Interview with author Devorah Heitner

People are getting canceled for things they said that maybe they didn't even really consider. People are posting these kinds of streams of consciousness and some of the things that come up in our consciousness that haven't been edited are not great, don't reflect well on us. Their friends can post stuff about them or videos. So how can we deal with these reputation questions? So I started researching that, talking with teenagers about reputation and I thought, okay, there's a book here. Kids are growing up in public. There's a story to tell. And one of the things I realized is that adults are actually surveilling kids too. It's not just kids, kids surveilling one another. Adults are tracking the heck out of their kids with location tracking. You know, Life360, we're tracking our kids grades. We have all these apps where we can see our kids grades in seconds of the teacher is posting, we can see it. So all of that creates a complicated landscape that I think we need to understand better.

Devorah Heidner, welcome so much. Thank you for being on the Near Far podcast. You are the author of Growing up in Public as well as several other books and so just so happy to have you here. You've done so much research over the years around how kids are affected by technology. You lectured on media psychology, and we'd just love to know what the inspiration of this latest book was.

Sure. So I had been talking about my last book, Screenwise for a long time and really helping adults understand how to mentor rather than just monitor and how to look at the quality of their kids screen experience and not just the quantity. So many adults are very hung up on counting the minutes of kids using tech. And a lot of people, educators, parents and other folks who care about kids would say to me, okay, I get it, Dvorah, like I'm here for, you know, not just monitoring the minutes. I'm here for mentoring. But what about the fact that my impulsive middle schooler can blow up their life with a post that is really harmful to their reputation? We've seen it happen to adults. We've seen it happen to teenagers. People are getting canceled for things they said that maybe they didn't even really consider. People are posting these kinds of streams of consciousness and some of the things that come up in our consciousness that haven't been edited are not great, don't reflect well on us. Their friends can post stuff about them or videos. So how can we deal with these reputation questions? So I started researching that, talking with teenagers about reputation and I thought okay, there's a book here. Kids are growing up in public. There's a story to tell. And one of the things I realized is that adults are actually surveilling kids too. It's not just kids surveilling one another. Adults are tracking the heck out of their kids with location tracking Life 360. We're tracking our kids grades. We have all these apps where we can see our kids grades in seconds of the teacher is posting, we can see it. So all of that creates a complicated landscape that I think we need to understand better.

And so if you had a magic wand, you wanted to change something, what would you change? Would it be the technology? Would it be the parents behavior? Would it be the kids behavior? I'm sure everybody has some responsibility here.

What I would change is just because something is possible doesn't mean we should use it. Right. Like some of the technology does make our lives better. And anytime it makes our lives better. That's a great thing to embrace. But we always need to be looking critically at every time we adopt a new app or every time we adopt a new device. Is this actually making my life better or is it adding more stress or is it doing both, which is often the case? And how can I balance the benefits and the joys and pleasures that this is bringing into my life with the stress? I think with location tracking our kids, parents feel like they should do it because it's possible. But it may be adding stress to some families or reducing trust in some families. And therefore I think we should just look hard at. Is this something I really want to lean into? Is this something that I need? You know, at the same time, are there positive uses of Life360? Yeah, I think there are. I think if you for example, have an elderly parent who wanders, you know, and they agree to be on Life360 and you that's an alternative to putting up signs in the community looking for, you know, dad who wants to like, yeah, I think that's great. Should you be monitoring your 17 year old's location when they say they're going to the library? Should you just trust them? I think probably you should, unless you have some really profound reason to worry about their safety.

So that's location tracking. What about tracking what they're doing on social media? What's your take on that?

I think we need to really work with our kids on understanding the risks of social media and the rewards and understanding how the apps are designed to push us toward those rewards. Like you've written a lot about habits versus versus addiction. Kids will say, use the word addiction themselves, which I think they learn from their parents. They'll say, oh, I'm addicted to Minecraft. Well, having a preference for doing Minecraft over doing your math homework is not a true addiction. It's a preference. You know, when you get to the point where maybe if you can't function, if you're not sleeping, you're not eating, I can't diagnose someone because I don't have a psychology degree. Right. My PhD is in media history. But I would be concerned about you. If you stop showering, if you stop leaving your room because you're playing Minecraft, then I would say your habit may be in a more destructive place. But if you just prefer Minecraft or you prefer Instagram to, you know, another activity, but you're able to transition, is that really an addiction? And can you learn habits that help you get to the things you need to do so that you're not only in these rabbit holes with tech? I'm not saying it's easy, but I think using external monitoring alone and not teaching kids how to self regulate does not set them up for success as adults who will need to be part of digital communities.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more there that there's so much we need to look into. And also on the deeper level of what's driving even the kids who use it to a compulsive amount where it's really, you know, a few standard deviations away from the average. Even there, there's usually something else going on. Right. I've never talked to someone who's treating a person with addiction who says there's no other issues, it's just the addiction. There's always something else.

