Screen Time & The Tech Diet for Children

Lukas: Where did you like to play as a child? I ask this question a lot because childhood memories shape us into the people we become. Welcome to Play It Forward, a Wearthy podcast. I'm your host, Lukas Ritson. Thanks so much for joining me.

I talk a lot about play. I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an educator, and I'm a playground designer. So I want to gather some of my favorite people who are advocates of children and nature and create a space to have an honest conversation about getting more kids outside. The power of play is very often underestimated, and I think we all need a little more play in our lives.

My next guest is a Director of the Internet Addiction Clinic at Kidspace, where he helps hundreds of families struggling with internet, screen, and gaming addiction. He is an author of a fantastic book named The Tech Diet for Your Children and Teens. He's also a well-respected presenter and frequent consultant on all the TV channels. Today we're talking about how screen time impacts wellbeing, what parents can do about it, and the role schools play in managing children's tech intake. Welcome into our virtual studio, The Unplugged Psychologist, Brad Marshall.

Brad: Thanks for having me, Lukas. Thanks for joining us today. It's such an important conversation to have. We're in these very unique times of people at home, people on screens, childhoods looking very different for children over the last few years. So I think this is a great opportunity to have this important conversation and get some good tips and insight into families and educators on how to manage screen time and best support the children in their world.

Lukas: We'll start where we start with all guests with a little bit of a reflection. Where did you play as a child?

Brad: Where did I play as a child? There's a couple that spring to mind. My father built my brother and I an obstacle course style playground set in our backyard. It had one of those sandpits and then commando nets, and he built it all himself. So we played a lot there and in our backyard pool.

Further than that, we had some pretty cool parks when I was a kid in the area. Quite cool — I just mean like probably pseudo-dangerous. I can remember one park near us that had one of those spinning circle things, and you'd run on it and it would go round and round in circles. Local kids would just get a bike or a motorbike or whatever and tie it to it and pull it, and you'd go flying off.

And then another park had just these giant towers. Sydney in the '80s when Bicentennial Park was built — there were these giant towers that looked like castles. As a young fella, it just was the coolest thing in the world. You'd ride your bike there.

And then even further afield, we had a weekend — a very modest weekend that we shared with another family. So there was five boys within five years all sharing a room, and it was on a national park and by the beach. We used to get into some pretty serious play there — rope swings, we had a catamaran that we sunk twice. We used to build little traps on the beach. I don't know if you ever used to do that as a kid — you'd dig a hole and the idea was that someone would walk along and put their foot through it, which of course is not such a nice thing. And on more than one occasion tried to catch snakes, which again was probably not a great idea.

Lukas: A previous guest posed a question to me which I'll pose to you now. Lenore Skenazy asked: What activities did you engage in as a child that you would no longer let your child engage with?

Brad: I mean, I think all this stuff at home I'd be pretty cool with. My dad was an engineer so he could build stuff, whereas I'm just not as good. All the park stuff I'm pretty good with. I think I probably would draw the line at my kids playing with snakes. Although in saying that, it's going to make it out like my parents were really negligent — it's not like they knew. We were just in the bush doing what 10-year-old boys do, grabbed the fishing rod and decided that a red-bellied black snake was a good thing to try and catch. So that's probably where I would draw the line.

And you didn't mention screens because they just weren't around. We would play a little bit, but we didn't have it on holidays. We weren't taking an Xbox — there wasn't Xbox then — a Nintendo 64, a Sega Mega Drive or any of those things. We had a Game Boy that we used to play Tetris or whatnot. And then in my teenage years, we had consoles at home, but it was much more the case that we would kind of do that for an hour and then swim for an hour and then play pizza and then hit golf balls in the backyard — which is another thing we did that was probably not something that you're supposed to do. So yeah, they were around but they weren't as prevalent as they are now.

Lukas: When we fast forward to children of today and their experience — in general, not just your children but the wider community and the things you're supporting families with — childhood's very different. Are we just being old and being stuck in nostalgia, "back in my day," or is this something that really has got out of hand?

Brad: I think it's both. I certainly meet parents or adults that will just get really stuck in the "back in my day" argument, and I think we need to remind ourselves that our grandparents or parents would have been saying the same thing about my Walkman or my Game Boy. I can distinctly remember my dad just talking about TV — "Back in my day we didn't have TV, go out and go fishing or something."

So I think there's an element of that generational impact, and we all need to be careful about going down that path as adults because typically teenagers or kids will just switch off in the same way that we did when that argument was said to us.

On the flip side, there is also an argument to be made that it is a little bit more for some kids these days than we probably would like. If you look at some of the statistics — there's a great Gonski report that was done — you can take out little snippets. For example, 67% of primary school children own their own personal device now — an iPad or a phone. There's about 30% of parents surveyed who say they let their kids take their screens to bed. So we're getting some numbers up there for things that were not done "back in my day."

