Get Your Kids off Screens and Outside (With Ginny Yurich)
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Coming up on the Dr. John Deloney Show. It would have been madness for you and I to get a $1,000 computer to put in our pocket in middle school. That's madness. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so it's like what is driving that pressure? I don't know. I don't know when it's shifted. But yeah, $1,000 thing. Are you kidding me? We had a computer growing up and it had six gigabytes and everybody got one. Everyone got one gigabyte.

What's going on? What's going on? This is John with the Dr. John Deloney Show. I'm so grateful that you have joined us today. We talk about relationships, kids, parenting, marriage, dating, whatever you got going on in your life. We're here to sit with you and help you figure out what's the next right thing.

If you want to be on this show, go to johndeloney.com/ask, A-S-K, and you're going to write out what's going on in your life, fill it out, hit send, and it will go to Kelly and she'll build the show and hopefully she'll reach out to you. We get jillions of letters all the time. And we get phone calls too.

Go ahead and reach out if you want to be on, and hopefully you can make it on the show. Today we got a special guest. We got a special guest. Y'all have said, hey, we love interviews, and so we have planned some more interviews throughout the year, and we have an awesome guest today. I was on her podcast. Her name is Jenny Urich, and she is the host of the Thousand Hours podcast.

And it's this movement to get people outside, get your kids outside. And so I was on her podcast with a delightful time and I invited her to come be on our show. We talk about education. She's an avid homeschool fan and I've been a public school guy forever. Now I'm moving my kids to a different school setting. We talk about it and we disagree on some things and I love it. She's amazing. And we talk about the Kelly. What else do we talk about on this episode?

We talked for so long. I mean, it was awesome. Yeah, we talked about, I mean, that's her whole thing is getting your kids outside, how to do it without being overwhelmed, how to slowly get your kids outside, you know, and to kind of start that process. We also talked about the hell that is being a woman in the modern world where you cannot win. You should be doing this or you should be doing that. You should be staying at home. Why aren't you married yet? Oh, my gosh, are you serious? Your kids should be doing this. Well, why aren't they doing that?

It's just chaos. And she talks pretty openly and candidly about it. She's been doing this for over 10 years, one of the largest podcasts on the planet. And I'm so grateful that she joined us. Buckle up. It's a fun conversation. Get your pins ready because she references tons of books and reading material, all ideas. And note the things where you disagree with me, not the things we disagree with her.

And find somebody you can talk to about those things in your regular life. It's a fun, fun conversation. One of the greatest people on the planet, one of the kindest people on the planet, Jenny Urich and me having a great conversation. Stay tuned. I have been guilty of just dumping the reason that we took

out of our kids' lives and we took like going outside out of their lives. I just started blaming devices 10, 15 years ago. Yeah. I worked at a university and they were a beta campus for like iPhones and iPads. And so we started handing them out to students saying it was going to change everything. And it did just in the wrong way.

But over the last maybe two years, I've begun to wonder if, yes, that's a caustic problem and I kind of blame him all the time. But I wondered if there was something beneath that. And it goes back to an article that a buddy of mine sent me. He's a rancher in West Texas. And it was from the UK. And it said one of the hottest selling markets for iPads was to two-year-olds.

And the interview with the parents said, every other kid has them. And here was the quote, I don't want my kid to be the only one. And that has haunted me, that idea of like being the only one, being the only one. And then I wonder if sitting beneath this, I'm protesting this idea with you and you can say, John, you're an idiot. Underneath it.

When did kids start running our homes or when did kids start being responsible for the emotional regulation of all the adults in their lives? Right? Yeah. I'd say it feels like that happened overnight and everything else, all these, it would have been madness for you and I to get a thousand dollar computer to put in our pocket in middle school. That's madness. Oh yeah. And it's now a must. You have, it is as...

Even though every parent knows, it's awful for them. They all know. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, what is driving that pressure? I don't know. I don't know when it's shifted that the universe of our homes has to revolve around our kids. Yeah. Yeah. And that we have just shirked that responsibility. Yeah.

And just said, oh, well, they all have it. So we're going to do it too. I think it's tricky when your kid... It is tricky when your kid is the only one. And maybe we all have those deep down feelings. Those like insecurities from our own childhoods, from our own experiences where we didn't want to be the only one. You don't want to stand out, right? We talk about like even just...

the way that people are formed, like in a tribe and you live and you don't want to, they say, you don't want to be the one everyone's looking at. Like you don't want to be kicked out. So you don't want to stand out. Right. So you conform, conform, conform. And so it's like, it's almost like we've taken that on ourselves. Yeah. But it's, it's really the kids thing. But yeah, a thousand dollar thing. Are you kidding me? We had a computer growing up and it had six gigabytes. Oh,

And everybody got one. Everyone got one gigabyte. And you could not, it was like if you like, you know, it's like you're in the car and you like go an inch over your brothers, you know, and it was like, I mean, if you take up any extra of your gigabyte, you know, it's enroaching on someone else's. And so, yeah, that has really changed. And it's interesting because parents seem to not be, a lot of parents seem to not be drawing the line, draw the line for your kids. It's not good for them. I just read the most gut-wrenching book called American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales. And talking about like the amount of pornography, the amount of,

all of these things that's happening in schools with the classmates. I used to be a teacher. I did too, yeah. And before the iPhone was even here, the kids were being intimate and videotaping on flip phones and sending it to the students. The police were getting involved and every parent was like, it's not my kid.

I was like, well, some of y'all's kids. Is one of your kids? And this really matters. Can you imagine being in seventh grade and having that pressure and having those images and they're circling around your whole middle school? It's a lot. Parents have to take a stand. How do they do that? You just don't have it. It's more than that. But see, I don't know if it is. It's that. And then here's what you have to do. This is what I think. When I was a kid...

at my neighbor across the street, locked the kids out all summer long. I was like, that mom, wow, she's on to something. You know, I was like, when I was younger, I was like, what's she doing? Like, what is she doing all day? And then I became a mom. I was like, that's the most brilliant mom I've ever met. And she had four kids and all summer long, they were out in the neighborhood. I don't even know if they ate. I mean, they were just roaming. They're healthy kids, they're healthy adults now. And everyone wanted to go outside because everyone was out there. And so then I became a mom and no one's outside.

There's a man named Mike Lanza who wrote a book called "Plaborhood" and he talks about how the most enticing thing outside is not your trampoline, it's not your amazing rainbow recreation play structure, it's other kids. Other kids. And they're not out there. And so as a mom, I've had to put in the work, which is I've got to call up at least one other family or maybe two or maybe five

And we have to plan it. We're all gonna be outside at the same time and the kids always wanna go then. And I used to be annoyed, John. I was like, this is annoying. I wish I was that mom from the 90s that could just shoot my kids out. But what would I have done? Clean baseboards? This has actually really enhanced my life too. But getting outside, I think as parents, we're inundated with technology just as much as our kids are. So when I'm putting in the effort to get our kids outside in community, everyone wants to go. And even the mom's lives are enhanced too.

