Office Hour’s Best of Parenting
42:27 Share

Do you want to be a more empowered citizen but don't know where to start? It's time to sharpen your civic vision and ignite the spark for a brighter future. I'm Mila Atmos, and on my weekly podcast, Future Hindsight, I bring you conversations to translate today's most urgent issues into clear, actionable ways to make impact. With so much at stake in our democracy, join us at futurehindsight.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

- Welcome to the final episode of the Prop2Pod special series featuring some of our favorite office hours moments. In last week's episode, we featured office hours best of career and answered your questions surrounding how to ask for a promotion at work, when and if you should ditch your full-time job for your side hustle, and when to quit your job entirely.

Establish a relationship with a mentor or your boss such that it's informal enough such you could say, which of my expectations be around a bonus or how are bonuses evaluated? If you want economic security, find something that satisfies you to the extent that you don't feel the need to do a side hustle and go all in on it.

Once you're out of the job market for longer than a year, you begin to smell. I know how terrible that sounds. People are like, what is wrong? And your skills begin to atrophy. Today, you'll hear best of parenting. After that, we'll be featuring an interview with Dr. Shefali, a New York Times bestselling author of The Conscious Parent and The Awakened Family. She's also a clinical psychologist, parenting expert, an international speaker, and a wisdom teacher who integrates Eastern philosophy with Western psychology.

So with that, first question. Hi, Scott. This is Jen calling from Toronto. I have a 12-year-old daughter, and this is the first year that she's had her own cell phone. And it seems that this is the year that, quote-unquote, everyone in her class is on social media. She doesn't have social media yet and hasn't really expressed much of an interest. However, my husband and I have told her that when she does want it, she should let us know. And we will talk to her about it and introduce her to it together.

So I would love your thoughts on two things. One is how would you recommend we introduce her to social media? What warnings or guiding principles would you share with her? And how would you frame the potential dangers for her? And number two, what rules and monitoring would you put into place around her usage in the first couple of years? And would you be transparent with her about how we're going to monitor her activity? Would love your thoughts on that. Thanks so very much. Really appreciate it.

Jen from Toronto, thanks so much for the question. And let me be clear, we have not figured this out. One of my sons developed device addiction. You'd think I'd be the last person that would let that happen because I braille on these companies. And yet we woke up one day and realized our son was really struggling and it was because of device addiction. In addition, I think that both my kids are, especially one of them, is showing semi-addictive behavior to social media platforms.

The research is as clear. It's worse for you, quite frankly, because you have girls. Boys bully physically and verbally, girls bully relationally, and we have put these nuclear weapons in our hands called a smartphone. And once social went on mobile in 2012, the hospital admissions for self-cutting, self-harm, teen depression, teen suicide skyrocketed for girls and escalated dramatically for boys. So my first piece of advice is if your daughter is

is not asking for these things. My general advice is to keep them off of it as long as possible. And here's the hard part.

When people say, well, okay, your kids struggling from social media are depressed, that's your fault. They recommend the dosing. They recommend, well, it's about parental involvement. Anyone who says that doesn't have kids because the most recent research, I believe it's from Gene Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, is there something called the cohort effect?

And that is once everyone is on SNAP, when you're the kid that's not on it because you don't know how to modulate it or it really attacks your self-esteem, you in fact become very depressed because you are ostracized and you are isolated and sequestered from the rest of your peer group. So there's kind of no winning. And what Professor Haidt has advocated for, and I think is absolutely right, is to have schools ban phones up until a certain age. Now,

Assuming at some point she does enter the brave new world of smartphones and social, I can tell you what we do. And that is they are not allowed to take their phones into the room at night. There's been a lot of studies showing that a lot of kids or the number of teens who are sleep-deprived has escalated because their phone is next to them, they hear a buzz, they pick it up, they start talking to their friends, and it goes downhill from there. Also, we try and limit the amount of screen time. We try. We're not great at it.