Lukas: An argument I've heard is that within the context of play and being out in the neighborhood and being social within your neighborhood — they're saying it's not that it's not happening, it's just happening online now and we don't see it but it is happening. How much truth is there in that?

Brad: There's probably a lot of truth in that. And again, that's not to say that I agree or disagree with that being a healthy thing. I was reading an article the other day about certain cities in lockdown where you get neighbors complaining about kids drawing with chalk on driveways. Have we really got to the point where we're complaining about kids playing outside and drawing on driveways?

I think there's an element of parents feeling pressure that if their kids are outside or out the front and not just contained in their backyard, that they're up to no good. About three or four months ago, I did a live chat for a small community in Canada — I think it was called Cariboo. We had about 100 parents live streaming, and they were telling me that during their lockdown, the police were called on their 10 and 11-year-old kids for playing outside and pretending to make a fire. These parents were just beside themselves. Even the police came out and I think one of the kids was like the policeman's son or something. So even they were commenting — how do we get to the point where neighbors are interpreting kids playing as being some dangerous activity, like we've got delinquents running the streets?

I think there's an element of that which is very tricky for parents because they feel like they're being judged as a parent if their kids are out and about.

But as far as your question — is the new version just online? Yes, it can be anywhere from social media websites to gaming platforms, depending on gender differences and age differences. A lot of that is done via video and chatting services — not Zoom or Skype as parents would have beliefs — things like Discord or Houseparty. For parents at home that might be going "I don't know what that is" — it's a kid's version of Zoom basically.

You get kids these days, especially during homeschooling, that are in a Discord call 24/7 with their friends. They just mute themselves and come back in sometimes when they've got class, sometimes not. What they'll be doing is gaming or doing social media stuff while video chatting. So what you hear from parents is "I've got a child that is in their room on a headset just swearing or yelling or getting very..." and that is kind of the equivalent now of the playground. It used to be "okay kids, calm down, everyone's yelling too much" or "I heard you swearing" or "I heard you throwing a stick." That's the version now, whether we like it or not.

Lukas: And that's where they're experimenting, exploring, and finding out these social requirements and norms and what's accepted and what's not. It's just that the parent is in closer proximity now — they're in the next room as opposed to back in the house while we're at the park.

Brad: Yeah. And I think that's where a lot of the cyber safety concerns come in. I'm not sort of a cyber safety expert — I stick with more of the overuse and the problematic use or the addiction as some people call it. But yeah, behind closed doors when you've got everything at your fingertips, one would argue that it's a lot easier to find yourself in a tricky situation if you're a child versus if you're out and about. Sure, you might be a stupid 10-year-old boy with five mates and come across a snake, but the chances of that happening are pretty low compared to finding yourself in a bit of trouble online.

Lukas: To rewind a little bit — this wording of "addiction" related to screen time is relatively new. How did you take those steps from studying psychology and finding yourself in this unique role of managing internet addiction?

Brad: So this is a story I quite often tell because it's not something that I set out to do. Probably about 12 years ago now, I was a very green young child psychologist. I was working in a big hospital, we had a team of people, there was a very fancy professor that was extremely senior, and of course I was doing what any new person does — keeping my head down and trying not to talk too much.

There was this referral that came across — this is back 2009, maybe 2010 — and it was a young man who'd found himself not going to school and not sleeping because he was immersed in this online world of Harry Potter. It wasn't even a game — it was a website where you could take roles, so he'd become like a professor at Hogwarts or something. Because of the time difference with people overseas, he just immersed himself in it and stopped playing sports, sleeping, going to school.

So of course the senior people in this team are all talking about who's going to see this young man and everyone's very quiet. Then all of a sudden the senior professor says "Brad, you're in." I said "What do you mean?" And he goes "Well, you game, don't you?" I mean, yeah, I kind of do a little bit. "Okay, well therefore you know more than anyone at this table about it, so you're it."

That's literally how I got into this — simply the fact that I was a young bloke who happened to be a child psychologist. We're not all that common — it tends to be a heavily female-dominated area in child psychology. And from there I just kept getting referrals for it, and then I opened the clinic a year or two later because it just kept growing.

The reason I called it the Internet Addiction Clinic was not because I agree with the term "addiction." People get very upset about this — I've had people shout me down on national radio about this, that I'm an alarmist calling it an addiction. I'm absolutely not. But you've got to remember that 10 years ago, the debate around whether it should be called gaming addiction or problematic use or gaming disorder — there were like 10 different terms and the academics just spent a decade trying to figure out which one to call it.

I just had enough, to be honest with you. I thought we're all sitting here debating for 10 years what we should call this, and I'm just going to be pragmatic. I'm going to call it what parents call it, which is internet addiction. So I'm not necessarily endorsing the term that it is on the same level as an addiction — I think the jury's out on that one — but I just called it what parents were emailing me and searching for in Google. The technical term now is Internet Gaming Disorder if you listen to the DSM, or Gaming Disorder if you listen to the World Health Organization.

