Raising Indistractable Kids: Nir Eyal's Unconventional Approach to Homeschooling | Teach Your Kids

Hi, everyone. I'm Manisha with Teach your Kids. And today my guest may not need an introduction. Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked.

Hi.

How to Build Habit Forming Products, which I believe you can find on the shelf of any company in the world. And also how to Control youl Attention and choose youe Life, which has an incredible chapter on Raising Indistractable kids, which we're gonna talk about today. But I think every single parent listening to this has to read that chapter, so. Nir also happens to apply what I would call a modular approach to his child's education as a replacement to traditional school. Nir is an expert in behavior design. He's an entrepreneur investor, and he just knows everything there is to know about the intersection of technology, business, and psychology. Nir also has been mentoring me for the last couple years. We've exchanged many emails and he's been so generous with his time as I work to build a community of homeschooling families. And I just want to add that in addition to all of his amazing accomplishments, I just find Nir to be such a kind, authentic and good person, which is really in line with the type of guests I like to have on this show. So, Nir, thank you so much for being here.

Yes, that's the highest possible. Kindness is gobbled, of course.

I agree. I think it's the most important quality. So I thought today we could start with your own homeschooling journey. I think you're just an amazing model for families who might be considering this route. And then we could dig a little bit more into the book and the topic of screen time and raising indistractable kids.

Sounds great. Yeah. Where do we start?

So, yeah, so I thought perhaps you could just start with your own homeschooling journey. What inspired you to homeschool?

Yeah, sure. So before I begin, I want to give a quick disclaimer that everyone listening, your mileage may vary. So this is personal experience. I'm not advocating, I'm not preaching, I'm not saying that this is something that you should necessarily do. So I always have to give that disclaimer whenever I talk about homeschooling. I'm just saying what's worked for my family. I will say that I used to be more reserved about talking about my homeschooling experience because it's a big experiment and now I can say we've been homeschooling for 10 years. So since my daughter was in first grade, we started homeschooling and now she just turned 15. So we've had a good decade of homeschooling experience. And so now I'm a little less shy about it. I'm a little bit more comfortable because we start seeing kind of the results paying off. I'm not just about academics or, you know, that stuff is nice, but that's not really what's most important to me. What's really important to me is the kind of person that my daughter has developed into. You know, I've always loved my daughter so much. You know, you can't help but love your child. But now I think I really like her.

That's such a wonderful distinction.

I like her as a person. Even if we weren't related, I would want to be her friend. She's just a really great kid. She's just a wonderful human being. And so where did it all begin? So it began. We were living in Palo Alto, and she went to traditional school for kindergarten. And the kind of real seminal moment for us was she came home from school one day with an envelope of cut paper. And we kind of said, well, what's this? Why the cut paper? Like, there wasn't any kind of rhyme or reason to why these little strips of paper were cut. And she brought it home in a little envelope. And so we asked her teacher about it, and she said, well, you know, Jasmine's a very good girl, and when she completes her assignments, I don't really have anything for her to do, so I just ask her to cut some paper. And we kind of kept, okay, no big deal. One. One thing. No big deal. But then this became kind of a metaphor for so much of what we saw in public education. It's a lot of cutting paper. Right between standing in line and taking attendance and reprimanding the bad kid in the room and going to the lunchroom, and, you know, all stuff that is just cutting paper. It's just a waste of time because of the systemic structural needs of the institution of public education or institutionalized education that, to us, doesn't serve any purpose in terms of educating a child. Maybe there's a little bit of, okay, it's nice to know kind of how to operate in a system. I think she's going to learn that lesson very well. Just, you know, the fact that she lives in a society and she lives in a city, she's going to learn that. But there was just a lot of cutting paper. And when we asked the teacher, what can we do? How can we give her a little bit more to explore what she's interested in or other Resources. She said, well, we're a 10 out of 10 school. That was it.

This is the highest you can go.

No rhyme or reason why. I think they were a 10 out of 10 school because they're next door to Stanford, so they have a lot of smart people's kids going to school there. But whatever. Okay, let's leave that aside. What are you complaining about? Right? And so it just made us wonder, you know, it's interesting that public, that traditional education is one of the few products where the customer has no say in the product. Right? Nobody asks kids, hey, how's school? How do you like what we're delivering for you? Is this serving you notes? You have to go to school because that's what you have to do. Why? I don't know. Because everybody does. And that's just not the way my wife and I have run our life. We like to challenge convention, and sometimes we agree with convention. Tradition has a lot. Most of the time, tradition should be followed. Convention should be followed. There's good reasons for it, but not always. And so we started off as a summer project to just see what homeschooling would be like for our daughter. And she really loved it. We loved the fact that at the time, I remember she was really into Egypt, and at school, they spent like a day on Egypt. She wanted to go deeper, and she spent months going into how all this fascination she had around ancient Egypt. And we just loved the fact that's cool. We could integrate various lessons. At the time, you know, she was only, you know, first grader, but, you know, you could integrate mathematics and writing and history and all this stuff that you could put to help a child follow their passion. Because one of the things I really wanted to make sure didn't happen to our daughter was what happened to me, which was that certain subjects became uninteresting or unfun because of the way they were taught. And that's a real tragedy. And so one of the things we really like about homeschooling is that she hires her teachers. So she goes onto a site we use Wyzant. We've been very happy with them. It's a marketplace for teachers. And she's had many times where she. Several years ago, she wanted to learn how to code. And the first teacher that we found just wasn't a fit. It was this kind of guy who was very skeptical around this girl wanting to learn how to code, and he was very patronizing. So she. Thank you very much. And we did book them anymore, but then we found other Teachers who were fantastic. And now my daughter actually teaches with you, Actually.