Our life just doesn't trickle away. And I think for me, the idea, I've got two kids, one's 14 and one's eight. The idea that I've got to call somebody and set this up every time. At this point, it's kind of like me wishing gas would be a dollar a gallon. It's just not. It's just not. That's not the world we're in. And so if I want my kids to have a healthy life, it's up to me. And I think you made a point that's super not cool or popular to talk about.

We talk about how these phones are destroying our kids, how these screens are messing with our kids. Yeah. They're messing with us too. And we're not impervious to this, right? Yeah. And so it's cool to tell kids don't smoke. It's not good for us either, right? Right. And at some point we all have to just say, all right, enough's enough's enough's enough. Yeah. But I wonder if it's just fear. Like I had to explain to my mom while I was inside back in the old days. Yeah. Like what are you, why are you here? Yeah. That was the odd thing instead of where are you going when you can like...

I think there's confusion too. I think that no one really knew what happened. It was like we were outside and then all of a sudden no one's outside. And because no one's outside, someone just said the other day, you know, when everyone was outside, it was normal for kids to be outside. Now people may go adulthood and not see a childhood outside. And then all of a sudden they see an eight-year-old out there and they're like, something's wrong. Something's wrong. I'm gonna call. And so then it just becomes this endless cycle. But society used to be set up in a way that...

Probably not on purpose, but it was set up in a way that preserved childhood because the television wasn't on all the time. And I mean, I remember as a kid, it was like the cartoons ended at noon on Saturday morning. And I wanted there to be more TV. I desperately... Sundays...

It's only WWF. I don't want to watch that. But I wanted to want to watch it. Right. Because I think there's, you know, like even Michael, he talks about, we have this bent toward laziness, right? Like we just want to be comfortable and lazy and we just want to sit there and if it's not available, it's not available. Well, now it's available. I mean, to the moon and back, right? I mean, there is a content you could consume for the rest of your life in a million lifetimes. Yeah, a million lifetimes over. So it is, I think, a tall order for the parents to,

to step in and take on, I have to help be the shaper of the life. The society used to do it for me. We all used to do it together. That's right. And now it's very individual. It is on my shoulders.

that I say no to the iPad, that I get these groups of people together and we go do things and we run out of time for screens. That's what I say. Our best days are not the days where I'm like, no, no, no, no, you can't do it. My best days are like, oh, it's bedtime and we ran out of time because we had a really full day. But what I've learned, John, is that I used to hold a little bit of resentment toward that. Like I used to wish, I wish I was back in the day when society had to do it and I didn't have to.

But what I realized is that my life is really full because of it. And my life has completely changed because I've had to be the one that takes that on. And there's this incredible quote in a book by Kim John Payne where he says, when you rescue your kid's childhood, he says, day by day, remarkably, inevitably, you rescue yourself back. Yeah, you get your life back. It's powerful. I had completely lost that...

I had a book signing in Dallas and two of the neighborhood moms that I got in trouble with when I was a kid and they had license to get me in trouble because that's the way it worked, right? Everyone's moms could get every kid in trouble. They showed up to the book signing because we're all still going, right? Yeah. Everybody's still...

And that's gone now. It's gone. Well, because you formed relationships through experience. So I think a lot of this just has to do with confusion. It just doesn't exist anymore. And our moms and our grandmas didn't have to parent this way. They didn't have to be involved. We don't have a picture. We don't have a model for what it looks like. So we're making it up as we go. So what happened, and that is really my story. My story was when we had our first son, I had no idea what to do with him. I didn't know how to fill the days. And that can be a really long day. It was a mom at home, you know,

If you've got a spouse that works out of the home and that's how ours was, it's 10 hours. I'm like, what am I supposed to do with this baby for 10 hours? And I really had no idea. And so we enrolled in all these programs, John, and it was expensive. I want to throw that out. I had like a little pile of money set over for my working days. I was like, well, I can sign up for the mom and me, whatever, music, this. And I mean, that money ran out real fast. And I was drowning because I didn't know how to fill the time. And there wasn't really an example of that because things are shifting toward the screens and toward inside.

And so I really was running ragged. I actually...

did not like being a mom for many years. I felt like every day I was failing and I had come from a life, I think that before that often you end up doing what you're already good at, right? You're like, I'm naturally good at this. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. And then all of a sudden I was in this life where I was failing every day. This baby is crying. This baby isn't happy. I don't know what to do. The baby's up in the night. And I just felt I was really in a dark spot. And we had a couple of kids in a row and then

I had one day that changed my life. A girlfriend of mine, I was doing mops. I mean, I'm doing all these different programs, right? And like signing up, trying to make the day go by. And I show up at this mops and a friend of mine, she says, Charlotte, she's like, it's just one sentence. Sometimes one sentence can change your life. Ken Coleman's got that book, One Question. I love that book because, you know, sometimes you can be in the worst spot and it could change today. Maybe it's going to change today.

And that's how it was for me. She comes to this mops. We happen to be at a table, right? This is God's providence. This is, I mean, this is what happened in my life. One thing. And she said, Charlotte Mason says kids should be outside for four to six hours a day whenever the weather is tolerable. I never heard of Charlotte Mason. Have you?

Yeah, she's 18. Yeah. She's old school. I never heard of her. I didn't know she was from the 1800s. And my friend didn't tell me she was from the 1800s. Right. Or I would have been like, whatever, I'm not paying any attention. But I thought this is an absurd idea. Who spends four to six hours doing one thing? Right. Right.

And so she asked me if I would try it and I desperately wanted friends, a young mom. And I know a lot of people come up to me that are grandparents and you've got grandparents that listen to your shows and they're confused. They're like, how do I help my daughter? How do I help my daughter-in-law? How do I help them with the grandkids? And they seem really lost.

And so she says it's four to six hours, will you do it with me? And I was like, oh, this is a bad idea. I mean, what are they gonna do? I'm like, they're like crying at the library program that's 45 minutes and I feel like, you know, I'm losing my mind a little bit, you know? But I agreed to do it and I tell people it's the best day of my life because it was the first good day I had as a mom.

I had not had a good day. Just sunshine, grass and sticks. And they just played. And I didn't know that they would do that, John. They just played. And what I have learned over the past decade plus is that when we let our kids play outside, and this is not like you have to set up a scavenger hunt. This is like the mom kind of that shut the door. But now we go, right? We go because we're trying to collect community and we're there. A lot of times we go. And so I'm there and I get to have a full conversation with a friend.

You know, sitting under the sun and the kids played. But when they play outside, it helps them develop their cognition. Yes. And we're talking about their eyes and all these, their bone structure. Every time they jump and land, it's building their bone structure. Katie Bowman, she's this biomechanist. She says osteoporosis is a childhood disease that shows up in adulthood. So we're talking about their bone structure. We're talking about their social skills.