Lukas: So to flash to that first ever client of yours — Harry Potter world — what were your steps there? How did you manage that?

Brad: Not very well. There was no treatment manual, there was nothing. There was a little bit from a famous doctor in the United States called Kimberly Young, who's since passed away unfortunately — I never got to see her speak, which is a shame. She was sort of the pioneer in this, but she had focused in the early 2000s on adults and there wasn't a whole lot on kids.

This is what I'm doing a PhD right now at Macquarie University with Professor Wayne Warburton on this very topic — because we still struggle to understand what are the best treatment options for kids in this area. What works? Because up until now, we've got a whole bunch of people, myself included, that have just been trialing different things. I think I've got some strategies that work, but the treatment research in this field is decades behind.

Lukas: There's hope because if we reflect on the knowledge we had around brains and how they worked a decade ago, we didn't know much compared to what we do now.

Brad: I like your optimism. The other side of that unfortunately — and again not to just be the pessimistic guy — the problem is that the amount of research using functional MRI scans, the brain scan stuff, for me to do a study with a functional MRI machine takes hundreds of thousands of dollars of grants of research. There's no one in Australia that can get that money in my field. The Australian government doesn't give that money.

My colleagues — a great professor from South Australia, Professor Dan King, and Professor Wayne Warburton who I work with — have both applied for multiple grants in the last seven or eight years and got nothing. So if you compare that to the gaming industry or the social media industry and the amount of money they have to put into functional MRI scans, they are decades ahead of us. As much as we feel like we're catching up, it's just a bit of an unfair fight unfortunately.

Lukas: Well, for all those philanthropists listening, there's some good direction of funding. All the links will be in the show notes.

So when a family comes into the clinic and gets in contact saying "My child's just... I'm really struggling, they're having behavioral challenges, emotional regulation..." — we've all seen the video of the parent getting fed up and chucking the Xbox in the pool or riding over it in a lawn mower. We've seen those things, but it's not always going to have an outcome. What's your approach when that family comes into the clinic?

Brad: From the start, the first and most important thing comes back to what we talked about a couple of questions ago — if we go down that path of "this is not the way it should be," kids will shut down immediately. So to be honest, my approach starts with talking to kids about what they play and what they do online. I want to understand what they do and why they do it.

That means that I do come across as pretty heavy on the positives of it — "Oh, that's great, this game looks so entertaining, it's wonderful, you're playing with a mate, that's fantastic." Really what I'm doing is trying to understand the why — why they're playing and what's getting in the way there.

But from there, I'm also trying to educate the parents. The more you are negative about games, the more they will shut down about this. We have to start telling them and sending a message of "some use is okay, but it has to be in moderation" — like anything. So I try to get the parents to shift to that. Sometimes one parent has, the other one hasn't, or sometimes they both have. But the longer they stay in that "this is not the way it should be" old-school mentality, they're going to get nowhere because that's just not the reality of what their children believe.

From there, what I'm looking for is the impacts in five main areas of development: behavioral development — are they lashing out, breaking stuff, getting physically violent, which happens unfortunately quite often. Emotional development. Social development. Education. And then health — sleep, exercise, outdoor play, hygiene.

Essentially, if you look at any child or teenager and you're asking "is screen use impacting them?" — I'm looking for is it impacting any of those five areas. Quite often it'll be multiple of those areas. If it's really bad, it'll be all of those areas.

I think where that segues into the outdoor play stuff is what you quite often see is the more that a child games or spends time online or on social media, the more that increases, the outdoor activities, the exercise, the fun, the adventurous play decreases. It's just one of those things.

If you have parents that try to say "we're going to do zero screen stuff and we're not going to game at all and we are a non-gaming family," it's just too much of a shock to the system. The idea being that you've got to slowly kind of level that out while giving them some time online because there are legitimate social reasons to be online. And then you're offering another "why" as opposed to the solely gaming "why" — creating the why for why you want to get outside.

Lukas: What is the main "why" you hear from children that you work with around why they're online?

Brad: Because all my friends are. It's simple. And on the flip side, the "why" from parents of how we got into this situation is quite often "because they were bored, so they needed something to do."

We've entered this generation of parents who feel this pressure from community, from society, from other parents, from neighbors, that we are supposed to be this never-ending juggling act of entertaining our children.

I never forget — I was up your way, I think it was last January/February, we were on the Gold Coast staying at Sea World, and it was just fantastic. We went to Sea World, my kids were just loving it. But I walked past multiple kids, and one that stuck in my head — he must have been probably three — and he was walking around Sea World with an iPad watching YouTube.

I said to my wife... and she immediately looks at me and she just says "Stop it, stop it, stop it, don't do it." So I didn't, but I couldn't help it stopping me for a couple of days. How do we get to the point where a child is at Sea World and they want to be on YouTube? What happened?

So there's this idea that even between rides or between amusements, apparently we've got to entertain that kid. There's this expectation that they can't be bored. So when it comes down to it, I think a lot of parents feel this pressure that they can't have a bored kid.

