A video of Justin... that Justin never made. This was the shocking moment that shook the families on Parental Guidance—a deepfake designed to highlight how real, how convincing, and how dangerous AI can be for our kids. In today’s recap, we dive into the confronting realities of deepfakes, online safety, and skyrocketing screen time. From fake videos to 65-hour screen weeks, how do we protect our kids in this hyperconnected world?
KEY POINTS:
- Deepfakes are real, fast, and easy. It took producers just 20 minutes to create a convincing fake video of Justin. This raises serious concerns about privacy, consent, and exploitation—especially for teens.
- The gendered impact is severe. 98% of deepfake porn targets women and girls, with devastating emotional and psychological consequences.
- The 'be careful what you post' advice is outdated. Even innocent images like yearbook photos can be misused. The real focus needs to be on teaching empathy, respect, and legal consequences.
- Screen time shock. One family clocked 21 devices for 6 people. A parent averaged 65 hours a week—over 9 hours a day—and her son hit 16 hours in a single day.
- The real cost of screen time. Excessive screens impact brain development, sleep, social skills, physical health, and relationships.
- Digital connections aren't enough. Kids need real-life, face-to-face interaction for emotional and neurological growth—nine times more brain activation happens in person than on Zoom.
QUOTE OF THE EPISODE:
"When we spend time in front of a screen—especially when it's excessive—we do not grow our brain. In fact, the research suggests there’s less grey matter. That is a massive problem." – Dr Justin Coulson
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
- The Parenting Revolution by Dr Justin Coulson
- TV Show: Parental Guidance Season 3 – available on 9Now
- Website: happyfamilies.com.au
ACTION STEPS FOR PARENTS:
- Talk about it. Have open, honest conversations with your kids about AI, deepfakes, and consent.
- Teach empathy. Reinforce that using someone's image without consent is a violation of their humanity—and often a crime.
- Audit your screens. Count your family’s devices and track your own usage. Awareness is step one.
- Prioritise real-world connection. Schedule offline time daily. Prioritise nature, play, face-to-face conversations, and physical activity.
- Set boundaries. Create clear family rules about screen time, nighttime device use, and online safety.
- Model the behaviour. Kids notice if we say one thing but do another. Manage your own screen habits.
- Stay informed. Keep up with emerging tech risks and solutions. Read, listen, learn, and adjust.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Artificial intelligence. It is everywhere and your kids know all
about it too many of them are using it in
dangerous ways. Plus how many screens do you have in
your home and how much are they being used? Hello?
Welcome to the Happy Families podcast, Real Parenting Solutions every Day.
This is Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast. We are Justin
and Kylie Coulson and the recap continues from Parental Guidance
(00:28):
Season three, Episode one on Monday night. If you haven't
seen it, you can catch up on nine Now. The
topic for the week how do we parent in the
digital age. We've got focused parents Amy and Mark. They're
active parents, Nathan and Joanne they're our traditional parents, Courtney
and John are our protech parents, and Mark and Tammy
(00:49):
are our up front parents. On yesterday's episode, we were
talking about how our children might soon be interacting with
AI if they're not already, and the implication of that
understanding that AI is the new social media bots are everywhere.
What's real? What's fake? How can we tell?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
That?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Was yesterday So a moment that shocked everyone on episode
one was a link that featured your image setting up
a new challenge. Here's what happened?
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Hi?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
There, it's doctor Justin Colson here with your next challenge.
In the modern world, many friendships take place online, but
just how real can these friendships be? Your child will
now make a new online friend.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
We haven't been introduced to them yet, but Cassie and
Josh they're the life school parents. They asked this question.
Can I just triple confirmed that the video of you
at the start is you and it's not an aiimage?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Justin? Was that you in that video? I did not
record that video message. I've never heard or seen this
until now. It wasn't me. It is a deep fake. Wow,
who made the video?
Speaker 4 (02:06):
I did?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Oh our talent to Lucy.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I mean, this is one of our producers and camera operators.
How long did that take you to make.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
The whole process?
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Take about twenty minutes?
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Twenty so?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Did you have to upload a photo of him that
you found, like online or something?
Speaker 4 (02:24):
Yes? I took about three minutes of video footage of
Justin which I found online, uploaded it to the platform,
and then I had a digital avatar of Justin which
I could make say whatever I wanted.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Cassie, Clock Dirt and our protech parents. I mean, I
put my hand.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
I had no idea, I had no idea anyone else
even think about it.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
No, I didn't think about it that we were actually excited.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
So I literally turned to you when that came on
and said, is that actually you?
