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43: Social media, and how to help your teens be their best selves online, with Natasha Devon MBE
43: Social media, and how to help your teens be their best …
Send us a text An interview with Natasha Devon MBE: We parents often struggle with our fears about how to protect our teens when they're on…
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June 5, 2023

43: Social media, and how to help your teens be their best selves online, with Natasha Devon MBE

43: Social media, and how to help your teens be their best selves online, with Natasha Devon MBE
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Parenting teenagers, untangled: The award-winning podcast for parents of teens and tweens.

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An interview with Natasha Devon MBE: We parents often struggle with our fears about how to protect our teens when they're online. So when I received Natasha’s book written for teenagers, 'Clicks; How to be Your Best Self Online', I read it cover to cover.

It's a great book to give your teens to help them navigate their online world in a way that's genuinely positive, because it covers things like avoiding tech addiction, swerving fake news, who to follow, online safety, and how to put your best self forward online.

What I thought might be particularly useful for us parents was the Tips and Tricks section at the back. I'm going to use each heading to bring up discussions at the dinner table so that we can have  informed conversations about the issues involved.

Book: Clicks: How to be Your Best Self Online by Natasha Devon MBE
www.natashadevon.com

Rachel’s blog post on handing your teen a device:
https://www.teenagersuntangled.com/blog/mobile-phones-social-media-and-online-access-what-i-would-do-if-i-had-my-teens-or-tweens-again/

Support the show

Thank you so much for your support. Please hit the follow button if you like the podcast, and share it with anyone who might benefit. You can review us on Apple podcasts by going to the show page, scrolling down to the bottom where you can click on a star then you can leave your message.

I don't have medical training so please seek the advice of a specialist if you're not coping.

My email is teenagersuntangled@gmail.com The website has a blog, searchable episodes, and ways to contact us:
www.teenagersuntangled.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teenagersuntangled/
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/teenagersuntangled/

Susie is available for a free 15 minute consultation, and has a great blog:
www.amindful-life.co.uk

Chapters

00:52 - Where the idea for the book came from.

02:21 - How do parents talk to their teens about social media?

04:45 - Introducing critical thinking skills to your kids.

09:33 - How technology steals our time.

12:35 - Advice to parents on technology.

16:18 - Avoiding the echo chamber of the internet.

20:21 - How to mute people on social media.

24:16 - Dealing with body image.

27:36 - Men leading the change on social media.

31:09 - Fixing our own approach.

Transcript
WEBVTT

00:00:03.930 --> 00:00:52.320
Hello, I'm Rachel Richards, and you're listening to Teenagers Tntangle the audio hug for parents going through the teenage years. Now, if you listen regularly to this podcast, you'll be expecting me and Susie to talk about my latest research. But this time, I thought you might like something a little different. As parents, we all worry about what our kids are doing online. So when I received a book called Clicks; how to be your best self online, which is aimed at teenagers, I was intrigued. It's written by Natasha, Devon MBE, who is an ambassador for the charity Glitch, which promotes digital citizenship. And she's also a patron for No Panic an organization helping people manage anxiety. Whilst I was reading it, I realized it could be used by us parents, too. So I invited Natasha onto the show, and began by asking her what gave her the idea for the book.

00:00:52.750 --> 00:02:20.379
Well, the idea for the book came because I visit an average of three schools or colleges every week, mainly here in the UK. But sometimes I get invited to other countries as well. And when I'm in those schools and colleges, I deliver talks, but I also do focus groups with teenagers. And the feedback that I was getting during those focus groups is that the education around social media was far too demonizing talking about how they shouldn't go on it, or they should try and limit their time spent with technology. And I'm not saying that that's not a good consideration to have, how much time am I spending with technology, but what they were looking for was some really kind of granular advice on how to navigate the online world. So I thought that I would be able to write a book about that, firstly, because as I say, right at the beginning, I'm kind of old enough that I remember the world before but young enough that when social media and its current form came along, I found it really exciting. And I embraced it. And I'm still quite positive about technology generally. And also, because I have access to some of the world's leading experts in this area, who I interview in the book that the Center for Countering Digital hate Marianna Spring, who I'm an ambassador for - a charity working in this area. So I thought I'd be a good person to kind of compile all of that information.