What I typically say to families is boredom is fine. It's boredom that is going to create them getting outside and doing other things. Parents quite often then get into "Oh, why don't you go to the park and do this, or why don't you go fishing with your mate, or why don't you go surfing with Billy?" And of course, the very nature is the kids are going to tell their parents to get stuffed. That's what kids do.

But if you create enough white space and boredom, they will eventually do something else. So that's what I work with parents around — slowly reducing the screen time. Again, not to zero because we're not in some apocalyptic world where the internet's not going to matter in the future. But enough white space and enough boredom so that they just will find whatever else it is that they want to do.

Lukas: And this conversation is not about demonizing screens at all. They are so practical for me as the way I learn — I can go down a rabbit hole, get into some crazy random research papers within all different parenting and play and all different sorts. And that's just the way I learn. It keeps me intrigued, it keeps me balanced. And when I want to find out something, that's there. I think so many of us can relate to that.

Brad: There is certainly many people in my field who talk more about healthy versus unhealthy screen use. Is there a difference between your child watching a science clip on YouTube during lockdown so they can run a science experiment from home versus gaming or on social media or watching YouTube mindlessly? Yes, of course there is an absolute difference in that.

The problem is that children and teenagers and even young adults get stuck down the unhealthy rabbit hole, and they're just not great because of their brain development at keeping on path. And that is the same for adults. I certainly have to limit my own social media apps — I have a limit of 20 minutes a day on screen time, and I found that I kept breaking that. So now my wife has the password, which my mates all laugh at me and still tease me about.

But that is 100% legitimate. I did an Instagram Live with Maggie Dent a week or two ago and my wife had to come down and put in the password because I'd run out of my 20 minutes. Even for adults, it's very difficult for us to stay on the path of healthy use — some news or reading an article or keeping up with friends. We do fall into that unhealthy use as well.

Lukas: A technique that I've used that's been super helpful was my wife is super diligent with her screen time — she's a ninja of screen time. All I did was say "This is where my screen time ratings are at, I want you to see my screen time at the end of the week." That accountability alone was like "Oh no, I'm doing that thing, don't go, don't do that, don't do that."

Speaking of my wife, we were discussing this — we've got young children and when it comes to screen time, growing up, TV was kind of a thing to relax. That social thing, you go around it, it's a bit of a chill. Children now — do they use TV as relaxation, or is that a taught thing? Do they use it as a tool like they know that they can go to a TV, switch off, and engage? Or is it completely different?

Brad: I think if you're talking specifically about TV, the way the technology has gone — because we have so many more screens in the house, it used to be something that was more relaxing. Certainly when I was growing up, the whole family would be around one TV. Typically if you had more than one TV then you were doing pretty well.

So it was like the whole family was around, right? You'd find a show that the whole family wants to watch and there was a social element to it because you're chatting with mum, you hear mum chat with dad, your brother's throwing something at your head and trying to push you into the fire or something. So there was other stuff happening.

Whereas what's happening now in families is just sort of everyone in isolation watching their own stuff. So again, it can be easy for parents to say "Well, he's just switching off, he's relaxing, he's watching what he wants." But there's a world of difference between doing that for half an hour in your room and then that turning into six hours of YouTube in your room.

I think it's really difficult for parents because it's just so readily available. I talked about 67% of primary school kids having their own device. So if you're all sitting there watching TV and going "This is family movie night and we've got the popcorn out," it's so easy for a child just to have a meltdown or just walk away and go in their own room and play their device. And then you've got a parent that goes "Oh, do I really want this argument? Am I going to battle him over this?"

I think it's hard to know what's relaxation and what's just kids these days switching off. And again, we should probably preface this by saying I do see a skewed version of the population — I see the 10% that have problematic use. Statistics in Australia are around 10% of Australian kids, which by the way, if you look at how many Australian kids there are, you're talking about four or five hundred thousand kids in Australia.

But I see the 10%. At home, typically with parents being quite vigilant, you can keep on top of that. But in that 10%, what we see is quite often kids will use it to avoid certain emotions. If you've had a fight with a mate or your mum's just argued with you over doing your math homework, it's very easy for you to just go to your room and watch that. And it becomes more of an emotional coping strategy rather than actually a relaxation strategy.

Lukas: So interesting. And like that 10%, when you put that into context of 500,000 children struggling with this... You mentioned earlier the impact on the brain. I know from a play standpoint and learning as a child, we need to have sensory learning, we need to absorb through our senses, through exploration and sensory feedback socially and physically. That activates those switches of learning and play. So what's the difference between what's happening internally from a play standpoint when it's converted to a screen as opposed to outside?

Brad: I think this is one of those issues where we haven't been able to drill down that far because at the end of the day, we don't have enough research dollars to figure all this stuff out. What we are figuring out at the moment in the research community is that we focus our research on the more broader questions and we're not being able to nail down some of those more nuanced questions because we just don't have the funding.