Speaker 5 (02:53):
Like?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Instantly?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Instantly?
Speaker 1 (02:55):
In fact, I don't think you asked the question. I
think you made a claim that's not you, so you
knew but you know me really, really well.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
So it wasn't the image, it was the voice. It
was not your voice.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Well. Also my movements were quite unnatural.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Yes, but that came later instantly when I connected your
image with your voice. It wasn't you, and it wasn't
until it repaid again and I'm looking at it and
there was something off about the image, but I couldn't
work out what that was. But it was your voice.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Okay, So that's great for you because you know me well.
But there are some pretty I was going to say,
severe significant, really important implications here, particularly around our children,
especially our young girls, and what to do in terms
of protection and safety for our children. I mean, fundamentally,
the issue of deep fakes is I would say, in
(03:48):
the news at least weekly, where typically school boys girls
do this as well. I just need to highlight it
does happen both ways, but boys are overwhelmingly the major
contributors to this problem problem creating deep fakes, sharing them
around in their online chats, message groups, discord wherever of
classmates and school teachers with a really strong pornographic bent.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
And here's the challenge though, even though you're acknowledging that
girls could.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Do this, and sometimes they do, like they set it up.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
As an attack against boys, the reality and.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
They also attack other girls as well.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
That does happen, But the reality is the fallout from
a deep fake representing you or another girlfriend is astronomical
in conquen lifelong cons to a boy who actually gets
kudos for the same kind of video.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, social status goes one way for the boys and
one way for the girls. And the boy who creates
the content as well, he gets social status for creating
it and disseminating it. I mean, the world that we
live in in so many ways is terrifyingly scary.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Raf talked about this to and the impact that this
is having predominantly on girls.
Speaker 5 (05:04):
So this is particularly concerning for girls and women where
deep fakes become a weapon against girls to create fake
porn of them. You know, all you need is really
just an image, and you just scraped that from Instagram,
and that can be really damaging for a teenager. Something
in the ballpark of ninety eight percent of those are
(05:24):
actually against women, so it's like clearly a form of
gender violence as well.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
There was a Channel nine reporter football reporter who recently
had her images deep faked, and the impact is enormous.
Our conversation now really needs to be about what we
can do to protect our children, to keep them safe.
What conversations are we supposed to be having with our daughters. Now.
This is a really provocative thing to say, but I'm
going to say it anyway because I'm known for saying
(05:49):
what needs to be said. Typically, the advice has been
be careful about what you post online. But it's terrible advice,
and I'll tell you why.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Because once it's on line, it's online. And when you look,
even just at the video that they utilized of.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
You, you were imagining me with my top off, weren't you? Na, No,
I'm not that.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Would have been that image would have been taken from
a video that you've done on social media. In your office,
we had a tricky question a number of weeks ago
about a mum who was worried about the kind of
photos her daughter was posting.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Because a bit too provocative. Yeah, but it doesn't matter, Correl.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
All they need is a face.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Well yeah, I mean, I'm not creating deep fakes and
I'm not jumping in there to see how it works.
But from what I've read, they literally just need something
and they can go from there, and the more information
they can provide the AI, the better it can work.
But the Channel nine reporter who had this occurred to
her she didn't have anything that was particularly provocative that
(06:50):
she was sharing. But people can still just take a
photo of somebody and stick it in there and away
it comes. There's some Australian kids that recently you used
yearbook photos. Like yearbook photos, you can't get much more
innocent and non suggestive than yearbook photos. But they were
able to take those and then disseminate deep fake pornographic
(07:13):
images of their classmates and school teachers based on yearbook photos.
So the advice to be careful what you post, be
careful what you share.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
It's no longer relevant.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
I don't think that that's relevant at all as a parent,
I would definitely say don't post images of your kids,
especially your young kids, because there are some horrendously bad
actors who will do the wrong thing with those images.
And we've been hearing this for more than a decade
about sharenting. I think that it's more important now than ever.
The advice that I would actually be giving is as follows.
(07:44):
Teach your sons and your daughters that it is not okay.
In fact, it's a criminal offense. Teach them more than that.