How do you learn how to interact and compromise and negotiate and be creative when you're inside doing worksheets and doing seat work? Just sitting there staring at each other. Yeah. Even the video games. The video games used to be a communal thing. You go over your buddy's house, right? And everybody's sitting around and playing their Nintendo. And you're talking and you're having food. Now it's all through the screen. You don't see any social... I mean, there's nothing. Emotionally, no.

There's so much respite out there. And for whoever families are listening, I know my podcast is probably so much yours. People have different faith backgrounds, but there is spiritual growth out there as well. And you can find principles of living and it does so much for kids and we don't have to orchestrate it all. It's like the pressure's off a little bit. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

So my wife and I were meeting the other day about the back-to-school madness that is about to be on us. We've got my travel schedule, her work schedule, our daughter's new school and clothes and forms to fill out and all these online portals and my son's sports schedule and he's got to have shoes every two weeks because his feet won't stop growing and how are we going to pay for all this and on and on and on.

And when we step back and look at our schedule, it's so packed and we haven't even put in the things like exercise, date nights, counseling appointments, church and holiday trips and big home projects. And these are the things that make life worth living. And I listened to y'all. This is your life too. And here's what I've learned. When it comes to taking care of me, my family and my work, I have to begin with the things that matter most and the things that keep me well and whole so I can wade into the chaos and be sturdy and present and strong.

you too. So as you're planning your upcoming end of summer and fall plans, make sure you don't skip date nights, don't skip regular exercise, and don't skip your regular therapy appointments. Yes, therapy can be hard work, but can also help make the rest of your life possible.

When it comes to therapy, I want you to consider calling the team at BetterHelp. BetterHelp is 100% online therapy staffed with licensed therapists. It's convenient, it's flexible, and it's suited to fit your schedule.

With a good therapist, you can learn things like positive coping skills, how to set boundaries, how to deal with all the chaos going on in your life, and how to be the best version of yourself. In this upcoming season, make sure you put on your oxygen mask first. Never skip therapy day. Call my friends at BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash deloney today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash deloney.

I feel like we've created an ecosystem that no mom can win. If you're working, you show, oh, you're not staying home with your kids. And if you're home with your kids, it's like, wow, like 80 years of hard work, you're just going to throw it away and not go get a job, right? And if you're at home, you're surrounded by your home should look like this and run like this and function like this. And then if you're at work, it's madness.

What do you say to the mom that's sitting at home trying to figure this out? I'm a firm believer, and again, I get myself in trouble here. I don't think moms were designed to do motherhood alone. And they're designed to be surrounded by people. The same as men are designed to be around people.

And a lot of the after effects that people struggle with is sitting at home screaming kid, all by yourself, no one to call. Or you call your mom and she just kind of rolls her eyes at you and you call your buddies and it's just alone. What do you tell a mom who's trying to figure out which way is left, which way is up or down, feeling like I cannot win?

It's so hard. Yeah. It's so hard. There's a phenomenal book called "Hunt, Gather, Parent" by Michaelene Ducliffe. And she has gone around the world and she works for NPR. So she's gone around the world and did this special project when she had a child of seeing how other cultures parent. And one of the things she wrote in her book was that in so many cultures,

No one is alone with a crying baby. Can you even imagine? That's it. You know, it's interesting when you talk about the village or the other people. And I think really the most important people to have around you, if you're pulling your hair off parenting, is not a bunch of other adults. It's not like a bunch of aunts and uncles. It's other kids. It's other kids because they occupy each other.

And so what I say to the mom who is drowning, because I was the mom who's drowning, I'm really only here because I failed. I'm not here because I'm super outdoorsy or super athletic. I brought in my go-ruck, but I mean, it's not whatever. Yeah, I must have like 10 pounds in it, so whatever, okay. But it's not like that's not, I was like a math teacher. I play piano. That is at the core of the things that I love, but I do love people and I love community. I've always loved working with kids. And so it just becomes this thing of,

All I did was try it once. Johnny was, it was a one day thing. It was a one sentence changed my life.

and trying it one time. So to the mom who's overwhelmed, I would say, "Hey, can you take your dinner outside tonight? Is it warm enough? Can you take that meal and just, can you go sit? Like, do you have a little balcony on your apartment? You know, can you go down?" No matter where you live, and people bring that up a lot. Like I'm in the city, I'm in the country, there's pros and cons to all of it, right? If you're in the city, it's walkable. And that's what Dan Buettner says, right? We talked to him, the Blue Zones guy. He's like, "Really, one of the best things you can do for your health is live in an area that's walkable. Get out, go to the local parks." If you live in the suburbs, you got, maybe there's neighbor kids.

And you can go play. If you're in the country, you got all that land, there's no one to play with. So there's pros and cons to wherever you're at. But can you take your meal outside? Can you take a game outside? And what happens when you go outside is that that full spectrum sunlight, there's over a hundred body systems that are dependent on bright days and dark nights. That's how our bodies are. Go out in the morning, can you walk to school?

One of the most important things you could do. And Katie Bowman, I talked about her earlier. She says, look, if you can't walk to school, can you walk part of the way? Can you park? If you go into the library, can you just not drive the whole way? Can you stop a little early and walk? Can you play some games? Can you go on a short hike and invite one other family and bring some really fun snacks? And you try and you incorporate it in because you realize, I think, in one period of time that this is really the answer to a lot. We keep talking about kids, but we have to have...

That thing that our mutual friend Michael Easter talks about, which is we gotta be committed to doing things even though they're hard. Well sure, yes. Yes, it's hot. I know it's hot. Yeah. Or yes, it's cold. Yep, it is. Yeah. And everybody's gonna be okay. How are these kids gonna develop grit? I mean, the other thing about parenting and I think what we're trying to solve, we're trying to solve the screen issue. I mean, that is the biggest issue in families and households today.

is dealing with the screens. But we're also trying to prepare our kids, right? And I think this is sometimes also where that change has come in. It's like the colleges seem like they're more prestigious. Like we're just worried. The world is changing so fast. And Neil Postman, he's written some phenomenal books. He was like this tech optimist, but he said change changed.

And he wrote that in the 80s. Like the velocity of change has changed. And so we're preparing our kids for jobs that don't exist. That's what we know. Our job that we do did not exist when I was in college. What is this? It didn't exist. No. It didn't exist. This building didn't exist. Right. Exactly. Oh, here I sit with Dr. John. And your questions for humor.

I mean, like, I mean, what? But none of this existed. There's no podcast, no YouTube. It wasn't a thing, right? Yeah. And how do you prepare your kids for that? They have to be flexible and they have to have grit. They have to know how to take risks. And there is a woman...

Dr. Jean Twenge, and I love her name, but she's a leading generational change expert. And she was talking about kids are coming to college and they can't even make simple decisions without texting their parents. So when kids go outside and when they have space, even if it's inside, they got space where there's time. They have to draw from their own inner resources and they have to figure out what's my next step.

