The Scary Truth About Kids and Screen Time Limits | Ep 072

📱 Could limiting your child's screen time actually be harming their development? In this provocative episode of Gurus and Game Changers, hosts Stacey and Mark interview Mark Prensky, the education visionary who coined the term "digital native" and makes the shocking claim that restricting technology access harms kids.

With his impressive credentials (Yale, Harvard, NSA and Department of Defense advisor), Prensky argues against conventional wisdom, believing that unlimited technology access is children's "birthright." While most experts warn about technology's harmful effects, Prensky suggests the opposite - that phones, games, and digital connections are essential tools for today's "Third Millennium Kids."

"School phone bans? One of the silliest things I've ever heard," claims Prensky. Age restrictions for smartphones? "A kid should have a phone as soon as they will say 'I won't do anything bad.'" He believes the real source of youth stress isn't technology but adults trying to control it.

Chapters with Time Codes
00:00 - The revolutionary claim: Technology restriction is like a "lobotomy"
02:20 - "Third Millennium Kids": Why today's children need unrestricted tech access
04:49 - "The MESS": Traditional education is failing digital natives
07:15 - From Harvard to tech revolutionary: Prensky's impressive background
08:42 - The surprising source of youth anxiety (it's not the technology)
10:25 - "One of the silliest things": Why Prensky condemns school phone bans
12:10 - "Surprise me": How technology transforms learning
14:16 - Digital natives and social skills: Prensky's optimistic view
17:39 - Technology and empathy: How devices support emotional growth
21:01 - "How could your kid NOT have a phone?": When children should get devices
21:48 - The sleepover scenario: Reframing how we view kids' phone use
24:08 - "Addiction" vs. engagement: Why Prensky rejects the addiction label
27:10 - "Say YES, not NO": The positive parenting approach Prensky advocates
28:14 - Technology as birthright: Why access matters for development
30:23 - Final thoughts: Embracing a new approach to raising digital natives

Key Takeaways

📺 Restricting screen time is like giving children a "lobotomy" and denying their "birthright"
📺  Prensky's Yale, Harvard, and NSA advisor credentials add to his revolutionary views
📺  Traditional education system (the "MESS") is outdated and failing today's digital natives
📺 Technology serves as a "de-stressor" for kids; adults create most of youth anxiety
📺  School phone bans and "Yonder Pouches" prevent crucial skill development
📺  Education should start with students' interests, using technology to pursue passions
📺  So-called "addiction" is often valuable skill development in digital environments
📺  Parenting approach: "Yes, if..." instead of "No" with negotiated boundaries
📺  Kids should have phones as soon as they can use them responsibly
📺  "Third Millennium Kids" need unlimited access to develop capabilities beyond previous generations


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Stacey: https://www.instagram.com/staceymgrant/
Mark: https://www.instagram.com/mark_lubragge_onair/

⭐️ Watch/Subscribe to Gurus and Game Changers on Youtube: www.youtube.com/@UCsRyuQWlLAYzM4IyJlF2IWQ 

📲 Connect with Mark Prensky
Website: https://marcprensky.com/
Books: https://marcprenskyarchive.com/books/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Prensky.M

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#DigitalNative
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#ParentingAdvice

Transcript

00:01 - Stacey (Host)
That was a cool conversation, Mark, don't you think? 

00:03 - Mark (Host)
Yes. 

00:04 - Stacey (Host)
Cool. 

00:05 - Mark (Host)
Cool. You know what Cool Thought-provoking For me. 

00:09 - Stacey (Host)
Well, cool is my word for thought-provoking. 

00:11 - Mark (Host)
I was hanging on every word, because the stuff he was talking about directly applies to me Directly affects you. 

00:16 - Stacey (Host)
My kids are older now. 

00:18 - Mark (Host)
Yeah. 

00:18 - Stacey (Host)
So I can't really change anything. I did wrong. You don't have any control. 

00:22 - Mark (Host)
But that's his whole point. I shouldn't have control. You shouldn't be trying to control the kids when it comes to technology. Today's guest, mark Prensky. That's his thing. He understands how kids and technology need to work together and how we the rest of us need to get out of the way. 

00:36 - Stacey (Host)
Yeah, but I think it's pretty controversial because I know that I have many friends who are disturbed by the fact that the kids are on their phones incessantly. I've seen it. 

00:48 - Mark (Host)
For sure. Yeah, I mean, I was even sort of talking about that with him, like how do you justify that? And his whole point is let them, because this is the world. We're trying to force our old ways of growing up, our old ways of learning on a generation that is nothing like us. And he's right. He's right. 