It shows a lack of empathy and a lack of
humanity towards others if you take their images and turn
them into something that they would not designed for. The
images were never taken for that, and it's just it's
(08:05):
just not okay. This is a massive topic. I only
see it getting bigger and more problematic over the next
few years until we've got some strong legislation, until companies
start to be held responsible for what they're promulgating. This
is not going to go away. Up next, we need
to talk about screen time, because, oh my goodness, was
this a revealing activity? Okay, Kylie? Online content is everywhere.
(08:35):
Everybody's connected, everybody is compulsively and completely online, but to
what extent, exactly how much time families are spending on screens,
and what the impact of those lost hours are in
terms of scrolling, liking, and clicking, the loss of human potential.
All of our focus families were asked to do an
order of their weekly screen time. The results varied some
(08:56):
shocking screen time.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
Here we go, average usage thirty eight minutes.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Thirty eight minutes a day daily averaged three hours thirty
nine minutes.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
I know already that that was between one am and
about four am.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
So yeah, it's a lot, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
It's disgusting Netflix. What's that say?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
What's five hours twenty three?
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Oh my goodness, young lady taking your phone off you?
Speaker 1 (09:21):
How many devices have we got?
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Two?
Speaker 1 (09:26):
That's twenty one.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, it shocks me that we had twenty one devices
amongst six people. Yes, you're up itdy.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
You averaged sixty three pickups of your phone sixty three
times a day. I was surprised. The screen does one
hundred percent become everything. We didn't want it to be
a babysitter. We're just focused on the phone. Peak usage time.
Speaker 5 (09:52):
I picked usage time was sat today.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
Oh no, that doesn't make sense because on saturdayackle sixteen
hours tis what.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Mum, get your phone out and your total screen time
for the week was sixty five hours In one minute,
I need to get a life.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
So a few things I really want to highlight from
that montage. Interestingly, Joanne, who has really tight limits on.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Her well, the kids don't even have social media.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Her girls had more than thirty plus hours herself. But
the standout scrolling Instagram between one and four am in
the morning.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Maybe Joanne knows the hooks that it has into her
and therefore she doesn't want the kids to cop that.
I think that's an important observation.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Number two, Mark and Tammy, they're our upfront parents and
they really believe that screens don't have a huge impact
in their lives, not a huge focus all at all.
But when they didn't audit twenty one.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
The six of them, twenty one devices, that is a lot.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
And the last one sixty five hours for Courtney, our
pro tech parent, what I found really really interesting was
her justification, her acknowledgment that it would be great for
her to play with her kids all day, but she
has to earn a living, and so often that's our
default as parents. We justify our actions when the kids
(11:25):
don't need us to play with them all day.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
I'm just going to call it out. Nine and a
half hours a day, seven days a week. That is
a lot of time on a screen. That's just it's
not associated with optimal human functioning.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
And the other thing that came out as a result
of that was the was her son, who's this little
entrepreneur and he's earning some money as a result of
what he's doing. But on Saturday, he was on his
screen for sixteen hours. So if mum's on her screen
for nearly ten hours a day and her son is
on screens for sixteen hours of that same day. But
(12:03):
she acknowledged that she knows every person that he's communicating with.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
And that not possible.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
It isn't it's not possible.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
No, no, no, it's not. I mean from nine am
until eleven thirty at night, that is a long day
in front of screens. It's not healthy, it doesn't. I'm
stoked that he's doing entrepreneurial things. We've just got to
be able to get the balance. So let's throw up
today's podcast. I mean, you know how I feel about this.
I could talk about it for hours. I could talk
about it for days, but I'm just going to share
(12:33):
a couple of ideas. When we spend time in front
of a screen, especially when it's excessive, we do not
grow our brain. In fact, the research seems to indicate
that there is less graymatter and people who spend more
time on screens rather than more graymatter. That is a
massive problem. Number two social life relationships. They will not
(12:56):
be as strong when they are digital versus when they
are our analog and our analog relationships will decay if
we're not spending time on those relationships. Cannot emphasize enough
our kids need. Our kids need to be having analog
face to face time. I keep going back to that
study that has just grabbed my attention so much. Nine
times more activation face to face versus on zoom. This
(13:19):
is a problem. I'm concerned about predatory behavior from people
who have bad ideas. I'm concerned that kids don't get
enough sleep, physical activity, or time in nature. We need
to have boundaries.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
What about real life connections like that has to be
the number one thing on the list. If you're on
a screen for sixteen hours a day, what real life
interactions are you having?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
So this stuff matters. It matters a great deal as parents.