Yeah, it's true. She's amazing. And she's such a great model for her student because, you know, the child is really inspired by her and something that she could be down the line. I think that your story really kind of captures how difficult it is to differentiate learning in a group environment. And even with the best intentions, I mean, it seems like your teacher was kind and intelligent. It's just not possible for 20 or 30 kids to learn at their own pace. And so you have to kind of fill in with these gaps and you can't choose a topic that suits the needs of each individual child. So I think a lot of parents think about, okay, well that sounds like a good idea, but what does it actually look like in practice? And I usually say, well, it looks different for every family. And that's the benefit. You can customize what your schedule looks like. Could you share what a typical week might look like for your family? Homeschooling?

Sure. So it definitely has changed with different seasons of life. Right. So the kind of daily schedule that she used to have, the involvement that we had in her daily schedule when she was, you know, in elementary School versus now she's 15 years old, it's very different. It's become much more self directed over time. You know, I think one of the things we wanted to avoid, again, this is just, you know, your mileage may vary. This is just our philosophy and what's worked for us. We didn't want homeschool to be schooling at home.

Right.

I think that's a big mistake that a lot of families make when they first try and transition into homeschooling is that they try and replicate school and bring it home. This is why I think a lot of people, during the pandemic, a lot of people were like, you know, their eyes were open to the potential to homeschool, and it worked out well. And they never went back to conventional school. But a lot of people, they, you know, they didn't work for them because they basically brought school into the home. And that's not. That wasn't our philosophy. Our philosophy was we wanted the benefits of schooling from home. Right. The benefits of homeschooling are that you can make your own schedule, you can chart your own path. And that's amazing because you can fit activities in that the rest of the world can't because they have the conventional schedule that everybody has to go to school this time to that time. So we kind of every, I would say Every three months or so we reassessed the schedule and figured, okay, now there's new classes starting and we want different activities. So how do we work those in? But I'll just walk you through what a typical day looks like now for a 15 year old. So we all have breakfast at 7:30. So typically I'm up a little earlier and I'll start making breakfast. And then my family joins and then we, so we finish by 8. At 8 she goes on a walk with my wife. They do French for two hours and then they, so they walk into, they get some morning exercise, morning sunshine. And while they're walking they have conversations in French as part of her French class. And then they come back, they do an hour. She's prepping for her ACT, so they do an hour of ACT prep. And then at 11 o' clock I have her. We're taking an MIT class together, so an econ class together. So I'm not teaching it. We're watching these videos and taking these quizzes. She's taking it for a grade. I'm taking it just to be supportive and spend some extra time with her and we can talk about how amazing that's actually been something I didn't expect. And the benefits of taking a class with your kid. I think there are numerous benefits. And then we have lunch together from 12 to 1. And then Monday, Wednesday, Friday we have another two hours of econ. And then in the afternoon when we don't do econ together, she's free to do homework. Typically she'll go to Bounce. We have this big trampoline park walking distance from our home. And so she goes over there and that's where all her friends are around like two or three, all her friends are there. And then she'll come home around seven and we'll have dinner together and she'll typically do some homework in the evening, wrap up, get ready for the next day and call it a wrap.

Super. And I remember last time you spoke you also told me that you set aside a day for family time. Is that something that you're still doing? I am very curious about this topic of family time and how it, it benefits you to be able to spend more time together.

Yeah, yeah. So that, so that was kind of broad strokes. But there are times. So in those afternoons. So for example, Wednesday she doesn't go to Bounce. Wednesday we have what's called wingman Wednesdays, which is time that we spend together to help with like kind of big projects that she's working on. So if she's applying for a scholarship. If she needs help, we're there to, to support. It's again being her wingman. We go on wingman Wednesdays. If it's doing research on Colle might attend. If it's working. She has a keystone project that she's working on, volunteer work that she's doing, tutoring, you know, all these things that like life admin type questions. We have a big chunk of time and so typically we'll go to a coffee shop or there's an ice cream place that we like to sit at. And so we'll be there for a few hours and just chat and help with whatever she's working on if she needs it. Sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes she'll just be working away and we'll do our work next to her and then we have dinners. Like tonight actually I have happen to have a dinner date with her. So we're gonna go nice.

Enjoy.

And we have that like once a month. Just daddy daughter time. Yeah. So we, we plan all this time. I think it's not so much that you have to follow a particular schedule, but I do think it's super important. I don't know how we could do it without having that schedule. I think where I've seen families struggle with, with homeschooling is when they kind of play it by ear. So for us, schedule is, is essential. And we plan out, you know, months and months in adv. We can fit in all the important things that we want to do.

And how much unplanned time does your daughter have?

Yeah, so unplanned time. So she has that time in the afternoon. Good. Three or four hours where she goes to bounce. Sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes she has friends come over, sometimes she goes to friends houses. We are really big advocates of free play. If you look at the work of Peter Gray, he's kind of my intellectual hero when it comes to our parenting philosophy. We're very, very big advocates for free play time for her to just be a kid, to just, you know, get some exercise and chat with friends and hang out and you know, not, not be told what to do from. From teachers or parents or coaches.

Yes. And you've said to me before how important it is to you to be raising an autodidact. Could you tell people a little bit more about what that means to you and how you decided that this was a really important value for you and how you work to instill this. The qualities of self directed learning and autodidacticism in your Daughter.