01:04 - Stacey (Host)
I know, but I mean to get people to shift and schools to shift their mentality around. I mean, this is like a major overhaul of everything, but he actually was the guy who created the term digital native. This is him, so he gets it and he's been. 

01:21 - Mark (Host)
You know, he's a smart guy. 

01:22 - Stacey (Host)
Yale, harvard, middlebury, oberlin. He works with the NSA and the Department of Defense. Like the guy is no dummy, he's got the street cred for sure. Yeah, he's been around the block. 

01:33 - Mark (Host)
And so he's going to say some things that you're not going to agree with. 

01:36 - Stacey (Host)
I think so. I want to hear from you guys if you agree with this theory. I want to know about it. I want to know if people are actually living this world with their kids. 

01:44 - Mark (Host)
Yeah, don't you? Yeah, because I feel like most of us are not. 

01:47 - Stacey (Host)
I would say the majority of us, who especially Jenna. We're Jenna, I'm Jenna X, you're Jenna X. 

01:52 - Mark (Host)
I'm at the very end of Jenna. Yeah, so we're built different. 

01:55 - Stacey (Host)
We're just built different. We saw life when we were interacting without devices. 

02:00 - Mark (Host)
But now I know, but we saw Pong and we saw Atari and, boy, I got swept into it. 

02:05 - Stacey (Host)
It's fine, but we weren't addicted to our devices. But he actually has an issue with me saying addicted. Yeah, I know he thinks that we overuse that word or whatever, but anyway, you guys will love this conversation. It's very thought provoking and cool, for sure. 

02:20 - Mark (Host)
So enjoy, mark Pinsky. Hi, I'm Stacey and I am sure so enjoy mark pinsky hi I'm stacy and I am mark, and this is the gurus at game changers podcast. Welcome everybody. So you have probably heard the term digital native right, referring to that first generation that's growing up right now, never knowing a world without the internet they are native to this digital world. 

02:44
Well, that word and everything it represents, was brought to us by today's guest, mark prensky, and he wants you it's a great example of how he wants you to think. He wants you to think differently about how today's kids intersect with today's technology because he's here to tell you we're doing it wrong, what the non-digital natives we need to get on board. 

03:05
Our old ways of thinking no longer apply and we think we're doing the right thing, we think we're educating the right ways, but in his view, we're probably holding them back. This is going to be an interesting conversation, mark. Welcome to the show, buddy. Thanks for joining us. 

03:20 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
Pleasure to be here. Thank you, you got it Thanks for coming, mark. 

03:23 - Stacey (Host)
So your book that we're going to talk about and it looks like you have a few books there that we're going to talk about, but this book I've written 12, but this is the one we're talking about 12 books. Okay, Start with this one. The book is titled Third Millennium Kids a Hell yes, Low Stress Guide for Everyone. So can you tell me, just so our audience completely understands, what is a third? 

03:48 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
millennium kid. Well, technically, a third millennium kid is somebody born after the year 2000. That kind of subsumes all the generation X, y and Z and now alpha and beta, because what I see is a huge change happened in the world that we will long remember, and the year 2000 is just a very convenient date that it happened around for us to think about. What's happened is that our intellectual powers as humans have gone through the roof. They've changed so much with connection and compute power and now artificial intelligence. Things have changed so much that all the rules that we learned and all the wisdom supposedly that we learned in the second millennium and that was perfectly good in that second millennium is not working in the third millennium. The whole environment has changed. 

04:49 - Mark (Host)
What's your best example of that? Like what is you know long division? Don't do it by hand, you don't need to. You don't need to know cursive anymore. 

04:56 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
My son was young. He's now 19, but when he was young I tried to teach him when you meet somebody new, look them in the eye. I finally realized what I should have taught him is when you meet an old person, look them in the eye. Interesting, because that's what was required in the 20th century. Now they don't look each other in the eye, they look at each other on the screen. They communicate very differently because they have new ways to communicate. 

05:26
Once you go into the curriculum, no matter what you make a case for, there are now different and often almost always better ways to do it. 

05:37
Why in the world would you learn all the algorithms that we used to learn in the past for arithmetic, when you know long division and things like that, when you can just push a button and get it? 

05:50
The whole world, for lots of reasons a lot of them have to do with colonialism has the same curriculum and I call that curriculum the MESS, and that stands for Math, english, science, social Studies, and it may be a different language in some places, but it's exactly that curriculum and that was a fabulous curriculum in the 20th century. 