Absolutely. I don't think you take a kid who's functioning completely fine, doesn't have anxiety, doesn't have anything else going on, hand them Instagra or Minecraft, and suddenly you have a kid with tremendous problems or who's relating in a way that's abusive or you know, you don't see social problems just start because a kid added group texts. You know, does the group text in many kids lives exacerbate the existing social problem of being in sixth grade and you know, the kind of meanness that happens around that age. Absolutely. It can absolutely turn up the volume on something that's already happening and if kids are using it as an escape and a lot of kids who have anxiety or have avoidance or have other things going on may turn just as Maybe I, as an anxious teenager, turn to TV as an escape. To a certain degree, it may be a healthy escape or a joyful escape. You have to look at the whole picture of someone's life. If it becomes a situation where they're missing crucial things like sleep, then that's not okay. That needs an intervention. And I would say, if that's your teenager or your tween or your child, yeah, as a parent, you should be intervening. Like, I wouldn't expect an 11 year old who's staying up all night, you know, watching YouTube to self regulate themselves out of that problem. I don't think that's developmentally appropriate. I think as an adult, you need to help your 11 year old by taking their device at night. And.

But it's interesting that we never hear about what technology replaced. And this is the safest generation in history. We think about, you know, when we were, we were more or less the same age. I remember when we were in school, the big problem was drunk driving. Well, that's at record lows. Smoking is at record lows.

There was a smoking room in my high school.

A smoking room in your high school?

Yeah. I mean, we would never see that now. Right, right.

Drug use is at record lows other than cannabis is at record lows. Pregnancy, like teen pregnancy, I remember, like they're constantly telling us about teen pregnancy when we were growing up, and now it doesn't happen. Now you could say maybe there's a flip side there. It's because kids aren't hanging out in the real world that they're not getting into the kind of trouble they used to. But that also has an amazing upside. Right. If you wanted to keep kids safe at home, off the streets, maybe these technologies do have some serious upsides as well.

Yeah. I mean, I wrote a fair amount in the book about sexting. And obviously I think as parents, we're not like, ooh, wait, great, we want our kids to sext. But at the same time, consensual sexting between two kids that stays private is safe sex. Right. Like, they're not gonna get pregnant.

They're not safe.

Sexy.

Interesting.

On the other hand, the privacy and social risks if it doesn't stay private are the things that worry us. Right.

So how do you do that? So how do you say, okay, well, this is much better than what could happen as an alternative if they were actually physically together. But is there such a thing as safe sexting?

Well, I mean, I cite Samir Hinduja and Justin Patchen in growing up in public and they offer kind of tips for what safer sexting looks like. There is really no way to safely share, especially as an underage person, because in most states, in most countries, it's against the law. Right. So legally you're in jeopardy. And I think we can all agree that socially, because digital sharing is so easy, that there's a privacy risk to sending any kind of picture of yourself that crosses that line that's either underpants or no clothes. But yeah, I think that it doesn't necessarily put you in jeopardy if you can trust the other person if they're sharing. So. Oh. What Justin and Samir said is, you know, a picture without your face is less vulnerable to your privacy than a picture with your face. For example, pictures in Snapchat that disappear might be less vulnerable than a picture that doesn't disappear. Although we all know you can screenshot Snapchat. A picture that is racy but doesn't actually show body parts might not actually break the law. It still might not make your mom thrilled if she sees it on your phone. Like anything that's, you know, I think most adults who have children in their lives don't want to see those children in a sexual way. Right. So literally seeing a picture on your phone where they're trying to appeal to a partner or a potential partner, it's gonna be weird. And it wasn't meant for you. So I understand that as a parent of an almost 15 year old, like, I wouldn't want to see that on my kid's phone either. And that's why I shouldn't be looking on his phone. Right.

So how do you approach these conversations to help educate your kids on how to be safer online? But then I guess lots of things could be weird to discuss with your kids. It was weird when we were kids trying to talk to our parents about this stuff. Any advice for how to have these conversations?