Absolutely. Yeah. So that, you know, even 10 years ago, when we started homeschooling, even as an experiment, one of the benefits that we saw in homeschool is that you have to make your own path. And so, you know, when a child is very young, the parent needs to help the child decide that path. But even in the very beginning, we never said, here's your class schedule. You have to take math and science and history. Like, we never said that. We said, you know, here's the selection of what you can do with your time. You can do anything you want with your time. You can watch Netflix video all day if you want. That's what you want to do with your time. But here's what's coming. So we're a big philosophy. One of our big philosophies is natural consequences that even when our daughter was very young, we never told her. One thing you'll never hear in our household is when our daughter says, why do I have to do something? The answer will never, ever be, because I say so. Like, because I say so is toxic in our mind. The reason is, well, here's the consequence, right? Because that's real life. If you're mean to people, they're not going to be nice to you, right? Like, there are natural consequences to everything. So even from a very young age, I'm talking six, seven years old, it was, you know, here are the things that you're going to need. Here's the natural consequences to not doing certain things. And so when she asked us, what should I do, what kind of classes should I take? We kind of gave her a framework of math, something in math, something in language arts and. But lots of selection, lots of variety around what she could choose from, and also selection in terms of the method of learning, right? You could learn with various different mediums. You could use a book, you could use videos on YouTube, you could have synchronous learning, you could have asynchronous learning. There's all kinds of modalities to learn. The important thing is that you develop the practice of teaching yourself, right? If the only reason you learn is because of carrots and sticks, if it's all about rewards and punishment, I don't think that really carries over into the real world. So, well, I wanted her to be able to say, I'm interested in something, I want to learn it. How do I go about learning it best? Because I need it, not because someone says I have to. And so that's this whole part of the autodidact philosophy. Because even 10 years ago when we started, we knew that the only thing that was constant is change. That the skills that she's going to need in the future are very hard to predict. And now it's even more prescient because with AI, it's really ridiculous to cram kids brains with information because they have to memorize it, regurgitate it on a test and then that's not real life. In her career she will have these tools that will make facts and figures readily available. That's not what's hard. What's hard is, is learning how to process that information, how to add creative insight to that information, not just pulling up and retrieving information. And there is some of that. She took a AP Chemistry class and passed with flying colors. A lot of that was ingesting information and barfing it out on the test, which we don't love. But that's what you have to do to check certain boxes for college. But we really try and minimize that as much as possible. And even with that, even with a subject that was as hard to learn as AP Chemistry, she had to figure out how to teach herself. Right? We, I could AP Chemistry. I don't know anything about AP Chemistry, nor does my wife. That was a hundred percent. You know, she led that entire process and she got a five on the exam. But she had to figure out how to teach herself that subject if it was important to her.

Absolutely. And Nir, I think you bring such an important point up because a lot of people might be thinking, well, Nir is obviously brilliant, he's a best selling author, he knows math and science. But you know, if you don't feel like you have such a sophisticated knowledge of some of these skills, you still know how to learn. And you, if your child is learning a math concept that you might not know yourself, you can think about how you might learn that math concept if you needed to have it for work or a test. Would you go on YouTube? Would you find a tutor? There's also a lot of free tutoring available these days. And so coming back to that, I also wanted to dig in a little bit deeper on this question of. Because I said so. It occurs to me that a lot of parents have an intuitive sense of why their children need to do certain things like not have five hours of screen time or learn math. You know, they know this is important, but. And you provide this beautiful example in your latest, one of your latest podcast episodes is how to have an Indistractable Summer. And you talk about how you addressed your child's need for more sleep by showing her a study on sleep. And she read the study and then she was convinced that she needed to have a better sleep schedule, which was such beautiful parenting in action. And in this age of information, when a lot of us didn't really learn critical thinking skills very well in school, and when your child says, why do I have to learn math? And you're not sure, where do you go for that information? How do you find these studies and research to help inform your child better?

Yeah, so a lot of it is, I think, being vulnerable with your child. I think a lot of parents, myself included, originally I felt that I had to have all the answers. And then I found the more I kind of let go of those reins and guided the conversation to allow her to think through these things. Right. So that originally we used to say, you have to have a bedtime. When my daughter was much younger. And then she called us out, she said, well, do you have a bedtime? And she was right. I didn't have a bedtime. So one is don't be a hypocrite. That's the first lesson. And by the way, this is the same lesson with technology. A lot of what I write about in Indistractable is about how to be indestractible yourself. And that's the best thing you can do. I hear from parents all the time. My kid uses screens too much. They're on Fortnite or Facebook or whatever. Too much. What do I do? The number one rule is don't be a hypocrite.

Start with yourself.

Yeah, exactly. Because you know, kids come built with these invisible antennae that are constantly searching for when you're a hypocrite. It's called the hypocrisy detection device.

They're very strong.

They are very strong. So you have to let them know that, you know, you're struggling with this as well. And that's fine. So when my daughter invariably said, why do I have to learn this? Why do I have to learn chemistry? I don't want to be a chemist, instead of saying, you just do. Right? I said, you know what, I don't know, like maybe there, I don't know why you need to know chemistry. Let's research this. And then that took us down this bit of a rabbit hole, a detour of, well, okay, what are your long term goals? Like what do you want to do? Like what? You know, you can do anything you want. You can, you can be a doctor, you could be a trash collector, you can be a Politician. I don't care. Whatever you want to do with your, with the rest of your life, go for it. But when she looked at. Okay, here's some things that I'm kind of interested in doing at some point. What, what gives me the options to do those kind of things? Well, you know what colleges need some kind of advanced science. Is that a good requirement or bad requirement? That's a different debate. The point is they do. They need. You need to have an advanced science. Well, why? Well, let's think about why. Okay, you don't want to be a chemist, but they still need you to take chemistry or biology or physics or some kind of advanced science. Well, what might be the other purpose? Well, maybe part of the purpose. What else could. By the way, this is over. You know, I'm summarizing.

This is fantastic. I think it's really useful for people to see how you kind of go down the rabbit hole.

