of that day than outside in 99 degree weather in the exposed heat for eight hours, to be honest. And that's just not really possible, but like I fully anticipate that they'll probably be on a screen when they get home. Because that's a lot. thinking of it as if my child engages with a screen, that doesn't mean that they're not going to engage with outside play or imaginative play. Lots of screenplay is extremely imaginative. Or these other things that I might want them to have. I can see it as another way that they might be engaging with these things. That's different. And that doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't also an okay use of time. It's okay to have leisure that's just leisure. It's all right to just do something purely for enjoyment.
Hunter:
Yeah, that kind of pushes back into the whole product work ethic and industrialization work ethic. But I guess I would push back on the non-hierarchical nature that you're talking about in a couple instances. There may be places like dinnertime, for instance, where you're definitely valuing face-to-face non-mediated interaction over something like leisure time with a screen, right? Or over a book.
Ash Brandin:
Yeah, over a book. Yeah, exactly. We're valuing it over a book. We're valuing it over playing checkers. We're valuing it over a bunch of things, right, in that situation. We don't attribute moral value to those things based on that. Just where it's a little different, right? Like if my kiddo is bringing a book to the dining table every single night, I might say, hey, we're not gonna read at the dinner table. But I probably would not say you're addicted to books. Because of all the words on the page and all the dopamine it's taking to your brain. You wanna be in that fake world more than you wanna be in the real world with your family. But we would, 1000%.
Hunter:
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Ash Brandin (19:42)
I could hear myself saying about aspects of screens, right? So that's what I mean about the morality piece. It does not mean that if I view these things as neutral, it doesn't mean that they're allowed in any amount at my child's discretion, right? Like bath time is morally neutral, but I wouldn't let my kid take a three hour bath. Books are morally neutral. And I have to put a lot of restrictions around reading, because my kid would read literally all day long. And I have to do a lot of saying like, we're gonna stop reading and we're gonna move our bodies now. And that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with reading. I love that they love to read. And I also want them to discover other ways of using their time and pay attention to how different things affect them because sitting and reading a book for six hours is gonna affect your body differently than reading for 45 minutes and then going outside and coming back. And so that neutrality allows me to help them figure out like how do different things affect me focusing on me and not focusing on like whether or not this thing is good or bad.
Hunter:
Yeah. You know, you're like calling it out and I can totally hear myself like thinking all of those things like, like what you said about going into the dinner table and thinking like, and I think it's fear, right? It's, it's fear that this thing, you know, we're taught by a lot of people, you know, Jonathan Haidt, anxious generation, all these different things. Like we know that the greatest minds that are paid the most money in our country are working to keep us addicted to these. I think you're right.
Ash Bradin (21:15)
Right, and to the different products and things like that. And so I think for me, if I think about like, yeah, I probably would think all those things. I would think like, no, you're addicted to this fake world. I definitely would think that. Like I would be, but it would be come from fear, this kind of, I guess, lack of moral neutrality about it. I think it's fear and I think it is an application of that fear onto our value as parents and like how good of a job we're doing. There are so many things in our world that are manufactured or engineered in a certain way. I make many comparisons to food and we've seen a big push in the last 10, 20 years to kind of change, many people are trying to kind of change the way they might parent their own children around food and eating. And we see a lot of closer things like the division of responsibility model by Ellyn Satter, which I really like. I, the division of responsibility model.
Hunter:
What's that? You decide, we decide what is it, we decide what and when they decide if and how much?
Ash Brandin (22:26)
Essentially, yes. And hers is particularly around food, but I find that model to be extremely applicable to technology. We decide when and what content is available, and our kids decide what to do within that content available. And this is true for the food model as well, they get to have feelings about it. And that is really hard because they are really, really good at that part. Like so good they probably don't need to practice anymore. But you know, to think about the food, it's like, you know, many foods are manufactured to be addicting. Many foods are manufactured. I'm a sucker for a good cheese puff. mean, that extruded cheese puffy food.
Hunter:
Heck yeah. It's so delicious.