I think it's really important for kids to recognize that there are social and privacy risks and they just need to try to think ahead, which is really hard. I mean, the teenage brain notoriously is not wired to think about long term consequences. Short term rewards are going to be like in just the loud blurring part of the brain and they're really appealing. So getting kids to think about whether they're sharing something intimate with someone, whether they're just even in a private conversation. One of the principles I've really emphasized with my own kid and in talking with other teenagers is the idea of mutually assured destruction. You know, if a kid has been in a long Texting, relationship with someone, they've probably both said things that they wouldn't want shared or screenshot. So just getting to the idea of like, we don't do that. We don't blow up people's lives, we don't blow up people's confidence. Even if a relationship, a romantic relationship or a friendship ends, we don't go back and take private communication and make it public. That's unethical. It's not what we would want someone to do to us. We need to recognize there's other people on the other end of all these screen based communications. And that is a thing that I think as human beings it is easy to forget when you're alone in your room, you know, thumbing your phone and making a comment, hitting like. It is easy to forget that there's other human beings who are going to be impacted by what we say. And it's important to remember that. And that's a guiding principle I would really emphasize with young people.

So, yeah, it's part of it. You know, when you read a book like ours, we give parents a checklist. But in many ways what you're saying is it just starts with this ethical value of treating others the way you'd want to be treated. Is that kind of the message? Right.

And never manipulating or coercing someone to share something they don't want to share. Never again sharing something out of anger that someone has said. Again, even if a relationship ends, we still don't like go back to that archive and make things public. We might go to an adult. If, for example, if a kid or a teenager is being threatened by someone or something, then you could take that communication and go to the police if you had to, or go to your parents or go to the school counselor. But just because you're mad at your friend doesn't mean you need to take the thing they said when they were joking about I hate everyone except for Canadians and then say, look how xenophobic my friend is. And you're taking that humor totally out of context. You were playing a game when you said that. It was a comment in the heat of the moment, in the middle of playing strategy game Risk online. That's not something you want to do. Because they could easily take something you said out of context. And even if you see the film, you're so not invited to My Bat Mitzvah, which is a very over the top parody film about teenagers. They have this archive of video of one another that's very compromising, like, you know, snot coming out of the nose and other things. But it's so they're so intimate with one another, the two girls, that they both have these kinds of videos so they don't actually make the decision to share to blow up the relationship. It's one of the parents who's portrayed as technologically clueless, doesn't preview and shares the video publicly, not knowing that it was kind of just being stored as in an angry way by one of the kids. I think it's so important to recognize that kids would almost never do that because they recognize, like, wait, if I have video of you, it's not coming out of your nose. What do you have of me? If we're that close.

Switching gears from the kids to the technology itself. About a month ago there was a lawsuit against Meta from, what is it? Dozens of states, attorneys general, 48. Was it clearly saying that the technology is made to be addictive? Not habit forming, but flat out addictive? And I'm curious, kind of what responsibility do you think the tech companies have here?

I think the tech companies have not responded to people when they complain. So when folks complain and say, hey, my 11 year old was too easily able to make an account when they're supposed to be 13 and up and it's very hard for me to police it because they have a device at school and they can go around me and access these apps in all these places and they can see content that might encourage disordered eating or violence against self, self harm. Those things are very concerning. And I think families and adults who care about kids feel like the companies have not been responsive to complaints about kids getting bullied, about nudes being shared underage and being shared in a way that's wielding as a threat, where someone is not consensually sharing another person's image and when they're not responsive, when they don't lean into prioritizing supporting their users. I have a lot of empathy for individuals, school districts and states who are saying, enough, we're suing. You're not listening to us. When you make these layoffs, it's clear that the content moderation people and the bullying response people, the harassment response people, that's who's getting laid off. So I don't know if the lawsuits will have the intended effect, but I do understand the user frustration because it's very hard to live at this point without using a Meta product.

Yeah. Why do you think it might not have the intended effect?

I just don't know if, like, what will make these companies change? Like I Would love to just see more competition, more variability, more products that are maybe designed for young and emerging users. I didn't love Facebook kids. I tried the messenger product for kids during the pandemic when my own kid was 11. I didn't love it. But I just think if the companies were less of a monopoly, we might just see the world kind of come into a place where there were just more opportunities and choices to be made versus feeling like as an author, like, do I really have a choice about Twitter and Instagram? Like I kind of need to be in those places. Like there's not some alternative.

Yeah, but I guess for kids it's Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. Yeah, kind of the trifecta. But you think they're all too similar to really provide much choice. But it's interesting because one of Meta's proposals was Instagram kids and I don't think that even got off the ground because what they were saying was we want a safe place for kids got interpreted as well, you're just trying to create an on ramp for future adults. What's your take?

I mean, I think this is how capitalism works and they do want to create an on ramp. Sure. I don't believe that there's a really good privacy loving, you know, as a privacy loving Gen Xer and sort of like more on the side of probably like Electronic Frontier foundation than, you know, someone who wants to see age. You know, I don't know if I want people to have to have a passport in use to use Instagram at the same time. Age verification in both directions seems like a problem. Like if your 12 year old kid joins a discord group for 12 year old girls and you want to know there's no 48 year old men in there. Like I kind of feel like age verification would be relevant in an upper direction as well as the lower direction because there's a lot of like youth focused groups on the Internet, especially in places like Discord where frankly there could be adults who are have problematic reasons to want to communicate with young people. So I don't have an answer. Like age verification does seem really invasive and making people use that kind of ID to get online limits some people like, what if somebody's stateless, does that mean they can't have an Instagram account?