That's the way it works. I tossed it back to her of what could be other reasons. So if it's not about the subject matter, they don't really, you know, your, your college is not going to really care if you really remember how to do some chemistry concept. That. What they're going to care about is did you have the fortitude to stick with a topic for a long time? And so this is, this is what we kind of concluded was that it's simply a test of your ability to focus and stick with a topic. That's all it is. Okay, well, that's a, that's not a bad test because AP Chemistry is really, really hard. It requires a lot of discipline. So that's really what they're testing. Okay, well, now I got. Okay, fine, I get it. But it's never. I know best because, like, you know, by the way, I just want to be very clear. I've never taught her anything. Like, I, I've never sat and taught her a thing. Everything we've done, we've done together. I sit with her and take these classes, but they're taught by experts. I don't know anything about AP Chemistry. I don't. I, you know, I, I'm not teaching her economics. The, the class is teach it. The nice part is we get to discuss it and have these kind of conversations where what's really great. This is what I was alluding to before about. One of the benefits is that I hear a lot from parents who have kids around my daughter's age about how terrible teenagers are. I actually just heard it the other day. I was Telling you how I really wish I would have spent more quality time with my kid when they were young because, man, as soon as they hit 12, 13, they hate you. You're not cool anymore. And I wanted to kind of shake them a little bit because I don't think that's true. I really don't think that's true. I think what happens is that conventional school teaches kids. You know, we know that there's what's called mimetic desire, that you want things because other people want things. And when you put kids in this pressure cooker of clicks and, you know, what do I wear and who do I talk to and what do I eat at the lunch table and all this stuff that they' peers that influence them so dramatically. We know that peers have a huge influence on our children. But when they have the type of environment where they get to spend time with a parent in a way where we're on the same side, right. I think for a lot of people, conventional school becomes kind of adversarial. It's the parents and the teachers versus the kids. We gotta get kids to do stuff. Whereas I don't have that with my child at all. Like, like my daughter and I are on the same side. And in fact, sometimes we together make fun of the teacher. Right? Like this class lecture, it's recorded lectures from mit and there's some parts that aren't so great, but at least we're on the same side. Like we're taking this class together. And I agree, like, oh man, that could have been taught way better. So it really has bonded us in a way, right? Like in the same way that I think kids bond together against a teacher and like make fun of the teacher behind her back or whatever. Like now we have that common bond of we're struggling through this together. So long winded way of saying, I think that's part of it is being very vulnerable with your kid and saying, look, I'm struggling with this. I don't know the answer. Let's talk about it. Let's figure it out together. Let's do a Google search to see what other people say about this topic. And then number two, going through that journey together as opposed to in any kind of adversarial manner.

Absolutely. And I often talk about how when we're homeschooling, school and home are not, not separate entities. It's not that the parent is responsible for the social, emotional life of the child and then they go away to learn. Everything is integrated. So you're spending so much Time with your child, and you have an opportunity to cultivate that relationship. It's much more integrated than when you have these two worlds of school versus home. So this is just some of the.

Tainting, I think, that I got in school. So I went to public school and I did well. But I think the message you get from your peers is that school sucks.

Yep.

Right? That's always the message that go ask a kid in public school or any school. I keep saying public school. Any conventional school, you know, is cool. Is school great, or does school suck? The vast majority are gonna say school sucks because it's a concourse institution. We force kids to go to school, and we don't have that. Like, we honestly, you know, because we ask her, we. Every six months, it's gonna sound ridiculous. We actually have a Google survey that my daughter fills out every six months.

Superb.

She's the customer, right? She's the user of this product of school. So she has to evaluate, like, what's going well, what's not going well, and then we use that as a jumping board to have a discussion about how we can make this homeschool better. So not only is that something that is not typically done at conventional school, the fact that we're on the same side here means that she can kind of compartmentalize the important stuff. Like, I want her to have that positive impression of school. I want her to have high agency, to feel in control of her education, and to honestly enjoy. Enjoy it. Because it's something that she invents for herself. If she decides physics versus chemistry. She made that choice, not me. She decided versus. In conventional school, the way I was taught was, ugh, this sucks. You know, this is awful. And your peers are telling you, and if you, God forbid, raise your hand and say, oh, you know what? I really like school. Oh, my God, you're the biggest nerd. Right? Like, you would never say that in conventional school.

What are challenges, if any, that you are confronting using a homeschooling approach or that you have. Have confronted and overcome in the past?

Okay, So I will say it takes a lot of time. It's a lot of time. And this is why I gave that disclaimer of, I'm not preaching or recommending to anyone because I don't know what other people's situation is. I'm very fortunate. I acknowledge my privilege and that I work from home. My wife works from home. We only have one child. That's a big determinant. I don't know if we could do this with multiple children. A lot of people do. It would, I would really have to think through how we could do this with more than one kid. So that would probably be the biggest challenge, is that it can be a lot of time now. There's been, you know, most of her classes she doesn't take with us. Like I mentioned, you know, AP chemistry, she did 100% on her own. I wanted to do this MIT class with her. It was a privilege. It's a joy for me to do it with her. You don't have to do that. I don't want to scare people away to think, oh my gosh, I have to sit through every one of my child's classes forever and ever. No, you don't necessarily have to. It's something we wanted to. But I think that would probably be the challenge is that I've definitely consciously put my career, my writing on the back burner for the next few years until my daughter goes to college. I only have three years left with her in the house, so that's something I've really prioritized. But I acknowledge that that's a conscious decision that we made. Not every could make that decision.

Could you give us an idea of how many hours a day you and your partner spend on your child's homeschooling?

So I do 11 hours a week and my wife probably does about 20 a week.

Cool. Got it. Superb. It's just wonderful that you've been able to give her this gift. And as I talk about a lot on the podcast, I do think it's possible to homeschool if you have two full time jobs and there are different childcare situations and micro schools and other opportunities for you. So near has made the choice to really devote a lot of time to curating his daughter's education that's worked for his family. But it's absolutely possible to do it if you feel like you have less time. So if you have questions about that, you should definitely reach out to us and we can give you tips.

So yes, just recently put in that much time like this only started with this last semester. Before that I wasn't doing more, it was more my wife, I would say she's probably doing the 20 hours isn't direct teaching, but it's, you know, between coordinating and scheduling and planning and that, you know, all that together. But I, I, you know, I don't want people to think, oh my gosh, I have to put in 31 hours a week with, with my kid. It doesn't have to be anywhere near that much that's just, you know, our choice.

Absolutely. And a lot of parents spend that much time schlepping their kids to after school activities and other sorts of things. So. Okay, so Nir, there's this image of the lonely, anti social homeschooler. Does your daughter have friends?