There are some studies that have been able to figure out some more nuanced questions that I use to drive my practice. For example, in 2013 there was a Scandinavian study that looked at online gaming versus offline gaming, and they did functional MRI studies. Essentially what they found is that the amount of dopamine going to the brain with online gaming is a lot more than offline gaming.

This is fundamentally the reason why playing a PlayStation or a Sega Mega Drive in the '80s or '90s had a tiny bit of dopamine to the brain versus the current gaming and social media platforms which have way more. The reason for that is the social connection — because it doesn't matter whether you're playing your best mate from school or the guy from next door or someone from the other side of the world, you still get a massive amount of dopamine to the brain. So I guess what that tells us is that the internet connection is a huge part of it because it brings a social aspect in.

When you look at all of the nuanced questions coming back to your question around at age 3, at age 5, at age 8, at age 12, at age 18 — there's just so many different questions on brain development and how it may or may not be impacting that we have struggled to do that. Even in the younger years, I don't believe there are enough of those studies. I think the focus has been on teenagers.

The reason the focus has been on teenagers is because that's typically the age when things really kick off. And by kick off, I mean that's when you get kids that have not gone to school for a year or two, that are — police are being called because of parents trying to take a phone from a child. It gets pretty pointy in those teenage years.

Essentially what we do know — to go down the path of some of the brain science stuff — in the teenage years, there was a big longitudinal study in 2019 by Paulus et al. It's an American study from memory. I think it was 11,000 kids over four years, so a really robust study, and they did functional MRIs. What they found is that kids that had somewhere around four or five hours of recreational screen use a day — now just to be clear, that isn't four or five hours of gaming, that isn't four or five hours of social media, it isn't four or five hours of Netflix, all of it — it's recreational screen use.

This is where parents get confused as well. Kids that had four to five hours, we would see that they would start to have impacts in those developmental domains I was talking about before. Not all of them — some kids can have five hours and still be sweet, others have three hours and it all melts down. It's different depending on different kids.

What it also found is when you go over seven hours of screen use, then you are talking about they could actually measure your brain cortex thinning prematurely. So I'm not a neuropsychologist — it gets really tricky here — but it's not a good thing. Essentially we don't know if that's reversible or not because that longitudinal study only came out two years ago. It's going to take us another 10 years to figure out whether that's reversible or not.

But you're talking about seven hours, and everyone goes "Oh well, okay, seven hours is a crazy amount of time, my kids don't have it." If you look at some of the Australian data, teenagers in every household are getting six and a half hours of recreational screen use before COVID. I'm having a guess here that a big chunk of them after COVID are getting more than six and a half hours.

So we are as a country at that point where many of our kids — I'm not going to put a percentage or figure out that — many of our kids are getting that seven hours that is thinning their brain cortex.

Lukas: What's the impact of the thinning of the brain cortex? What does that do?

Brad: It gets pretty minute here and we would just be guessing. It has all sorts of implications on areas like the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala — basically emotional regulation, decision-making, impulse control. And we know that for teenagers, that doesn't fully develop especially for boys until they're well in their 30s. It used to think it was like 21 — you know, it explains why stupid Brad crashed his car at 21.

I'm not saying that all men at age 25 or 30 are going to be like that. But I guess it's important to give parents some context here because so often we hear parents say "Oh well, they're really struggling with emotion regulation and their impulses. Can you teach them that?" My standard response is "I can't speed up brain development. I can do some stuff to try and help, but I don't want to oversell it. I can't speed up development."

The teenage years is the most tricky point for that, and I guess that's when we see a lot of these issues cropping up as well.

Lukas: So important from that emotional intelligence standpoint, that emotional development, the identity of self at that age. And that disconnect from what I observe — this identity you have online and then you transfer out into the real world — and then there's such a disconnect, they just can't cope. And the social interaction, the instant gratification of those dopamine responses that are just accessible — it's just like "I need a bit of a hit" — boom, boom, boom. And then dealing with the crashes afterwards.

Brad: And so you know, what you're getting into now is more about the pointy end. That would qualify for what we call Internet Gaming Disorder or Gaming Disorder, which we know in Australia is more like 1-3% depending on what study you look at. But again, you look at 1-3% and you're still talking about like 50,000 kids.

So this is huge. And there's not really many places that parents can turn to for help in this. If you're one of the 1-3% and you need treatment, where do you go? There are private clinics like myself, but you know, I do the best I can with some Medicare rebates or something like that. But at the end of the day, as a country, we're so far behind in helping those kids.

If you look at somewhere like Singapore — I spoke at a conference back in May and one of the other speakers was the director of an addiction clinic in Singapore. Melvin was a great guy, and he was chatting about all the services they have there. If you've got a child with addiction or with internet gaming stuff, "We'll get someone to come out to you, and if that's a problem, we can admit you, and we've got a hospital here" — all these fantastic services.

