How can I get my children and myself unplugged from technology? How can I provide opportunities for what kids really need—downtime, boredom, unsupervised free play, and in-person time with family and friends? In this new podcast, Dr. Jordan interviews author Katherine Martinko to answer these questions and more.
Resources:
Website: Katherine Johnson Martinko
Newsletter: The Analog Family
Book: Childhood Unplugged: How to Get Your Kid Off Screens and Find Balance
Look for Dr. Jordan’s new book, Keeping Your Family Grounded When You’re Flying By the Seat of Your Pants, revised edition—coming late March 2025.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
How Parents Can Take Back Their Daughter’s Childhood
Should Kids Be On Social Media?
We come to you every week with a different topic. I like to pick topics that are important to parents who are raising daughters. People who have sons also would get a lot out of these shows as well. The topic is one we’re hearing more and more about, as there’s been this movement to start focusing more on, is it okay for our kids to be on social media? Is it okay for our kids to have phones? Why are we all so busy? I decided to ask an expert to come on to give us even more information. I found Katherine Martinko. There’s a subscription or this online thing, you can describe Substack better than I can.
It has lots of authors who come on and write articles about different kinds of topics that affect parents, and I like it. There’s a lot of good information on there, and that’s how I found Katherine. I wonder if she could come on? She also is the author of a book called Childhood Unplugged: How to Get Your Kid Off Screens and Find Balance. I know there are no parents out there who aren’t interested in that topic. Welcome to the show, Katherine.
Thanks, Tim. It’s good to be here.
By the way, she’s in Canada, and she’s got 30 feet of snow outside her window. One of the articles that I read that you wrote a few weeks ago was called Parents, It’s OK to Do Less. This is true in Canada as well because I travel and talk to people everywhere. It’s interesting. I wanted to ask you why you think parents have got so sucked into this race to nowhere, where it’s more and more, and kids get so involved, and they’re so supervised with so many activities. Why do you think that we’ve got sucked into that?
It’s something that I’ve certainly noticed anecdotally, and it was brought to the forefront of a lot of people’s attention with the US Surgeon General’s official advisory that was issued a few months ago about the stress levels that parents are experiencing. Dr. Vivek Murthy pointed out that parents are substantially more stressed than the average adult. Why?
As a parent, you’re always stressed out to a certain extent. You are concerned about your child’s well-being. You want them to do well. Our world is a lot more hyper-competitive than it may have been in the past. Parents have a lot more fear around what could happen to their child. They have a lot more concern over how their child is going to succeed professionally and financially.
The economic situation is a lot less stable than it may have been for us when we were growing up or when our parents were young. There’s a lot of heightened emotions surrounding this whole experience. Parents pour themselves into trying to improve their children’s chances of success. Often, that comes out in the form of extracurricular activities, tutoring, and intensive educational experiences. Those are valuable things to pursue, for sure. I understand why parents do that.
In the process, we forget to let the kids play. We forget to let them be. We also make our own lives exhausting as parents because we become the people who are chauffeuring them around, monitoring their homework, and making sure that they get all this stuff done on their very tight schedules. It becomes this assembly line. We’re trying to churn out these children who are going to be successful.
In the process, I don’t think that many parents, or many kids, for that matter, are having a whole lot of fun. That piece that you saw, I wrote for Jonathan Haidt’s Substack called After Babel. The piece is called Parents, It’s OK to Do Less. It was a call to step out of the parental rat race, to give yourself permission to de-schedule your lives a little bit, and to try to find the quieter, slower pace that will benefit all of you as a family.
Part of what’s going to have to happen is people are going to need to take it seriously. It is because the culture is saying something different. Many parents come to my counseling practice with their daughters, and they’ll say things like, “I want to give my daughter an edge. I want her to have a leg up.” They’ve been conditioned to believe that there’s this one path, and we have to have all of our kids lined up on this path.
