Can I tell you what's been on my mind lately? Every time I open the news, there's another headline, another country, another law, another alarm going off about kids and screens. Australia just became the first country in the world to fully ban social media for kids 16. Not limit it, ban it. And France, Denmark, and Spain are all racing to follow.

Right here in The US, Virginia is now legally capping kids to one hour a day, and congress is debating cutting younger kids off entirely. See, to me as a freedom loving American, this just seems so strange because this seems like a parenting thing, doesn't it? Not something that governments need to step in on. I don't know. Let me know your thoughts on that.

But more than that, what is so bad about screens that these alarms are going off across the world? What I've come to realize these last few weeks, I just finished teaching a three week unit study to my co op to the high schoolers on digital literacy, and I've been doing some deep dives into the research. What I'm discovering is that a lot of us are quietly losing the screen time battle, and we don't know what to do about it. And as homeschoolers, just because we're home educating our kids, that doesn't automatically mean that our kids are getting less screen time. For a lot of us, honestly, it means more.

After all, a lot of curriculum is now on a screen. I've been that mom. Sometimes I still am that mom, and I'd be willing to bet I'm not the only one wondering about screens. What is too much screen time actually doing to our kids' brains, and is it already happening in my home? And if you, like I am, we do use screens for school, have we already used up whatever margin we had before the day really even starts?

And what's the difference between screen time that damages and screen time that doesn't? Are you a mom listening right now, and when you take the screen away, does your kid completely melt down? Which then begs the question, how do we actually reduce screen time without a full blown war in the house? And do homeschool families have an advantage at all here? Because the rest of the world is spending millions.

But do we already have an atmosphere in our home that's in our favor? Don't go anywhere because we're gonna be answering those questions today, and my goal is that you have clarity on this issue and if you need one, a plan. I am so excited about this show today. Real quick before we start, if you are watching every single dollar right now, a lot of us are, I wanna tell you about something that gave our family a thousand dollars back per month. Because financial stress is its own kind of screen time problem.

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A link to The Christy Faith List is in the show notes. Go search for somebody right now. Alright. Welcome to the Christy Faith Show. If you're new here, this is the podcast for homeschool moms who take their craft seriously.

On our little corner of the Internet, we come together to have conversations that sharpen the way we think about education, motherhood, and the life that we're intentionally building. I'm Christy Faith, your host, homeschool mom of four, education expert. My kids range from high school all the way to elementary. I wrote a book called Homeschool Rising, and I am someone who has spent over twenty years. I should add some years to that twenty years, but let's just keep it at twenty years in education.

And before we get into the show, I want you to know I have so many free resources on my website for any age and stage of your homeschool. So make sure you check out those resources, including a free training homeschool one zero one, three episodes with a 20 something page download just for brand new homeschool curious families. And I got stuff for you veteran mamas too. Don't worry. I'll put a link to my website to get those free resources in the show notes.

Today, we are untangling the mess about screens. When I was preparing for the show, I was remembering the mommy and me class that I took back when I had my firstborn. There was a whole week where they went over the dangers of screens. This was fourteen years ago. And having only one baby, I actually was able to pull it off.

But then I had twins. And then eighteen months later, I had another beautiful baby girl. And I'm sure you know where this is going. Right? Picture it.

A five year old, two two year olds, and an infant. Dinner needs to happen somehow. My husband isn't home to help. I'm standing at the stove. Something's on the burner, and you can just hear that specific silence that means someone is about to cry, about to fall, or has found something they absolutely should not have.

That silence in parenting is so terrifying. Right? Well, I had a few scary moments, and what did I end up doing? I turned on the TV. I turned on Netflix shows.

Baby bum. I don't even remember what I would put on back then. But I did it because I had to. I had to be able to keep an eye on my kids while I was getting dinner on the table. And even while I was doing that, I felt guilty.

I felt some shame. Like, those screens before the age of three, and look what I'm doing here. What am I doing? But at the same time, I was exhausted. And sometimes you just don't have one more mess in you, one more thing to referee, one more, mom, hold me.

Sometimes we just need a few minutes where nobody needs anything from you. And a screen, if we're honest, it buys us that. And we've all been there, maybe even right now, so you could listen to me today. And actually, what's so funny is to write this show last night to finish it up, I let the kids all on Minecraft. I mean, the irony is just so poetic.