And he was asking the Australian audience — it was mostly doctors and academics — "I'm sure you've got similar things like that in Australia?" No. As tumbleweed rolls through, everyone's like "No, we don't have any of that." So I think those kids that get stuck in creating a sense of self online and the instant gratification and then not wanting to get out to school or wherever it may be — maybe 1-3%, but you've still got to remember that's a big chunk of Australian kids.

Lukas: And also just even if they're not showing the symptoms of this, we're not seeing the implications of — the book I'm reading at the moment, The Road Less Traveled, a psychology book, and he put it in a really interesting frame where he describes the development of the map that you work from to view the world. And if that map's being created through social interaction online, like what map are you taking out into your adult life that we're only going to see until those adult years?

Brad: I think that comes back to the question of how much social interaction needs to be done online versus offline. And I'm not going to give you a percentage or anything like that — it's different for every child. But the key part here is a child or a teenager shouldn't be getting 100% of their social interaction online.

The classic question that I give to parents when they ask me — if you've got a teenager, I say "Well, let's talk about the job interview test. At the moment, does your young man or young lady have enough social skills to sit through a job interview? Can they actually do that appropriately, pick up all the social cues, sit there, know all that stuff?"

That's just again an old-school question for parents. But fundamentally what we're saying here is I'm okay with them getting some social needs met online — that's the way of the world, that's the way it's going to move, that's fine. But it shouldn't be 100%, and it shouldn't even be anywhere close to that either.

For parents, they've got to find what works for them as parents and what they believe in and what balance that is. Some parents say 50/50 or something like that. If you have a child that's limited to say two hours of recreational use in an evening and they're bored for two or three hours, that opens up more space for them to go out and play or join a footy team or rejoin that netball team or whatever it may be. It doesn't even need to be anything too arduous — just normal sports, which you find a lot of kids have dropped out of in this situation.

Lukas: For a family like yours with young children, what's your recommended approach with screen time for early primary school, kindy age?

Brad: Essentially what most of the guidelines will tell you — the Pediatric Association in America have some pretty good guidelines on this. Basically the guidelines are around under one or two years old, you should be getting nothing. And from two to five, they talk about sort of one to two hours. And then moving on, it kind of goes to two or three hours depending on their age.

I loosely follow that stuff. That's daily, yeah. But I guess in saying that, I think we should just quantify that during things like lockdowns, I don't want to guilt parents into feeling like they have to be perfect at this. I feel like the toll for parents even on mental health can be quite high, and I don't want them to chase some unattainable goal.

I think we also need to be flexible about that. So what I mean by that is — on that holiday that I mentioned before when we drove back from Queensland, it was like an eight-hour drive or something, absolute nightmare. And I will happily, hand on heart, say my kids had more than two hours of screen time that day.

There are certain situations where you're going for long trips like that or if your kids are sick — one of my little ones was sick recently and she was proper sick, she had a really high fever. And so she had more than two or three hours. She didn't have ten, but I think parents need to be honest with themselves because quite often they just don't keep track because they don't want to know.

But they also need to be a little bit flexible around it. There are these guidelines, but at the same time, understand that if stuff hits the fan in the family, then you can be flexible around it. That should be the exception and not the rule. There's a world of difference between going on a long road trip and using more screen time to get you through that versus having iPads in the car so that every time you go to swimming or every time you go to the grandparents' house, you duck them out for 20 minutes. That, to me, is just a point where I think we're probably going a little bit too far.

Lukas: What are some of the things that parents can do as we move up into those teen years and we're talking about phones? What's scary for me is that amount of children taking phones into the room for bedtime and staying up all through the night. What's your recommendations there for parents to apply?

Brad: I go through this in detail in my book and I've got videos online and stuff. So there's seven steps basically around this stuff. But if I can just give you a brief overview — and if anyone else wants a deeper look, they can look into it — all the links will be in the show notes.

I guess what I've found in my work and in my research is that this mentality which some other people prescribe — that you just need to be a parent, just man up, just take the phone, just take the device — it just doesn't work. So it might work for 60-70% of kids that are super compliant, that want to do the right thing.

And even in my family, I have a sneaking suspicion — if I had a little crystal ball — it's probably going to work for my daughter. It is not going to work for my son, who I think we were just talking about before we started here, just barreled through a baby gate and runs around the house swinging a cricket bat.

So different kids are going to be different here. And if you just — in my experience, typically for families that have say three kids, for example, there's going to be one that's going to really test the boundaries with this stuff and not just going to leave their phone on the kitchen bench and not take it into their room.

For families in that situation, if you have one child that is not willing to be compliant and follow those rules in the teenage years, then you have a problem for the whole family. Because as soon as you have one child that is not willing to follow those rules, you have to implement rules for the whole family — otherwise they're just going to take their sister's or brother's devices when you're not looking.

So the idea of "just take the devices, don't let your kids have them in the room and everything" — it's just so simplistic. There's not the actual meat and potatoes of how do families actually do that. And that's what I take parents through — how to actually do that in a practical sense.

