The war for our kids' attention is being waged, and we’re losing. That’s my cynical summary of so many experts who study such things. When it comes to screen science, I’ve attended the lectures, seen the documentaries, read the books, gone to parent meetups, and flipped through the studies. I’ve been through it personally with my high schooler — hooked, caught in dangerous situations, experiencing mental health crises thanks to the online world. My third-grader is phone-free and blissfully unaware (well, he loves Tears of the Kingdom, but that seems downright educational these days), but I still work so hard to get ahead of it. I’ve signed the Wait Until 8th pledge, I’m working on ways for the kids to be more independent (both commute to school themselves!), and we talk about screen time an annoying amount. Hell, I’ve helped to start and run a PTA committee whose purpose is to look critically at screen time and help foster independence in kids. There’s a lot of movement. And yet, it feels like parents are American revolutionaries in 1773. We’re dumping tea into the harbor and an impossibly well-funded army is coming to get us.

This past week I took the fight overseas. I had the pleasure of talking with Kaitlyn Regehr, Ph.D., a researcher and professor of digital humanities at University College London and author of Smartphone Nation, out now. The tagline of the book is spot on: “Building Digital Boundaries When Offline Isn't an Option.” It’s a go-to book that’s informative, but not overly complex, exhaustive, but surprisingly short and to the point, and lacking in the shame that so many screen time books put on parents. I can't recommend it enough.

Tyghe Trimble,

Fatherly

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

I'd love to start with the idea of digital pyramids, if that's OK. Like the food pyramid, it can be a really helpful guide to how we and our kids should consume media. Would you mind just walking us through that idea?

I think the idea of healthy eating is something we understand. The food pyramid, similar to the digital diet pyramid, is weighted with the good nutritious things at the bottom and the not-so-good things, the things that we want to limit, at the top. We might not always choose to follow it. We might sometimes eat a tub of ice cream, but we are aware that we are making that choice. I think what the digital diet pyramid does is it allows people and parents, most particularly, to think about the choices that they are constantly making every time they open a screen. Generally, what we want to do if we want a healthy relationship to screens is we want to be thinking about active, educational, informative, healthy socialization as forming the base of that pyramid. And then farther up the top are things like passive consumption, doom scrolling, short-form, low-quality content that we want to mitigate or moderate to a certain degree.

In the digital pyramid, where do you place movies and cinematic video games? I think, these days, a kid who can watch a full movie or pay attention to hours of plot in one of those cinematic video games kind of has a leg up. Do you agree?

Right. So you are talking about long-form content versus short-form content and how that relates to the development of attention spans and the ability to follow full narratives through. Absolutely, not all screen time is created equal. What we want to be doing, where possible, is, of course, running around outside is normally better, but if you are going to use screens, we want that screen time to ideally be long-form engagement, like good quality movies, where possible, interactive engagement and collective viewing.

“Generally, the bigger the screen and the longer the content, the better.”

So particularly with young children, ideally, you are sitting there with them watching a Julie Andrews movie talking about the content, using it as a springboard for their discussion. If it takes place during World War II, maybe that is a discussion point for you to talk a little bit about history and use the viewing as a jumping-off point for education and for communication. That's where we really want to be with screen consumption, if we are going to be using those screens. Generally, the bigger the screen and the longer the content, the better.

So Mary Poppins over Roblox, that's my takeaway from this.

Definitely, yes.

I appreciate how Smartphone Nation repeats the idea that screens aren't all bad and that the concept of “screen time” can shame parents for turning to screens ever. I think your book is a nice counterpoint to The Anxious Generation’s Jonathan Haidt, which primarily argues that taking away phones and getting kids outside is the answer. You note that being digitally native isn't all bad. So my question for you is, if screen time limits aren't the answer, where should we start?

First, let's talk about where screen time comes from as a concept. Screen time, that guidance came out of some pretty good physical health research, mostly around childhood obesity and childhood diabetes from about 15 years ago. What that research said was, "If kids are sedentary, if they are sitting in front of screens all the time, they aren't moving around, that's bad for their physical health." That is still true. And Jonathan Haidt's argument around that is true. If you are in front of screens, you're not moving around, and that's not good for your physical health and aspects of your mental health, and I absolutely agree with that. But that guidance really just captured the quantity of the screen consumption, and not the quality of the screen consumption. So that guidance is limiting in that it doesn't address the mental health implications of what kids might be consuming on screens.