It’s all about perfect grades, the best teams, college scholarships, and the best college. I’m stressed out trying to say all that. The girls I work with are stressed out to the max. So many. I had a high school group yesterday after school. There were eight girls in high school, and they talked about all the pressures and stresses on them. Overwhelmed is the best way of saying it.
I can see that, too, in the people that I know. Technology is playing a bit of a role in that because now we live our lives in public. Everything is on display. A lot of teenage girls, especially, are being affected by the amount of stuff that’s getting posted online. Even if they’re not doing all the posting, they’re seeing everything that everyone else is doing. It creates a sense of insecurity, maybe a little bit of fear that you’re not doing what everyone else is doing to try to keep up.
In the past, there was more anonymity. There was more privacy. Everyone stuck to their own path, did their own thing, and was less concerned with what everyone else was doing. It’s now all out in public. It’s all on display. It can make you feel inferior, like you’re not doing as much as you could be doing. That affects parents, too. They worry that they’re not keeping up with everyone else and that their child is going to miss out.
Especially in relation to technology, because that’s the stuff that I think about a lot in my work, we need to be giving our kids the skills that will set them apart from the machines, that are going to break them out of that rat race, that are going to be the human skills: the ability to connect with other people, to have face-to-face conversations, to know how to connect with people. Right now, so many kids are not getting the opportunities for those in-person interactions. They’re very much going to suffer as a result in the long run.
Women in college were talking about how when they walk across campus, it’s so hard to meet people because everybody’s walking with a phone in their face. Even when they’re in class, before class, the same kind of thing. They also describe how they feel so socially awkward. COVID was a layer of that or a piece of that pie, but I don’t think it’s just that.
How COVID Exacerbated The Social Disconnect
COVID exacerbated a lot of issues that were already simmering below the surface. We know that smartphones in particular, but also the internet, have contributed to a great rewiring that has occurred since the early 2010s, bringing out very anti-social tendencies in all of us. COVID made it worse. I don’t think that we’ve reclaimed our ability to gather, converse with people, and know how to interact with others since then.
That’s why it is quite urgent for parents to take the lead on that and to get their kids maybe out of so many organized activities and into casual social gatherings where you talk to your neighbors, you host people in your home, you invite friends over to play. You re-normalize this idea of interacting with people in a normal way and not doing it online. A lot of my work is encouraging families to not let a child’s primary form of social engagement occur on the internet.
It doesn’t hurt to have that in part, but if that constitutes the majority of a child’s social interactions, they’re going to suffer. We know that online interactions are inferior to in-person interactions for a number of reasons. You want to balance that out. You want the in-person to greatly outweigh the online interactions.
Do not let a child's primary form of social engagement happen online. In-person interactions are superior to online interactions for several reasons. Share on XOne of the things is we blame our teenagers or even preteens a lot because they’re on their phones so much. They’re not getting enough in-person interactions, and it’s blame, blame, blame. What I say to parents a lot is that it’s our responsibility. We’ve shrunken their geographic freedom so drastically in the last 30 or 40 years. We’ve become so afraid of kids being kidnapped. We’ve become so afraid of predators, all kinds of fears that are oftentimes unwarranted. Things hit the news, get spread, and a lot of parents are afraid of allowing their kids to be out on the street playing because of all those fears. How do you get parents over that?
Parental fears are greatly misplaced these days. There’s that great phrase from Jonathan Haidt’s book where he says that children are overprotected in the real world and underprotected in the online world. We have that backwards. We need to switch it around. The real world has never been safer for kids than it is now. This is the greatest and safest time to be a child.
For it to be statistically likely for your child to get kidnapped in that stereotypical stranger in a white van scenario, they would have to loiter outside in public for 750,000 years. It’s probably not going to happen to your kid. However, the likelihood of them being approached by a sexual predator on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat is incredibly high. Instagram has been described as hosting the largest-scale sexual harassment of teenage girls that has ever existed in the history of the earth because it’s so common.