Ash Brandin:
Yes, and that has been literally studied and engineered to have high caloric density and have a mouth feel that tricks your brain into thinking it is calorically dense, like has a deficit because other sort of like kind of collapsible, I don't know, like not dense foods like that, actually would fall in that category. So that's been engineered that way, right? And we also know that if we say we can't have any cheese poofs because they're genetically engineered to addict you, we also know that that can go to a place of scarcity and make our kids really interested in cheese poofs. Right? Yeah. And so the same thing happens with technology. If we want these things to be a part of their lives, but not the center of their lives, then we also kind of have to treat them that way. And that does not mean that we're serving cheese poofs at every meal as much as you want, right? Like I can treat cheese poofs and broccoli with equal moral neutrality. And that does not mean that they have the same nutritional value. And it doesn't mean that I serve them with the same frequency. And it also means because I'm talking about them morally neutrally, we can talk about what they do for our bodies and how we notice those things. Like my kiddo just the other day, we were going into like a five hour marathon of exciting things before they would be able to eat again. And in the car, I like, I want you to think about if you have enough long lasting energy to get you through this next few hours with what you're eating, just keep in mind what your body might need. We need some longer lasting energy. That doesn't mean I'm saying like, don't eat the chips, they're bad. Eat the turkey. It's thinking about the purpose. Similarly with technology, it doesn't mean we allow it all the time.
And it also means we can talk about like, “Hey, you had a really long day, you are zapped, I am zapped. Should we play the open-ended video game that's really hard to stop right now? Or should we play something that's gonna be like have an ending level and it's gonna be easier to turn off, which is gonna be better for us right now?” And then we're getting our kids to think about the purpose and what they need without necessarily going to that place of this thing's good-
Hunter:
Okay, I like this a lot. So from this perspective of moral neutrality, from this perspective of this is going to be in our kids' lives and this is in our lives, what are some guidelines that you have for parents about creating healthy relationship and healthy rhythm in the family for kids and screens?
Ash Brandin:
So I mean, I wish that I could distill all of that, but that is essentially what my book is devoted to. But I love that we're getting to this question now because the first part of my book is really devoted to what we were just talking about, this reframing our view of these things. Because if we had led with this question, and I'd said what I'm about to say, people would have a harder time, I think because it's hard to put some of these boundaries in place that allow maybe our kids to have more routine access to screens, not unlimited, but more predictable. It's hard to do that if we are thinking of them as this bad thing to do with their time. We have to kind of settle ourselves in that neutrality first, recognize that that doesn't mean that we're allowing it constantly or putting our kids in control of it, but that we can see them as a thing our kids want to do with their time. And from there, we can put boundaries around it. So the middle part of my book, I call the Screen Time ABCs. And I talk about these three aspects that are really end up being the kind of root cause of a lot of screen time struggles that we might have. And if they're not an area of struggle, it might just be an area to keep in mind when we're thinking about like what we want our kids' relationship with screens to look like.
The ABC stand for “Access”, meaning like how and when they get a screen and for how long. “Behavior”, our behavior and relationship to a screen and the feelings that it might evoke. And then C is for “content”. So like what's actually on the screen and different types of content, the differences between them and kind of figuring out what might be a better, not as good fit. knowing those things can give you a ton of guidance because you can already think about how those things might fit in your life. And if I know that maybe I am okay with my kid having screens while I am making dinner and finishing up work email, because it's helping us both, that might also help inform me of how long I want that to be. Or if my need is to have some time to attend to work, staff, or make dinner, that might mean that my kiddo needs to be like fairly occupied and not need a lot of my intervention, because I might be kind of absorbed. And that might tell me that, actually, maybe they should be watching a TV show instead of playing a game that might be really stimulating, because I'm just not as available then. So the last part of my book is really helping families create these structures and boundaries. And it starts with just what we were talking about, thinking about what is the need here? Like, what is our need as a family? And that might mean that I need time to get some stuff done. It might mean that I'm in another room putting a baby sibling down for a nap. It might mean kiddo needs some time to unwind, but what are the needs? And then that kind of informs a lot of the other pieces. It informs what I might say yes to. It might inform how long. It might inform the kind of like decision-making I give my kiddo. If I know screen time is definitely gonna be before dinner, I'm not gonna let them decide when it is.
That's going to be something I get to decide. But I might let them decide what thing they watch and give them more control. Or as they grow, I might hand over more responsibility so that they can kind of figure out what works best for them. So it's really centering what are our needs as a family. And then how can we have this be a predictable part of our lives, which doesn't mean freely available but something that we can know is gonna happen at a time that works for us so that we're not arguing about when does, we're not fighting about the conditions, can be a more predictable part of our kids' lives, become part of the routine, and finding also the kinds of content that are going to make all of that possible.
Hunter:
Yeah, that sounds like the smart way to think about it. I definitely didn't think about it like this when my kids were little, but I think that makes so much sense. Since it is such an absorbing thing generally, as a parent, when do you need time? I've heard the pushback and I've thought about this myself that there is the idea of like, we don't want to maybe, I mean, depending on your needs, guess, but depending, you know, not necessarily always like give your kid a tablet when you have something, some things to do around the house because you don't want to give them the message that they have like special exempt status from not contributing to the house, right? So there's that kind of idea to think about also, we want to maybe balance this idea of our needs with, we also want to start to incorporate our child into doing things in the house and cooking maybe and all these different things that we do. So they learn to live in the world with other people, right? So I guess there's that to balance out and think about.