She has tons. So this is, this, you know. Okay, this is the most annoying part about homeschooling is that everyone's first question is, well, what about socialization? How does she have any friends? And I always say, you should just meet my daughter.

Right, they should. She's amazing.

You better. Like she's, she's very articulate. She's, she's very calm around grown ups. You know, a lot of when I meet people her age, you know, they kind of just sit there like a lump. They don't want to talk to you. They're scared of adults. They're, they're, they're not very social when it comes to people of different ages. That's not my daughter. She's super, super comfortable because I think she has so much time that she spends with, you know, her peers are us. So she can get along. I mean, she just had an internship at a, a pretty prestigious company, a tech company. And like people couldn't believe that she was only 14 when she worked there. She, you know, she was, she was doing great. And yeah, so she's super social. She has lots and lots of friends her age as well. But we had to be very intentional about that. So when we first moved to Singapore, we were lucky enough to pass by this trampoline park. Park called Bounce. And then we were staying in a hotel at the time. But she took to Bounce so much and made so many friends there that we moved. We got our apartment within a 10 minute walk so she can go every day. She goes five days a week. She has gone on weekends. She hangs out with friends on the weekend, but five days a week she's there. And we intentionally got an apartment nearby because we wanted to have that social outlet ready to go. So. So for us it's not a problem at all. And that could be something you could locate yourself near a park or a YMCA or somewhere where kids can congregate and just play. But that was a very conscious decision. Yeah, so she has lots and lots of friends her own age and she's very comfortable communicating with adults as well.

And what about you? I mean, sometimes it can be challenging for parents to meet other people when their children don't go to school.

Well, I don't rely on that. So I have friends from other places. The nice thing is because we really prioritize free play. Your kid doesn't actually have to have that many friends. We would prefer quality over quantity. So she has three really good, reliable friends that every single weekend she has one on Friday night, night. It's always the same friend that either she sleeps over here or my daughter goes over there. And then the rest of the weekend she's usually hanging with one of these three friends or more. Sometimes they hang all together and so she's fully busy as far as I'm concerned. That's not my daughter's problem, how many friends I have. But thankfully I found friends through other outlets as well. And it's not that hard. For example, athletics is something that has made friends. I work out with a group on weekends. I made a lot of friends there and through my career and professional interests, I found a nice community as well.

Wonderful. I know it might seem like kind of a weird question, but so many people struggle with loneliness and it's just good to know that there are other avenues besides school where you can make friends and where your children can make friends. And I will say Nir is not just bragging. I know his daughter a little bit and she is one of the most self possessed, articulate, kind, thoughtful, authentic young women I have ever met. I mean, I hired her to work for me, but she's, she's amazing. She's just a testament to what can be achieved when you are curating your child's education, obviously to her parents as well. So this, I mean, this is just such an amazing overview of your own homeschooling experience. You are an expert on being indistractable and screen time is just, just so top of mind for parents right now. I know that people are just so worried about the mental health crisis that they're hearing about on the news. We can go into that. And whether you feel it's something that's really happening or not or whatnot, and you talk a lot in your book about the self determination theory and needing these psychological nutrients of autonomy, competition, competency and relatedness. And I do want to go into that. But before we really dive into, you know, what is causing overuse of screen time, I would like you to tell us a little bit about what you view as good screen time, bad screen time. Is there too much screen time? Should we stop screen time at all? How do you, in your own life make that decision of what's positive and negative screen time for your child? And what advice would you give to parents.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's great that you differentiate between the two, because screen time alone is a very poor metric. Right.

How.

How can we say that, you know, time spent on TikTok is the same as time spent learning something on YouTube or talking to grandma and grandpa on Skype. You know, that we can't just say blanket screen time. And look, this is screen time. Right now. We're having this conversation.

Energized.

Exactly. So screen time alone. There's nothing evil about screens, and we need to be very, very careful. I think that there's a media narrative that technology is bad, and that's very dangerous for our kids because the jobs of the future will require them to be comfortable and conversant with technology. So we don't want to scare them. Right. This is what we did in the 1980s where we said, drugs are bad. Don't do drugs. Drugs will kill. We. We made it into such a forbidden fruit and so terrible that, you know, then we got these in part, part of the drug epidemic we have today. It's because we weren't honest with kids at the time. This is, you know, my generation about, you know, to be thoughtful rather than to have blanket statements that all drugs are bad. You know, the same with screen time. It's ridiculous, right? It's about how we use our technologies, who is using the technologies, and maybe most importantly, what you would be doing instead of using these technologies. So one of the things that we don't hear about, you know, we hear about the mental health crisis, and there is a lot of data that shows that. That teen mental health is deteriorating. We can talk about that. Some of the more dire predictions, I think, have more to do with how we count these things. We know that awareness of mental health issues is much greater today, but what we don't think about is all the good that these things do. And I think we can't get the good without the bad, right? We know that teen pregnancy is at record lows. Truancy is at record lows. We know that drug use is at record lows. We know that drunk driving is at record lows. All the bad things that used to harm kids, right? All these things are at record lows with the exception of teen suicide. And again, that might be. There's some finer points around that, but that's actually something to celebrate. Because if you think about it, if you wanted to invent a device, a tool to keep kids off the streets, off the roads, and safe at home, hey, you know what? Maybe Fortnite and YouTube videos are not.

Such a terrible thing. Right?

Sure. Because we know that kids today are safer than ever, partially because they don't do a lot of the risky things that people in our generations used to do. So we need to take that in a balanced approach. Now, let's start with the fact that we know that when it comes to age appropriate screen time, there is not even one study, not even one that shows that three hours or less of age appropriate content has any deleterious effects. None.

Even if a child is one or.

Two years old, as long as it's age appropriate content.

Right.