06:17
But we don't live in that world anymore. We live in a world where all the things you need, if you need them, are right in your pocket. You can go to YouTube and you can make your choice of who you want to explain it to you. You don't need the teacher for that, and so we don't need to go through a predetermined curriculum for 6, 12, 20 years of learning in advance before we can accomplish something. And the underlying thing behind that is that it's very hard for many people to accept in their gut how different the world is, and so they want their kids to be like they were except a little better in a great environment. But that stuff that we used to learn, that learning for 12 or 20 years, getting a degree that's not what prepares you for the future you have. 

07:15 - Stacey (Host)
Harvard MBA, you've been to Yale, you've been to Middlebury, you've been to Oberlin, you've advised the NSA and the Department of Defense. So you've had this like fascinating journey to becoming an advocate for kids in technology. But what brought you to kids in technology? 

07:30 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
The world is set up in rules and I'm not a rule follower and I don't think most people should be rule followers, except in the very basics that keep us all safe. What worked in the past? The rules that were very, very good and efficient. If you went to college, you'd earn more money. If you got this degree, you do this. If you went into these professions, you do well. All of those things are going away. That's changing, because in the past it was a replacement society. It was a society that didn't change much, and when you said to a kid, what do you want to be when you grow up, you were really saying who do you want to replace when they die? Because the roles would stay the same, right. And now that's not the case. Now you're going to have to craft your own job. You're going to have to become an influencer. You're going to have to become something else. You're going to have to become something different. That didn't even exist in the past, because now we're in such a different environment. 

08:36 - Mark (Host)
But it sounds like that is leveling a lot of stress on the kid right. 

08:42 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
Well, partially, the change of environment is leveling stress, but I think most of the stress that we hear about and that Jonathan Haidt and others write about and I agree, many kids are stressed it doesn't come from the technology. It doesn't even come from the environment, because kids are very good at adapting to whatever environment they find themselves in. It comes from adults. Talk to the kids, as I do, and they won't say my phone is stressing me out, and the one exception is bullying. We got to deal with that but usually they won't say that the technology is stressing me out. Technology often helps them and it's often a de-stressor for them. What they say is my parents are stressing me out, my teachers are stressing me out, my homework is stressing me out. That's why kids are so depressed because they're told that they can't do all the things that they might be excited about, that they think they want to do, and they have to do what the school or the parents tell them to do. 

09:50
A great example of this is AI. When AI came out in 2022, the first month all these kids were using it they were so excited. It did their homework, it was so useful. It was so useful. And so what was the reaction? The reaction was okay, now we have something more useful. We don't have to do the homework anymore because we can do it with the AI. Let's do better things. No, the reaction was ban the phones, don't use AI these yonder pouches which is one of the silliest things I've ever heard in the world. 

10:23 - Stacey (Host)
What's a yonder pouch? 

10:25 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
A yonder pouch is what schools use. You have to put your phone into this pouch. It's on the wall or somewhere else you can't open. That yonder pouch till school is over. Parents are not liking it because they can't contact their kids, but it's just it's such an excuse not to move to the future. 

10:57 - Stacey (Host)
It's such an excuse to say, well, the way we did the mess before, the way we taught it before, maybe we can improve it a little bit, but basically that's what you need. Well, I'm going to play devil's advocate here, because, not that I believe that kids need their phones out of the way the entire day, but why would they need their phones in class? 

11:07 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
They would need their phones in class. If we do different things, okay, if we say we want to use your phones to learn math, science, social studies, they don't help a lot there. No, what we want to say to kids is you have a supercomputer in your pocket. Now what can we do that kids could never do before? It's so exciting. We are in a time when young people can do things that were just. We couldn't even imagine them, we couldn't dream of them. Teachers think they're doing all the right things banning the phones, trying to get the kids back to interest in the program and no, most of the kids almost all of the kids don't like what it is that they're being forced to listen to every day. The idea of a batch process that forces all kids to sit down for an hour a day and learn algebra, which most of them will never fully understand and will certainly never use. Why are we doing this? 

12:10
When we could be saying to kids when they come in the door tell me your dreams, tell me what you're interested in. What do you watch on YouTube? What do you do? What would your friends call on you because you're so good at it? We could say this and help them find out which they may not know initially find out their deep interests and concerns and then say school is about making you do more of that and building up the skills that will help you do more of what you love. What I say to the kids instead is okay, surprise me, you've got this stuff and you kind of know what we're trying to do here. And so, surprise me, do something that blows my socks off. And when you say that to kids, they do it, they get excited. 