It's incumbent upon us to set appropriate boundaries and have
effective conversations. If you'd like to know more about how
to do that, I've written about it extensively in my
book The Parenting Revolution, which is based on the TV
show Parental Guidance. You can find The Parenting Revolution wherever
you buy your books, and I think it's the most
important pairing book that I've ever written, Like it needs
(14:00):
to be on the bedside table of every single pairent
in the country. I reckon we should wrap it up
there though tomorrow our final discussion about online bullying. Oh
my goodness.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Of course, the worst case scenario is we've seen younger
and younger, often young girls take their lives, you know,
literally right down the hole from their parents. And so
letting our kids know that we'll be there for them
no matter what happens is really really important.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
I love this TV show, Parential Guidance Season three. You
can catch up on nine now on the app. The
Happy Families podcast is produced by Justin Roland from Bridge Media.
Mim Hammond's provides research and other support, and Craig Bruce
is our executive producer across this busy parental guidance recap stage.
If you'd like more information and more resources about making
(14:49):
your family happier, check out the book The Parenting Revolution
and visit us at happy families, dot com, dot a
Artificial intelligence. It is everywhere and your kids know all
about it too many of them are using it in
dangerous ways. Plus how many screens do you have in
your home and how much are they being used? Hello?
Welcome to the Happy Families podcast, Real Parenting Solutions every Day.
This is Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast. We are Justin
and Kylie Coulson and the recap continues from Parental Guidance
(00:28):
Season three, Episode one on Monday night. If you haven't
seen it, you can catch up on nine Now. The
topic for the week how do we parent in the
digital age. We've got focused parents Amy and Mark. They're
active parents, Nathan and Joanne they're our traditional parents, Courtney
and John are our protech parents, and Mark and Tammy
(00:49):
are our up front parents. On yesterday's episode, we were
talking about how our children might soon be interacting with
AI if they're not already, and the implication of that
understanding that AI is the new social media bots are everywhere.
What's real? What's fake? How can we tell?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
That?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Was yesterday So a moment that shocked everyone on episode
one was a link that featured your image setting up
a new challenge. Here's what happened?
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Hi?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
There, it's doctor Justin Colson here with your next challenge.
In the modern world, many friendships take place online, but
just how real can these friendships be? Your child will
now make a new online friend.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
We haven't been introduced to them yet, but Cassie and
Josh they're the life school parents. They asked this question.
Can I just triple confirmed that the video of you
at the start is you and it's not an aiimage?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Justin? Was that you in that video? I did not
record that video message. I've never heard or seen this
until now. It wasn't me. It is a deep fake. Wow,
who made the video?
Speaker 4 (02:06):
I did?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Oh our talent to Lucy.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I mean, this is one of our producers and camera operators.
How long did that take you to make.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
The whole process?
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Take about twenty minutes?
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Twenty so?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Did you have to upload a photo of him that
you found, like online or something?
Speaker 4 (02:24):
Yes? I took about three minutes of video footage of
Justin which I found online, uploaded it to the platform,
and then I had a digital avatar of Justin which
I could make say whatever I wanted.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Cassie, Clock Dirt and our protech parents. I mean, I
put my hand.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
I had no idea, I had no idea anyone else
even think about it.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
No, I didn't think about it that we were actually excited.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
So I literally turned to you when that came on
and said, is that actually you?
Speaker 5 (02:53):
Like?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Instantly?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Instantly?
Speaker 1 (02:55):
In fact, I don't think you asked the question. I
think you made a claim that's not you, so you
knew but you know me really, really well.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
So it wasn't the image, it was the voice. It
was not your voice.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Well. Also my movements were quite unnatural.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Yes, but that came later instantly when I connected your
image with your voice. It wasn't you, and it wasn't
until it repaid again and I'm looking at it and
there was something off about the image, but I couldn't
work out what that was. But it was your voice.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Okay, So that's great for you because you know me well.