If you want to protect your children, you should be getting them off of their devices and sending them out into the real world, where they’re going to encounter far fewer creepy strangers than they would online. That’s a real issue. When you give your kids more independence, let them spend more time outside, and see what they’re able to do, it builds your own confidence as a parent.
It’s this positive feedback loop, where, as your child proves their ability, you become more comfortable letting them do things. This does take training. It can be very hard if you’ve been a bit of a helicopter parent and held your child very close. It’s understandable. We’ve all done that. It’s very hard to let go. I’ll give you one little example. My nine-year-old son, I have three boys. They’re 9, 13, and 15. He’s my third. He’s my youngest kid. I’ve been around the block a few times in terms of promoting independence with my kids.
A few months ago, he asked to ride his bike about 1.5 miles to Walmart in order to buy a toy that he wanted. He wanted me to take him, and I didn’t have time. He begged and pleaded. He said, “I can do this. I know I can do this.” Finally, I relented and said, “Fine, go for it.” It was hard. It was very hard to let him go. He had to bike quite a distance. He had to cross four lanes of traffic. He had to bike through a huge parking lot, lock up his bike, find the toy in the big-box store, do the transaction, all of this on his own. I was nervous the whole time he was gone. He showed up about 45 minutes later, and he had been successful.
He was far more excited about the outing than he was about the new toy he had purchased. He has been walking with this swagger, this independence, this confidence that I don’t think he had before. It was such a valuable lesson in letting kids take the guidance, or be the leaders, in determining what they’re able to do. As parents, we have a responsibility to recognize that and to let them do it, to let them prove themselves.
I talk to parents a lot about being a safe base for their kids. When their kids are little toddlers, they go to an outing, they’ll be sitting in your lap, looking around, not quite sure, grabbing onto your leg. After a little while, most kids will get their courage up and wander off. They’ll come back a little while later for reassurance, then they go back out. They come and go. I tell parents that, first of all, you want to let them toddle off at the family party. Also, when they come back, you want to have that look on your face that says, “You got this. It’s okay. It’s so good to be out in the world. It’s so fun. Have some adventures.”
I’m worried that a lot of kids come back to their parents, or when they ask their parents for freedom, what they get instead is this anxious look, like the worst thing is going to happen. We don’t become a safe base anymore. We become this base where, I don’t know, a fear base is the best way of saying it. It doesn’t give kids the confidence that your son received.
Another thing that you have to fill a child’s life with is that independent, free play, which often includes risky play. There are these eight categories of risky play that are said to be very healthy for children in order to test the limits of their physical and mental capacities. It can involve things like playing at high speeds, playing at heights, playing with sharp objects near fire, playing somewhere where they could fall, playing somewhere where they might be able to get lost, like on the edge of a forest. I can’t remember all of them.
Playing vicariously is another one, where you watch older kids engage in activities that scare you but also fascinate you as a child. As parents, we have to give our kids the time and space to engage in those things. We have to stand back. We have to remain on the sidelines, as hard as it can be, and not interfere. Trust them once again to self-regulate, which almost every child can do. There might be a few exceptions to that rule, but for the most part, kids are very good at determining what they’re comfortable doing. They will often astonish us because we don’t even understand what they’re able to do.
There are two proofs of that. Number one is your son’s experience, where he has a swagger now. He gained so much confidence from one trip to Walmart on his bike. Also, if we think back to our childhoods, I’m sure this is probably true in Canada as well as it is in the States, when I was a kid growing up, I’m way older than you, going on your bike somewhere would have been an afterthought, and nobody cared.
The Decline Of Unstructured Free Play For Kids
My mom used to send me up and down a quarter-mile stretch to buy two cartons of cigarettes a couple of times a week. There was so much more freedom and so much more unsupervised time, and we all gained from it. We need to look at ourselves and what we learned having all those freedoms, and also when you allow your kids, like you did your son, the effect of that on them.
