"Teach skills before screens."

-Emily Cherkin

Show Notes

Hillary (00:02):

My guest today is an internationally recognized consultant. However, when I say consultant, don't think traditional business model, you see, she started a business called the screen time consultant in the greater Seattle Washington area. And for the past 15 years, she's been the one who schools called and families summoned to help navigate the challenges in our distracted digital age. She is awesome. She's been featured on Good Morning America, the today show and been in many publications. I, I kind of can't believe I'm talking to her and I can't be more thrilled to have her here today. Welcome to the healthy screen habits podcast - Emily Cherkin.

Emily (00:45):

Thank you. Thank you, Hillary, for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Hillary (00:49):

Oh, I'm excited you are here. Okay. Before we get kind of going into the meat of what we're going to talk about, can you, I mean, you've been doing this gig for a while. Can you kind of tell me what's what led you to start the Screentime Consultant business?

Emily (01:07):

Yeah, so I'm actually a classroom teacher by training. So I spent 12 years teaching middle school. Seventh grade was my jam. I loved seventh graders. And what I started to notice about, well, when I first started teaching, none of my students had smartphones, of course, like one or two kids had a flip phone. And then within the decade, I stayed at one school. I saw a huge shift in, you know, no smartphone to, by the time I left 10 years later, 98% of the kids had smartphones. And over that decade, what I started to realize was the early social media stuff was coming in. And it was like Facebook when kids were on Facebook, remember that not anymore, that was for moms and grandmas. And they would come in and they talk about all these things that they'd seen on the, you know, on the social media.

Emily (01:53):

And they would talk about parties. They'd been left out and stuff got mean. I mean, kids were creating, like I hate so-and-so pages. And I realized like this is really affecting their emotional wellbeing, their relationships with each other. And it's completely derailing any lesson planning I have because they're complete, they're so fixated on what's happening out in this cyber world.

Hillary (02:13):

Right.

Hillary (02:14):

So I realized I had to start talking about it. So I started asking them and I wanted to know like, what's going on and how, how are you navigating this? And it seems like it's taking a lot of your energy and intention. And we had some really great conversations. And for a while I sort of was on the like, well, you really need to monitor that. You know, you don't want to be on it too long and it's not so good for you and all of this.

Emily (02:34):

And then they started telling me stories about their parents. And they were like, well, my dad texts and drives all the time. Or my mom is constantly looking at her phone or playing a game. And it's like, it's not just us. And that's when I realized, okay, this is not a kid challenge. This is a parent challenge. Right. And I need to be able to help parents. And so, as I pivoted out of classroom teaching, I've been doing some parent education nights at the school, but I realized there's a market. There's an audience who needs help here because we don't know this is totally different from anything in our childhood and even our young adulthood. And so that was, that was sort of the impetus to start. The consulting business was to say, I can offer these, this support and advice to schools and to parents. So I'm going to do that.

Hillary (03:20):

Right. And one of the focuses of your business that I really identify with and us at healthy screen habits identify with is this difference between being tech intentional versus anti-tech. And can you, can you kind of like talk about what's the difference between that for people who are feeling like, you know, I, I'm scared to let my kid have a phone, therefore I'm going to put everything in a box, but I don't recommend that. And can you talk about them?

Emily (03:51):

Yes. For sure. I always open my talks by saying my philosophy is that I am not anti-technology. I am tech intentional. And what I mean by that is there's a time and a place for the tool and that technology and all of the things that come with it is, is multifaceted. I always, I like to say too, it's like a Swiss army knife, not a switchblade, right? Like it's got all of these different things we can do with it. And so, yes. Right. And so if we treat it like a switchblade or we just say knives aren't for children, then we're not, first of all, equipping them with any skills where, when they do come across it, because they will, and then we're also lumping it all into this. All good, all bad binary, which is problematic on many levels. If we say chocolate is bad, do you, are you never supposed to enjoy a piece of chocolate? Right? Maybe you shouldn't have chocolate every single day for every single meal. Okay.

Hillary (04:39):

Or, or little chocolate every day is okay, come on. Let's not get crazy here, Emily. Okay.