One of the biggest ways that I found helpful is by managing the Wi-Fi. And so what I mean by that is — I referenced that study earlier about how any game or social media with Wi-Fi is much more powerful dopamine hit than without. So basically what I'm saying to parents is kids are not going to offline game. 99% of kids will not. They might do it for an hour, they're going to get bored. They get bored because there's less dopamine to the brain.

So if you manage the Wi-Fi and the mobile data, you're halfway there to managing this. Some of the practical things here are families turning the Wi-Fi and the data and stuff off at night. Because you can have a rule — and you should have a rule — that there are no screens in your bedroom for teenagers. That's a good rule to follow.

But for parents when you're tired and when you're stressed — going in, what are you going to do, like three times a night roll in there like a ninja and try and check if they're on their phone? I mean, some parents do that, right, and it's exhausting.

So essentially there are layers of security that you have to think about. And if they have no Wi-Fi access and very limited mobile data, then you're halfway there. Because even if they manage to commando crawl out to the kitchen and grab their phone and then sneak it back before you wake up, there's no Wi-Fi. So they're doing offline stuff.

There's a multitude of strategies that we would use, but the biggest one is managing the Wi-Fi and limiting the phone data. Typically I say between two and five gigabytes. The reason I don't say zero data is because I do think that kids should be able to communicate with their friends. I don't mind them messaging or Instagram messaging if they're using it correctly. That's how they communicate, that's how they organize play dates or meet up for the beach or go to the movies.

But we shouldn't have so much data that it means that they can stay up all night and game or watch YouTube and just get in the endless loop. Kids will burn through two to five gigabytes of data pretty quick.

Lukas: You mentioned earlier a technique we use in our house. I've got a five and seven-year-old and we do tokens. So you get three tokens a week. It's two for a movie credit and one token for a show. And once you're out, you're out. My son's probably a bit similar to yours — he'll blow them straight away. And my daughter's a bit strategic with it.

But once they run out, my son will still be saying "Oh, can I watch something? Can I watch something?" Just constant "no." And this isn't a kid that's had a lot of exposure to screen at all — we're very blessed with our outdoor play areas, our bushland at the back. But man, how many times "Can I watch something? Can I watch something?" What are some techniques parents can use — specifically me and my wife, I know other people are going through it as well — because what stands out is not just say "no." I don't want to demonize TV or screen time. They don't do phones, they don't do that at that age. So any tips are welcome.

Brad: I think token economy systems for younger kids tend to work. You're obviously going to get kids that still ask and try to get what we call "high attention, high emotion" — they're trying to ramp up the energy in the room to hope that mum or dad snap and just go "whatever."

That's not some Machiavellian plan because your son's an evil bloke or anything — it's just what kids do. So certainly try not to engage too much in the debate around it. I find that it just sort of leads nowhere. You can reiterate to him "Look mate, I'm sorry, you used your token, start again tomorrow." But you've got to keep it fairly short with that.

That sort of system, a token economy system where you then go on and turn the TV on for them or give them access or whatever it may be — there is a point where that stops working. And it's typically around older primary school or early high school. There is a transition period that in my research I'm very much honing in on now — around a child going from Year 6 to Year 7 is a real risk period that we've identified for screens. Because they seem to get access to personal devices — they need one for school — and access becomes greater.

But what I'm saying is that will work for a child your kids' age. It's probably not going to work for a 14 and an 11-year-old. The token system will literally just be "Whatever, Dad, keep your token sticker." And then, you know, they're commando crawling and trying to break into different things.

So I think I quite often see families that had a system that worked when their kids were five and three or seven and five or something like that, and when they hit that age of anywhere between 10, 11, 12, some of that stuff starts to slip because that's normal. As kids get closer to adolescence, they're going to push the boundaries.

Kids have been doing that for years and decades and that's just coming through on screens as well. It's the same as the 13-year-old kid where you say "Be home by 5 o'clock for dinner" and they rock up at 5:20. "Where were you?" "Ah, close enough, right?" That used to happen 30 years ago.

Now the version is "I thought you were only supposed to watch one show, what happened? That was an hour ago." "Oh, I don't know." So I think you've got some pretty good strategies that work right now, and you would have to have a think about what to do when they get older.

Lukas: I think my daughter's seven going on 15, so I think I would act pretty quickly.

What are some of the unknown, invisible side effects that parents might not know about that are impacting their children with their screen time?

Brad: I think we've gone through some of the brain development stuff which obviously isn't commonly known. I think that if a parent is looking at all of those five developmental domains, they are then able to reflect on what screens might be impacting that they didn't quite realize.

It would be fairly common that a parent hasn't put two and two together with some of the more subtle ones. Even the impact on social development — parents may go "No, it's okay, they're playing with their friends online and they've still got good mates and they're going to school and stuff." But if your child is staying up late to game or on social media and then they get tired because they're not getting 10-11 hours sleep that they're supposed to get, then they're a bit stroppy at school the next morning. And that can start to wreak havoc a little bit over time — not immediately — with social relationships.