And also, and this sounds very 1984, and initially we didn't do it, but now we do it. We check their accounts and we check their content. I have wonderful boys that are really well-behaved, and I've had already two incidences, one involving bullying and two around really ugly language that my kids were not directly involved in, but part of a circle. And it's just, I mean, wouldn't you like to find...

the people who invented this shit and just kick them in the nuts a few thousand times. It really has been a net negative. I think it's especially bad...

for girls. Because the notion, I don't think we can even imagine what it's like to be faced with your full self, to be presented with your full self 24 by 7. And then you have algorithms that encourage you to say outrageous things or that overly sexualize young girls, specifically Instagram. I mean, the deck is just so stacked against them. For me, what I try and do with my boys, because I think my boys have an easier time relating to me on certain things than they do their mother.

I sit him down. I try and sit him down once a week. I'm like, what's going on with you? Are you doing okay? And what I try to communicate is that, look, if something bad happens online, this is the deal. I'm going to try and be generous and not judge you and not get mad at you. Maybe you do something really stupid here and something bad happens. I'm going to give you a bit of a hall pass on this stuff. And in exchange for that hall pass, you're going to come to me when something happens that upsets you. Because

What you don't want, and where real tragedy strikes here, is that something bad happens online and the kids suffer because

in isolation and the parents don't even know about it. They don't even know about it. A kid gets bullied online, starts having suicidal ideation, goes down a rabbit hole at night, and the parents don't even know what is going on. Because if your kid develops an addiction to meth or alcohol or shoplifting, you find out about it. I mean, there's just certain externalities, there's certain functions of those behaviors, there's certain ramifications that

The kid has an addiction to alcohol. Before you know it, you're going to figure it out, right? So you can intervene. That's the dangerous thing about these insidious devices is that a lot of times the bullying, the mental health issues can pop up and get very bad very fast without you even knowing. So let me finish where I started. I know our household hasn't gotten this figured out and congratulations. If she's not asking for it, I just don't think you're going to regret it.

your 12-year-old daughter not having a smartphone or being on social. If she shows up a little bit late to it, I showed up a little bit late to alcohol and drugs. I enjoy both of those things, but I'm glad I didn't do any of those things until I was in college. And I think we're going to look back. And the one thing we're going to regret most about tech, big tech, is not that they weaponized our elections, not that they made our discourse more coarse, not that they created more income inequality, not that they abused the monopoly power. We're going to look back on this era and

And we're going to say, how did we let this happen to our kids? So, Jen, you are thinking the right way. I think you need to be all over this stuff. Appreciate the question. Best of luck to you and yours. Question number two.

Dear Proc.G, this is Dr. C from Toronto, Canada and Sao Paulo, Brazil. I have just listened to your episode in which you explain why storytelling is the most underrated, yet perhaps the most important skill we should be teaching our children. I couldn't agree more. After 22 years in management consulting, including 8 years as a partner, I got to see the upside of superior storytelling. This is, in essence, what partners do in consulting or investment banking or any other senior positions.

As a parent, on the other hand, I have been experiencing mostly the downside of storytelling, either in the form of honest incompetence, when there is subpar fact-checking or no fact-checking at all, or dishonesty, in the form of misinformation. Dishonest storytelling is certainly what populists and/or dictators do best. Given the downside of storytelling, I have two questions for you. First, what do you do as a parent so that your child can become a savvier consumer of stories?

And second, as an educator, do you think universities should do more on how to become better consumers of stories? Thank you for your wonderful podcast series. This is a thoughtful question, Dr. C., that touches on a bunch of things. There's raising kids to be good storytellers, and then there's sort of this post-truth world that we're entering that's really unfortunate. As it relates to raising storytellers, good storytellers, I remember thinking about

You know, I do so much virtue signaling on this program, and I pretend to be such a better father than I actually am. And I've been talking about how important storytelling is for a while. And I'm like, well, okay, boss, what are you actually doing about it to try and help your kids be better storytellers?

So I've been doing, you know, dumb things like at dinner when, you know, my 12-year-old won't, you know, be quiet, but my 15-year-old won't say anything. I tasked the 15-year-old with starting a conversation. When they're telling me stuff, I ask them to continue. What I'm going to start doing, I haven't done it yet, is to actually come up with stories. I started by telling them stories of their grandparents, how they met, immigrating from Britain,

you know, moving to Canada, their drive across the U.S. in an Austin mini metro when my mom was seven months pregnant. And they're enthralled by it. And I think that them hearing stories, I hope, gets them to be better storytellers. The schools, I'll give it to them, are trying to pull that out of them. My son went to this wonderful school, or my son's called Gulfstream, and their eighth grade, every eighth grader has to stand up in front of the entire community of the school, including the parents, and do a 10 or 15 minute talk.