00:02:20.889 --> 00:03:23.500
Yeah, really good point. And I think you're absolutely right, a lot of the parents I talked to, they're either very fearful, or they just say, well, they'll have to work it out for themselves. And I think neither is really the right approach. I think we have to be quite conscious about what we say to our teenagers, about what life online is, and should be like. And what I loved about your book is, first of all, that it's very quick and easy to read. I've read the whole book quite rapidly, and also laid out in a way that for people who've got poor attention span can engage with, I don't think it's for boys. I don't think a boy would ever read this because partly to do with just the way that it's presented as a book, my 16 year old looked at it and said, Hmm, my 15/14year old said, Oh, that looks interesting. So it's very interesting to get an instant response about what they might think about it. What are your thoughts about the sort of readership

00:03:24.819 --> 00:04:16.089
that's interesting, I didn't write it with any particular gender in mind. I suppose. Not only am I a woman, but also the evidence consistently shows in terms of young people's social media experiences, girls are more likely to have their self esteem negatively impacted, and just be targeted by trolls and cyber bullies and, and have their voices essentially bullied out of the the online experience when it comes to things like radicalization and polarizing of opinions, which I also cover in the book, boys and young men are actually more vulnerable to that. So I did have everyone in mind when I wrote it, I suppose part of it comes down to the fact that girls are just more likely to read books, generally.

00:04:18.939 --> 00:04:49.870
What you've done, which is really great - is at the end of the book. I was making notes as I went along, then at the end of it, you've got Tips and Tricks, and you've got each section broken down so that if you're a parent, I thought one thing that they could do is take this book, read it. And for boys who may not be inclined to read a book like this, use those Tips and Tricks as your sort of headlines. What do I talk to my kids about? What do I cover? Possibly even before you actually give them access?

00:04:46.209 --> 00:05:08.500
But I think for most of us, I mean, you described it as a frog in water and slowly heating up you know, most of us our kids get access to online and then we start thinking oh wait so what do they know? And what should we be talking about? So there's no really right time or wrong time to sit down and have these conversations is there.

00:05:09.040 --> 00:05:30.129
I don't think for parents, it's ever too early or too late actually, that even if your child is really young, you can still be introducing the critical thinking skills and teaching them about how not everybody is who they say they are, and, and disseminating information and spotting fake news. You know, these are hugely transferable skills that you can introduce really, really early on.

00:05:30.550 --> 00:06:05.620
Yes, I love that. Because I went to journalism college, and did a post grad. And one of the things that I had to spend a lot of time on was looking at sources, checking the veracity of what they were saying. And, you know, if it was a trusted source, you could go with that and one other source. But if it wasn't necessarily a trusted source, you'd need to look for at least two or three versions of the same information before you started sharing it. You talk about sharing information, and fake news. Can you talk a bit more about. Why would somebody post fake news?

00:06:06.610 --> 00:07:07.060
It's interesting, I spoke to Marianna Spring about this. And she said something which I genuinely hadn't considered, which is that some people share fake news knowing that it's fake, but just because they think it's funny or entertaining. What they don't consider is that there may be people in their following or who eventually see that post, who don't understand that it's fake and take it at face value. I think it's partly that and I think it's partly the fact that we tend to be less voracious in checking things when it fits with our internal bias. So if something chimes with what we already believe we're very quick to go see, look here. And then when something challenges our internal beliefs, we're more likely to dismiss it. So the kinds of things that you're talking about, one of the things that I recommend in the book is, normally in an online article, or under a YouTube video, if they've shared a study, there is a link to that study, just take a look at it, just to have a look and see who did the study.

00:07:07.089 --> 00:07:09.279
See how many people were involved? You know, that kind of thing?

00:07:09.870 --> 00:07:37.860
Yes, I do that in my podcasts. I mean, whenever I talk, because I spend a lot of time looking at what what the experts say. And I always post the links in my podcast, so people can go and and find the original information to check whether what I'm saying makes sense. And whether they agree with, you know, the people I've used as sources. So it's very important. I think the hard thing for teenagers is knowing I mean, I've grown up in an environment where I wasn't online originally, and everything was in a textbook.