They're in their playground at recess, they're tired, they get short with their mate, they have an argument. So I think quite often there are some of these more subtle ones that parents wouldn't come into my clinic and say "Oh, screens are really impacting on him having fights with friends." They don't see the dominoes falling and how they do in that manner.

And the other little impacts — educationally, because it would slip over time. Again, if you have a child that hasn't slept or is having a social fallout, he then comes back from recess, he's just had a fight with his mate and he's tired, he's not taking in as much as he normally would at school. But that's not going to show up educationally — especially in primary school — for I don't know, 12-18 months typically. You might get a report and kind of go "Okay, it wasn't a great one." It's not until the second or third report that parents go "Oh wow, hang on, what's going on here?"

So I think some of the invisible side effects are ones like that where it's not until you're pretty far down the rabbit hole that — or someone like myself points it out — that parents kind of go "Okay, hang on, this was doing a lot more than I thought."

Lukas: And what's happening in the sector of supporting children with internet addiction that you're most excited about and the work that's happening out there at the moment?

Brad: Look, again I'm not trying to be the pessimistic guy here, but not much. And that's from someone who dedicates their life to this — my life, my career, everything is about this — trying to help kids. And even I am sitting here saying what I'm doing is not enough. Not even close.

It's not just me. I have many great colleagues — Dr. Kim Lee is a child psychiatrist in Adelaide, he's just fantastic, Dr. Philip Tam — there are enough of us in Australia, but there's not enough support politically and from schools.

I suppose if I had to really pick one thing in the last five years, there has been a recognition from schools that we shouldn't just focus on cyber safety while that is important — that we need to really focus on overuse and addiction or disorder or whatever you want to call it as well. So I am seeing a lot more schools coming on board and trying to offer their parents parent education sessions and all the rest of it. But it still does take a back seat to this.

And it's amazing, in the last couple of years I speak at a lot of principals conferences — a lot of primary school principals conferences — and the feedback that I get, not because I'm some amazing speaker or something, just because they honestly these principals and their staff are crying out for help with this.

They see — the amount of principals that I see that say to me "This is the number one reason for why kids do not attend school." It used to be drugs and alcohol or truanting or like it used to be all these other reasons in the '80s and '90s, right? Gaming and social media and phones is the number one reason why these principals see that kids will drop out or not go to school.

So how that is not causing more waves in a political sense, in a public health message sense, I don't know. Clearly we're not doing enough, we're not making enough waves. Maybe myself and my colleagues are not speaking up enough.

Traditionally child psychology and child psychiatry are a very conservative sort of profession — we wouldn't do podcasts, we wouldn't do interviews. I think the first interview I did was probably 2015. I ran the clinic for five years and knocked back every single interview I was ever asked for, just because it's not the done thing in our profession.

But we are slowly starting to understand that we probably need to speak up more because without us raising awareness about it, nothing's going to change.

Lukas: And there's an urgency to it. Childhood gets by pretty quickly in those influential years. It's not going to take much, and then like you said, the data's not there to know the long-term impacts. As a father, I'm like "What's the community going to look like for my children?"

Brad: I mean, plenty of generations and our parents probably thought the same thing, so I don't freak out as much about that. I certainly see the technology is going that way and there's nothing that's going to change that.

But when you get into the nitty-gritty of brain cortex thinning and all these things — that's the stuff that social media companies and the gaming industry can't spin. You can't argue with that. It's there in black and white. And that's why I keep harping on about the brain imaging studies, the functional MRI studies. They are the ones that are irrefutable, even though the industry will still try to spin it in some different way or come up with other studies.

But at the end of the day, those are the things that need to drive us for a healthy amount of use for kids. Again, I'm not like — some people quite often say to me "Oh, so you must live on a farm somewhere and you don't give your kids screens at all." No, that's not the case. We were playing Mario Kart a couple of days ago on Nintendo Wii with my daughter. She didn't like it that much but anyway, I enjoyed it.

But it's not something where I'm off on some commune and living off grid and I pop up every now and then to talk about this. We can do it, we just have to do it in a healthy way that's not going to impact them. That's all I'm saying.

Lukas: It's not going away.

Brad: Not going anywhere.

Lukas: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate the conversation so much. I appreciate the work you do so much. And the challenge you come up against — it's something as a sector we haven't considered until delving into your work and what you do. But there is a lot you personally are up against. So I appreciate your resilience and making it a mission for your life and helping so many children.

Brad: Like you said, help one — one percent's too much. It's pretty scary, isn't it? But look, I really appreciate your questions and thank you for taking the time to look into it.

Lukas: No problem. Look forward to having you back again because we didn't even get into talking about schools and technology at schools. But look forward to you joining us again soon.

Brad: Absolutely. Thanks so much.