So there's a lot of stuff on the Internet you don't want to show a one or two year old, but it turns out out even at one or two years old, age appropriate content does not have deleterious effects under, under three hours. Okay. Now I think that's a lot. I would have argued that three hours or three hours or more of pretty much anything is, is a warning sign. For a while, my daughter was reading way too much Harry Potter like she was spending all day reading Harry Potter. That's also a problem, right? It's what does it come at the cost of love? And I think that's the right way to approach this conversation. It's not that, oh, screens are bad. Screens are going to mess up your brain. They're, you know, addicting everyone. That, that's, that's mythology. That's not real. It's having a conversation with your child around what comes at the expense of spending time watching YouTube videos, et cetera. So that, that's where to have the conversation. So, yeah, so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's about having these honest conversations for that limited amount of screen time and looking at it as an opportunity cost and then making sure that you empower them. You talked about these psychological nutrients, which I'd love to get into because I think it explains a lot about why kids use more than those three hours. So maybe we should talk about those for a minute.

Let's do it.

Okay, great. So when it comes to really excessive use of devices, what we find is that there's a theory called the needs displacement hypothesis. The needs displacement hypothesis says is that when you're not getting something you're looking for in the offline world, you look for it online. And this happens when kids are deficient in these three psychological nutrients. So this is the work of Desi and Ryan. Self determination theory. It's the most widely recognized, most widely studied, most widely accepted Theory of human motivation flourishing, which says that all human beings need these three things of competency, autonomy and relatedness. So I call these psychological nutrients psychological vitamins. Just like we have, have macronutrients for our bodies, we have protein, carbohydrates and fat, we need psychological nutrients for our mental well being. And if you have these three psychological nutrients, turns out you do fine. If you're deficient, you get all kinds of problems. You get greater rates of depression, anxiety disorder and increased use of devices and other things to take your mind off of these deficiencies. Now how does this work? If you think about competency, we know that around the same time that social media became a thing, something that also happened around that time period was the no Child Left behind act, which in the United States mandates that kids are taught to a test. Effectively, this is what's going on in many school districts. Starting in first grade, kids are tested 3, 4, 5 times a year with these standardized tests. And there's many areas in the United States where teacher pay is tied to, to performance on tests. And so you get these cheating scandals where teachers are doing all kinds of fishy things and where kids are put through very high pressure environments starting from a very young age, where for a subset of the population of children, they are constantly told, you are not competent, you are not good enough. Now, not all kids, but for some kids, we're only talking about the kids who really used technology to an excess degree, use various forms of media. This can help explain that phenomenon. Because if you don't feel competent in the real world, well, you go online and now you feel like a God, right? You feel super competent when you learn how to play a video game, when you get better at something online. Autonomy. Autonomy is this sense of control and agency over what we do. And by the way, this doesn't just apply to kids. All of us need these psychological nutrients of competency, autonomy and relatedness. Well, we know that this is the most scheduled generation in history. There are only two places where you are told where to go, what to think, what to eat, how to dress, who to be friends with. And that's school and prison. And so it's no surprise that when kids come home from school, they want to be free, they want autonomy. We all would, right? And so where do they go for that freedom and autonomy? If they're not getting it offline, they're getting it online. If you put people in cages, they behave like animals. That's what people do in prison, they form gangs. Well, in school we call these Gangs, clicks, right? And they beat up on people and they act terribly because it's not really a natural environment. It's funny, we dog on technology. We say, oh it's TikTok, it's social media, it's this, it's that conventional school is a technology. It's about 150 years old. You know, putting 40 kids in a room with one teacher, that's a new technology also with lots of benefits. It's a great technology, but it's not perfect. And it has downsides. And part of the downside is that it does not give children, I think, think sufficient autonomy. And the third psychological nutrient, relatedness. Now this is a big one. I think we can equate almost all of the psychological damage that we see with kids today. It's not the technology, folks. I've looked at the research. What's really going on is that kids have less time for play. Why? Because the media has convinced people that there's stranger danger and that kids are, you know, threatened and sex trafficked and all this, this fear which is by and large unfounded. Okay, this is the safest time in American history to be a kid. So what happens? It used to be if you go to the neighborhoods around America, you would hear the song of sick of kids playing in neighborhoods. You don't see that anymore. You don't see it anymore. You don't see kids playing outside because all the kids are now forced to be inside. And if you have money, what do you do? You send your kids to Mandarin lessons and swimming practice and Kumon test practice, etc so they're so hyper scheduled that they have no time for free play. And if you look at the work of Peter Gray, it'll blow your mind. He's shown how as play has decreased, mental health issues have increased. And why does this happen? Because play is where we learn our place in the world. It's where we learn to deal with uncomfortable situations. It's one thing if a parent says don't do that. It's a whole other thing if one of your friends, your peers says, hey, if you act like a jerk, I don't want to play with you, you. And so it is critical, the best thing you can do for your kids, mental health starting from a very early age is to let them play. Because play is where we get the psychological nutrient of relatedness interacting with other people. So of course, obviously if you're not getting play in your day to day life, and it's amazing how many parents I hear tell me, you know where does your kid get socialization? And I ask them, well, how much time does socialization? Yeah, how much time does a kid get at school? 15 minutes for recess. Right. Like 30 minutes for lunch. There's no play going on in school either. Right. My kid gets three to four hours of play a day. Right. And she always has since we've been homeschooling. And so that's so important for us to get that psychological nutrient of relatedness. So competency, autonomy and relatedness, those are the critical components that if you look every single time, talk to any psychiatrist out there, there dealing with so called tech addiction, I guarantee you 100% of the time, 100% of the time. The reason that that that overuse is happening is because the kid is missing one of these three ingredients.