And my son did his talk on whaling and the whaling industry in Nantucket. God, could that be a wider topic? Seriously. All of a sudden, I just felt exceptionally Caucasian and privileged. Anyways, and it's great. And he thinks about it and he has to do it with slides. And, you know, he's nervous about it. And it's hard for a 13-year-old to stand up in front of people.

The only competence I have is communications, right? I just, I know how to communicate. I know how to write. I know how to put together slides. I know how to, a good twist of phrase, right? And that is how I've made my living.

And I immediately recognize with younger people, they have to be able to be good storytellers if they wanted to be a businessman consulting. If you're really amazing with technology, but you can't spin a story, that's the COO or the CTO max. You can be less good and a great storyteller, and you call that woman CEO. The ability to communicate your ideas and attract capital, human and financial, is the whole shooting match.

How do you get people to be good storytellers? One is practice. Two is different mediums. I would start with the written word. I think if you can express your thoughts cogently by writing them out, the other stuff's going to get much easier. And then just practice, and specifically a lot of confidence in trial and error around speaking in front of people. And I'm credited with being a good communicator and a good speaker. I get paid a lot of money to speak. And I have panic attacks.

Sometimes I get so fucking nervous and I freak out and I get on stage and I start talking and I start gasping and swallowing air and I feel as if I'm dying and the whole audience freaks out because I look like I'm in the midst of a heart attack.

And so if you're nervous in front of people, if you think I can just never do it and I need to avoid it, think again. Think again. This is how I make my living and I get panic attacks. And you have to get over it. You have to figure it out. I'm not suggesting you're going to be Tony Robbins.

right? I'm not suggesting you're going to be Maya Angelou, but you've got to have a certain minimum acceptable presentation skills. It's painful. Take classes, go to Toastmasters, whatever you need to do. I am trying to figure out a way to put my kids in context where they get more of that, more experience at that, creative writing, et cetera. The second part of your question, I'm really worried about a post-truth world. The biggest fear I have about generative AI is I would say, okay, give me 10 tweets. I

about how vaccines alter your DNA that sound real and like they came from a medical established agency or a medical think tank. And it'll produce 10 tweets that are false, have no scientific verification or scientific veracity, but sound kind of real.

And veracity has really become a function of who is the loudest and who has the biggest following, right? If Donald Trump says a lie long enough, it starts to become less of a lie. What do we do about that? I don't know. Invest in organizations that have fact-checking, whether it's the Wall Street Journal or PBS or the BBC or, you know, love them or hate them, The Post and The New York Times, they have a viewpoint, but they do take fact-checking

Very seriously. Don't advertise on Fox News that should be called Fox Entertainment where the anchors coordinate to spread information and lies that they know are lies because they think it'll inflame their audience and sell more hearing aids. I mean, that bullshit is really—that's mendacious. That's an abuse of your position personally.

and society. What else can we do? Remove Section 230 or have carve-outs such as these social media algorithms. If they are circulating lies that result in teen depression or misuse of medical treatment or a belief that an election is rigged when they know it's not rigged, they should have the same type of liability they have out now with a carve-out around sex trafficking. If you put information on Facebook that results in the trafficking of a minor,

Meta is liable. And guess what? It reduced it a lot. So do we want to reduce election misinformation, vaccine misinformation, medical information, data or content that gives kids suicidal ideation? Oh, no, it'd be too complex. No, you can do it. They could absolutely do it. Just give them financial incentive to do it in some way.

I haven't figured this out, but I recognize the importance. I'm trying to do some things that help my kids develop those skills. Some of them are uncomfortable. I don't have definitive answers. I just know if we want to appreciate

the truth, we have to appreciate the truth and reward those that are fact-checking and punish those that believe they can turn a lie into the truth by just telling it over and over. Thanks for the question. Dr. C from Toronto, the friendly, clean Canada. Go Leafs! Go Leafs! We'll be right back for our conversation with Dr. Shafali.