As parents, we need to protect the fact that we have the vantage point of retrospect. Especially my generation, we are the last generation to be able to remember a childhood without technology. We can remember the so-called play-based childhood before it was replaced, colonized by the devices, before it became the phone-based childhood. It’s important for us to draw on those memories that we have of the things that were the most exciting about our own childhoods.
What did we love the most? Usually, it was when we were away from our parents. We were out on our own. We were probably outside. We were with a gaggle of other kids, maybe getting up to some mischief, I don’t know. Those form the best memories often of our childhoods. We need to be able to give our kids similar opportunities.
We handled the mischief, and we got hurt, and we handled the hurt. Things weren’t fair, so we figured that out. We had to figure it out. That’s the part at the end of the rainbow, we figure stuff out.
It’s true. I remember I once fell out of my treehouse and broke my arm when I was eight years old and had to spend a whole summer with a cast on. It became this badge of honor because, everywhere I went, people wanted to know why I had this cast. I became proud of it, and everyone signed it. It wasn’t a fun experience, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but it was also a mark of my accomplishment. It became a good story later. You never know. These things are all resilience-building and character-building experiences for kids.
Another thing we’ve lost besides the risky outside behaviors is boredom. We don’t allow our kids to be bored anymore. We become their entertainment directors, and we keep shoveling things their way. We take responsibility for it. That’s also a big loss.
Boredom is something that I tell parents they should not be afraid of. If you are trying to get your kids off screens, you do have to go through this replacement phase, where you replace all the digital entertainment with analog entertainment. An inevitable consequence of that is going to be boredom because there will be these swaths of time when the kids don’t know what to do. They don’t have something to reach for, something that will instantaneously suck them in.
That’s where the good stuff happens. A bored brain is not an idle brain. It is a brain that is waiting for something very exciting to happen. Boredom is what stimulates a lot of our best creativity, our musical skills, our poetic, our artistic skills, our athletic abilities. It’s because kids are desperate to do something and figure out how to fill their time that they are able to pursue a lot of these hobbies and interests that then later become their passions and maybe even their careers. You never know.
By eradicating boredom, we very much do a great disservice to our children. Parents should not be afraid of boredom. It also makes the parent’s job easier. This speaks to that question about the stress that you mentioned earlier. Once you accept that a bored child is simply a child who has yet to discover the next thing that they’re going to do, it removes the burden from you as the parent and frees you up to do your own thing and not worry about them nearly as much as you might otherwise.
We’re talking to Katherine Martinko, who is an author of a book entitled Childhood Unplugged: How to Get Your Kids Off Screens and Find Balance. She has also written some articles that I’ve read on the Substack site. She’s talked a lot about how we can shift the way we’re approaching our children’s childhood and our parenting. One of the most interesting thoughts I got from Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was that oftentimes, what’s more important than what your kids are doing online is what they’re not doing because they’re online. That’s what you’re describing. That was Haidt’s book.
He calls them experience blockers. A child on a device might appear to be distracted, but they’re in this vacuum. They’re completely cut off from everything that’s going on around them. He also describes handheld devices using this great analogy with cuckoo birds. A cuckoo bird will come into another bird’s nest and lay its eggs in a nest that already has other eggs. The cuckoo hatchling is the one that hatches first, and it hatches and pushes all the other eggs out of the nest, then it dominates.
It remains in that nest and commandeers all the food that the cuckoo mama brings back to the nest. He likens this to the way that devices take over a child’s life. Once a kid has unlimited access to a tablet, a smartphone, or video games, they will likely lose interest in most other activities in their life because those activities simply cannot compete. They’re not as engaging, not as stimulating, and not as neurologically compelling to use as these handheld devices are.
That is very much an issue. That’s why it’s important for parents to create strict boundaries surrounding the use of these tools because kids certainly don’t have the capacity to self-regulate when it comes to this. I describe myself as an authoritative parent. I’m sure you’re familiar with the different categories of parenting: the authoritative, the authoritarian, the neglectful, and the permissive. The authoritative parent does not hesitate to draw strict rules and set expectations for how their child handles technology.