Nir. I love this framework of adding psychological nutrients rather than taking screen time away. I just think for myself, for example, competency. I know that as a startup founder, I often notice that, you know, building a startup is a really rocky ride. And when I'm feeling less confident in myself, those are the times that I go on Facebook and see how many notifications that I have. And then for autonomy, how much agency does a child have over their own life? I always encourage parents to involve their children in setting up their school schedule and the activities that they do. How much can you involve your child in deciding how much screen time is right for them? They might not have even thought of it before then. Lastly, relatedness. I just feel like it's so important for children to have three to four hours of self directed learning time where they can explore and play. You mentioned Peter Gray's book, which is really seminal in talking about this need for children to develop critical thinking and cognitive abilities and through play. I really recommend that people check that out. It made a big impact on my way of thinking. So if possible, I'd like to dig in a little bit deeper on this question of screen time and maybe challenge you a little bit if that's all right. Because I know that people are going to have a lot of questions. What do we do when screen time really has gotten out of hand? I know that during the pandemic a lot of parents allowed their children to use screens a lot more than they would like, sometimes out of necessity because they had to work while they were children at home. And in some cases children might have developed severe addiction to screen time or might be playing games like Fortnite 10 hours a day. So what do we do? How do we scale back in this case? And how do we learn how to really manage children's screen time in a way that's healthy for them?

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so a few tips. Yeah, this is great. Let's get very practical here. So assuming that they're using it a safe amount, assuming that it's age appropriate, and now we're talking about how do we, and assuming that there aren't these underlying issues of the psychological nutrient deficiencies that we talked about earlier. Okay, so now we're talking about how do we manage the right amount of screen time, assuming that it's, it's all age appropriate. If it's not age appropriate. Easy answer. Answer. It's a no. Like very clearly you need to have certain blockers on. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, if your child was watching pornography, would you be like, oh, well, he's developed a habit. No, like he's not ready. A child, a young child is not ready for certain content online. That's a hard no. So now we're talking about assuming it's age appropriate. How do we make sure that a child is not over using? So first is to assess those psychological nutrients. And why is that so important? I have never met a child, I've been doing this line of research for over a decade now. I have never met a child who, given the opportunity, given the opportunity to play with real kids in the real world and do something really fun, wants to go back online. They go back online because they're not getting it. They don't have the opportunity. What the heck are kids supposed to do all day when we shut them behind closed doors, what are they supposed to do? So if you're not giving your kid the opportunity. So we have to schedule play. Right now we're very fortunate. We live next to a bounce. But before we lived in Singapore, when we lived in New York, we had to find like minded parents who let their kid come play. And let me tell you, it was hard, it was very difficult because people are so convinced that, well, my kid has to start test prepping at 8 and they need to do ballet and they need to do swimming lessons and they need to do water polo and all this stuff. And they don't realize that just like you schedule all this extracurricular, you need to schedule time for play. So if you can find just one or two other parents, parents that put time in their schedule for play, for free play in person, what you will find is that for the vast majority of kids, I should put a little asterisk that there are some kids who really have some kind of developmental challenge. Maybe it's, you know, there are conditions out there. But the vast majority of children, 99%, if they are offered something with real kids in the real world, that's really fun, they want to do that thing. Now, let's say what happens with the remaining time where they want to go online. I would argue one of the best things you could do do is schedule time for the thing they enjoy. The problem is parents think that it's a sin, right, to let their kids on fortnight or whatever the case might be. They think it's a sin. So we have to restrict it. We have to be very careful with it. And that's exactly how, by the way, you develop all kinds of psychoses like food disorders. If you say, oh, we're gonna keep, don't eat the chocolate. You can never touch the chocolate. Chocolate's bad. It's only to be given as a reward, as a treat. You start giving all kinds of weird messages that can have long term consequences. Consequences. Instead, what you want to do is to say, look, there's nothing wrong with a limited amount of these things done consciously. So we're going to make time for that, right? So how much time would you like to spend doing that activity? So when my daughter was only six years old, we sat down with her and we, and we very plainly told her, as you would to a six year old, right? So we had to talk at her level as well, of, look, you know, there's nothing wrong with. She loved watching episodes on Netflix, right, Of kids shows. Netflix. There's nothing wrong with it. But what does it come at the cost of, right? What could you be doing instead? Well, you could go play with your friends, you could spend time with mommy and daddy, you could make a craft project. There's all these fun things you like to do that you're not doing because you're watching videos. So given all the things you love to do, how much time do you think you'd like to spend per day watching a TV show on the iPad? And she thought for a bit and she said two episodes now, two episodes. Each episode is about 45 minutes. There's nothing really wrong with, you know, 45 minutes or an hour and a half of episodes. That's fine. So we said, okay, okay, fine. But we don't want to be the policeman. We don't want to tell you to stop. How can you know it's time to stop? How can you know that it's been time for two episodes and then you won't watch anymore? She thought for a bit and she realized that we had a microwave at the time. We had a microwave that was under the kitchen counters below the shelf. And it was at her level that she could walk up and she'd seen us do it before and she could use the timer to set an alarm to tell her when the time was up. And so she became the monitor of her own time again, giving her agency and autonomy that she needed. There's that psychological nutrient. Today she still does it. She's 15. But today she tells Amazon Alexa to set a timer for a certain amount of time when she wants to watch YouTube videos or whatever she's doing so that she, she knows she's doing it on a schedule. So not only does she have it in her daily agenda, which is great. Why? Because now she doesn't have to think about it. So we see this with a lot of kids who love playing video games or love watching YouTube or whatever or social media. They're thinking about it all day because they don't know when they will have time to do it, as opposed to saying, and this is a great thing to do for, for adults as well, I do it with my schedule. I know, okay, 8:00pm, that's when I have time for social media and I want to do it for an hour. And there's nothing wrong with it because now I'm doing it on my schedule, not the social media companies. So asking how much time you want to do it and when you're going to do it and having it on a schedule, this is what teaches them to build this skill of becoming indistractable. Because the fact of the matter is if we're the cops all the time telling them what to do, get off your iPad, stop doing this, stop doing that. Not only are we the bad guys, not only does that create a division, a wedge between the relationship. What happens when they go off to college or get their first job? Are we going to be there when they leave the home? No. So we need them to practice this skill for their own well being. That's the most important skill of the century, is the ability to control your attention. This is truly how we control our life.