Emily (04:47):

What I say to parents who they ask me all the time, how much screen time is too much screen time. And I say very unhelpfully a little bit is okay. And a lot is too much the issue. Isn't a little bit of screen time. The issue is excessive screen time. And even that can mean a whole lot of different things.



Hillary (05:03):

Early on in the pandemic, very early on like March 20, 20, you were featured in an article in the New York times that the title was Corona Virus Ended The Screen Time Debate ---- Screens Won. And I have to tell you, I had this kind of visceral response to that title because mostly because just exactly, like you said, it boiled down the issue of screen time to this win lose scenario. And for people like you and us at Healthy Screen Habits, who do the work of create, trying to create for tech intentional practices, it seemed super dividing and super binary. You make the point in this article that ed tech companies were jumping on the opportunity. And so I have to ask you the question that is like the million dollar question that I don't even know if we know the answer to yet, but knowing that digital platforms have provided a lot of instruction during this time is online education working?

Emily (06:28):

Oh, that is the million dollar question. So let me be really clear about one thing. That's often glossed over in these stories and it just said it a minute ago, and I'm gonna say it again. Issue's not a little bit of screen time. It's excessive. And what is excessive for one kid may look really different for another. And the problem with online education has been, and it's not that online education didn't exist prior to the pandemic. I I'm speaking specifically to what remote learning sort of for the last 12 months has been. But, you know, there's a huge range in quality and application. And every, even within a school, different teachers have done different things. Even if the school said do it this way, teachers are still masters of their craft. The problem is, is also that is that kids also don't respond the same way.

Emily (07:15):

So, you know, one of the big challenges is that prior to the pandemic, you know, the American Academy of Pediatrics had some recommendations about screen time limits. Well, forget it. I mean, if your kids are now spending six hours online for remote learning, what does that mean for that entertainment piece? You know, and I, I can see in my own household, my two children's very different experiences with remote learning. You know, one was incredibly passive, just listening all day long, not moving in a chair. And another child had creative teachers who only met twice a day for an hour and a half. They were on their feet doing theater games, drama, dance, music, art, like it was all about the relationship

Hillary (07:54):

I could not agree more. I've seen the same in my own household.

Emily (07:57):

Exactly. And you know, my husband came up with this great analogy and, and I will say, I think there's a small subset for whom remote learning. Actually might've been an improvement over regular schooling. And I, you know, I think it's okay to have an option for that for a small select group. That's really a known entity like that. We identify as this is better for them, but I don't think that means we shouldn't continue to make schools better. Right. For everybody, that's what they should be. And my husband had this great analogy that he said, you know, last, last spring, remote learning was the lifeboat that we needed to keep kids connected to their teachers, like to kind of get us through the spring. But a lifeboat is not long-term housing, right? No one, right? No one is supposed to live on the light boat lifeboat for a year.

Emily (08:43):

And yet here we are many of us with kids still in remote learning a year later and they are struggling and it isn't academics. I mean, I'm a teacher and I'm going to say, number one, I do not care about learning loss. The way that, you know, lots of headlines want us to care about it. I see nothing happens without the relationship. It is learning happens in the context of a relationship so intelligent. Yes, exactly. And until we get that piece back in place, doesn't matter what math skills you're teaching. Doesn't matter what standards or state requirements are. It's all about getting kids back into a relationship with their educators. And educators with their students. I mean, it's, it's both ways. Right.

Hillary (09:26):

Okay. When we come back, we're going to be talking a little bit more about education and a buzz phrase. That's come up called gamification, but we'll be back after this break.

Hillary (10:43):

I'm Speaking with Emily Cherkin, The Screentime Consultant, who's helped numerous families with her consultation services, small group coaching and webinars. We're talking about the role

She has had in education.

Hillary (10:57):

And there's kind of this buzz word around ed tech. That is the term: "Gamification". Can you define..... What is that?

Emily (11:00):

Yeah So it's a little bit confusing because it sounds good, right? Games. That's a good thing. We like games play make learning fun, but the problem is it's a lot more insidious than that. And it's using well, how, how deep do we want to go? Right. So what, actually, it's not the same application that concerns me as it is, but it's really just the tip of an iceberg of something called persuasive design. So shall we, shall we jump into persuasive design? 