This is not the most common approach. It’s not the most popular. A lot of parents like to manage it. They like to talk about the technology with their kids and trust their kids to use it wisely. That’s expecting too much of the child, to be quite honest, because we as adults struggle enough as it is to manage our own technology use. I don’t think we can possibly expect a child to do it too. We need to be that safe base that you described before. We need to create the limits that the child comes to expect and let them grow from there. Give them the chance to do other things and not have all of those experiences blocked by the presence of that device.
I interviewed a woman, Gabriella Nguyen. She’s also a writer for Substack, After Babel, one of those places where I found an article she talked about. She has a process. She’s a grad student at Harvard, and she created this process. I think she called it the 5D method for weaning yourself off of phones or social media and stuff. One of the things I hear from kids a lot, I heard this from one of my patients and her parents, is that all her friends have a phone, all her friends are on these things, and so if she doesn’t have them, she’ll be left out, she’ll be left behind, she’ll lose all of her friends. The kids are always worried about that.
One of the things Gabriella talked about in her method is that if you start to get rid of some of those things, like social media, you will have to be more proactive in how you create your friendships and how you connect with people. We’ve forgotten that they can do it. Our summer camps, our weekend retreats, I have eighteen high school girls coming in two days for a weekend retreat.
A bored brain is not an idle brain; it is a brain waiting for something exciting to happen. Share on XThe first thing we do at the check-in table is ask, “Where’s your phone? Where are your devices?” They hand them over to their parents. The girls who have been before readily hand them over, but the new girls are like, “Oh my God.” What happens is, after a weekend without them, after a week of summer camp without them, all of them say, “It was amazing. I didn’t have to worry about it. I feel so much less stressed.” They receive the benefits, which is that we walk around talking to each other, we connect, we sit after dinner at a picnic table chatting for an hour. That’s one of the things they don’t get to experience enough to realize, “It’s worth it.”
I am familiar with Gabriella’s work. I found out about it a few weeks ago from Jonathan Haidt’s Substack. She runs this program called Abstinent. She’s arguing that social media is optional, and that’s not told to young people often enough. Instead, there’s this assumption that it’s mandatory. It’s not. I can speak from experience. My fifteen-year-old is in tenth grade. He does not have a smartphone. He does not have social media.
He will be able to get a smartphone once he turns sixteen, but he will not be allowed to have any social media on it. He will not have it before he’s eighteen because it’s simply not a place that I think any teenager should exist. You do have to create workarounds, like you said. I don’t want my child to feel like he can’t have conversations with his friends or connect with them. We’ve come around and made up an alternative, so he can have group chats, let’s say, on our desktop computer that sits in a common area of our home.
All of my kids are able to text their friends from this computer using iMessage. It works with anyone who has an iPhone. It doesn’t work for Android users, in that case, they can borrow my phone if they need to communicate with a friend. There are workarounds. You do have to come up with these alternative methods to communicate and text friends. It may take a little more work. He’s said, “It’d be so much more convenient if I had Snapchat.” I argue that the benefits do not outweigh the negatives, so it’s not worth it.
Instead, we have to use this alternative method that’s maybe a bit more clumsy. The benefit is that it adds friction to the process. He has to come inside, sit down at the computer, log on, and check the message in order to respond to it. He walks away from it. He leaves it behind. It doesn’t go out into the world in his pocket, accessible every single second of the day.
What are some specific things that parents can do, which may sound like a dumb question, to guard their kid’s time? Otherwise, all of a sudden, your kid is on three teams this quarter, and the whole family is running around like crazy. What can parents do to set those limits when everybody around them is doing something different?