Your business deploys AI pilots everywhere. But are they going anywhere? Or are they stuck in silos, exhausting resources, unable to scale? Maybe you don't need hundreds of AI pilots. You need a holistic strategy.

IBM has 65,000 consultants with Gen AI expertise who can help you design, integrate, and optimize AI solutions. So you're not just deploying AI, you're scaling it across your business. Learn more at ibm.com slash consulting. IBM, let's create. Think scaling AI is hard? Think again. With Watson X, you can deploy AI across any environment.

above the clouds helping pilots navigate flights and on lots of clouds helping employees automate tasks. On-prem so designers can access proprietary data and on the edge so remote bank tellers can assist customers. Watson X works anywhere so you can scale AI everywhere. Learn more at ibm.com slash Watson X. IBM. Let's create.

Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Dr. Shefali, a New York Times bestselling author of The Conscious Parent and The Awakened Family. Dr. Shefali, where does this podcast find you? Hi. Well, in my home in New York. That's where I am right now. Great. Well, welcome. We appreciate your time. So let's bust right into it. How has parenting or our approach or our perception of parenting changed over the last several decades?

Oh, my goodness. I think, I don't know whether it's changed so much or just progressively deteriorated. You know, I think from our original blueprint of being raised in tribes within community with a deep sense of interdependence to where we are now, this has been the marked skew.

skewed deterioration that I am concerned about because now we've become progressively more and more isolated, more and more nuclear and increasingly disconnected.

The advent of technology and this fast-paced world we're living in has really detracted our ability to give our children what they truly need psychologically and emotionally. And what they truly need is parental presence and parental well-being with parents more harried, more distracted, more busy and stressed.

and more disconnected because they're on technology more than in person, our children are being robbed from the very emotional ingredients that they truly need. And that is of deep concern and, you know, tragic. It's a tragic reality, but here's where we are. So what I think is original or unique in your work that I haven't seen as much in other people's work is you emphasize on the well-being of the parents.

So start there. If parents are working a lot, trying to manage the expectations and capitalist reality that you need to work a lot to provide a safe, secure household where the kids have access to health care and education. I mean, I've often heard the best thing you can do for your kids as a husband is to make sure that their mother feels loved, secure, and is in a place of security and comfort.

Tell us how parents, if you will, reconcile that tension in a capitalist society. Well, that's it. In your question is the greatest predicament because we've created such an extreme capitalism and a desire for it.

that now we're stuck in its spiral and all of us are suffocating. So part of what I teach, besides, you know, what do you say to your child to get them to be motivated or go to school or learn and educate themselves, besides those elemental ingredients of parenting, what I really teach is how parents can begin to recognize and reconceptualize

reconcile this capitalist matrix that we're within? How do we live within it without being a slave to it? How do we live here but really practice presence, practice mindfulness, practice

internal reflection and slow the F down just because the entire world is racing by you and the entire world has created a mandate that you

you are what you do, you don't need to prescribe to that. So my rallying war cry is for parents to wake up, to live differently, albeit in this world, but to really regulate themselves and understand that this extreme superior focus on capitalism is really a wounded wound

dysfunctional, diseased trauma response from a dysfunctional, diseased childhood. So here you are. Now you have children

Don't repeat the same pattern. Do it differently. Dare to do parenting differently. And I talk about the traditional parenting paradigm, which has been in place since we all have been born and way before, which is focused on capitalism, focused on consumerism, focused on racing ahead, separatism, comparison, competition, and competition.

An extreme focus on these elements will create dysfunctional children. So this resonates with me, and I want to try and bring it down. One, I always use the podcast as a chance to talk about myself, which I enjoy. And two, I also want to try and make this actionable. In 2000, it was 9 or 10, I had a startup. My partner, then wife, was working at Goldman Sachs.