00:07:38.519 --> 00:07:47.519
And being able to filter what's online for who you can trust and believe can be extremely difficult for this generation.

00:07:48.379 --> 00:07:56.540
I think so. There's a class that I do about about social media and self esteem.

00:07:53.029 --> 00:08:38.480
And normally, I've got a whole year group in front of me and I say, raise your hand, if you live in a house with an even number on the door. If your address starts with an even number, raise your hand, and about half of them raise their hand because that's how numbers work. And then I say, statistically, the people with their hands raised are more likely to do well in their GCSEs. That's to get them to understand that causation and correlation are not the same thing. Obviously, we don't advocate that people move in order to do better in their GCSEs. But it's just getting them to understand the nature of data. So even if it is coming from someone that they really like and trust, they have the ability to go ah,. but is that just because one would always do better than the other kind of thing? Right?

00:08:43.940 --> 00:08:59.509
One of the other areas that I thought was particularly interesting was avoiding tech addiction. Now, I think a you mentioned that right at the start, a lot of parents are very scared of two things.

00:08:54.470 --> 00:09:32.990
One of them is the extent to which they find their kids online. And I did an episode on that, you know, how do you deal with it if your kids are on the screens an awful lot? That it's not just the fact that they're using the screen, it's what are they actually doing when they're on the screen. And the other thing that really scares parents is who they're talking to. So let's start with you know, the whole addictive nature of online, and you actually explain it quite well in the book about what what consistes of currency now online.

00:09:37.070 --> 00:09:52.190
So, because we live in the attention economy, technology is essentially always trying to steal our time because the more time we spend interacting with technology, the more of our data it can harvest.

00:09:47.809 --> 00:10:27.649
And that could be as simple as the algorithm measuring what we're looking at; how long we're looking at it, what we're most likely to click on. All of that is giving the algorithm a better understanding of what we're likely to respond to. And that is worth an awful lot of money to anybody who has a vested interest in manipulating people or selling them something online. So within that interaction, we are the thing that's being sold. So social media isn't actually free it because we're being sold. And it's between the apps and the people who are paying the apps or the brands that are paying

00:10:28.190 --> 00:10:31.070
It's hard to get your head round, isn't it?

00:10:31.070 --> 00:11:33.980
If you want more information on it, there is a brilliant Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma, which talks about it in a lot more detail, and I think is really good family viewing. Actually, you have teenagers, you know, sit down and all watch it together. It's a good kind of discussion springboard. But the problem then becomes that these activities which are supposed to be relaxing, and things we do in our leisure time, like gaming, like scrolling, like watching TikTok videos or reels, they start to become sources of stress, because we then no longer have enough time to do everything else that we need to do in our lives. So I've actually, applied some of the principles of addiction recovery in that part of the book, and looked at ways that you can create alerts to go, Okay, I've spent quite a lot of time doing this and bring in your conscious decision making brain so that you're deciding how much time you spend with technology rather than letting your phone decide.

00:11:35.450 --> 00:11:48.259
Yes. And I love that. And the advice was, if I'm going to go online, how much time am I going to allocate to this, that sort of spending your ducks can concept?

00:11:49.710 --> 00:12:13.019
Yeah, so when I was talking about ducks, it was more about the the outrage economy. And again, I was really inspired by a brilliant book called outraged by Ashley,'Dotty' Charles, which I think I referenced it in the book, where she talks about how everything's outrageous online, which actually means that nothing is.

00:12:09.299 --> 00:12:18.840
And it means that when something genuinely outrageous happens, it's treated the same as something that doesn't matter.

00:12:16.230 --> 00:12:32.610
And so people are getting away with stuff. So she encourages us to see our outrage as currency in the bank, and you spend it on the things you really care about. So if you're not particularly bothered about something, resist the urge to pile on, is what she says.

00:12:33.120 --> 00:12:52.529
Yes, don't engage. And then coming to the other point that really scares parents, is this chronic, kind of, who am I kids accessing an awful lot of what I see is parents saying, you know, what can I use to stop my kids, how can I monitor my kids? What should I be doing? What would be your advice to them?