How Parents Can Set Tech Boundaries For Kids
You have to be comfortable with being different. It’s always a little bit uncomfortable to go against the status quo and forge your own path. You have to spend time thinking about the things that you value the most as a family and then make decisions that are going to support that and reflect that. We let our kids do about one sport. It’s the scheduling that is a big part of this. I should say that it’s one sport a season.
It’s non-negotiable the fact that we have to sit down together for dinner as a family every single night. We will adjust the time of dinner according to what people’s obligations are, but it always happens. I can’t even remember the last night that we didn’t sit down and have dinner together as a family. I find that that brings us together. It’s a good touchpoint for us to check in with each other all the time and know that things are going well.
I keep a lot of free time on the schedule for the kids to be able to play because free play, indoor or outdoor, independent free play will not happen unless there are extensive chunks of time where the kids can do that. We don’t have devices in our house. We don’t have tablets, the kids don’t have phones, and we don’t have a TV, which often surprises people. Those are time sucks. We do have laptops, we have the family computer. It’s not that we are anti-tech, we just recognize that we don’t want tech to be the main form of our entertainment at all times.
We play a lot of music. Everyone in the family plays musical instruments. We read a lot of books, we play a lot of board games, and we entertain a lot. Our house is a social hub. I have found, too, that investing in lots of outdoor toys for teenage boys in particular will act as a draw. Kids will want to come to our house, and my house is always full of these kids who want to come use our trampoline, use our garage gym, or hang out on our slackline. We’ve got all these things that kids can do outside, and they are happy to get off their phones and talk to each other. I overhear the conversations that they’re having, and it’s quite delightful to create this alternative environment for everybody to enjoy.
They don’t miss their phones when they’re in your garage, in your gym, and they don’t miss their electronics when they’re jumping on the tramp, BS-ing with each other, and doing what we did down the street when there were no parents. You were eavesdropping a little bit, but there were no parents looking over their shoulder 24/7. I have girls and young women who go off to college, and their parents are still following them on the 360 app so they know where they are at all times. I’m like, “Ah.”
That’s not good. There have been a number of studies that show that teenagers who know they are being tracked by their parents are more likely to engage in risky behaviors because they know that they’re being watched or that their parents could find them in an emergency. Whereas when they are not being tracked, they’re a little bit more self-aware. They realize they may need to be a bit smarter about their choices, about who they go off with and where they might choose to go. I’m very staunchly anti-surveillance, and it can maybe create more problems than you might think.
One other piece of the pie we haven’t talked about that maybe you can address quickly is that parents have to model behavior. We blame our kids for being on their phones so much, but if you ask most adults to whip out their phones and check how much time they’ve been on their devices, it’s not much different from their teenagers.
That’s true. The average amount of time that American adults spend on their phone is four hours a day outside of work, and two and a half of those hours are on social media. We have a serious problem ourselves, and we do need to model behaviors. There’s a great phrase that comes from Cal Newport, who’s an author. He wrote Digital Minimalism, among many other great bestselling books.
It’s always a bit uncomfortable to go against the status quo and forge your own path. You need to spend time reflecting on the values most important to your family and make decisions that support and reflect those values. Share on XHe says, “Fix your analog life first.” If you want to reduce the amount of screen time you have, then you need to find things to do, find other ways to fill your time, whether it’s deciding on some career aspirations that you want to achieve, building a new skill, finding a new hobby, getting in shape, reading more books, getting more sleep, whatever it may be. You need to establish those habits. Otherwise, it’s going to be too hard. You’re not going to be able to resist the siren call of your phone. It’s going to keep pulling you back.
If you can set up the structures of all these offline habits and activities, it will be a lot more successful, and your child is watching you. If your child sees you sitting down to read a book, cooking dinner from a real physical cookbook instead of looking at a device, or going for a walk without a device, those are all patterns that the child is going to absorb. It’s very important that we be aware that our children are always watching us. It is hard, I get it, because so much of what we do is on our phones. I work online too.