We had two babies at home. She was waking up at 5:30. I was working around the clock. And we both decided that this was just not the life we wanted to lead. At the same time, we recognized that to stay in New York, we both had to be doing that. And so we moved to Florida. We dramatically cut our cost of living. She left Goldman, continued to work, but had much more flexible, much more flexible life. But what, so for us, that recognition that you're talking about, that we're not

What's the point if we aren't having a nice life and at some point our kids are going to sense the stress? We dramatically cut our burn rate and we decided that one person would be at home a lot with the kids. So those are two things. One, I imagine you agree with those things, but what else can parents do as an audit that helps them create an actionable plan to foot against your more conscious parenting?

Well, every action really needs to come from a deep intention. So I can tell you the action, but you know, I'm all for the deeper intention. But an actionable plan is something

Stop racing to nowhere. You know, clear out your schedule. Limit your children's extracurricular structured activities between the ages of 1 and 12. Children are meant to play and explore and be in this dreamlike state of creativity and in a quest. Putting them in all these manic activities is

robs them of their ability to explore their inner world. And if you ask me what is the one disease of today, it's that our children do not know how to sit in stillness, in creativity, and be bored and activate.

They're in a resources without governance from parental and other supervisory figures who constantly are telling them what to do, how to do, when to do. And then we wonder why our children by the age of 14 are listless and motivational lists on the couch. Well, because we've robbed them of that initiative and we've prescribed them.

into how to be. And no one wants to live according to a prescription. Well, that's what we're doing to our children. It's as if there's only one track to success and joy. And that's the mainstream consumeristic, capitalistic track. And it's dangerous. And our children will become actually more antipathy than less because we're taking them into antipathy instead of out of it.

And so you write in your book that we should move away from outcome goals to process goals. What did you mean by that?

Well, our entire culture is based on linearity and the future outcome and how that looks to the outside world. I mean, it's just an externally driven world we live in. And when we are tethered to external goals, looking to the future, looking to tomorrow, we get displaced from the most precious gift of life, which is the present moment.

And we're missing life, waiting for tomorrow. Childhood.

is in existence for one reason only, for the experience of childhood, not to raise an adult. We somehow seem to think it's in vogue that we're raising adults. No, we're not raising adults. We're raising children. Children have a very unique developmental phase, quality, and value that we are

because we have put stock in the future. So similarly, in the present moment, when we focus on how we are experiencing the present moment, how we are entering the present moment, this lived experience that you and I are having right now, if we can awaken to it, alive into it, for the listener right now in their car or on a walk, if they can truly enter their body right here, right now, and examine where they are,

Now that is process-oriented living. Have you done any research or thinking around if and what different types of approaches are needed or modifications around parenting girls versus boys? I've done a lot of thinking and work around it with my own clients. And I think we do need to recognize that there is a difference between

biologically between biological males and biological females. I'm not talking about gender. I'm just talking about just the biology. And we need to attune to that. Having said that, we also don't need to get stuck in that, right? There needs to be an attunement to who the child is as they show up

based on what we see right in front of us. So boy or girl, if they're fidgeting in their chair in fourth grade and they just can't sit still, well, we need to adapt to that. I can predict more likely that the boy with a higher testosterone and higher activity level may need more activity, but I don't want to just stereotype it to that.

But I always want to be aware that there is a biological difference, and it may not feel avant-garde to say that, but for me, that's the reality. The thing you said there that resonated was our need to sort of identify and label in hopes that we can help shape the outcome to a better place. And I think that concern comes from a good place, but what I see across households is

including ours, is this immediate need, especially I think with boys, although it might be as true with girls, is to immediately label them as someone who either is ADHD or not ADHD, and then if someone who needs medicine or doesn't need medicine. What are your thoughts on ADHD? It's the prevalence of the diagnosis.

And your general views around prescription medication for ADHD. That's the debate I see playing out in almost every household I'm in contact with.

Yeah, so there's several layers to it. So if you look at a lot of the research, they will say that there is an inheritance in ADHD and other spectrum disorders. And I'm not a researcher, so I will just go with that. However, I tend to ask what

what is the use of that research? Like, how am I going to use that research? That's more important to me than knowing whether it's inherited or not. So the first thing that that research tells me when I coach parents is that we are dealing with a different kind of brain. But guess what? I say that for every damn child. I say it for every human. Guess what? You have a different kind of brain. So, okay, right there, you can relax because we all have a different kind of brain and we need to adapt to that brain.