But there are some pretty I was going to say,
severe significant, really important implications here, particularly around our children,
especially our young girls, and what to do in terms
of protection and safety for our children. I mean, fundamentally,
the issue of deep fakes is I would say, in
(03:48):
the news at least weekly, where typically school boys girls
do this as well. I just need to highlight it
does happen both ways, but boys are overwhelmingly the major
contributors to this problem problem creating deep fakes, sharing them
around in their online chats, message groups, discord wherever of
classmates and school teachers with a really strong pornographic bent.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
And here's the challenge though, even though you're acknowledging that
girls could.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Do this, and sometimes they do, like they set it up.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
As an attack against boys, the reality and.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
They also attack other girls as well.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
That does happen, But the reality is the fallout from
a deep fake representing you or another girlfriend is astronomical
in conquen lifelong cons to a boy who actually gets
kudos for the same kind of video.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, social status goes one way for the boys and
one way for the girls. And the boy who creates
the content as well, he gets social status for creating
it and disseminating it. I mean, the world that we
live in in so many ways is terrifyingly scary.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Raf talked about this to and the impact that this
is having predominantly on girls.
Speaker 5 (05:04):
So this is particularly concerning for girls and women where
deep fakes become a weapon against girls to create fake
porn of them. You know, all you need is really
just an image, and you just scraped that from Instagram,
and that can be really damaging for a teenager. Something
in the ballpark of ninety eight percent of those are
(05:24):
actually against women, so it's like clearly a form of
gender violence as well.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
There was a Channel nine reporter football reporter who recently
had her images deep faked, and the impact is enormous.
Our conversation now really needs to be about what we
can do to protect our children, to keep them safe.
What conversations are we supposed to be having with our daughters. Now.
This is a really provocative thing to say, but I'm
going to say it anyway because I'm known for saying
(05:49):
what needs to be said. Typically, the advice has been
be careful about what you post online. But it's terrible advice,
and I'll tell you why.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Because once it's on line, it's online. And when you look,
even just at the video that they utilized of.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
You, you were imagining me with my top off, weren't you? Na, No,
I'm not that.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Would have been that image would have been taken from
a video that you've done on social media. In your office,
we had a tricky question a number of weeks ago
about a mum who was worried about the kind of
photos her daughter was posting.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Because a bit too provocative. Yeah, but it doesn't matter, Correl.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
All they need is a face.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Well yeah, I mean, I'm not creating deep fakes and
I'm not jumping in there to see how it works.
But from what I've read, they literally just need something
and they can go from there, and the more information
they can provide the AI, the better it can work.
But the Channel nine reporter who had this occurred to
her she didn't have anything that was particularly provocative that
(06:50):
she was sharing. But people can still just take a
photo of somebody and stick it in there and away
it comes. There's some Australian kids that recently you used
yearbook photos. Like yearbook photos, you can't get much more
innocent and non suggestive than yearbook photos. But they were
able to take those and then disseminate deep fake pornographic
(07:13):
images of their classmates and school teachers based on yearbook photos.
So the advice to be careful what you post, be
careful what you share.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
It's no longer relevant.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
I don't think that that's relevant at all as a parent,
I would definitely say don't post images of your kids,
especially your young kids, because there are some horrendously bad
actors who will do the wrong thing with those images.
And we've been hearing this for more than a decade
about sharenting. I think that it's more important now than ever.
The advice that I would actually be giving is as follows.
(07:44):
Teach your sons and your daughters that it is not okay.
In fact, it's a criminal offense. Teach them more than that.
It shows a lack of empathy and a lack of
humanity towards others if you take their images and turn
them into something that they would not designed for. The
images were never taken for that, and it's just it's
(08:05):
just not okay. This is a massive topic. I only
see it getting bigger and more problematic over the next
few years until we've got some strong legislation, until companies
start to be held responsible for what they're promulgating. This
is not going to go away. Up next, we need
to talk about screen time, because, oh my goodness, was
this a revealing activity? Okay, Kylie? Online content is everywhere.
(08:35):
Everybody's connected, everybody is compulsively and completely online, but to
what extent, exactly how much time families are spending on screens,
and what the impact of those lost hours are in
terms of scrolling, liking, and clicking, the loss of human potential.
All of our focus families were asked to do an
order of their weekly screen time. The results varied some
(08:56):
shocking screen time.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
Here we go, average usage thirty eight minutes.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Thirty eight minutes a day daily averaged three hours thirty
nine minutes.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
I know already that that was between one am and
about four am.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
So yeah, it's a lot, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
It's disgusting Netflix. What's that say?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
What's five hours twenty three?
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Oh my goodness, young lady taking your phone off you?
Speaker 1 (09:21):
How many devices have we got?
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Two?