Hillary (11:35):

For sure, For sure, because my next question, I asked you that, so I could ask you this, which was, how does gamification  affect motivation with learning. And I think that speaks more to this persuasive design element that you're speaking of. Right?

Emily (11:44):

I think, yes, exactly. So persuasive design. This is how I define it because I try to put it in terms that parents will understand. It is the combination of psychology and technology to change our behavior. And on the one hand, you're like, well, okay, that's how bad can that be? But if you've ever been on your phone and had a notification jump in and say, Oh, your friends miss you at Instagram. Or if you've been scrolling through Twitter and notice that there's never a bottom, right? Like you could literally scroll forever or, you know, we've all been in there. You know, you watching the Netflix series and just one more episode and you just, it auto loops into the next one, right? So those are all examples of persuasive design, right? Those subtle, tiny design techniques keep us on longer because at the end of the day, more eyeball time on screens is more advertising dollars is more money for tech companies. And the problem I have, you know, any parent who's ever watched a kid like meltdown after an iPad, you know, is over.

Hillary (12:51):

I think we can all know what that looks like.

Emily (12:55):

Exactly. So we've all witnessed the power of persuasive design because these apps and games are designed to hook and hold our attention and impact the same neural pathways in our brain that are triggered by other addictive behaviors. So  our kids are sitting there playing on the iPad and their dopamine is just flowing. They feel good. This is fun. They get rewards and prizes and tokens. And woo. Look at me, go, and then mom or dad comes in and pulls it away. You have interrupted that feel good hormonal flow. And they fly off the handle. So when we talk to parents about this, I often say like, first of all, our kids' brains, aren't fully developed like, look how hard it is for us as adults to stop that auto looping into the next episode, you know, four hours later, our kids don't have that executive function control and they're being manipulated.

Emily (13:43):

And so this is when we talk to parents. I mean, one of the things I always say is this is not a fair fight. This is not fair. You are not fighting your child's behavior, refusal, whatever it is, your they're hijacked brains, you are fighting. Yeah. And that is that you want to get me fired up and on a roll. That makes me so mad because there's so much money behind all of this. None of it goes to what's best for children and tech companies have hired developmental psychologists to help design these products to be addictive for children. Right. And that's criminal in my mind, I just find it astonishing that this is happening.

Hillary (14:22):

Right. So, but let me ask you, when using persuasive design in thinking about educational tech, I would feel like parents would say, well, isn't this a good thing? Like, I mean, they're, they're keeping my kid hooked on learning, you know? I mean, how, like, can you speak to why persuasive design doesn't necessarily translate to higher level thinking,

Emily (14:47):

Right. Because it's a short-term fix for a long-term need and it doesn't work. It works in the short term. I mean, how many of us as parents have said, if you don't do X, you lose screen time. Right. I mean, I'm totally one of those parents who used to say that and I probably still slip into it because in the moment it works and like in the games when the kids are, you know, even if it's a game for school, kids are getting these tokens and prizes and rewards. Well, they're not necessarily, I mean, yes, there are certainly examples where you could prove that it teaches a skill, but what we want is we want kids to be intrinsically motivated to learn. We don't want them to be extrinsically motivated. We want them to learn for learning sake, not because there's a prize at the end of the game. Right. And so I, there's a, There's a pediatrician here in Seattle, Dr. Dimitri Christakis 

Hillary (15:40):

Love him! He coined the phrase, toddlers need laps, not apps

Emily (15:50):

Yes. He's great. And, and one of the things he said that I quote all the time is that everything is educational. It's just, what is it? You want it to be teaching. And if we're teaching something about this, you know, and actually the campaign for commercial-free childhood has just done a huge campaign against the game prodigy, which is a math game, completely gamified it's, it's pretty astonishing how much it's uses gamification to drive in app purchasing and upgrading and leveling up. And, you know, it's worth looking into what they're doing. And, and the campaign itself is pretty fascinating, but you know, it, it, maybe it makes learning fun in the initial moment, right. Kids get excited about the tokens and the prizes, but we want teachers to be the ones who help make learning fun, because again, learning happens in the context of relationships. So your iPad is only going to entertain you in a very one note, you know, way for hours, but at what expense, right?