And when we constantly are putting kids in an environment that is adult directed, that's harder, number one. Yeah.

I said, "Did you talk one time for kindergarten?" Every four minutes, it was like a new activity. It was all adult directed. How do you do that for 13 years plus extracurriculars, plus homework, all these things that were loading into childhood and then say, "Go off into this world that's rapidly changing." It's a reminder that every time I step in to save my child from something other than death,

I'm looking them in the eye and saying, I don't trust you and you're not enough yet. That's good. Well, we have to be able to pass off the baton. This is a two-person thing, right? We have to learn how to trust. And I think it's meant to be little by little over time, I'm passing off the baton to you. Otherwise, if they've never done it, we both...

hit adulthood. That's right. And we're both freaked out. You go to college, I can't breathe. So then I have to call you all the time. I pass that on to you and you're carrying that and your studies. So, okay. So there's this really cool guy, Christopher Chin. He is an adventure photographer. He's got a masterclass and it's phenomenally interesting. So he's like out with his camera skiing down, you know, these huge, and he's taking photos, right? So this is his whole job.

And he's just got this huge following and really cool things. And in his masterclass, he gave a calculation for risk, which I thought was super interesting as I like math. So I'm like, oh, this is good. It's a calculation. He said risk is a combination of how dangerous is it?

with how likely is it to happen? I was like, that's kind of life-changing. So I was thinking about it in terms of, okay, would I let a small child play near a body of water unattended? No, because how dangerous is that? Incredibly. How likely is it that something's going to happen? 100%. Right, right, okay. But I'm like, could I let a three-year-old crawl up onto a fallen tree? How dangerous is it?

Not very. How likely is something going to happen? Sure, they're gonna fall off. I mean, that's what they do. They're gonna have a bruise, they're gonna have a scrape, they're gonna cry, you're gonna have to console them. But it's in those moments where they're starting to learn how to trust their body. It's riskier in the long run to not know how to take risks. And so I think that that calculation helped me because I'm gonna step in if it's catastrophic. You're up on the roof and you're four, okay, maybe not, right?

But in smaller situations, I think that we can step back and trust them and know that we're growing in that process too. That's a scary proposition. It's hard. Yeah. So going back to moms. Yeah. You're in your house, listen to this. You have two...

Or three under three, right? Yeah, that's what we had. Oh, that's what y'all had? Yeah. People call the show and I'm just astounded. Yeah. They'll often say, they'll call with the presenting issue like, you know, my intimacy died in my marriage or we're running out of money or whatever. And then we'll get to, well, I've got three kids under the age of four. I'll just be like, just stop. Stop. Like everything in your house exploded, right? We have hope for you. There's so much hope. Yes. Okay. So that person's alone. Yeah. She's got nobody. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So you're going to find some, you're going to find, if you're not, you're going to try and find somebody. You may not be able to. It's life or death. You've got to find somebody. You have to find, you really have to find a spot. I would say that's the most important. So we would go to these spots when our kids were that little because they could run and you don't want to be near a road. So we would go to these spots that were a little more tucked back or a

maybe that was fenced in, right? So your kid's not gonna run from you. If you could find one friend, just one, or maybe you're gonna find them there. Maybe, right? You're gonna find...

People know, like people are talking about getting outside. So they know it's gonna be easier to find someone, I think at this point that shares that value. And you're gonna say, look, I'm gonna bring a blanket. I'm gonna bring some food. I'm gonna bring a lot of water, so that we have what we need and we're gonna stay. And I think that's the key. We have siphoned things off into these little chunks. And so then we're running ragged. I mean, I remember John, it would be like 11:00 AM and I had gone taking the kids to the library program. I love the library. Okay, library program is great.

But in order to get three small children to the library,

They're all nursing. They're all in diapers. They're all throwing up. You know, they're spitting up. You have to change them. You have to carry, you know, I mean, talk about rucking. Everyone's in those little buckets. You have to buckle everyone in. They're crying. Nobody wants to be in the car. You got to get to the library. You got to get out your huge stroller. You've got your bag. It's full of books. You have your diaper bag. It's got all those things. And you got to try and get them through the parking lot without getting their fingers pinched in the doors. And then you get to the room and they don't really want to be there. So they're crying. They're not paying attention. You're trying to nurse the baby. You know, they're getting into stuff.

And then I tell people I wouldn't even drink water 'cause I was like, what if I had to go to the bathroom? What would I do? Like truly, how would I even manage that? And so, and I would go home and it will be so early in the morning and I would think I have so much of this day left, I'm exhausted. So the change to doing something for a longer period of time, there's a bigger payoff, right? You're gonna put in probably the same amount of effort to get your kids outside, but you still have to take all this stuff

But then you're there and you get to exhale. Right. You get to have that blood pressure drop. And so there's a woman, a phenomenal book, it's called Balanced and Barefoot by Angela Hanscom. She's a pediatric occupational therapist. So she's been on the front line of seeing, like kids are really struggling in a lot of ways. We're talking about mental health, sure. But they're struggling in a lot of ways with different tactile things and...

And a lot of the things that she says is the outdoors will help with a lot of that. But she talks about, you know, the kids and being outside. And I just think that we have to expand the time because she says it can take kids up to 45 minutes to develop a play scheme.

You gotta wait through it. Who's in charge? Who's the boss? What game? Yeah, what are we gonna do? We're gonna play princess, we're gonna play knights, whatever it is. She's like, you have to wait through that period. So the kids are gonna fuss. They may fuss. You might go out and in 20 minutes be like, this is not going well. He's gotta wait it out. Give it that 45 minute mark. And if they haven't done it much, it might take a little bit longer. Dr. Nicholas Cardaris, he wrote Glow Kids and Digital Madness, phenomenal books, just phenomenal. He says he's got kids that come in his office now that are three years old, don't know how to play with blocks.

They don't know how to stack them up and knock them down. So if you've not been playing a lot, it might take your kids a little bit longer. So they're going to come up and they're going to say, this is boring, mom. I don't want to be here. And I'm into the love and logic stuff. It's like you respond empathetically without being emotionally charged. Yeah.

And I would just say, and now my kids don't do this. See, it does change in time. Like they learn how to draw off. Kim John Payne says the best babysitter is your kid's imagination. Long-term, right? Long-term, that's what you want. You want a kid that can occupy themselves because they love life and they have things that they wanna do. But in the short term, you're just gonna have to say things like, it's okay to be bored. That's all right. I trust you'll find something to do. And you just say it on a loop. And then eventually they're bored of hearing you say that same thing.