Do you think 13 is too young for the current. Just to fill everyone in COPPA compliance.

Says it's 13, but nobody thinks 13 is the ideal age to be in a sharing and comparing machine. So COPPA is really about Advertising. And theoretically we're not tracking kids under 13, although we know kids under 13 are tracked by algorithms and kids are joining server based games like Roblox and they're getting tracked in all kinds of ways. I don't think 13 is the ideal age for social media because there's already so much going on socially. It can be, I think, a really rough age to be shared and compared. I think 13 for a lot of kids, that's eighth grade. That's like the nadir of judgment in terms of social. Like, if I think of the cringiest, meanest I ever was to anyone, it was probably eighth grade. And so when parents talk about waiting till eighth for a phone, you know, I think there are like fifth and sixth graders that are probably a lot more compliant and more open to being mentored on how to use a phone. I think eighth grade is a really rough time. So again, I don't have the perfect answers to any of these questions.

I agree. I think it drives me nuts when parents tell me about, oh, my kid won't get off of Instagram and TikTok or whatever and, well, how old's your kid? 10. The company is telling you not to let your kid use this app before 13. What are you doing letting your kid use it at 10 years old? So definitely not before 13. And I agree, I think well into high school is a much better age. What are you seeing in terms of adults? I know a lot of your research, your books have focused on kids, but I'm curious what your opinion on how adults can use technology better.

I think all of us need to just really self examine around our use of technology and especially around our identities, like, who are we? And as adults, our identities are fluctuating less intensely than a teenager. One of the reasons, and Dana Boyd has talked about this, that Facebook may be more comfortable for adults, whereas Instagram might be more appealing or Snapchat for kids is that Instagram and Snapchat are more of the moment and Facebook is more about the archive. And as an adult, I could see a video of myself from five years ago. I'm probably still wearing the same sweater. I still think a lot of the same things are true. Like my ideas hopefully have evolved a little bit. I hope. Hopefully I'm not in total stasis, but I'm not like a completely different person.

Five years from 13 to 18.

Yeah, but 13 to 18 is like completely different person territory. And you could find what you said even two years ago incredibly cringy and awful. So in that way I feel like adults need to look at, you know, am I playing to the likes? Am I using footage of my own family? Am I trying to make my family life seem perfect? Am I trying to make my career seem perfect? And I think, you know, I know enough other authors where we can kind of joke about, like, what we have to do on social media to try to, like, make it look really fun. You know, I just finished my book tour and, like, I have lots of pictures of me, like, in bookstores, but I also have a lot of, like, sad stories, you know, that I'm not telling. I'm performing a certain experience on social media, and I think it's really good to make sure that you can keep that in perspective, whether you have trusted friends that you can kind of laugh about it with or whether you can take breaks. I totally agree with you about not, you know, sort of completely unplugging, but I sort of find that if I have periods where I go very lightly on social and I let my intern do it for me or I don't do it at all and I can feel okay about that, then I enjoy it more when I'm feeling like it.

Do we have a responsibility to show the whole truth, you think, or just another outlet to share the dark sides?

I don't know if we have a responsibility to do anything. We don't owe people anything. I mean, I think the current conflict in the world is one, for example, where so many people, like, I have a friend who runs a sex toy shop, and she felt like she had to post because she has a big public Instagram about Israel and Palestine. And I was like, you really don't have to. You don't have to. Like, you are not. You don't work for cnn, you know, like, this is not your job. And I think it's so important to not feel obligated. Like, if, you know, if you're a parent and you're struggling, you don't have to post those struggles or make it look like your family' always on the top of a mountain with your hair blowing in the wind. You don't have to do anything. None of us owe anything to anyone. And I think, especially when kids become influential at a young age because they've built some kind of platform or something they did went viral quickly, which can happen to kids now. I think they feel that obligation. And I've seen adults feel that way too. Like, oh, I have all these, you know, TikTok or YouTube followers. I must, I must, I must. And it's like no, you don't owe them anything.

Yeah, but how do you balance that? Because, you know, we've heard this, that evil thrives when good people do nothing. So part of it historically we have this obligation to have an opinion on everything and counteract every evil we see in the world or we're complicit. On the other hand, are we really, do we really have to have an opinion on what are we qualified to talk about? Does the woman who owns a sex shop really need to have an opinion about this? How do you balance that? How do you personally balance that?