00:12:53.909 --> 00:13:44.340
It's really difficult in terms of who they're talking to, that's the most difficult thing to police, I would say, the most useful thing that a parent can do is approach all of these conversations about technology with a genuine curiosity of 'oh, you know, show me show me how the app works or what why do you like it? Oh, that's interesting'. Because what you're doing then is you're building trust, that they're not going to get in trouble. If they disclose to you, I've been chatting to this person. And they said this, that your that you create them a kind of sounding board. And they know that they can come to you with that stuff. Because there's some really interesting research that came from Childnet that showed that teenagers greatest fear is having their technology taken away from them as punishment.

00:13:44.909 --> 00:14:08.100
They will do anything to avoid that. Yeah. So they quite often were avoiding talking to their parents, if they suspected they were being groomed, radicalized, if they were being sent inappropriate material, if they were being encouraged to send inappropriate material, they would rather try and deal with that by themselves, then ask for an adult's help, because they didn't want their technology taken away.

00:14:09.330 --> 00:14:19.830
That's, so interesting. I mean, we talk about this all the time on the podcast, that our job as a parent of a teenager is not to dictate what they should do.

00:14:19.830 --> 00:14:57.629
It's kind of be an ally and a coach and someone who they can talk to about any of these things so that you've got some sort of open space, but that's, you see the consequence of taking away the phone, or taking away someone's WiFi is used a lot. And that's it. So that's a very interesting point you're making there and really important. So, one of the things I wanted to ask you was why are you because you're really positive about social media. I'm reasonably positive, enthusiastic. So why what why should we you know, as a parent, why should we be excited and happy about it?

00:14:58.769 --> 00:15:11.370
Do you know what I think it is? I'm a pragmatic person. So I often resist the idea to the notion of speaking in ideals, because I think that keeps us trapped where we are.

00:15:11.909 --> 00:15:39.929
And my starting point is social media is here. And it's not going anywhere. We're not getting that genie back in the bottle. So how can we turn this into a positive experience for young people? And I find so many of the conversations that I have with people my age and older, you mentioned, social media, and their first port of call is, Oh, thank God, it didn't exist when I was a teenager, I'd hate to be a teenager. Now. I wish we could go back to before it exists.

00:15:36.330 --> 00:16:06.690
Fine, you know, have that philosophical discussion. But that's not useful to the teenagers that exists now. So I would rather focus on the positives, but what you can get out of it. And what people find online is community, like minded people, role models, information. You know, that's why technology was created. It was it was created to serve humanity. And I think sometimes we forget that.

00:16:07.710 --> 00:16:18.720
I think that's absolutely right. And I personally have found that I've managed to connect with people that I never would have had the chance to meet, or actually didn't understand that that was something that interested me.

00:16:18.720 --> 00:16:25.830
And I can also find points of view that differ from mine, just by actively searching for them.

00:16:22.830 --> 00:16:38.129
And that's something you talk about where these slip streams get created, where it's quite easy, because of the way the algorithms work to find that you end up in a kind of echo chamber of people who think the same way as you and then you think everybody thinks that same way.

00:16:38.730 --> 00:17:18.839
Yes. And what's interesting about the slipstream is you will see opposing points of view, but it will be the most extreme or ridiculous examples of the quote unquote, other side. So it exists to convince you that everybody thinks the same way as you apart from the ridiculous people who should be laughed at and mocked, what you'll never see is the reasonable people who have a slightly different view from you. So I encourage young people to think of it as like a maths problem. If you can see someone's workings but you just don't agree with their solution, then they're a good person to engage with online because they're going to challenge your thinking. Yeah.

00:17:19.859 --> 00:17:34.140
But why does that happen? Because that's the thing that's confusing is that yes, I can understand that we'd end up in this sort of, you know, Slipstream, but how is it that the the algorithms get us there? What's going on?