Ash Brandin (31:35)
Absolutely, and that kind of predictable piece, it applies to our kids, but the part that we don't always say out loud as much is that it also applies to us. And so that means that if I want screens to be like not this huge deal, then I kind of have to avoid inadvertently putting them on a pedestal. And that can happen through scarcity of saying like, no, I'm going to restrict this thing. And it can also happen when it is not necessarily predictable, right? If it's randomly my adult is suddenly overwhelmed or needs to get something done and then I'm getting access to a tablet, then I as a kid don't know when to expect something. And this isn't just true for kids, this is true for humans, right? This is just kind of how our brains work. When we know when something is going to happen, then we might look forward to it, we might be excited about it, we might ask about it and we can kind of rely on that so we don't have to become as preoccupied with it talking about intermittent reward. Like if this is like a thing that is reward that is given intermittently, that is the most addictive form of anything that we could do, right? Like isn't that what studies have shown?
Hunter (32:48)
Right.
Ash Brandin:
Well, yes, so having things that are not necessarily predictable, it's interesting to frame it specifically as a reward because sometimes we do use it as a reward. Sometimes we might say like, okay, well, if you do X, then you can use the iPad. And then yes, we are creating a reward pathway and we're doing what we call extrinsic motivation. And what's really, I think ironic about that is that we are inadvertently doing two things we don't want to do because we are making it so that our child is more focused on a screen, which we probably want the opposite. And we're thinking, well, I'm only going to give it once they've done their chores. Okay, what are they going to focus on the entire time they're doing their chores? They're going to focus on the reward they're going to get. They are not focused on the purpose of the chores. They're not going to focus on the contribution to the household. They're probably not going to focus on doing it particularly well.
They're going to focus on getting to the reward. And so now I'm sending the message of you should be doing this thing, a chore, in order to get a reward. And that is not what I want either, right? I don't want them as focused on the screen. And by rewarding them, I'm kind of putting their attention on the screen and I'm taking their attention away from the underlying purpose of whatever the activity is because it's worthy of doing.
Hunter (34:20)
Yeah, we want to help around the house because we all do that. We're part of a team. We live in this house. We care about each other. We care about our home.
Ash Brandin:
And that's what we do. Right. Like that's the intrinsic motivation. It doesn't necessarily mean like intrinsic motivation is often because we're doing something because we want to do it. And you know, I wouldn't say that I don't necessarily think I vacuum out of intrinsic motivation, right? Like I'm not doing it for the love of it. So there might be an internalized reason, like I might have internalized the importance of something and that's okay too. And to go back to like figuring out how things serve a purpose in our lives, you know what else I do sometimes when I vacuum? I put a TV show on in the background, right? Like if I am cleaning the kitchen, I will 1,000 % put on like sort of a half watching show called The Midwife tends to be that for me and like put in an air pod because this isn't the most fun activity. This isn't something I necessarily do for the love of cleaning my kitchen, right? And that might be a time where actually I am gonna pair it with something that might be a little bit more enjoyable to make the whole experience a little better and make it more enjoyable for me. And that is something that I want my kids to figure out, not necessarily with technology, it might be music or doing something with someone else in the room. But that is an important skill of figuring out like how do I make a less desirable task more desirable.
And that is different than saying, “Okay, Ash, if you just clean the kitchen, then you can get this reward”. Sometimes that's possible, but not always, right? And I love the point you made of just contributing to the household because it's important. My kiddo, their household chore job, which was not my choosing, they chose this, is that they clean all the toilets in our house. wow. I know, I know. I'm like, I don't really know how that happened. I gave them a choice and that was what they chose to do. And they're really good at it. They are great.
Hunter (36:23)
That's great!
Ash Brandin:
I taught them the whole, like, we're gonna wipe down all the surfaces, we're gonna start here and work our way to the dirtiest one, and then they go through and they scrub them all, and they do a fantastic job. And we talked the other day, actually, about if we were to, like, of reward them and give them access to something, like screens for cleaning the toilets. And the first thing they said was, like, I would not like cleaning the toilets as much.
Hunter: Yeah, that's interesting: they knew that intrinsically. Like, it just wouldn't be as enjoyable.
Ash Brandin:
Proving my point. Right?
Hunter (37:06)
Stay tuned for more mindful podcast right after this break.