I think it's really important to share things that you think are useful that can actually help people. And when you think you would potentially do more harm or when you recognize that you aren't really qualified to have an opinion, that there's just more going on than you could know. To always say like, this is the limits of my knowledge, like even within kids and media, which is my expertise, if someone says is my kid addicted? I would always say, please go see a psychologist, sit down, have your family talk with someone. If you're even asking that question, your family is probably suffering enough that a little therapy won't hurt. If you're even asking that question. Right. You're having enough conflict around this issue. And I just think it's really important to go to people who are actually experts on things and tune into those channels and not feel like all of us have to be experts. And I also think what we accomplish by posting on social is less than we might think. And I would, I mean even for someone like you who is influential because you have a big platform, people are tuning in because that's what they want. Like if they want to know about being indistractable, they're going to follow you. Right. But that's a space specific group of people that's not necessarily everyone in the world. And I think to believe that for any of us that if we're posting on social we're influencing the world and not just people who are tuned into us in the filter bubble is probably an overstatement of the power of social media.

Right, right. And I think it really does affect your mental well being when so much of what you can't control you think is in your control that you really, that some politician in some other country actually gives a shit what you think or what you posted about is the epitome of narcissism, I think, in some ways.

And it makes you feel worse. One of the things I talk to young people about, But I think a lot of adults would benefit from this is if something outrages you and you post in response to that outrage, it just feeds the outrage. Whereas if you do something in your community, like maybe you're outraged by a policy toward refugees, but if you go bring coats to the police station where people are sleeping because you believe that's the right thing to do, you will feel better, you will have done something, someone will be a little warmer because you brought that coat. Whereas if you post in outrage in response to someone who says something horrible, you just feel worse and you feel more alone. So anything that you can do that brings you into the world, that's actually an effective action and maybe brings you into contact. So I would say to a high school kid, if someone's posting and saying you disagree with climate change isn't real, you can outrage comment, but they're not gonna take down their YouTube channel. They are deeply entrenched in that belief and in what promulgating that belief is bringing to them. So nobody's gonna be like, oh, Devorah in Illinois says I'm wrong. I'm gonna take down my channel now. I'm gonna stop this.

I wish there were more forums for where we don't have 100% conviction and well researched and a PhD in something for those other topics, as opposed to posting whatever memetic theme we're going to reverberate. We had an offline forum to ask others. For example, in Singapore, I had a lot of Singapore friends who asked me about the Palestinian Israeli conflict. And so as opposed. Well, let me force this opinion down your throat. We got together a bunch of people and in person kind of did a perspective sharing, okay, what's this side say? What does that side say? And everybody left understanding that there's no easy answers. And I think if there's one thing that unfortunately legacy media as opposed to social media emulates, it's not so much the echo chamber, it's the dumbing down of stories. We really like simple stories, tech good, tech bad. This side good, this side bad. It's very. What we've killed is nuance, right? That when you hear both sides, you say, okay, they've got some good points, they've got some good points. But on balance, I believe more of this than the other, as opposed to, we need to be very polarized as opposed to saying, you know what, these issues are complicated because of all this complexity and nuance here, and social media.

May not be the best place to hash them out. I mean, I have been in some small circles in social media or group text, where I feel like good work happens along those lines. But even there, it's just so tricky. It's so easy to take one comment out of context. It's very easy to get reactive rather than responsive. And when you're in the room with people, I mean, here's both of us. Like we're both so interested in technology, but the more potential for harm a conversation has, I think the more important it is to think about doing it in person too. If you know that someone could leave like terribly offended or really with a deep misunderstanding of your beliefs or their beliefs, or you know, feel misunderstood, it's so important to do it in person.

Right? Or maybe a different tech channel. So maybe it's not social media, maybe it's a podcast where it's a long form you get to hear, you know, on episode one, you hear one perspective, on episode two, you hear the other perspective.

I do think some really deep dives, like I really love the podcast School Colors, which is like a really deep dive into a conversation around gentrification in a school. Or I really love Dashka Slater's new book Accountable, which is like a five year study of an Instagram account gone horribly wrong in a school in Albany, California, near Berkeley. And the kids posted these really terrible racist things in a small closed Instagram account. And then it became public that someone sort of exposed it. And then, I mean, a lot of she and I have talked and a lot of what she wrote about, I'm also writing about and growing up in public and I'm writing sort of, how do you deal with that? And her book is kind of a case study of like what not to do. Like at every turn there were terrible mistakes made in how to handle the situation. The kids who perpetrated were exposed to physical violence. The book was excerpted and the New York Times is really worth a read. But the depth in which she talks to the people on every side, the kids who were directly targeted and harmed, the kids who were bystanders, the kids who did perpetrate and make the account, the teachers, some of whom witnessed things that were really problematic, just that level of reporting is such a different. Whereas if you had seen one article about this when it came out, you would think, oh, well, I know what happened here. And the more depth, whether it's a podcast or a book that takes five years to research and write, I do think that's helpful. But a lot of times we don't have time, we feel pressured I need to have a quick take. I need to make my Instagram reel today.