13:01
And they get excited and they do it, and I've interviewed kids all over the world. I used to interview them on stage as part of my talks and the main thing their biggest complaint in the world is that adults don't listen to us, they don't take us seriously, and that's because we consider kids something we own and that we control. And the worst thing you can say to a teacher or a parent is your kids are out of control. No, your job is to control those kids. 

13:34
And that is not what works for the kids, and especially for kids today, who have so many capabilities that they didn't have before that. Every parent you come across who has a kid will brag about the things their kids did with technology. Oh, my kid did this and my kid created this podcast and my kid did that. And then they want to ban it in school. 

13:54 - Stacey (Host)
Yeah. 

13:55 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
Then they turn around and it's just not right for the kids. That's the most important point is that it's not right for the kids. That's the most important point is that it's not right for the kids. It's not preparing them for the future. It's preparing them for the past, for the 20th century. 

14:09 - Mark (Host)
So you are an eternal optimist for the future, given that children have access to technology right Provided it's used properly and to its full extent. 

14:16 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
I don't know that the future will be great. There's a lot of forces that are saying the future may not be great and one of the things that's going gap, the IE gap. And so our kids. A teacher looks out at kids like Mark, you look out at your students and on the one hand they are just, they're people like we were at that age, emotionally right. So we often say, oh, they can't conjure, they can't do this. They have the same emotional issues that we always had, but they are so much more powerful intellectually, they are so connected, they have so much compute power, they have so much artificial or added intelligence and so it's finding that balance. 

15:18 - Stacey (Host)
You mentioned, the emotional intelligence or the emotional IQ of kids aren't the same as perhaps it was for some of us older folk, and a lot of people attribute that to the fact that they're on their to being in, and you're probably going to disagree with me on this, but I I have heard and heard of people talk about how they're so used to being in their world, in their phone or games or whatever it is, that they don't spend as much time solving conflict in person. Do you agree with that or no, totally disagree great totally disagree excellent I. 

15:57 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
I think that that, that that the technology has become a very convenient scapegoat for change, and what parents are seeing is changes, and they should be seeing changes because the world is changing and people are communicating differently 20-year-old son now, who communicates very, very different. Sometimes I just have to text him if I want to get his attention. But they're going to be running the world. It's their world, it's not our world. And now we're just in a totally different world. 

16:31
You imagine something and AI can create it for you, whether that's a book or a piece of architecture or anything that you can imagine. Suddenly that can come out of people's heads and into the world, and that is something that is totally new. We never had it before, and we have to start learning how to become better humans with it. Now the other side, the emotional side. We know that there's some very good stuff emotionally that we all have I call it Lego love, empathy, gratitude, optimism, and you can add other things like compassion and all that to that, and that's great. But that is almost always overshadowed by the other side, which I call grab greed, racism, abuse, belligerence, bullying, and time after time every time we try to do something that's going to be great and going to be new and going to benefit all people. 

17:31
The grab people take it over and they use it for their own purposes. 

17:39 - Stacey (Host)
This episode is brought to you by Mainline Studios and the Podcast Factory, where great content feels right at home. Located in beautiful Wayne, Pennsylvania, our creative rental space offers high-end tech in a space that feels like your best friend's living room. Book your session or a free tour at mainlinevideostudiocom. And back to the show. Just one more follow-up for this, because all those things that you just said, what was the first word? It was the thing with empathy in it. 

18:09 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
It was Lego. Lego L-E-G-O. Love, empathy, gratitude, optimism. 

18:14 - Stacey (Host)
You're saying that the same amount of Lego can be had if you're on devices and you know, sort of in more of a virtual world as it can happen in true face-to-face life. Is that what you're saying? It has to. 

18:30 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
It's not that it can. It has to Because we're going into a world where we, you know it used to be. We had two worlds. We had the real world and we had imagination. Those were the only two worlds we had. Now we have a third world, we have the virtual world. Yes, those things, of course, for physical things, we don't have an alternative to to touch it. Having a relationship like we're having, like you and I are having right now that's where we are really having a good conversation online is just as good as being in person. 

19:04 - Mark (Host)
So we're talking about unleashing the power that's probably the best way to put it unleashingleashing our children. Let them go, let them do what they can do, Right. What's the downside to that? What is? What is an unintended consequence? 