Speaker 1 (09:26):
That's twenty one.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, it shocks me that we had twenty one devices
amongst six people. Yes, you're up itdy.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
You averaged sixty three pickups of your phone sixty three
times a day. I was surprised. The screen does one
hundred percent become everything. We didn't want it to be
a babysitter. We're just focused on the phone. Peak usage time.
Speaker 5 (09:52):
I picked usage time was sat today.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
Oh no, that doesn't make sense because on saturdayackle sixteen
hours tis what.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Mum, get your phone out and your total screen time
for the week was sixty five hours In one minute,
I need to get a life.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
So a few things I really want to highlight from
that montage. Interestingly, Joanne, who has really tight limits on.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Her well, the kids don't even have social media.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Her girls had more than thirty plus hours herself. But
the standout scrolling Instagram between one and four am in
the morning.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Maybe Joanne knows the hooks that it has into her
and therefore she doesn't want the kids to cop that.
I think that's an important observation.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Number two, Mark and Tammy, they're our upfront parents and
they really believe that screens don't have a huge impact
in their lives, not a huge focus all at all.
But when they didn't audit twenty one.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
The six of them, twenty one devices, that is a lot.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
And the last one sixty five hours for Courtney, our
pro tech parent, what I found really really interesting was
her justification, her acknowledgment that it would be great for
her to play with her kids all day, but she
has to earn a living, and so often that's our
default as parents. We justify our actions when the kids
(11:25):
don't need us to play with them all day.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
I'm just going to call it out. Nine and a
half hours a day, seven days a week. That is
a lot of time on a screen. That's just it's
not associated with optimal human functioning.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
And the other thing that came out as a result
of that was the was her son, who's this little
entrepreneur and he's earning some money as a result of
what he's doing. But on Saturday, he was on his
screen for sixteen hours. So if mum's on her screen
for nearly ten hours a day and her son is
on screens for sixteen hours of that same day. But
(12:03):
she acknowledged that she knows every person that he's communicating with.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
And that not possible.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
It isn't it's not possible.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
No, no, no, it's not. I mean from nine am
until eleven thirty at night, that is a long day
in front of screens. It's not healthy, it doesn't. I'm
stoked that he's doing entrepreneurial things. We've just got to
be able to get the balance. So let's throw up
today's podcast. I mean, you know how I feel about this.
I could talk about it for hours. I could talk
about it for days, but I'm just going to share
(12:33):
a couple of ideas. When we spend time in front
of a screen, especially when it's excessive, we do not
grow our brain. In fact, the research seems to indicate
that there is less graymatter and people who spend more
time on screens rather than more graymatter. That is a
massive problem. Number two social life relationships. They will not
(12:56):
be as strong when they are digital versus when they
are our analog and our analog relationships will decay if
we're not spending time on those relationships. Cannot emphasize enough
our kids need. Our kids need to be having analog
face to face time. I keep going back to that
study that has just grabbed my attention so much. Nine
times more activation face to face versus on zoom. This
(13:19):
is a problem. I'm concerned about predatory behavior from people
who have bad ideas. I'm concerned that kids don't get
enough sleep, physical activity, or time in nature. We need
to have boundaries.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
What about real life connections like that has to be
the number one thing on the list. If you're on
a screen for sixteen hours a day, what real life
interactions are you having?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
So this stuff matters. It matters a great deal as parents.
It's incumbent upon us to set appropriate boundaries and have
effective conversations. If you'd like to know more about how
to do that, I've written about it extensively in my
book The Parenting Revolution, which is based on the TV
show Parental Guidance. You can find The Parenting Revolution wherever
you buy your books, and I think it's the most
important pairing book that I've ever written, Like it needs
(14:00):
to be on the bedside table of every single pairent
in the country. I reckon we should wrap it up
there though tomorrow our final discussion about online bullying. Oh
my goodness.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Of course, the worst case scenario is we've seen younger
and younger, often young girls take their lives, you know,
literally right down the hole from their parents. And so
letting our kids know that we'll be there for them
no matter what happens is really really important.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
I love this TV show, Parential Guidance Season three. You
can catch up on nine now on the app. The
Happy Families podcast is produced by Justin Roland from Bridge Media.
Mim Hammond's provides research and other support, and Craig Bruce
is our executive producer across this busy parental guidance recap stage.
If you'd like more information and more resources about making
(14:49):
your family happier, check out the book The Parenting Revolution
and visit us at happy families, dot com, dot a
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