00:17:35.160 --> 00:18:15.720
Well, because they're trying to keep us online as much as possible. And we're much more likely to engage with either people who agree with us, or people who make us really angry. And if somebody just makes you go, you're not really going to engage with you. And that's another thing I talk about in the book. Is that what you hear, so if you put a piece of content out online, if there were 100 people in the world, 90 of the people would watch it, and go or see it and go, and then get on with their day. And then the 10 people you hear from other 10 people who either loved it, or you made them angry. So your impression of the response that you're getting is not actually accurate?

00:18:16.618 --> 00:18:19.229
Yes, yes.

00:18:16.618 --> 00:18:44.189
That's fascinating. I can see I can absolutely see that. And if you were, I think you mentioned that if you were trolled and trolling it, perhaps you can explain what that is. And I suppose for a younger teenager, this might end up happening if they'd made a remark or something and then people started, pot, the word would be piling on the phrase. So what what what's your advice? What's trolling? And what should somebody do about that?

00:18:45.470 --> 00:19:18.019
So trolling is when you send somebody abusive or negative feedback, just to try and get attention. That's what that's what trolling is, and that the official advice is, don't feed the trolls. That's very difficult to do, because we have inbuilt inbuilt negativity bias, which means that and you see celebrities do this, they will get 1000 comments underneath an Instagram post saying you're amazing. And then the one that says like, you've got a bit thin, that that's the one that they will respond to.

00:19:14.539 --> 00:20:15.140
So people very quickly learned that's the quickest way for me to get attention and traction with this and some people get off on that. And a pile on is a slightly different thing. That's when people see that somebody is being targeted for a perceived transgression, and then they join in. And my advice if you find yourself at the center of a pile on is if you possibly can don't respond for at least the first 24 hours. While you're feeling really emotional and it's horrible being at the center of a pylon and it's very difficult not to look, it's really hard. But even if you are looking, try not to engage with anything, because ultimately what you want to be able to do is Say, Is there any validity in this? Do they have a point? If they do have a point, do a proper apology. Not I'm sorry if... but, you know, a genuine if I could have my time again, I wouldn't have done this apology.

00:20:15.559 --> 00:20:18.980
If they don't have a point.

00:20:15.559 --> 00:20:21.529
That's when you've got to start blocking and muting people.

00:20:18.980 --> 00:20:21.529
Right.

00:20:21.740 --> 00:20:35.990
Right. And how do you do that? Because you said there's to block, but I think he was talking about you were saying that there's this amazing facility where you can just mute people. And that means that it's a low grade option of just ensuring that you have a positive experience online.

00:20:36.890 --> 00:20:56.660
Yeah, so if there is a mute button, and on Instagram, there is a restrict button. So you restrict how much you see an account on Twitter, it's mute on Tik Tok, it's, I'm not interested in this. If you click that, that person pretty much disappears from your feed.

00:20:52.309 --> 00:21:02.269
But they don't know that that's happened. A block is in a way.

00:20:56.660 --> 00:21:04.460
It's quite an aggressive move, if it's someone that you know.

00:21:02.299 --> 00:21:11.990
And if it's someone that you don't know, it's letting them know that they've had an effect on you. Yes, they've upset you.

00:21:07.789 --> 00:21:12.799
Yeah, to mute I think is always a better option.

00:21:13.589 --> 00:21:16.470
Interesting.

00:21:13.589 --> 00:22:13.710
Yeah. And you mentioned earlier on that, for girl's the online experience can be quite difficult, because there's an awful lot of information about the way we're supposed to look and the way we're supposed to think about ourselves. And I've seen, I've seen, because I've got two bonus daughters, one's now 28, the other one's 25. And I've seen them go through this because of course, the 28 year old didn't have the same experience of being online as the 25 year old because it happened to him as they were growing up. And so their relationship with online is different. And I think 25 year old is more comfortable with how she works online. If you were to advise a young girl, who was just starting to, you know, I think the crux the kind of difficult ages 11 to 13 - really hard on girls, what would you be saying parents could say to their daughters about being online, and how they should feel about themselves.

00:22:13.000 --> 00:22:30.160
So the number one, the most important thing is diversity, by which I don't mean because I found recently that when people say diverse, they mean a specific thing. But somebody was saying we need a diverse person the other day.