Hillary (16:49):

And any, any motivational research absolutely agrees with you in the, in that token systems are good for short term corrections, they do not have sustainable change. What happens is, is you have to keep upping the token, which is the computer. It easily does it doesn't, there's also, I've, I've read a lot about, you know, when you're in this heightened state of hyper arousal, hyper, you know, attentional focus with that Josephine flow, you're not able to organically transfer to long-term memory. That alone for me is a big stopping point on gamification. Now can computer games be used within education to maybe solidify an existing skill?

Emily (17:50):

Exactly. Yes. Sure. And I always say Too, I always say skills before screens, because there are certain skills that have to be in place. And, and the problem I see as schools and tech companies, and well-meaning parents who drive more tech, more tech, younger, younger, because they think that's better. But really what, and Dr. Doug genteel talks about this idea of displacement, you know, that if you are spending time more time on screens, you're spending less time doing other important skill building activities. And for me, in particular, it's those executive function skills, right? Like planning, prioritizing organization, emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility. Those are the skills that matter. And again, I I've met, my husband works at a startup in the tech industry. We talk about this all the time and he will even say, when he goes and hires a new developer or coder, he does not care so much about their tech skills.

Emily (18:35):

Yes. They have to know how to do basic stuff. But yes, when they learned it, not in elementary school, they learned it in college. But more than that, he says, they have to be able to look me in the eye. They have to be able to problem solve with a colleague. They have to be able to collaborate and communicate and plan a project from start to finish. Those are executive function skills. Those are not tech skills. Right. So that's important in my opinion, that, you know, we don't want to ignore the importance of that, but there are things like, you know, you can't do graphic design on a piece of, well, okay, you can do it on a piece of paper, but you need to be, there are certain tech-based tools that can hand enhanced, like, look what we're being able to do right now, you know, doing a podcast across the country.

Emily (19:16):

Right. That's wonderful. That's a great use of tech, but those things it's like, well, every school.org  they have not explored the amazing, so they have something called the ed tech triangle, and they basically, it's like a food pyramid and they break it down into here are the different levels and the different types of tech and how much you should have. Like, it's the visual parents. I mean, it's designed for schools, but actually I recommend it for parents too, because it max it out. You know, there's so much tech for Tech's sake and so much, that's just, you know, mindless, like, you know, we've talked about the gamification and all of that, but the top part is the stuff that's really high quality. And also you don't do that often. Right? Just like the food pyramid or at least whatever the original food pyramid was. I know it's true.

Hillary (20:00):

Yeah, exactly. Yes. Changed depending on who gets their hands on it. Exactly. So that's super interesting to me, going back to the skills that actually end up being the hireable trait, then within the technology community end up being human

Hillary (20:23):

Skills. It's not, it's not

Hillary (20:25):

Digital manipulation. And so I it's, it's very, you are so interesting in that you kind of get this peek behind the curtain.

Emily (20:34):

Yes, yes. For sure. No. And I mean, poor guy, we talk about it all the time, but I'm usually, you know, telling him a, along a lot more than he's telling me, right. I have strong opinions about this, but you know, and again, it's, I, I get a lot of parents who say, well, my kids need tech now it's the future. It's 21st century skills. No, it's not. I mean, I always joke in second grade, I learned how to play the Oregon trail that has not served me well in my future careers, except to know the vocabulary words, grueling and meager. That's what I remember. And maybe dysentery, but it was a game and I had fun playing it, but it didn't set me up for my future career.

Hillary (21:14):

What it did was just like what you were saying. It helped cement prior knowledge that you already had going into Western movement.

Emily (21:26):

Right. And it was in the context of a bigger learning thing. I mean, of course I'm dating myself, but back in our day, like the learning computer lab was like one 40 minute session a week. Right. Right. I mean, even remote learning, if we think about it, what would happen 10 years ago? I mean, even 10 years ago, we couldn't have been,

Hillary (21:43):

I think I've said that again. And again, I've said that, well, I mean, Corona virus was a lot of things, but at least it was well-timed as far as this goes, because I think, I think our world would have truly shut down. Had we not had the ability that all of the digital platforms have allowed us to embrace. So for that. Okay.