Right, Right. If we can. Time. I'm a big advocate of timeboxing, but if an issue really matters to you, before you post about it, timebox reading. Maybe two books, read on one side, read on the other side so that you can. I like the test of you don't advocate for a side until you can explain the other side. Well, until you can do that, then you really shouldn't be advocating for your side either. But I'm curious to know, back to more advice, and I know it's hard to bring everything down to actionable tips, but are there more pieces of advice that you might give to individuals or parents in terms of what do most people do that you think we should do better?

I think looking at your own tech use and especially looking at what apps bring me joy, what apps help. I mean, so simple. But the Google Calendar, I feel like has revolutionized family life for me. I think about all the times my parents, like, you know, left me sort of by the side of the road. Like, I was, like, stuck somewhere because my parents didn't. Couldn't coordinate as easily, and it was more difficult for them. They didn't have these tools. And I love sharing a Google Calendar with my husband. I can kind of look at my week and his week. And as much as I try not to overfill my own week and part of my practice has become about leaving white space, I also have to look at family white space. And so, like, if he's on deadline, do I also want to be on deadline the same week? Because we're a system.

Yeah, absolutely. I call this schedule syncing.

Yeah.

I love it.

To me, it's like, how full are we all? If it's my son's finals week and my husband's on a huge deadline and I have the opportunity to do a big speaking gig that week or the following week, Maybe I'm gonna go with the following week because I know that in a family of three, it would be good if one of us is incredibly stressed.

Yeah. Do you do this with your son as well?

To some degree, but we're just kind of bringing him into scheduling. But I do think calendaring is one of the hidden executive function skills that schools don't teach. Even when kids are on an explicitly executive function focused curriculum, I don't see them helping kids break down projects into time.

For example, it's amazing what schools don't teach. Like, this is the macro skill you need to learn how to manage your time and attention. And I never learned that in school.

And in fact, I think the digital syllabi, like Canvas rather, which he uses at his high school, it breadcrumbs out everything so much that you can't really look ahead. So as a former college professor, I'm used to the idea of a syllabus where you could absolutely see, when are the big projects due? And kind of work your way back and figure that out. And what I see with a lot of high schools now use systems like Canvas, and there's a million other ones where you're just breadcrumbing. Like, I see this little piece I have to do on Tuesday and a little piece on Wednesday, but what if I have a cross country meet on Wednesday and I want to do it all on Tuesday? I should have that opportunity. But you actually only see three days ahead.

Yeah, in the workplace, they're going, yeah, you're gonna see the big picture. Not just, okay, I need you to do the half a day of work and half a day of work at a time.

I don't like the breadcrumbing. So I think helping kids kind of get past that, whether it's by homeschooling or resisting. There are times where I've actually purchased for him the actual book because they also want them to read online a tremendous amount. And I know that that could be distracting for a lot of kids. So if it's a long book, we'll just get the book. So old school technology. And another thing is just thinking about, do people view you in a way that you feel aligned with? Like, am I sharing about myself in a way that I actually feel aligned with? Do I feel comfortable with kind of the picture of how I'm putting myself out there? And I think that's a question for all of us. And I've had to ask myself that too, you know, and knowing how much we might be filtering, like, a certain aspect of ourselves onto LinkedIn versus Twitter versus Instagram, for example, and thinking like, like, does this feel integrated? Does this feel consistent? Do I like this? Is there any way that I'm caving to competition or pressure and just making sure it's not making you feel bad? So for me, that's the big self regulation. I mean, yeah, putting it away before I go to bed is also good.

Yeah, yeah, we talk about it. We talk about the harms more than the goods, because that's what we feel viscerally. But if we don't make a plan for what to do about that, we just Keep wallowing. It.

It.

I'm curious, switching gears a little bit around, are you seeing anything with kids and relationships? It sparked this idea because you talked about what kids aren't learning in schools. And I think one of the things that we don't learn in schools is how to have relationships.

Right.

How to have conflict resolution. We don't really formally learn that. So I'm curious, do you see technology changing? I don't know. The way kids date, the way that in college, how do they form long term relationships?