That brain though, the "ADHD brain" seems to require certain things, which let me tell you, any parent will figure out if you just observe your child. So what are those things? An ADHD kind of brain requires more space, flexibility, creativity, and constant feedback. Because their brain, and research has shown this, has more dopamine deficit,

they require more of that

external feedback to provide that quote-unquote dopamine hit. So schedules that are more bite-sized, projects that are broken down into chunks, constant feedback to those kinds of children, and room and flexibility to move, to create, to play, to not follow such a tight schedule. Now, that's just on the brain level. Culturally and societally, we have created

a cage, cage for children, ADHD brain or non-ADHD brain. I remember, and even though I'm quote unquote a girl and I was more socialized to be compliant, I felt stifled in a classroom growing up in India. So fast forward now where we've become even more regimented, more achievement oriented,

Children are being stifled in these little cages that is so detrimental to them. And I think it causes ADHD on its own as well. Besides it being an inherited or inherent feature of one's personality and brain function, I think we also accentuate it and we actually cause it too. And the third issue is parental stress.

And I don't want parents to feel like they are to blame, but we have to look at our co-creation. I think I, in my own life, as mindful as I like to be, I can act

completely scattered, distracted, stressed out, which then my daughter absorbs and she immediately feels it. Now she's stressed out, which causes her to not engage in a presence-filled way in her life. So look how many things there are to create this ADHD. Now you asked about medication. My blanket knee-jerk reaction is to be skeptical of medication for young children, but I

I'm also open to each case, right? Sometimes I've had to refer my eight-year-old client to a psychiatrist to just get checked out, but I've loathed it because I know that we can adapt the environment to create a better environment for our children before infusing them with drugs. And, you know, many families with ADHD children will have the experience

pre-ponderance of ADHD somewhere in the family. Genetic or situational, it's there. So I help parents, you know, clear up their schedules, clean up their environments, calm the hell down and engage with their children. And that helps tremendously. So I will explore all those things before I recommend medicine.

What are your views on a parent's role with respect to the intersection between technology, specifically the phone, and kids? Do you have any best practices? Yes. You know, given that we've now seen how addictive these screens are, you know, my daughter's 21, so I've already messed it up. But I tell young parents, you know, no screens till teens as much as possible because they

It's to me giving crack cocaine to your young children and to these young brains and they are not developmentally ready to handle the influx of all this stimulation that is really designed to rob them of presence, which is the main thing children need to thrive. And children need connected parents. So the more parents are on their screens...

the more children are not getting what they need in terms of emotional food. So it's just an all-out disaster. You know, I think technology to young children

It is a disaster. But what does a parent need to do, right? The parent needs to fight the matrix as much as possible, not give in, and really try to be as present as they can, which is a big, high, tall order for parents today because now we are all addicted. So what do we do?

Our emails are constantly buzzing on the phone and we're called to work now 24-7. Now it's virtuous to work on the go. You know, before we couldn't check our email if we were on vacation. Now we can check our email all the time. So our children are getting exponentially less attention and connection from a present, grounded, undistracted parent than ever before. I mean, so much of this resonates. I struggle with...

One thing, my parents were worried I was going to get into too much trouble. I'm actually worried that my kids won't get into enough trouble. The absence of free play, supervision everywhere. I used to leave my mom's house, it's 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning with a Schwinn bike, an Abba Zabba bar, and 35 cents. And I'm not exaggerating, I would come home 13 hours later. And she had no idea where I was, none. And if I wasn't home by 10 or 11 p.m., she'd start calling around.

But for 13 hours, if my son is 20 minutes late from school, you know, we call MI6. I mean, it's just nuts. I mean, how much of this is that the parents need to try and quell their own anxiety? I'm sure you're hearing the terms Jonathan Haidt every other word right now. But one of the things that Jonathan said that really, really resonated with me is we over-parent offline and under-parent parents.