As we discussed previously, it's a very different scenario to have a kid watching with their parents Mary Poppins than for them to be alone in their bedroom with headphones on, scrolling through an algorithmically-driven feed. That is qualitatively a very different experience. The sad thing is that a Pew research study has recently pointed out that 89% of kids from the age of 5 are on YouTube now, an algorithmically driven, largely unregulated platform, and I think it's about 81% from the age of 3. Now, most of the discussions that we have at the moment around algorithms, around social media, completely leave out those younger years, and they tend to leave YouTube out of that discussion. But really for a lot of us, well-meaning parents, without realizing it, we're actually grooming our kids into these algorithmically-driven short-form, often low-quality content, from a really early age. So what we need to get to grips of is that not all screen time is equal and that we're actually needing to make an active choice.

“That's not to say that we weren't plopped in front of screens to watch hours of content with bad-quality TV dinners (we were), but … you weren't watching 10 episodes of Bluey in a row.”

Fortunately, there are many more choices available to us as parents than our parents had to make. That's not to say that we weren't plopped in front of screens to watch hours of content with bad-quality TV dinners (we were), but these were different screens and it was different content. Those were largely regulated spaces, often programmed by children's commissioners who were experts in programming children's content that had a diversity of content. You weren't watching 10 episodes of Bluey in a row. Those regulated spaces that a lot of good advocacy went into in order to develop, if we think of the development of children's programming on PBS, unfortunately, a lot of that good work has been thrown out the window because those kids are not on those spaces anymore, they're on YouTube, and that is a great tragedy.

I think it's really important as parents that we remind ourselves that we are making choices. But because we are making choices, we can make different choices and we can make empowered decisions about the types of screens and the types of digital spaces we want our kids to inhabit. There's great empowerment in that I think.

You just mentioned how even Bluey could be problematic, which I've actually never thought about. It is a really good point. If you give the kid the control or you let it auto-rotate and do eight in a row, Bluey is a completely different experience. Whereas, usually, it's the safest possible space for parents with young kids.

I'm not saying that Bluey is problematic. It's not problematic. What is problematic is allowing a binge watching of an entire season. We actually should be having diversity of content. There are great things about curated spaces, and there are great things about children's programming that has carefully thought through what comes after what and that there's some kind of host that comes in and makes sense of things for kids. Terrestrial TV is a very different experience. When I speak to my kids who are still very little about healthy screen consumption, I talk about terrestrial TV. I talk about algorithms and the fact that algorithms make our choices for us. It's important that we're active in our decision-making and that there are experts and, in the post-truth world, it's worth acknowledging, that there are some people that curate viewing experiences and these are regulated spaces. That means that that's a different experience so that there are healthy forms of screen consumption and less healthy forms of screen consumption.

Now, that is not to say that running around outside is still a much better thing to do. Of course, it is. But if you are going to use a screen, it's good to be much more intentional about how you do it.

If I can move to a slightly older audience. I have a teen myself, so I think about this all the time. How do I stop my kid from getting red-pilled?

When we talk about online extremism or the echo chambers that our kids or our uncles or ourselves might be in, I think it's really important to take a step back and think about the technological processes at play. The reason that young boys are often fed online misogyny or more extreme content is because it is more attention-grabbing. The reason that girls are fed body dysmorphic content and self-harm is because it's more attention-grabbing. The financial structures of social media are an attention economy. The whole system is set up to hold our attention as long as possible and, in fact, hold our attention a little longer each time. Unfortunately, that often means that hate, harm, and disinformation are often algorithmically prioritized because they are more attention-grabbing, because disinformation is often more attention-grabbing than truth.

One of the best things we can do, and we absolutely should be doing this with teenagers, is talking about that concept, talking about the attention economy, talking about the way in which we are manipulated through social media, and our usage and our behaviors online are collected in order to manipulate us, just to hold us a little bit longer. If you talk to kids about this idea, even from early teenage years, they don't like it. They don't like the idea of being emotionally manipulated and controlled. One thing that I talk about with any type of echo chamber is instead of fighting or debating your teenager or uncle at Thanksgiving dinner around the specificity of the issue, around the granular detail. It's better to take a step back, collectivize, and talk about the ways in which these technological and corporate structures are feeding them this content and pushing them potentially down a narrower and narrower path.