And off they go to find something to do. And that, it really does work. It's transformed my home. Yeah. In a pretty profound way. I read this really cool thing in a book called Opt Out Family, which isn't out yet, but it might be out by the time this is out, by Erin Lackner. And she wrote a book also called Chasing Slow, which is, I'm going to set you a perfect, like we have to chase this. Yeah. It's the reason that we have a goal. We have a goal to get outside because it's hard. Right. It's hard to set that time aside. It's hard not to fill with other things. But she talked about in this book, this,

idea of watermelon versus candy. She's like, if I put out a bowl of watermelon after dinner, my kids are clamoring for it. Like, I mean, everyone, you know, or on a hot summer day and you bring out a bowl of watermelon, you just slice it, it's cold out of the fridge. You know, kids, she goes, but if I put out a bowl of candy every single time, my kids are going to choose the candy over the watermelon. And so the premise was, and I actually thought this was so freeing. It was like, give kids time when the only option is the watermelon. Mm-hmm.

So that they don't have to be, they're having to choose. They're having to use those resources to choose and they can't, neither can we. And it's, I don't think it's fair to always have them be the ones that you choose for them. That's what my parents did. You know, long before any of these podcasts existed, we had a limit of the amount of shows that we could watch. Right.

And that was freeing because when you can't do it, you're free to open up your world to all the other things that are out there that are fascinating and interesting. And so it's a gift we give our kids like boredom. This came out, John Payne, he wrote a book called Beyond Winning. It's about youth sports culture. Oh, geez. Which is a phenomenal, it's a phenomenal book. One of my favorite I've ever read. He wrote it with Luis Fernandez Yosa. And there's a statement in there that says, and I think this is big and maybe circles all the way back to the beginning.

When your kids are bored, you have not failed. Yeah. I think we need that reminder. We always feel like we're failing. Yes. Like we're losers. Our kids aren't happy. Put that on your fridge. When your kids are bored, you have not failed. My favorite piece of parenting advice I've ever heard in my life comes from Jack Black. And he just said, don't make a happy kid happier. Like he saw his kid outside in the mud with a stick or something and he's like,

Like, I'm Jack Black. And he said, I ended up six hours later with a kid who was over-sugared, over-stimulated because I took him to this. We had to drive through this. We had to drive through and pick up this. He said, my kid was having the time of his life, sitting in the mud, playing with a stick. And what I should have done is got down there with him. And we would have had an enormous day, right? Can we talk about, you know, people I know calling your show all the time and we're sitting here at Ramsey. And it's like, childhood could be a very expensive proposition. It's insane. Here's a stat for you.

It's from a book called Smart Moves by Dr. Carla Haniford. Dr. Carla Haniford is in her 80s, but she says this, elderly people who dance regularly have a 76% less chance of developing dementia. Mm-hmm.

That's a pretty high stat. And so the point is, is that when we move our bodies in complex ways, which kids innately do when they're outside, right? They try. That was one of the things I noticed right away. As soon as we started getting outside, I was like, this is just for me. I feel better. I feel more present. I feel less ragged and more

I think that if I'm a better mother, our house will run better. But I noticed immediately, John, like our kids were thriving. They're eating better. They're sleeping better. They're getting along better. They're playing better inside. We haven't had to go for a doctor's appointment for any acute, like, I mean, and we've been doing, I've got a lot of kids.

You know, and we've been doing this for a decade. Like it's helping their lymphatic system. So I started to notice right away, but they're always like, look at me, mom, look at me. And they're climbing up a little bit higher. They're getting up over the fence. They want me to watch. So complex movements enhance and protect

The neural wiring in the brain. That's what I want. I want my kid for the world that's coming to have a quick and adaptable brain. And you do it with other people. Yes. And then they're learning social skills and they're scaffolding up and scaffolding down. If you have a child that has developmental delays,

and you're able to go outside in a group of mixed age. Dr. Peter Gray says, mixed age is where it's at. Like this is, or if you go outside, then your child, maybe they're super athletic and so they can go off with the older kids or maybe your child is a little bit developmentally delayed and there's friends there and kids, you know how kids grow at all different rates. You don't know that this kid is seven and that you don't know that just by looking at them. So they find playmates. And I think that's a beautiful thing too. If you have a group of friends and everyone's, you've got toddlers through teens,

That's a good situation to be in. I keep thinking of, as you're talking, I keep thinking of the, okay, but what about, but what about? Yeah. And the thing that popped up was, okay, what about the mean kid? Joy's a mean kid. And I remember a buddy of mine who's a therapist, who's just a brilliant therapist. He said this 20 years ago. He said, the way we're handling bullying is gonna bite us hard. And I said, what do you mean? And he said,

we're trying to do away with bullies, which is good, but we've stopped teaching kids how to deal with and respond when they're bullied and we're robbing them. And I was like, okay, whatever, dude. And that has come home to roost. As you have a group of kids that you get shut down. I worked with college kids for 20 years.

They can't handle a C. They don't have the cognitive wiring for a C. They implode, right? They turn to ash. They don't have the cognitive wiring for a bad breakup. They don't have the cognitive wiring for... Mom's not there to answer that question. I don't know where to get my tire fixed. I don't know what to...

When they end up in the Dean of Students, right? I mean, it's not their fault. And this is a change. It did not used to be this way. It happened overnight. Yeah. They're losing the resolve. There's a phenomenal, a phenomenal book, John, about bullying. It's called Emotionally Resilient Teens and Tweens by that Kim John Payne.

And I read it in preparation for a talk. And at that stage in life, we didn't need the information. And then all of a sudden we did. Sometimes it happens like that. I was actually really surprised by the premise of the book. He goes through every different type of bullying in story form and has someone who's been through it kind of talk about how they made it through. Because he says, you know, some kids get bullied and some kids don't. Like, what's really going on? But the premise of the book, he said, was to strengthen the family base camp.

to be a safe harbor that your kid can come home to. And then you teach them to stand in their own power. That's the premise of the book.

But a kid can only stand in their own power if they're anchored to something bigger than themselves. That's it. But you know what I thought, John? I thought, this is a little bit too simplistic. And I think kind of a lot of these things that we talk about, we discount maybe because they sound too simple. I can just go sit at a park and my kid is going to grow. My kid is going to grow into the person they need to be. And I'm sitting at a park and I'm maybe sitting over the side reading your book. You know, that gives you a time to read your book.

books. And if your kids are old enough and you're away from the road and it's safe, you've got a little bit of time to invest in yourself. You could do a little workout over on the side, whatever it is. You all of a sudden have bought yourself time and it feels almost lazy. It almost feels too simple. It feels irresponsible. But how are kids going to adapt if they don't ever get those opportunities when they're kids? And that's what we're seeing. And

And then we'll move on from this topic. I think it's important to note that if I am a stay-at-home parent, or if I'm a just flying in from work parent, that tension and that angst and that frustration and that boredom and that I feel like I'm not producing, I feel lazy, our kids absorb that and they blame themselves and they try to solve that and they can't carry that. They can't...

their job isn't to make sure we're all okay. That's our job, right? And if something, I love watching the arc of it all, like in diet and nutrition and in mental health, all of it is arcing towards

Often the simpler, the better. It doesn't have to be so hard. I'm gonna tell you a story. Our oldest is 15. He just got his first internship, paid internship. He's super into video stuff. Like, I mean, he would love this as cameras and that's what he's interested in. And we've tried different things. And I mean, he just loves that. That's his bent and he gets his internship and fills out an application and does all the things. Do you know, they didn't ask him what age he learned how to read.