I just love how you teach executive functioning skills by involving your daughter in this process of choosing how much screen time is right for her and then also the tool that she uses to make sure that that screen time is right for her. It's so interest that as a small child she used the microwave timer and then now that she's gotten older, she turns to Alexa I think that is such a wonderful approach. All right, so now, as we're wrapping up the episode, I want to ask you a question that I ask every guest. I think that on a fundamental level, this show is really about a passion for learning. So what's something interesting that you're learning right now? Ideally, completely unrelated to any of the topics we've discussed today. What's something you're studying or an interesting fact you've learned? Would you be willing to share with us?

What am I learning right now? So I'm always learning. That's why I love what I do as an author. I get paid to learn and go deep on topics, so I'm always learning for my professional endeavors. I think, you know, just because it's top of mind, I've really learned what's to appreciate the time with my daughter in new ways. She's shown me we have very different interests, and it's been great to see things that I didn't previously enjoy through her eyes make them enjoyable. Like yesterday just happened to. Sorry, not yesterday. The day before yesterday was her birthday, and for her birthday present, we went to a pug cafe. I didn't know such a thing existed. It's a cafe full of pugs. There were 11 pugs in this cafe, and my daughter loved it. Right? Best birthday gift we could possibly get her. And I don't. I don't particularly like pugs, but it was awesome. It was adorable. I had a blast. So I never knew how much fun pugs could be, so I'll chalk that up.

So great. I love the pugs. And knowing how to appreciate your daughter is such a wonderful answer to this question. I am also going to have to remember to wish her a happy birthday. A lot of people who have listened to this episode today might be realizing that the first place to start is with themselves, that if they want to teach their children how to be indistractable or really any skill, they need to learn those skills themselves. And they might. You know, some of the parents in our community struggle with adhd. They might feel really overwhelmed. I mean, so. So if a listener today is thinking that they would really like to change some of their own habits, where is the best place to start?

There is a workbook@indistractable.com that you might find useful. So we didn't talk about the model. There's a plan in the indistractable model that is the same way we teach our kids to be indistractable as well as becoming it ourselves. So if you go to indistractable.com, there's a complimentary 80 page workbook you can download. It doesn't cost anything. It's@indistractible.com that's spelled I n the word distract. A, B, l, e. So indistractable.com Fantastic.

I know that I, for one, am going to go straight to indistractable.com after we finish recording today and start going to that 80 page workbook. So exciting. All right, so I hope that I am not throwing too much of a curveball here, but I was thinking it might be fun if you could give our listeners a prompt, for example.

Example.

You know, some people might be really excited to get started. What is one thing they can do this week to move forward in being less distractible? If you could maybe give one piece of advice, one prompt, and then over the week, people can try them, share their stories, and we can share what worked well in our next episode.

Oh, just one. Okay. Can I. Okay, so can I give you. I'll give you four.

Okay. I'll allow it.

Yes. Okay. So the reason I say four is because I spent a decade researching the psychology of distraction. And there is no. There is no. There's no, there's no magic bullet. But if you. Yeah, thank, I appreciate. But, but if you understand the model right, if you understand the strategies, you can figure out the tactics. So the most important four things you can do, number one, is master internal triggers. We talked about, you know, the needs displacement hypothesis earlier. Turns out that 90% of our distractions begin from within. 90% of our distractions begin from within. So learning how to deal with discomfort is incredibly important. If you don't master your internal triggers, they will master you. So understand what to do with boredom, anxiety, loneliness, fatigue. All of us experience this. Our kids experience this. It's about what we do with it. Do we try and escape it with distraction or do we use it as rocket fuel to propel us towards traction? So that's the first step, mastering internal triggers, making time for traction. Right. You can't say you got distracted from something unless you know what it distracted you from. So we have to plan our day, including teaching our kids how to plan their time. The third step is to hack back external triggers. So all those ping dings and rings, there's one thing I think every parent should have as a rule is that nothing that interrupts schedule sleep should be in your child's bedroom. And that includes old technology like radios or televisions, anything that can interrupt sleep, anything that emits light or sound needs to be out of the bedroom because we know how important sleep is. And then helping them hack back all the different external triggers that might prompt them towards distraction. There's lots and lots more of this in the book. And then finally preventing distraction with pact. There are so many technologies out there, most of them free, that we can use to help block out distracting technology. We just have to use them. So that's the four big steps, the four big strategies. There's of course the whole book tells you exactly how to do it step by step, super practical. But those are the four big steps to becoming indistractable.

So we have four great prompts from near today. The first stay present. Be aware when you have uncomfortable feelings that cause you to be distracted. So that might be a meditation practice or simply noting what is causing those in distractions, whether it's related to feelings of lack of competency, autonomy, or maybe you don't have enough time to relate or hang out with friends. So just being present, maybe you might notice something that tends to trigger you. Number two, plan what's important to you. One great thing you could do this week is just sit down with your child and ask them how much screen time they feel is appropriate and and what they want to do to track that screen time. That could be a great thing to try. Take away things that distract you, especially from sleep. So one really easy fix is get that cell phone out of your child's bedroom and yours too. That sleep is just so critical for learning and for happiness in life and so many different levels. And then number four, probably easiest of all, just take advantage of all the great tools available to you. I have a Chrome extension that limits my Facebook time to 10 minutes a day. Near's website, nearandfar.com has a whole list of resources that you can use to help yourself become less distractible. And that takes almost no effort at all. So if you do try something this week, I would really love it if you could email me or share it in the comments so other families can benefit. Let us know if it worked, if it didn't work, and we'll be sharing some of your stories in next week's episodes so everyone in the community can benefit. Nir, it has been such an honor to have you today. I just so appreciate you taking the time and for all of your advice. You are truly a jewel and we are lucky to have had the opportunity to listen to you today. If you would like to learn more about Nir and his work, you can go to nearandfar.com all of his social media links are there. I highly recommend the book indistractable, especially part six, how to raise indistractable kids. Nir has a fantastic podcast. Nearandfar.com Nir, thank you so much for being here today.

My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.