00:22:31.269 --> 00:22:35.170
And it and it turned out they meant they meant a black person.

00:22:35.170 --> 00:22:48.339
And I was like, well, you need to say a black person then because Because diversity doesn't exist without a kind of set. So you're kind of centering whiteness. But anyway, so what I mean by diversity is a lots of different people who look different from each other.

00:22:46.000 --> 00:23:26.349
Regardless of how you look, you should be following a really wide range of shapes and sizes, and races and ages and abilities. That has been proven to have a positive impact on people's body image. Because the message that I give when I'm talking to young girls and teenagers about body image is there is nothing inherently wrong with for example, wanting to wear makeup, or wanting to do something interesting with your hair, or having an interest in fashion. But these things are supposed to be joyful. They're supposed to be there for creativity and self expression.

00:23:27.190 --> 00:23:30.220
It's not what you do, but why you do it. That is important.

00:23:30.940 --> 00:24:15.250
You can't win, know that you can never win. Because if you in the vanishingly small chance that you happen to naturally match society's beauty paradigms, everyone will think you're stupid or a bitch. You know, I have a friend who looks like Margot Robbie, who actually had to have therapy, because of how she's been treated, because she is so naturally beautiful, and how people have treated her. If you make an effort with your appearance, you'll be told you're trying too hard. If you don't make an effort with your appearance, you'll be told that you're you're slovenly if you know whatever you do, you'll be too fat too thin, too young, too old, too dark too light. Like whatever you do, you won't win.

00:24:12.220 --> 00:24:15.250
So don't think you can

00:24:15.250 --> 00:24:23.799
Like the guy who commented on you wearing trainers on TV. You said hey, they make it easier to run away from people like you!

00:24:24.640 --> 00:24:28.869
Yeah, exactly.

00:24:24.640 --> 00:24:49.299
Yeah. And just do you like if you think you look good. That's the only person's opinion that matters. And and that's where I think we should be with it because we've been encouraged to judge other women and girls for their appearance so much. And that's a way I think of keeping us divided and keeping us weak.

00:24:46.029 --> 00:24:53.259
It's not the individual's choices that are the important thing. It's whether they think they look good.

00:24:53.769 --> 00:25:09.069
Coming back to your point about diversity... I think you made a point in the book about How when we see a lot of different body types and shapes, it can make us feel so much better about ourselves.

00:25:10.259 --> 00:25:52.529
Yes, because then the message becomes, look, there are tons of ways to be a person to be gorgeous. And bodies comes in come in lots of different ways. And that's such an important lesson for them to learn, you know, that I did a TV program a couple of years ago called Naked Beach. And that was based on a piece of research that was done by Professor Keon West at Goldsmiths University that found that if you spend time around a diverse range of naked people, so if you went to a nudist beach, for example, for a week, it would improve your body image. Because you wouldn't just be seeing one body type constantly, you know.

00:25:54.009 --> 00:26:17.259
And that's the problem. Because when I look at things like Instagram, I'm not on TikTok. But when I look at Instagram, there's an Instagram look. And I'm always saying to my girls, come off line, look around you, when you go to the supermarket, how many people actually look like the people you're seeing online. And that's the reality that I'm trying to sort of push a bit more. It's hard.

00:26:18.549 --> 00:26:21.220
And it's boring is boring when everyone looks the same.

00:26:21.730 --> 00:27:22.450
I completely agree. Now, also the other thing that I think you mentioned boys, and Idid an episode on the manosphere. And it was prompted by a mother who contacted me and said, I've got three sons, they seem to have them seem really enamored with Andrew Tate, I just don't know what to do about this. And so I did an entire kind of research about all of it rather than just him because I think I think what he's doing is he's using dog whistle words that flag up things that people like, but, you know, his real followers is young boys. To them. He's what looks successful. And I don't you know, what would you say? So, so parents have got sons who are kind of going down that path...how would you advise them to help their sons find good role models that aren't necessary? You know, because I don't think masculine equates to being, you know, a rapist, you know, these things are different, you don't have to be like that.