One thing I try to do is keep my computer and all of my work-related technology in my office, which is a separate space from the rest of the house. I try not to work when they’re around. I try to end my workday when they come home from school, and then I spend some time with them, I’m not on my device and not on my phone. If I have to do stuff in the evening after they go to bed, I’ll save it for then. I often get up very early in the morning to do work before they’re awake.
It’s not a bad thing. It’s just that you want to be able to give them your full attention during the time that you are with them. Out of a typical school day, it’s not that much time that you’re in your child’s presence. The least we can do is give them that hour or two hours of focus. I wouldn’t say focus on them, I would say it’s also important for the kids to join us in the things that we do as adults.
I often try to incorporate my kids into chores that need to be done, into prepping food for dinner, going to the grocery store, doing yard work, whatever it is, with the expectation that they be active contributors to the household. That, too, can take kids away from their devices, which is a good thing. It helps to fill that time that remains when the devices are put away.
I remember my dad had a father-daughter retreat, probably 10, 15 years ago. I’ll never forget, he said when his kids were young, he would come home from work, walk in the door, and they’d come running up, “Daddy, Daddy” and hug him. He said, “It was one of my favorite times of the day.” He said, “I started to notice that they stopped doing that.” He realized it was because he walked in the door on the phone, finishing up his workday.
He said, “I noticed it.” He said, “It hit me in the face, like, my kids aren’t coming to the door anymore.” What he started doing was pulling into the driveway, stopping the car, and finishing his work in the driveway. Once he was done, he’d put the phone away, and then he would walk in, and he said, “My kids started to come back.” We have to have that kind of awareness.
A lot about how often your child looks at you, and instead of seeing your face, they see the back of the phone. Especially babies, there are some studies showing that babies are failing to develop smile reflexes on time when they typically would because they haven’t had enough time making eye contact with their parents. The parent’s eyes are averted, looking at the screen. It’s important.
Another thing parents need to consider in terms of modeling is, what are they taking pictures of all the time? What are they posting online? How often are they checking for the likes and comments? If a child sees you checking your Instagram feed to see how many likes or comments you got on a post, you are teaching them that external validation is what matters. That matters far more than your own satisfaction, which you might gain from being with your kid or enjoying an experience together. There’s a sense that it has to be posted in order for it to be of value.
I know that has affected my own habits online. I have deactivated Instagram completely, which felt hard initially, even though I was never an active poster. I liked having a presence there and being able to connect with people if I needed to. I’m willing to find some workarounds now because it was starting to feel a little bit too performative for my liking.
One other quick thing, I appreciate your time. We’re talking to Katherine Martinko, who is the author of a book called Childhood Unplugged: How to Get Your Kid Off Screens and Find Balance. She’s also an author who writes articles on a platform called Substack, which I would strongly encourage all of you to check out because she’s not the only author who posts great articles. One of the things I’ve also noticed, I’ve been working with kids for over 30 years, is they ask, “Are kids different because they see them on their phones and all that stuff?”
I say it depends on the context. For instance, when they come for a week of my summer camp and they don’t have those devices, they are left with each other. On purpose, we have a lot of downtime at our camp. After dinner, there’s always an evening activity, the whole camp does together. We don’t start it until 8:00 or 8:30. They have a couple of hours at least to hang out. They create games. They take hikes. They do creek hikes. They do stuff that they normally wouldn’t do because they’d be so latched onto their devices. They do what we did if you give them the context and the opportunity.
Kids have not changed in one or two generations. They’re the same kids that we were, that our parents were, that humans have always been for many years. It’s that we adults have changed the environment of their childhood in very recent years. In a way, it’s been this horrible experiment that we’ve inflicted on them without them understanding it or having any say.
Is It Too Late To Change Kids’ Screen Habits?
It’s not going well. We’re seeing that reflected in the rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, even suicide rates have skyrocketed in the last fifteen years or so. We owe it to the kids to reestablish their environment, to get them off the devices, and to return them to the play-based environment they need in order to develop optimally. They will bounce back. Kids are incredibly resilient. I often tell parents who come to me and say, “I think it’s too late. I don’t think I can change what I’ve done.” I say, “It’s never too late.”