Emily (22:05):

Exactly. And it also, I would say pull back the curtain for a lot of parents and educators to see what is behind this huge tech industry marketing. Not that everybody's going to do something good about it, but I think parents are, have witnessed firsthand. Now what, six to eight hours of screen time looks like, you know? Okay.

Hillary (22:22):

I think that parents also have gotten a really good look at what the life of a teacher looks like.

Emily (22:46):

Yeah. And I am a huge supporter of teachers. I think there have been asked to do the unthinkable for less pay for many, many years. I mean, you know, technology is one thing, but you know, the violence and stuff that we've seen in schools and that, you know, teachers being asked to do beyond their pay scale, right. You know, teachers go into teaching, no one, I always used to joke, no one goes into teaching for the money, but you know what, that's wrong. It's not should go into it for the money, but we should fund and support teachers in schools. Right? Like that is a problem. And it needs to be, and I hope this did pull back the curtain again, both for us to appreciate teaching more. Yes.

Hillary (23:23):

And provide more options for different subsets. Like you said, that may benefit from this type of learning that wouldn't have had the experience of having it. Otherwise.

Emily (23:36):

I mean, the big takeaway is actually that differentiation, which was a buzz word in education, right. Which means meeting each student at their level with their needs and you take one subject and you apply it in different ways to each student, it works. It's what is good teaching! And the problem is the more, the opposite has been happening, especially in public education with standardization, right? So it's like, no, no, no, no. We're going to make everything fit into this one box for this one test

Hillary (24:03):

Iwas going to say driven by standardized tests, which I think produced numbers that were easily comprehensible, but it is certainly not the reality of the human experience cannot be boiled down to these, you know, two week period of, of bubble in the, the test answers.

Emily (24:27):

Children are not robots, right. We're not going to get a uniform response when we test them and we can test. I mean, again, even my own microcosm in my household, like my two children have a very different experience with testing and they're differently intelligent, but like their ability to perform on a test is just a skill. Right. And so it doesn't actually tell you anything about what kind of a learner they are, what kind of a person they're going to be. So yeah, I could get on a soap box about that.

Hillary (24:54):

Okay. When we come back, we're going to talk about a healthy screen habit that you could put into place in your own home.

Hillary (25:42):

Okay. I'm going to go back in. Hang on. We're back. I'm talking with Emily. Churkin the screen time consultant whose mission is to help families and schools find balance with screen time. So Emily, on every episode of the healthy screen habits podcast, I ask for one healthy screen habit that our guests can put into practice in their own. Sorry, let me back up on every episode of the healthy screen habits podcast, I ask for one healthy screen habit that our listeners can put into practice in their own home. Do you have one?

Emily (26:21):

I do so a few years ago. No doubt many, but my favorite is one that I heard from a colleague a few years ago. And it's this idea of living your life out loud and I've taken that and extrapolated it to the way we use our screens in technology. So it's when we are holding our devices or we're something on tech, we narrate what we're doing as we're doing it, we're saying it out loud. And there are so many benefits to this because we are holding ourselves accountable. We're modeling all the different ways that, that tech device like a Swiss army knife, right? Helping bottle, that executive function, function, skill building, and we can attach emotional vocabulary to it. We can say, Oh, I get so frustrated by these notifications. I wish they weren't bothering me. It distracts me from what I'm trying to do. And then our kids go, "Oh, tech can be distracting! Oh, this is hard for my parents too. Oh, right." And we do it. If you, the more we can do this, the better living our life out loud talking, you're going to drive your kids nuts. But that's the point you want them to pay attention. Right? This is

Hillary (27:28):

Repetition builds that kind of internal dialogue for them.

So I love that the healthy screen habit tip: to live life out loud.

Hillary (28:18):

Okay. Well thank you so much for being here.

Emily (28:22):

Yay. Yes, it's an honor to be here. 

Hillary (28:26):

True honor to have you on. Absolutely. If our listeners want to find out more about your wonderful service,

Emily (28:33):

They can check them out at the screen time, consultant.com and I'll link that in the show notes. That'd be great. And I'm also on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. And I have a YouTube channel because of course I do the irony. Right. But I hire someone else to help me with this. So I don't have to be on social all day.

Hillary (28:52):

And that's how you live your life intentionally. Exactly. Intentionally. Exactly. That's so true. Awesome. Thank you.