Is that changing? I think even the group texts show that kids are really struggling with conflict resolution, and they're doing a lot of, like, screenshotting and showing it to their parents or screenshotting one another and kind of appealing to others. Like, am I the rightest or the wrongest? A lot of therapists say that their clients will bring texts into therapy because they want to be validated. Like, I'm the rightest, this person is the wrongest. I find that so interesting. I mean, I understand the desire to be validated, of course, but in some ways, it doesn't matter if you're the rightest or the wrongest. Like, you have to kind of move forward in the relationship. And so I do think kids need more practice in that in school, and adults need more practice in the workplace. One of the things I worry about with all the remote work, even though I embrace it, it supports my own family life. Like, I'm happy to be working remotely at this stage, but I'm also glad I had many years in collaborative offices with people, because you can solve a problem more quickly. Walking over to someone saying, hey, are we okay? It seemed like I could see your face in that meeting. I could see you weren't happy with the outcome. Like, do you want to talk about this versus everything? Being on Zoom, it seems like it can kind of limit the opportunity to have real conflict resolution, which is also growth. Like anytime you're in a conflict in a relationship and you get to a yes, that often means the relationship has gotten to be deeper.

Right, Right. And also for future mates.

Right.

I mean, people meet each other and get married after meeting in the workplace. How does that happen?

Over.

If we're all working from home over Zoom, where do you get that?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I was introduced to my husband. I wasn't. And we were set up. But a huge portion of our social life, he's a journalist. Are people he met working in newsrooms. Like, tons of people we're friends with. And a theater that he worked at. I have a few friends as well from like my museum days and other things. So I just feel like a huge portion of my social life is not from university, but from post university jobs in the first maybe 10 to 20 years of my career.

I don't think it's impossible. So we homeschooled my daughter since first grade and we've worked from home for the past 11 years. But we have definitely made an effort. Like we have this kibbutz that we get together of other couples and talk about life issues, but we've definitely had to make more of a concerted effort compared to when we used to work at the office. It just happened. Social engagement. Oh, what are you doing after work? Okay, let's go get a drink or something. Now we definitely have to plan ahead for that stuff, which is not impossible, but it's a value. I think it's a. A sea change that we, if it's important to you, if that matters in.

Your life, has to be planned for.

It doesn't happen spontaneously.

I also think that in some ways our relationships at work can be so fulfilling, like some of my relationships with other authors, that I forget that I, like, want to have friendships outside of work that don't, you know, that our people like. One of my good friends, I just moved to this community two years ago, and we moved during a pandemic, so it was harder to meet people. But one of my good friends I met was at transfer student laptop pickup day at the middle school, and we started walking home together. Another mom in the community, and our kids are a year apart. They're not in the same grade. They've never really met. They're not friends. So it's not like she's like a mom friend I met on the playground. I literally met this woman at laptop pickup day, but she's an actor from LA who moved here during the pandemic, like I moved here during the pandemic. And now we're friends. And it feels really great to have some friends that are not work friends. Right. Because so much of the work at this point, I find that the zooms often turn to personal. You're on a work zoom. I'll be talking to a head of school, but then they'll tell me about their own kids and we'll end up in a whole conversation. And that fills some of my social need. But it's not the same as having a local friend to go for coffee with. And I don't want to fill all my social need with Just talking to my clients.

Can you orchestrate more of those spontaneous moments? How do you do that?

I don't know. I mean, I think it would be nice if I went back to the gym or yoga or something. But I have been on the road a lot and I think for me travel, work, travel even more so interrupts that. The flip side is there's always the principle of the friends who you do see when you're in town will make time for you. So I'll go to New York or LA and people who might be sort of too busy doing air quotes if I lived in LA will like make time because I'm speaking in LA for three days and it's like that narrow window focuses people as you've written about that idea of like, oh, I'm available right now. And so my LA friends will do things that they would otherwise never do like leave their neighborhood in LA and drive in traffic and see me. So I do appreciate that aspect of being on the road.

Yeah, very true. So what are you working on next?

I don't know. I am doing a bunch of tech consulting. I mean I'm eight weeks out from this book coming out, so it's still really new and I'm helping a lot of schools rethink their curricula, especially around damage control, reputation, what can go wrong? Dashka Slater, who I mentioned earlier, and I are doing some teacher workshops together helping schools hopefully navigate this stuff better. But I don't know what's next. Maybe some tech consulting.

Tech consulting for.

I would like to help apps be better for families, for kids. So I've done a little bit of conversations, I've done some work with Google Family and I want to be helping tech companies do this better because I do think they want to be better. I really believe that most of them want to be better. I'm not sure if every company out there is truly interested in their users happiness and safety, but I think a lot of them are for sure.

For sure. I've gotten many calls and I don't do it for money because I don't want the perception that I change my opinions because they pay me so many times. I'll tell them my advice for free.