19:21 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
Well, thank you, I mean that's important to think about. And and the the downside is that they'll do negative things. There's plenty of negative things somebody can do. My one requirement when I say surprise me, is that it be positive. I think people basically know that something is good and right or that something is kind of wrong and they're doing it anyway. We need some of that kind of training. Perhaps when kids are young, we should give them the platinum rule right, do unto others as they would like you to do unto them. 

19:53 - Stacey (Host)
That's good, that's a new one. 

19:55 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
The other one is do the most good and the least harm you can those things. Yes, I would want kids to know that and follow that. My view of kids is so optimistic because I spend so much time with them and I hear over and over again we are being controlled, we are being told what to do. We are not giving credit. Again, we are being controlled. We are being told what to do. We are not giving credit for what we're capable of. We've set ourselves up as we are the ones who are. We are the adults we know, we've lived, we've done this and you are our chattel and we have to raise you. And it's not we have to raise you as we're your curator, which would be good. We want to bring out what's in you, the very best in you. No, we want to control you and direct you. And that's what we have said to kids everywhere for a very long time and I think they're going to finally start to break out of that. 

20:49 - Mark (Host)
So wait, at what age? Somebody's home right now trying to figure out do I buy my daughter or buy my son a phone or not. He's in sixth grade, fifth grade, oh the other kids have it. What do you say to them? 

21:01 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
I say to them of course, how could you not have a? 

21:04 - Mark (Host)
how? 

21:04 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
could your kid not have a phone the only requirement, or the one, that you never do anything that you know is negative and bad with that phone? And second, if anybody does something to you like bullying, you tell me right away. So many parents say my kid was being bullied for you know years and I didn't even know about it. Well, that's not right. Another friend of mine has this. Who's a teacher, has this acronym TRIC Trust, respect, independence, collaboration, kindness. Her name is Esther Wojcicki and I subscribe to that. That's a basic. 

21:44 - Stacey (Host)
I want to give you a scenario. 

21:46 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
Oh, please, pop quiz I want to give you a scenario. 

21:48 - Stacey (Host)
okay, Because this is the actual thing that I've heard from moms. Recently I had a sleepover for my daughter and all of her friends came over. They're all in third, fourth, fifth grade and I went down to see how the girls were doing, and every single one of them was sitting on their phone in the same room not paying attention to each other. How could that be a good thing? 

22:15 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
to each other. How could that be a good thing? 

22:17 - Stacey (Host)
Well, first of all, it's she caught them at a moment when they were doing that All night. 

22:19 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
I mean, I don't think it was something that they were just oh, if you, if you think kids don't talk to each other, if you think kids don't interact in in their own ways and in their own times, I think that's just wrong. It is scary when you see people communicating and behaving differently than you behaved. You know, and you're a person who grew up, perhaps with a dinner table and everybody sat down and talked to each other. Well, talk to some kids about that dinner table. Nobody likes it, unless you grew up in a very exceptional family. All they want to do is can I be excused? The idea of how we socialized in the second millennium, when we had none of these other affordances? That was fine for them. The kids are not going to be I don't think going to be messed up. In fact, they'll be better off if they do what they do in their own way. 

23:14 - Mark (Host)
But let me offer it's not an alternate opinion but we're stewards of our children. We don't want to control. Well, we do want to control them, there's no doubt. But something like a phone, right? I think the downside of that at any age, because it affects adults as well is you mentioned, mentioned, doom scrolling. I consider it an anchor that leads to procrastination, that leads to you not moving forward, that leads to you not doing the things you need to do. When you're an adult, that thing might just be laundry and you spend two hours looking at your phone instead. If you're a kid, that's your chemistry homework, that is practice on the piano, that is working out, that is all these things that will move you forward. That you're not doing because this technology the phone, the video game, console, all those things are just anchoring you into a stagnant spot. You're happy and you're far more capable, far more intelligent, you have greater resources, all of that, but you're not going anywhere because of that technology I there, I don't see it that way. 

24:08 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
That I mean procrastination is nothing. 

24:10
Procrastination is nothing new rightcrastination is nothing new, and we, most adults, tend to see their childhood as much more rosy than it actually was. And we struggled through, we all struggled through our childhoods. We didn't, you know, making friends, doing all this kind of stuff, being bullied, whatever it was. We all went through that, and the kids are going to do the same thing, and so I don't see it as what you said was. These are things that are going to help you. Right, you could be doing your math homework, you could be doing this. Well, that's not true anymore. You better figure out how to be a new human, a different human, in a world of technology, in a world of AI, in a world. That is just where you are a different human. You're not like your parents. That's the biggest thing. Parents think their kids are like them because they have some emotional connection. The emotions haven't changed, and that's true, but they're not. They're not like them at all anymore. They just have a very different environment and they have very different capabilities. 