No. It wasn't on there. He learned it when he was seven in the second grade. I mean, that's way, he played his whole childhood. He just played second grade. I mean, that's like remarkably late in today's and it didn't matter long-term. So I think a lot of these things that we feel like matter so much, maybe they don't. And maybe there's another really good book by Linda Flanagan called Take Back the Game, where she's also talking about youth sports culture. And here's what she says. She says,

How are we presenting adulthood? Right. Are we presenting adulthood that all we do is sit on the sidelines? Yeah. Every single game we come in, just sit. And yell and scream? Yeah, that's all we do. That's all adulthood is. She's like, no, cultivate your life. Like, have relationships. Miss some stuff. Go to the championship, but miss some stuff because you're out there living a life. You're not sitting. She's like, on the sidelines in the fetid expanse. I mean, it's a funny book. She talks about all this stuff. And it's like, oh, I think that there's validity in that. And also-

There's people that wrote in that said, in retrospect, we lost all of those Saturdays. I don't remember specifically any of those soccer games. But in our family, I remember the hikes we've been on. You remember because it's all sensory. All those sensory things contribute to development and memories. So when you do the same thing over and over again, Mike Recker talks about this in a book called The Fun Habit. When you do the same thing over and over again,

Your brain encodes it as one memory. So every single Saturday, it's the same thing. You go to the same field, you play the same soccer, you know, it's mostly the same. Your brain, your whole childhood, that's kind of one memory. It's one thing. Baseball. Yeah. But if you do a bunch of different things and you go a bunch of different places and you go to a couple of different parks, you go to the zoo, those make your life feel more full because they're new memories. It is one of my most sincere honors to be partnering with an amazing supplement company. I'm talking about Thorne.

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Here's our options now. Unschooling, homeschooling, private schooling, public schooling, any number of those schoolings, getting mad and moving schooling, requesting changes in district because this one teacher was mean to my kids. It doesn't ever stop. It doesn't ever stop. And we're in the process of moving kids from one situation to another situation. And here's a couple of things I'm noticing. Yeah.

I'm putting my bias out there. I worked at universities forever and I was a high school and elementary school teacher before that. My wife's a lifelong teacher. Both of us are public school people to the death and now we're transitioning out. And so I'm losing some of my identity, right? Yeah, sure. Kind of like I talked a lot of trash as an 18 year old and I got a peanut allergy kid. It's a very similar thing. I ran my mouth a lot and now here we are.

Here's a couple things I'm noticing. One is, so a cool thing to talk about is nobody needs to go to college anymore. College is a waste of time, it's stupid, you shouldn't go. You should go get a trade. Totally. I worked in colleges. Thousands and thousands of students should not have been there. They should have been borrowing that kind of money. They should have been at a different place, et cetera. And I don't know, on the flip side, any, zero, and I'm sure they'll fill up the comments, I don't know any person or family of means that is not sending their kid to college.

I know of, it's only when I started touring private schools that I thought, oh, this is where everybody, this is where people who know something that I don't know are sending their kids. And then I saw the other side, which are people who are brilliant savant people pulling them out and just saying, we're homeschooling. I'm not doing this anymore. And so we have some people that are way smarter than me in our life that have just said, I'm opting out and this is how we're going to do it. Yeah.

And I guess for the first time, I'm looking at my two kids and they're saying, "Dad, what do I do? What do we do?" And I'm saying, "I don't know." When I was a kid, there was just a school, a neighborhood school, that's what you went to.

And now there's so many options and so many ways to, in some situations, leverage your soul. You can borrow your soul to send your kids to X, Y, and Z place. Or you can opt out and you've probably like me have seen some amazing, just transcendent homeschool situations and some that you're like, oh no, oh no. It feels like it's all over the place. And so on the one hand,

I can't keep doing with my kids where they are right now. Yeah. And I don't know what the next step is. Okay. I have two thoughts. First of all, what an amazing thing that you're modeling to your kids. Right. And I want to throw that out there. Because whether you homeschool or you hybrid school or you public school, when you make a change... Mm-hmm.

I think that is one of the most powerful things that you can ever do in a family because our lives are not static. And here you sit in a situation that you never could have imagined. And I think so often kids are siphoned off from real life. Yes. And they don't have the opportunity to say, what does an adult do when they're stuck? Someday your kids are going to get older and they're going to be like, there was a time when my dad didn't know what to do. And he told us. And so it's normal. He told us. It's very normal that I don't know what to do. I think we embrace those things. I think those are really good things. I think that no...

decision that you make is final. Our lives are very fluid and people, they come in and out of all sorts of situations. So the only way to know is to try. So I do think that there's something to be said about trying something and saying that didn't really fit. And also what an amazing thing of modeling.

My favorite quote, and I have read a lot of books, I really like to read, and I've gotten a chance to talk to so many authors, but this guy's dead, so I haven't gotten a chance to talk to him. His name is John Holt, and he wrote a book called Learning All the Time. The subtitle is pretty fascinating. It's how young children learn to read, write, do math, and investigate the world without being taught. So a lot of information out there that says the pressure's off. This pressure that we feel that's heaped on our shoulders, we maybe can just throw away. Kids grow.

And the quote he says is when children are living fully and energetically and happily, they are learning a lot, even if we don't always know what it is. And I think that's the trade-off, right? It's like, as a parent, I would love to be able to check every box. I would love to read a book with my kids and be like, you know what? They learned these 400 vocabulary words and they, but this concept of living energetically and happily and fully, they're learning, they're growing. And so we aim to,

to live a full life today? Can I live? And that's gonna look different in every situation. You got a single parent, right? Like do what you can with the time you have. Everyone who's listening has a different situation. What time do you have? And in that time, can you live fully and energetically and happily with your family? And I believe that that sets you up for tomorrow. I'm gonna give today all I've got. And I'm gonna give today all I've got

in a way that prioritizes what I value, right? So it's like, it's faith, it's my kids, it's my family, it's my husband, it's my friendships, it's my community, and then comes the work. And

And it's worked. That means we have to collectively say no about some things, just some things. Yeah, I think the things that everyone says you have to have in order for your kids to be successful, do they really? John Taylor Gatto wrote a book. He says that it only takes kids about 50 to 100 contact hours to learn functional literacy.

So to learn to the point where they could learn anything, to play their Gibson guitar, to get in their rock band, to become a chemist, to whatever it is that they love. I mean, our kids come into the world with things that they love, you know, by the time they're seven or eight. And I just talked to this guy, Chef Nathan Lippe. He grew up eating fish sticks, but he was interested in cooking. And so he spent a lot of time like watching early Martha Stewart. He went through all these names. I hadn't even heard of them all.