Even if you have a kid who’s a teenager and is used to spending excessive hours a day on their phone, all the more reason to get them off it now, to give them a chance at reestablishing, relearning, maybe not even relearning, perhaps learning for the first time those habits, those ways of filling their time and becoming comfortable with boredom. It is a muscle that needs to be developed. It takes time. It takes practice. It’s critical. The kids deserve it. It’s the least we can do for them at this point.
If our audience wants to find you and read your articles and things, where would they go?
I have a Substack newsletter. It’s called The Analog Family, and I publish articles twice a week on The Analog Family, everything to do with digital minimalism, getting kids off screens, and embracing this play-based childhood. You can find that if you Google The Analog Family Substack, or the actual website is KatherineMartinko.Substack.com.
I also am a guest contributor to Jonathan Haidt’s Substack newsletter. It’s called After Babel. I’m a contributor to The Globe and Mail newspaper, which is Canada’s largest newspaper. I also have my book, which is Childhood Unplugged: Practical Advice to Get Kids Off Screens and Find Balance. It came out in the summer of 2023, and it’s available on Amazon and in bookstores, pretty much anywhere that books are sold.
A lot of great information that Katherine puts on those sites. I would strongly encourage you to look that up once you’re home, not when you’re driving your car, and keep reading. There’s great information over and over again to keep us on our toes and keep us on track. It’s easy to get off track because there are lots of cultural messages and conditioning telling us the opposite. We appreciate what you’re offering to us, to parents, and everyone. Thank you so much for that and also for being on the show.
Thanks, Tim. It was a pleasure being here. Great talking to you.
Thank you so much. Keep up the good work.
Thank you.
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That was a great conversation with Katherine Martinko. I strongly recommend you all read her writings. She’s a nice writer. She does research as well. She’s part of this movement now, which is great, about getting our kids back out on the street playing, getting our kids off their devices, and giving our kids more unsupervised downtime, etc. It’s good to keep opening up our minds to different ways of looking at things as opposed to the same old, same old.
I’ll be back here, as always, next week with a brand-new episode, different topics each time. Thanks so much for tuning in to Katherine Martinko, and I will see you back here in a week. By the way, sometime in March, I’m not sure exactly when, probably mid-to-late March, my new book will be published. It’s a revised book. It’s called Keeping Your Family Grounded When You’re Flying by the Seat of Your Pants. I wrote it twenty years ago, which is a long time ago. I decided to revise it. I added four new chapters, one on social media, one on listening skills, and one on youth sports. I think you’ll enjoy it. Look for that. It’ll be coming out sometime in March. Thanks so much for dropping by here every week. I’ll see you back in a week.
Important Links
- Katherine Martinko
- Katherine Martinko on LinkedIn
- Substack
- Childhood Unplugged: How to Get Your Kid Off Screens and Find Balance
- Parents, It’s OK to Do Less – Article of Katherine Martinko on After Babel
- After Babel
- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
- The Analog Family – Newsletter of Katherine Martinko
- The Globe and Mail
- Keeping Your Family Grounded When You’re Flying by the Seat of Your Pants
About Katherine Martinko
She is the author of Childhood Unplugged: Practical Advice to Get Kids Off Screens and Find Balance (2023) and the creator of a fast-growing Substack newsletter called The Analog Family. She is a contributor to the Globe and Mail, Canada’s premier newspaper.
A speaker on behalf of The Anxious Generation, Katherine gives presentations that empower people to limit screen time using a “digital minimalist” philosophy. Her approach is not anti-tech, but full of practical strategies for putting digital media in its rightful place.
A mother of 3, she offers smart guidance on when to give kids smartphones, how to deal with social pressures, how to give kids more independence, and why we all have a responsibility to solve this collective action problem.