25:15 - Stacey (Host)
There have been studies that have shown that when you're on phone or Facebook or Instagram, there are dopamine hits that you get when someone likes your post or when someone you know that's not sort of a more, I know it's just the way of the world. I know it's just the way of the world, but I think, too, your emotions and your chemical balance can be different and affected by devices. No, yes, okay, yes, you got one, got one. 

25:46 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
That's what happens when you love something. You get some dopamine released in your brain. Now we can engineer it a little bit more, and we always engineered it because we said do good things, go to an amusement park, do the kinds of things that will bring this stuff out because it feels good. We turned around and said and, by the way, do a lot of these things that don't produce dopamine and don't make you feel good, which is what school is Going back to. 

26:12
Mark, what you said I don't think we're stewards of our kids. Stewards is what you preserve from the past. If you're the steward of an institution, you want to keep that institution more or less like it was in the past, going forward. I think we're curators. I think our job is to find out who they are and to find out what they can do and, more importantly, what they want to do. What they're excited about. That's the hell. Yes, and then give them more of it, as long as it's not harmful to others. What I like to say to kids is never say no, I say yes. If so, the answer is always yes, you want to do this. My kid wanted to go flying. Yes, if we negotiate the right conditions, you can do almost anything you want to do. That's not harmful, if the conditions are right. 

27:05 - Mark (Host)
Tell the parents what the heart of your message is. Tell them what they need to hear that they're not hearing. 

27:10 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
The heart of my message is that we have to treat young people as people. We have to listen to them, we have to let them do things that they want to do, not that we should let them be harmed, but we have to understand that it's only in doing what they want to do that they're going to find the things that they love to do. And if we don't want to wind up in a world like we have today, where most people hate their jobs, we'd better figure out how to help young people grow up and create or form or move to things that they love to do. And by saying no to kids, we don't help them. We don't help them by controlling them, by telling them what worked in our time period. We help them by saying yes. If yes, you can do this, you want to do that, you're excited about that, let's go, but let's make some conditions that we negotiate that make it not harmful, that make it worthwhile. 

28:08 - Stacey (Host)
At what age should kids have phones? 

28:14 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
it worthwhile. At what age should kids have phones? I think a kid should have a phone as soon as they will say I won't do anything bad and I'll tell you if I'm being harmed. And I think they should have it because it's their birthright and I think that not having it is like giving them a lobotomy. Literally it's saying here's this great thing that should be a part of your life, that a lot of people have, and we're not going to let you have it you're saying that we should just carte blanche say to our kids yes, if what? 

28:43 - Stacey (Host)
if you see, your kid is addicted to sour patch kids or something or like has some. I mean, you're not talking about that per se, you're talking about in modern technology. 

28:54 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
I don't think we distinguish enough. I think we've adopted this term addicted, to mean something you really like to do and that you want to do more than you want to go to school. Somebody once told me when I was very into video games. The guy said I remember my mother yelling at me and yelling at me when I was up in my room playing video games. She guy said I remember my mother yelling at me and yelling at me when I was up in my room playing video games. She didn't know that I was managing a 300-person guild. What the guy became was a manager. 

29:19
There's a lot more going on than the adults think is going on. We see the doomscrolling. We see this slumber party where some of the time the kids are just staring at their phones and it looks bad to us. But there's a lot more going on. The interactions between kids are still extremely complex, as they always were, and they're just happening in a very different context and environment. Because you give your kid a cell phone, that's a great opportunity for you to interact with that kid, you know. Then you start texting your kid, then you start sending each other YouTubes, then you start interviewing each other, then you start doing I mean, there's so many possibilities that we're not at all exploring and what we're looking for, not just any possibility. Not every kid likes the same thing, so you've got to find out what causes your kid to say hell yes, do you want to do this? Hell yes, okay, let's go there, let's do it. 

30:19 - Mark (Host)
Oh, this is awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We really do appreciate it. 

30:23 - Mark Prensky (Guest)
Great I look forward to seeing it. I'm very glad to be here. You guys are doing a great job and hopefully we'll do it again. Thank you. 

30:31 - Mark (Host)
Thank you so much Thank you guys for watching. It's been a great episode. We'll see you soon. Be well. 

30:41 - Stacey (Host)
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