And he said, when I was eight years old, he said, my mom was gone and I just had time in the kitchen. And he's like, I wanted to make homemade pasta. And he's like, I'm just gonna do it. He said, I seen it, you know, and he gets out the flour and the egg and he makes the well, he told me, and he does it. And he had leftover queso in the fridge from something else. And he makes raviolis.

And he's eight. I mean, he's in the third grade, right? And he makes the bread and he rolls out the dough and he does the fork around the sides and he boils them. He's home by himself. You know, maybe there's another dog, but his mom wasn't there. He boils the water. He parboils. I mean, that's what he says. He's eight. He knows how to parboil. He puts them in the garlic and the butter. And anyways, he says, his mom walked home and it was a disaster. The kitchen is a disaster, right? He's eight years old. He's making homemade pasta. And she was kind of like, whoa. And then he said, I sat down, she sat down to eat it. And he said,

The way that she looked at me changed my life. My mom's look, because she was like, this is incredible. I've never had pasta so good. How did you do this? And he said, I want that feeling for the rest of my life. And he was eight. And I think so often, so John Taylor Gatto says 50 hours. Wow.

Well, we put a lot of childhood toward academics, like 15,000 hours. And we're raising whole kids. Towards a test score. Yes. And if you're raising toward a test score, that test score doesn't even matter. If you're teaching for a test, there's healthy cones written a ton about that. It's not about the test.

It's unethical, I think. I think we're destroying human beings. Yeah, so I think that we have to, it's a philosophical, it really is a philosophical, what is education? And I would argue that chef Nathan Lippe got a good one and it came from himself.

It didn't come from his mom who was making fish sticks. It came from inside of him and living in a place that allowed him to make a mess of the kitchen, that gave him the time and whatever. I asked him, I was like, what did your mom do? And he was like, I mean, she really didn't do anything. She just allowed for it. And there was a time and space for it. So my advice is look at your life. Are there things you could cut that are not life-giving to you and your family today?

And whatever the time that you have, maybe you have 50 minutes a day, maybe you have hours, maybe you're a stay-at-home mom and you've got toddlers. You've got all the time in the world. And when you're in that toddler stage as a mom, you're so ready. Like you're so ready for them to be potty trained. You're so ready to be out of that stage. But we know,

When you leave that stage, your life gets so busy. You're not necessarily the driver in that seat anymore. You know, you've got your kids and their interests and you're kind of go, go, go. This is actually really a beautiful special time when you've got your kids home. The unending, this open time is a gift. And if you can take that and figure out in that time, where does our family thrive? How do we live fully and energetically? Because this is what I would say.

what's one of the biggest changes that's happened in the past 20, 30 years? There are hardly any kids that are living happily and energetically and fully. If it really truly only took 50 to 100 hours, and obviously every child is different. If you've got a child that sucks, we're not going across the board, but I wanna tell you this, we've got five kids. So when you have five kids, you can experiment a little bit. So like for the first ones, I was super nervous and we do home education, but like I said, everyone has their own amount of time that they have that they can play around with.

And this book says a kid can learn to read, write and do math on their own. And I was like, okay, all right, I can see my kid investigate the world. I can see my kids learn how to count, right? I was like, could a kid really, really learn how to read without being taught? My other kids, I use this book, it's called "Teach Your Child How to Read in 100 Easy Lessons." So it wasn't that hard. It cost me $20. It worked for all my kids. This was a good investment. And they all were reading. They went from being illiterate to reading chapter books in a couple months.

But for my youngest daughter, John, I was like, I really wonder about this. And they say that the kids at the right age and stage, right? Not when they're four. Maybe, maybe, you know, maybe they're three, maybe they're 12. They want to read because they see everyone else doing it. And they're like, that's intriguing to me. And I want to try that. And so they ask the questions that they need to ask in order to understand it. But that's what they did when they were babies, right? They learn from mastery. Did you teach your kids how to crawl? No.

No, but they learn from mastery. And then they went on to something harder. And so our youngest daughter is seven years old and I did not teach her how to read. And she can read anything. She reads Berenstain Bears. She reads them out loud. And it was because she was like, well, what? You know, we've talked about letters and you read to them and then they start to get interested. And here's this letter that starts your name. My wife had a great party trick. It's cheating because she has a PhD in literacy, but...

Oh, she might hate this. Maybe she's going to hate this. No, no, no. I don't know anything about it. We agreed long ago in grad school to not discuss what each other's research was. But she had a great party trick where she taught our son and our daughter, but I remember it specifically with our son. She got those little magnet letters on the bathtub. Yeah. And she taught them the letters like they were animal sounds. And so like any...

18 month old could like what's a lion say? But she would put up what's a bee say and he'd go buh and he was 18 months couldn't speak yet He wasn't fully speaking and you sit in the backseat and someone had given him a blanket and it had his name embroidered on it and we're driving he goes on

And he's reading. We have good old hunting. We have good old hunting. She's like, no, he's not. But it was the first seed of literacy. I think that that is, that's the point, right? That it might not be quite as hard as we make it out to be. And there are kids that struggle with reading and they have all, there's all sorts of different situations there. What works for one is not going to work for the other. But the point is, is that kids are naturally designed to grow and want to grow. And sometimes we turn that off. I also think kids, that growth is often,

I remember, and I've told this story often, but I was doing a practicum with a psychologist and we're working with a really troubled kid. And as we left that room to go into another room, I said, "What are you supposed to say to a kid to help him respect women? That kid is sick and he was saying some wild things." And he looked at me and goes, "You can tell a kid whatever you want, but they're just gonna watch you." And I was like, "Oh, that hurts, man." So if a kid grows up in a house and mom and dad are always reading,

My son was typing the other morning before school and I was like, get off that screen. What are you doing? You know how I feel about that. What are you doing? And he's like, I'm working on my novel, dad. And I was like, oh, because two of your parents are writers, right? I mean, it's what he sees. It's what he knows. It's all he knows. And he's like, I guess that's what humans do every morning, right? And it's like, no, actually. And what I think that's...

That's what's interesting too. It's like, I feel like we have siphoned off family where it's like, okay, there is a genetic component there. Like, and maybe like chef Nathan Lippe, his mom's making fish sticks and that kind of came on the inside. But in other situations, sometimes that is, you know, your kid already maybe has that bent or they've seen you do it. And so what a, what a blessing for that kid to be able to fall in the footsteps of someone else.

I think that my biggest message is one of hope that we can do less and gain more. Yeah, that's it. That's it. And I think the things when I was talking about we have to give stuff up, we often think of, yeah, you may not be able to afford the new Suburban. If you want to do some of these things, drive an old minivan, drive an old camera, you're going to be fine. Kids will be fine.