Right.

I seen consistently that they understand that if they burn people out. Right. If people overuse their products, they don't moderate people tend to quit altogether. Right.

That's what I heard. And I will say TikTok was the most frequently quit app when I talked to teenagers, very few of them would quit an app like Instagram or discord, they would say, oh, I took a break or I'm not using it as much. A lot of kids don't post to their grid on Instagram now and they'll just use direct messaging or maybe post to their stories. So they've reduced their sort of use of what I would say is what seems like the main part of the app for a lot of adults. So you'll look at a kid's Instagram and they won't have any pictures on the grid or one picture. But with TikTok, kids would get to that level of frustration. They would feel like, you know what? I blew my really important AP physics test and I had to retake it and I'm really frustrated with myself. So I'm just getting rid of this app.

Yeah. And that's such a great test for whether you are addicted or not. You know, people, other authors saying, oh, you know, that's stealing our focus and there's nothing we can do about it and it's all happening to us. But then if you are able to sit at the table with your family and have a conversation and you are able to take a break or you are able to write a book, then you're not really addicted.

Right.

Maybe you overdid it, maybe you indulged, maybe you were distracted. But knowing that you can take those pauses is so important from a self efficacy perspective.

Absolutely. And so when kids said, I quit TikTok, or I took it off my phone, which for a lot of kids is pretty much quitting, even if they didn't close their account, I would listen to that. I mean, I think that's really interesting. And I think it is probably more effective to have a kid get to the point of quitting themselves than have someone make them quit because they perceive it as a problem. At the same time, I think as parents, especially of emerging adults, it is always a question of like, how far do I want to let this become a problem for my kid? Like, if I do see it interfering with school, do I want to be the one who steps in or do I want to let them see it and potentially live with those consequences? And I don't have easy answers for that. As a parent, I think I've done both. Honestly, there have been times where something has been problematic. Not really tech use for my kid, but something else where maybe I have stepped in and been like, okay, this has to change. And other times where I've been like, let's see how it goes.

Yeah, yeah. And how often is it with the Folks you've worked with, how often is it this deeper issue of overusing technology because there's something crazy happening at school, like bullying or cliques or all the other drama that happens at school.

I think with TikTok specifically, some kids did feel like it was really hard to walk away from that. The algorithm was really good. They really did feed them, and the really short videos just were. And again, I'm not on the sort of dopamine nation side of things where I think it's all the chemical in the brain, but the kids had a pretty convincing argument that for some of them, TikTok really fed something, that it seemed to bring them joy, but in the big picture of their lives, it didn't meet their goals. And they were walking away because they didn't feel like they could. And I didn't hear from them that TikTok was a place they were going to for respite from anxiety about exam stress or getting into college or relationship issues, as much as they just really, really liked it until they really didn't.

You're right. And it's not that different. I mean, I would spend hours watching television and stupid stuff, you know, clicking. And sometimes it was. I remember as a teenager, you know, we got cable. Cable was a relatively new thing, and, you know, just surfing. Right. Channel surfing. That's what we called it. Channel surfing of, you know, going up and down the channels and not watching much of anything. That's actually pretty much TikTok. It's not that different. Maybe the content's more engaging and bite size, but it's really not that different.

Yeah. On the other hand, there are kids who have tremendous platforms in places like TikTok and Twitter X, where they're able to speak truth to power in these incredible ways. Like when you see young activists using these. Incredibly, the potential to go viral is there. And I interviewed some young activists for growing up in public who were using at the time. Twitter was a big one for them. I don't know if that's gonna still be the case, but I was amazed at think about a way for young people. Like, in what other time or place could young people have their voices heard by that many adults, by that many people in power, and be able to say, like, in the case of Caitlin Zavato in Chicago, we need more mental health professionals in schools than cops. We need the police out of schools and counselors in. And she could tweet about it and go to street protests as well, but then go viral because someone shared what she said at the megaphone in this bigger way and have this very public voice as a 14 or 15 year old. That's an incredible thing. And so I think the power of social media for young people is what.

Could she have done a generation ago? Written to the newspaper? No way she would have this kind of impact.

Yeah. I mean, when you see young people in the 20th century who were that impactful, their bodies were on the line. I mean, there were kids who were, you know, beaten in jail in the civil rights movement. I mean, some of the people who were jailed were 14, 15, and they were very impactful. But if that was your kid, you'd rather they're on Twitter, right?

Right.

Safer, for sure.

So the moral of the story, the big takeaway, is it's complicated, it's nuanced, which is like all interesting subjects in life. Right. If it was simple, it wouldn't be interesting. So thank you so much for joining me. Really appreciate it. Devorah Heidner, your book again, Growing up in Public. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.