How do we learn to stop the over-parenting offline? It is 100% our parental anxiety. You know, these apps.

where you can track your kid 24-7. And, you know, I refused. I only just recently put it on my phone because my daughter wanted to track me. I was like, what the hell? Why do you want to track me? She's like, I need to know where you are. I said, see, you're falling into your current generation's bullshit, sorry, to track people.

people. And I never tracked her. She's 21. And only because she's tracking me now, apparently, you have to do it mutually. And I told her, I don't want to track you, not because I don't love you, but I don't want to fall into this plague of constant anxiety around where you are. It is

over-parenting offline because it gives us this illusory sense of control, which is our greatest desire, has always been our longing to control the hell out of other people, and especially our children. And our technology has given it to us, but it's an illusion. It's the illusion of control. And, you know, it's given us tools to micromanage our children, to overproduce them,

And of course, our children are now not, you know, rooting for themselves, not flying the roost and just breaking free from us because our tethers are too deep in them. And now we've trained them to constantly look to us, rely on us, call us the moment there's a catastrophe in their life. They're like, mom, dad, right away on text.

We didn't have that. We didn't have the tether. Once you left the house, you left the house. I left at 21 to America without a phone, without, we used to write letters home and it took three weeks for news to reach home and a lot of money to call long distance. We've removed that, you see, but what we've removed is not just inconvenience, we've removed the capacity for resilience, for our children to sit in the mess of their life, to

to be bored, to sit in the anxiety of waiting for a bus, to wait for their meal, to walk to the Encyclopedia Britannica and find it on the shelf and then wait for it to come back because it's been checked out. All that waiting, albeit terribly inconvenient, now has been bypassed. And when you bypass waiting and delaying gratification, you take out life skills.

which is dealing with the main life skill is coping with your discomfort.

Why do you think children are more anxious ever today than ever before? Because we have removed discomfort from their life and they don't know how to deal with discomfort. They expect things at their fingertips because we've trained them. Our generation did this to them. Don't be blaming children. I always tell our generation of parents, we gave them all this technology because we were tired of walking to school. We were tired of cooking. And now we've raised children who are highly indulged

and incapable of sitting with messy feelings. So as we wrap up here, we've talked a bit about parenting, but there's a lot of macroeconomic factors at play, right? The child poverty is up. I believe there's a lot of economic policies that make it harder for young parents to be economically secure. If the White House called you and said, Dr. Shefali, what are two or three programs or policy changes you would like to see us implement that would make it easier for parents to

to be more conscious parents? What would those two or three ideas be? I would say no child should have a screen, a portable screen, till the age of 16. Take it away, it's banned. I would take out the screen from the school. Yeah, and then people will be like, well, what about technology? Well, I would limit it to like an hour a day. I wouldn't make it the way of life.

I know parents of today's generation, if there was a rule in place that screens were banned from the home till the child was 16 or 17, all of us would heave

breathe the biggest sigh of relief because we've seen it contaminating our lives at home. We've seen our children getting high on the drug of the screen dopamine and unable to get off and monsters when they get off. So that's the first thing I would do. The second thing I would do is I would make mindfulness and a meditation practice completely non-religious, secular meditation practice

a must in every school, a must in every corporation, a must for every parent. And the third thing I would do is I would send all parents to my conscious parenting classes so they learn to heal their baggage and learn how to be a conscious parent. I think that would be the saving of the planet. Dr. Shabali is a New York Times bestselling author of The Conscious Parent and the Awakened Family.

She's also a clinical psychologist, parenting expert, an international speaker, and a wisdom teacher who integrates Eastern philosophy with Western psychology. She joins us from her home in New York. Dr. Shefali, we appreciate your time.

I have one more thing that I'm also now off. Yes, I am now the host of my own parenting podcast called Parenting and You, which is not your typical parenting podcast because I help the parent in this podcast raise themselves. And I only do live interventions with parents in real time. Parenting and You. Great. Thank you, Dr. Shapali. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehoursatpropertymedia.com. Again, that's officehoursatpropertymedia.com.

Creativity is one of the core traits that makes us human. It allows us to tell stories, to create, and to solve problems in new and exciting ways. So why does it feel so threatened? With new technological advances that can create art in milliseconds, where does that leave us? In this special three-part series, we wanted to ask, how can we save and celebrate creativity?

Tune into Saving Creativity, a special series from The Gray Area sponsored by Canva. You can find it on The Gray Area feed wherever you get your podcasts.