Okay, so we want it to be rhythmic, kind of a ritual thing. So we're trying to make it no big deal. It's just like anything else. It's like going for a hike. It's like going, doing your homework. It's like playing whatever, our, whatever the kind of screen time that you've, the content that you've decided is appropriate, know, nutritious enough for your kid is available at just a regular time, but something maybe that meets your needs as a parent for, you know, have some time when your kid is absorbed. And it's just something that's a regular part of the day.
Ash Brandin:
Yeah, and it doesn't mean that every day is the same. I give some examples of this in the book that for some families it might mean you're getting a screen every day before dinnertime. For my family, it was more often that way of serving in these purposes of me needing to make dinner. Now my kiddo's older and like you said, that's not necessarily something I need from more of like a safety perspective. When they were younger, I did need to make sure that they were of safely occupied and they weren't gonna suddenly be behind me in the kitchen- might be like a safety issue. That changes when they get older. And some days might not be the same, right? It might mean that actually our weekends are a little bit different than our weekdays or every Wednesday we have soccer and we're gone all day and that might mean that looks a little different. And just like we have our routines for those afterschool activities or dinner or the general plot of our lives, we can find ways of incorporating screens into that so that it's helping, right? It's serving as a tool, even if that tool is just fun leisure for the sake of leisure. But then it becomes something else that we can kind of rely on and go in the back burner without having to sort of litigate or argue about when it might fall.
Hunter:
Okay. Let's imagine that we're doing this. We're establishing some time- mom’s joined the Mindful Parenting Training. So every Tuesday, every Tuesday at two o'clock, she's in, and you know, this long meeting and then, know, whatever you have these regular different times where your kid has to think about what, and what do you have guidelines for parents about ending it? How to make it stop? Because it is. really hard to make that stop. And I also appreciate, by the way, how you talk about how things go wrong and how things won't always go right in your book. But tell us, how do we make it stop?
Ash Brandin:
I like that particular phrasing of how do we make it stop. So this is, I think, another benefit of looking at them with neutrality is that if I am looking at the screen as negative, bad, et cetera, I'm probably not going to notice some of the details that could inform me about how to end it more easily. If I am thinking of it as bad or I feel guilty about it or I have some shame about it, my instinct is probably going to be to say like, oh, they're having a hard time stopping. See, I knew it. Like, I knew it was the fault of the stream. I knew I shouldn't have let them do that.
Hunter:
You're in my head, Ash. You're like saying all of the thoughts that I've had.
Ash Brandin:
Well, if it makes you feel better, it's because hundreds of thousands of people have shared these thoughts. So I have a pretty good data set to go off of. But to flip it around, if we were in certain other fun activity here, right? We're at the playground, we're at the pool, we're at a friend's house, we're on vacation, we're at the amusement park, and it was suddenly hard to leave, right? We would probably recognize the underlying reason
And also, very importantly, the underlying skill that our kids are needing to work on. So probably something like stopping in the middle of something or leaving somewhere fun. Like those are hard things to do. And those are also skills that we have to develop. And when it happens at the pool or a playground or a friend's house, we know that, okay, this is hard. We don't want it to be hard every time. And we know that the way to make it less hard is by sticking to the boundary and enforcing it, but also validating the difficulty of that experience. And we also know that it's probably not gonna do us any good if we blame the playground and say, well, we can't come back to this playground ever again, right? Because we recognize that it's not actually about the playground. And sometimes with screens, it is different, because like not all screens are the same, right? And we are gonna interact with those things differently. And we still want them to be able to walk away from those things, right? Like you mentioned earlier, we're in a tech-driven world that's not going away, even if we might wish it were.
So like, I do want my kid one day to be in college and be able to put down the PlayStation 7 controller or whatever and say like, I have to go, I have to study for a midterm, right? So that does come back to some of those same skills. When I look at it with neutrality, I can look at it and say, okay, like what is the difficulty here? Is it actually about the screen? Or is it about stopping something? Is it about being able to stop in the middle? And if that's the case, then how do I help them work on the skill of stopping something, walking away, and coming back later? Because there's a lot of ways we can work on that. So being able to pay attention to those things can be really informative. So if you are a parent to a kid who struggles with ending, some of the things you can pay attention to are kind of the format of what they're doing. So if it's something that's sort of has like a finite ending, you know, a TV show episode, Mario Kart with levels, something with a time component, then I can say, okay, at the end of this race or at X number of minutes, and that can be helped with, you know, a timer, a time limiter within the device itself to make it feel a little more concrete for kid if it's something that's more open-ended, and I think this is where this happens a lot, something more open-ended like Minecraft, something that's like big open world, right? One of the tricks that I love, that I use all the time as an educator, there are two, they're very similar. One is to ask the question, how will you know when you're done? Which is to get them to kind of visualize a stopping point.