But I think that, I love that Chef Lippe, 'cause that picture in my head is that mom gave up this perfect picture of a clean kitchen. Yeah. For the sake of her kid. She also gave up like a little bit of, other parents would be like, "You're a bad mom. You let your child boil water and you weren't there." That's right. Yeah, yeah. She gave up that too. She gave up a lot, right? Yeah. Gave up a lot.

You give up control and I think that is the trade off. It's like, we can't know. That's why I love that quote so much. They're growing even if we don't always know what it is. And I think that's the point of it is that if we can learn to let go of that sort of perfectionism, the worry,

I mean, this is what your whole thing is about, right? Building it up. It's like, well, what's my kid gonna do? I'm like, my mother could have never been like when I was seven years old and worried about sports and extracurriculars, never been like someday my daughter's gonna be sitting across from Dr. John Deloney. I mean, my mother could have never predicted that, right? I don't think my parents could have predicted I'd graduate high school. Right, well, sure. And so we don't know what path they're gonna take, but if they can come at today in a way that really gives today what it's worth. Yeah.

Without having to worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow does take care of itself. And I think the pressure is off for parents. And I think that you have to have a little bit of practice in it. So you have to try it. Maybe you try it if your kids are in public school. Maybe you try it. It's like you go pick them up from school. And instead of going straight home, you stay at the playground for 45 minutes. Go to the park, yeah. Stay there for 45 minutes and ask a couple other parents if they'll stay too and bring some snacks that the kids really like.

and give everybody a time to wind down. And once you see it, I think that's what we've lost. We've lost the seeing it. We don't see it anymore. And I had to, even with my own kids and reading all these books and having like a baseline knowledge, I think this is the right way. I had to see it.

I had to see, like, can my daughter really learn how to read? She learned how to write, same thing. And she was motivated by different situations. Once you see it, then you gain that foundation under you and you take that with you for the rest of your life. Let's just assume there's two parents in a home. And I know that for, I guess, the majority now of families in the country, that's not the case. Now, let's do it across the board. You've got families, you've got somebody sitting by themselves.

In my head, this is an exercise that you get out of your house and go somewhere and you just swipe your calendar clean. And instead of saying, okay, we have to do this, we have to do this, we have to do this, we have to do this, we have to do this, I got to buy this, I got to buy this. Swipe it all clean and see what do we want our house to feel like when we walk in? Like what do we want this thing to be? And let's rebuild it that way.

Right now for the next year, you gotta keep going to your job, right? You gotta keep going to public school or you gotta keep, we're gonna keep homeschooling until we, whatever your thing is.

reverse engineer it that way. Does that sound right? Yeah. I don't know another way to do it. I think it's like you start with what time do I have and where am I putting... What time do I have that I have the option to make a decision about it? Because we all have so much time. You got to work. You got to... You have these... You have to shop. Maybe you have to go to therapy appointments. Whatever it is, maybe you're taking care of an elderly relative. Maybe...

Maybe you're in a spot where you're physically not doing super well. But we all have a certain amount of time that we're the boss of, that we have the say-so. And so the advice is to, as much as you can, not give that...

to the screens, not give it to swiping, not give it to something that's going to give you one memory. You're never going to remember. I'll be like, hey, John, you know, like, hey, what were you looking at on Instagram three weeks ago? This whole, this life changing. No, nothing. Right. Nothing. Just in the vacuum. Yes. And so you're like, I am going to go do and be and be embodied. I love that. That's what Jonathan Haidt talks about. His new book is The Ancient Generation. He talks about embodied and it's almost wild that we have to even have. I was like,

Like these sentences, like, but we have to be saying them to people. Can we be embodied? Can we go have an experience where we're there? We're with people. We're doing something. And that may be taking a walk around the block by yourself and waving at neighbors. I tell you what, there's nothing. You wave and someone smiles at you. I mean that,

That really changes how you feel on the inside. It's very powerful. And so I'm going to take the time where I can make the decision, however much that is or however little that is. I'm going to say, I'm going to fill it with what I want to fill it with first and leave the leftover time for screens, not the other way around. That's exactly right. And for anyone listening, I think in my house, it's Friday nights, there's pizza and a movie or something. So good. And then Saturday morning they can...

It's almost like you mentioned it. Yes, it is. I didn't realize I did that. No, you have created it like how it used to be and I think that makes sense. Saturday morning, yeah. There is time for screens because then you can be the yes parent. Yes. So that's what we did. Like when our kids were little, I want to watch a cartoon. Sure, on Saturday morning. That's it. Just turn it back to the 90s where society protected childhood by the way that it was structured. Can we take that and recreate it in our homes, which means that screens are limited and that there's friends to play with. Yeah.

And the bigger thing for me, I think underneath those things that you're mentioning is I get, me and my wife get to breathe and we get emotionally regulated parents, which has a cascading effect on our kids' nervous. It has a cascading effect on every part of their lives. I love all that. We all go inside the house. And I want my home to be a place that my wife, that me, that my kids, when they think of it, they can't wait to get there because it's a, it's a.

Yeah, and I think that if you're in a spot, I mean, we were in a spot where it's hard to get babysitters and you got a lot of little kids, they cry, they're clingy, your marriage is struggling because you're not being able to connect. And this is a very common thing, right? You're both running together.

I felt like nature, time in nature was, I felt like mother nature was like having another mother, both for my kids. It's someone else to keep your kids occupied and for me, right? And then I've got a little bit of time to connect with Josh. You know, we get to have a conversation because we're on a hike. Ew, he's in there. Ew. You know, we're on a hike and the kids are playing with whatever. They're playing with sticks. And so we get to have a conversation. We get to connect. So if you're in a spot where you're alone, right?

You have no family around to help. Maybe you don't have the finances, but you can still connect as a family and you can connect with your spouse. Because when you go out, if your kids are occupied, you got a chance to just sit around and have a conversation and connect. And I think it changes family life. You just did it. Just, yeah, it's just a exhale. Jenny, you're awesome. Thank you for coming to hang out with us. Thanks for having me. And wear that. My Deloney shirt. Deloney shirt probably. I will. Thanks for having me. Awesome.

What's up friends? Dr. John Deloney here. Tickets are selling like madhouse for the money in marriage getaway happening over Valentine's day weekend in 2025.

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All right. That was my conversation with my friend, Jenny Urich went all over the place and I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you found some places where you were nodding. You're like, yes, yes, I'm not crazy. And I hope you found some places where you're like, I don't buy that. Or I need to dig into that further.

She referenced about a jillion books, about a jillion books. She's like a walking library. I wish my brain was as smart and as fast as hers. We have linked to her book page. She has a show notes page on her website where it has all the books that she references, all the authors, all this stuff. You can go check it out, and we link to that in the show notes if anybody's interested in any of the additional books. At the end of the day, get your kids outside. You go outside. Put your phones away.

down. Put them down. Put them down. Go outside. Experience this incredible, amazing world out there that is very, very real, unlike things on the internets. I love you guys. I'm so grateful that you joined us. We will see you soon. Stay in school, don't do drugs, and go outside. Love you.