And then it becomes you together against those structures, and that becomes a very powerful thing. One, you are equipping your young person with tools to be empowered digital citizens, and, two, it's something you're in together because you yourself are not immune to it and you are probably being fed something different, but it may be something that makes you feel bad.

This one's for parents of neurodivergent kids. It seems that we are getting pulled in two directions. On one hand, social media is more dangerous. One study you cited said that the likelihood of seeing self-harm content is, tell me if I'm getting this right, 40% greater for those with mental health difficulties, 31% greater for kids with autism. On the other hand, you also write that evidence suggests that screens can provide predictability and a sense of belonging within like-minded communities and can be instrumental in helping neurodiverse kids manage anxiety. Can you please walk us through this?

I think this goes back to this idea of quality consumption and the choices that we make around our screens. That work around social media-fed harm or algorithmically-prioritized harm and the way in which neurodiverse kids are disproportionately targeted is immensely problematic, and, if you have a neurodiverse child, something you should be aware of. That is not unique to neurodiverse children. Social media is very, very good at predicting our behaviors, but also at knowing our vulnerabilities because it is through those vulnerabilities that it can point out [what we] lack and we are more susceptible to buying things if we feel a lack. That fits into this business model. The work that has been done around the way in which screens can support neurodiversity tends to be around ways in which screens can be used to calm kids, ways in which different learning applications can support neurodiverse kids, and that there are ways in which differently abled kids might find community through the internet. That remains true and those are good things, but of course we're almost talking about different usages of screens. That stuff is not happening on TikTok in the same way. It just really isn't.

A lot of the discussions that we used to have around the beauty of social media a decade ago and the way it gave platforms for speaking voice and finding community has shifted as the technology has become more and more sophisticated and more and more manipulative. When we talk about that good stuff, we really need to be careful about how we're carving out those spaces, what screens we're using to do them, and where those screens are being used.

In another sense, keep kids away from the algorithms.

Yeah. For younger teenagers, I tend to find that algorithmically driven content is more and more problematic. As these systems become more and more sophisticated, they will be able to hold our kids' eyeballs longer and longer and longer, and we have to push back against that.

“Most things have to be proven safe before they hit the market. For social media, the opposite has been true.”

It's hard to do forever, of course, even if we hold off social media until they are 16. That birthday will come, and they will turn 17. What we want to be doing is preparing our kids. Just like you would teach them how to drive, you would prepare them and you would talk to them about the dangers and you would talk about how to use it safely.

Hear, hear. You acknowledge throughout this book that so much falls on parents that shouldn't, that the dark recesses of this online culture we're fighting is not our fault, but it is the fault of corporate profits and lack of regulation. What do you say to us burned-out and angry parents? I wonder, you seem so pragmatic, are you angry at all at this world?

Yes, absolutely. I am like an angry mama bear, but I do think that there is power in that anger too and I think a movement is starting. I am hopeful, because if there is enough of us that are angry, we will see change because policy follows the public will. But I do acknowledge that, at the moment, so much is heaped on individual responsibility in a way we don't have for anything else. We're used to consumer protections. We're used to consumer protections around the food we eat, the medication we take, the cars we drive, the small parts on kids' toys so they don't choke. We are used to being protected, and we're not being protected in this space and our kids are not being protected in this space. There is a newness in that. Most things have to be proven safe before they hit the market. For social media, the opposite has been true.

Now, unfortunately, that means that the duty of care and the responsibility is currently falling on us as parents. So while we wait for regulation, while we wait for greater corporate responsibility, we need to know that if our kids are going to inhabit this space, they're doing so without seat belts, and that's why we need to educate ourselves as parents. We need to do that work. I think that doesn't make it our fault. This is not our fault, but we do need to learn these things or else our kids will be forced to navigate it alone.

On the flip side, how do we fight? How should we join the movement? What's your advice for those of us who want the anger to spill out in the public space?

This is why this book is not written in the way that other books are, which is often from a mental health perspective. That's not my expertise. I operate in the digital space. I'm talking about how these technological processes work so that you yourself can be informed about them and you can push back against it. I think if enough people understand that, if enough people read this book, they will say, "This is crazy. This is totally crazy that we've allowed this to happen," and that's when you will see policy change because, ultimately, that's how democracy works. If you think of really successful grassroots movements, it is because people inform themselves and they think it's no longer acceptable.