And that might be like, “Hey, you have five minutes. What is the last thing you're going to do today? What are you going to do to wrap up?” And I would ask them that if they were in the middle of a drawing, if they were crocheting something and they couldn't finish, if they're working on a long-term project at school. Right. So that's speaking to the skill. The other that I love and also use all the time is what I call the sticky note trick. And it's to ask them, “what is it you're doing right now that you want to come back to? Like what's the first thing you're going to do tomorrow or whenever you come back? Okay, we're going to write it on sticky note and we're going to put it somewhere really obvious. Like I will literally stick it like on the game controller. And the words might be meaningless to me. Like my kid did this once and I was like, I don't know what any of this means, but okay, stuck it on there. And then the next day my kid came back and was like, yeah, I was going to do that. And especially for kids who might not have that executive function developed yet, they're younger, they might be neurodivergent. Being able to stop and come back to something can be really tricky because they might literally not remember at all what they were doing and then they feel like they're wasting time trying to remember. And so this shows them, wow, okay, if I have to stop in the middle of something, one thing can help is give myself a reminder when I come back. Again, that's gonna help no matter what like medium we're talking about. And then we can find ways of building that skill across different mediums, across different parts of their lives, so that they're seeing that these things are interconnected and apply just on the screen and outside of the screen.
Hunter: (47:32)
Yeah, I like that. I wish I had done these things. There's so much more, Dear Listener, in “Power On”. There's a lot to know about online safety, all these different things. I definitely recommend this. But to wrap up here, Ash, just thinking about for the parent who maybe has been feeling like the screens are evil and that's been coming across in the way they're talking and acting about the screens and what is there's any thing you want to leave that parent with to kind of help them shift into a more neutral place and kind of support a more positive, less fraught interaction with screens as they move forward with their kid?
Ash Brandin:
The biggest thing that I've noticed for myself and also hearing feedback from many others over the years is that when we are able to step away from that more judgmental place, I mean, judgmental of like the technology or judgmental of ourselves, it puts us on the same team as our kids. And I think that that goes a long way in so many ways where it feels like, it's us versus whatever this difficult thing is we're navigating instead of it's me versus my kid with screens in the middle. Because then if I'm thinking that, like, I don't like this thing, but my kid does, then I'm seeing myself in opposition to my child. And that doesn't feel very good. And if I want my kid to be able to come to me when something in the online world feels unsafe, right? Someone said something unsafe, posted something unsafe, they're curious about something. If I want them to come to me in those moments, they first have to be able to come to me when something does feel safe. And that means they have to be able to share their triumphs with me and know that I'm going to value that because I value them. So I think just putting ourselves on the same side.
It doesn't mean that they're always going to like everything we do. That's okay, right? But we're working with them to empower them for the future. And I think that helps me focus on that this is a long-term goal and that if I can do that alongside my child, that that is probably going to set us both up for a more sustainable relationship with technology, but also with each other and be kind of partners in this together as they grow.
Hunter:
I like that. like we're getting into the mindset of we're practicing for the future. We're modeling, you know, we as parents, we're modeling the behavior and we're also practicing for the future and yeah, shift that mindset. I think that's this all, this is really helpful. You know, it's amazing, like this time has flown by. We didn't get to get into the nitty-gritty of safety and modeling. We've talked about those things in other podcasts, but I think it's been so valuable to just talk about this idea of that mindset and the neutrality. I feel like the way you've talked about it has created a for me. So I'm hoping it helps create a shift from the listener too, because I think that's been really, really valuable.
So Ash Brandon, the book is “Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family” and get it anywhere books are sold. Thank you so much for coming on the Mindful Mama podcast. I really appreciate you sharing your time with us.
Ash Brandin (51:30)
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being here with you.
Hunter (51:39.534)
Thank you so much for listening. I hope this episode has helped. Could you take a breath around screen time and maybe not feel so panicked about it, which is something that happens to me sometimes, as you may have heard me say.
Do share this episode with friends, share it on social media. It really helps the podcast on our own. And it's a lot of work. So if you can share it, that does a big us a big favor by just getting it to more ears. So I appreciate that enormously. So will your friends, I think, because it's so helpful. Anyway, wishing you a great week. Know that it's human for you this week. It's hard to be a parent. It's hard to raise these kids and that's okay. You're not alone. And in your ears connecting with hopefully some helpful stuff again next week. Take care. Namaste.
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