00:27:23.799 --> 00:28:17.470
I completely agree. So, there are some great male role models out there who are actively questioning the kinds of ideologies that are put forward by people like Andrew Tate. So for example, there's a guy called the Young Imam, and he's called Saba. And he talks about, you know, how Andrew Tate claims that what a lot of what he talks about is Islam. And this guy's like, no, no, if you look at what the Quran actually says, it says, You're not allowed to tell women what to wear, and you shouldn't judge other people an he's kind of, really, from an academic point of view, saying, you know, that's, there's another guy called Alex Holmes, who talks all about mental health and being able to express emotion and vulnerability as a man and what that looks like and how society responds to that.

00:28:13.599 --> 00:28:42.009
There's another guy who I love called Dan Richards, he's called the one armed wonder, he's a disability advocate. For slightly older men, there's there's a guy called Sam Delaney, who also talks about mental health, but in a real kind of, I'm a bloke, I'm a normal bloke, I like football, and I want to talk about mental health. And these, I think, are the solution because you or I could talk about Andrew Tate until we're blue in the face.

00:28:42.160 --> 00:28:49.059
And I don't think it's gonna make any difference. I think it does need to be men who are leading the charge.

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Yes. And I think the general message is about questioning what you're actually seeing when you're online, because I think o so you know, you mentioned sort of monitoring your time, but how much time am I going to spend online and my 16 year old turned me the other day and said, you know, what's weird is I would never allocate 45 minutes of my time in the middle of the day to watch one of my favorite programs. And yet, I'll pull up Instagram and suddenly find 45 minutes later, that I've just lost an entire chunk of my life.

00:29:23.980 --> 00:29:40.630
And so I think coming back to this whole question about online and being conscious about it, if you're going to tell parents any top tips, what would you be, you know, to finally what would you say to a parent to try and get their kids to be more conscious about their time.

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So, you know, how we do dry January or a lot of people do dry January, and it's become this thing of, oh, it's a compensatory behavior for Christmas, which I think is really unfortunate because I think the original idea was to just make you aware As of how much you were drinking before, and the same principle applies, if you can, even for just three days, say, I'm not going to go on Instagram, then you will very quickly become aware of how much time you have, you know, even if and to make sure that that time is filled with something, because if you're bored, you're gonna go online. So is there a book, a physical book that you can carry around with you that every time you want to go online you defer to that instead? Or can you go for a walk around the block? Or, you know, what other activity are you going to put in there that's going to stop you from reaching for your phone and just see, and there's, without judgment, just see? How's my life different? And do I need more of a balance? The other thing I think, is teaching them self regulation. So the section where I talk about alerts, they're setting the alerts. And I think that that's more effective than parents sticking their head around the bedroom door and going, what you're doing. Is that homework or... so you know, getting them to kind of lead the charge on that I think is better.

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And I did love your point, which we talked about in the sleep episode, that actually comes up all the time, which is that our kids aren't really listening to us as much as we'd hope; they're watching us. And so if we are constantly on our phones, unable to put them down, unable to come offline, saying things online that possibly aren't respectful, then you're just teaching your kids, you can't get them to do something different from what we're doing. So it's about we've got to kind of understand, them, meet them where they are, and have a conversation I guess.

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Yeah, and, and role model the behavior that you want to see as well. There's a whole generation of parents now who are addicted to technology themselves. And so I would always say to say to them, sort your own relationship with technology first, and then turn your attention. Yeah, put your own mask on first.

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Oh, you see, we parents hate that. We don't we don't want to do that. That's every single one of our episodes is basically Well, you know, you got to look at yourself first.

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Anyway, Natasha, thank you so much for spending the time with us. I think it's a really good book. I genuinely really enjoyed it much more than I thought I was going to, if I'm honest, and it's a good one that you can then use to create a sort of background for talking to your teenagers. So yes, well done.

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Great. Well, thank you very much. That was Natasha Devon talking about her book cliques, how to be your best self online.

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Did you find that useful? Do drop us a line and let us know if you'd like more interviews like that? Hit subscribe and you'll never miss one. In our next episode. I talk with Susie about what we can do as parents if our teenagers start being shall we call it delinquent and the one proven thing that makes a difference. Bye bye for now.