Right? But I got a lot done. But anyway, I digress. Maybe it's dinner. Maybe it's a phone call.

Maybe it's just five minutes of quiet because you're running on fumes. And the screens work, and so we use them again. And then somewhere along the way, they stop being something that we reach for in like a time of an emergency just to keep our kids safe, and they start to uncomfortably become a default. And that's when the self talk enters the chat. The questions start creeping in.

Am I raising a child who can't be bored, who can't entertain herself? Is our amount okay, or do we need to cut back? So that's what we're gonna sort out today. And here's where it gets interesting for us specifically. For homeschooling families, it looks a little bit different.

And I know you're wondering this too. Often, our kids curriculum is on a screen. So when they've done their schoolwork that's a little bit on a screen, and then they've watched a history documentary or they're reading on a Kindle, does that count? Is that screen time that we should be limiting? Because if it is, and I wanna just be real here, some of our kids might be on screens more than their public school peers, not less.

When we talk about screen time for our kids in our homeschool, we have to reckon with the fact that a lot of the curriculum today involves screen by design. And when school and home are the same place, the line between education and screen time, it gets blurry pretty fast. So that's the question we actually need answered today. Not just how to reduce screen time for our kids, but also what should we be even counting? And I'm so happy to report that what the research says about this really matters practically in our everyday life.

Because not all screen time is created equal, and the difference is not what most people think. So first off, I was relieved to find that the data says we've been worrying about the wrong thing. See, we're kind of obsessed with this how much problem, time, hours, minutes on the screen. And so that's what we've been trying to manage all these years. It's the clock.

But the researchers who are really sounding the alarm about screens, they're not really worried about the clock so much. They're worried about the type. Jonathan Haidt, if you haven't read his book, The Anxious Generation yet, please add it to your list immediately. He makes this distinction clearly. There is screen time that's essentially neutral or even good.

And on the flip side, there's also screen time that is doing something sinister and specific and measurable in our kids' brains. So just to do our due diligence here, the AAP, American Academy of Pediatrics, lays out screen time recommendations by age. So here we are obsessing over the time again. Right? They say under two, essentially nothing except video calls with grandma.

Two to five years old, an hour a day max, and you should be watching it with them. And then six years old and up, no hard hour limit, but consistent limits on what and when, and of course, screens out of the bedroom. Makes sense? No kid should have a screen in their bedroom. Talk about dangerous.

I agree. And then there's Serge Tissaron, a French child psychologist. He developed the three six nine twelve rule. So what that is is it's no screens before three, no Internet before nine, no social media before twelve. France actually built a national policy around this.

Now, I know what you're thinking right now. None of our kids follow these guidelines, and maybe you're feeling terrible about yourself. I hear you. I get it, but stay with me because this is where it gets genuinely important, and we gotta look at the research. Right?

Every single one of these researchers concludes this one huge thing, and it's not what we typically think about. When we come back, I'm gonna tell you exactly what it is and why it changes everything you think about screens. Don't fast forward. Give those sponsors some love. Homeschooling for kids means I'm juggling roughly 24 different subjects at any given time.

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They're available for you whenever you need them. It's like having a homeschool expert on speed dial. Go to bjupresshomeschool.com or click the link in the show notes to find out more. People are always curious what curriculum I use for my own family. And honestly, it changes.

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I use it for all four of my kids, and they couldn't be more different when it comes to math. Finding one curriculum that actually works for all of them, that's been nearly impossible. You know that pit in your stomach when you realize the curriculum that you just invested in isn't working again? Yeah. That was us until this one.

The genius behind CTC math is that it's adaptive. The questions adjust to each kid's level in real time, so they're always challenged but never crushed. And mama, it does the teaching and grading for us. Yes. You heard that right.

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Use the link in the show notes to do a free trial or to get that half off deal. Don't spend another year kissing math frogs. This one stuck for us, and I have a feeling it's gonna stick for you too. The line the researchers agree on is social media. Not a documentary on YouTube, not Khan Academy, not Minecraft.

Thank goodness after last night. Not even Netflix. The thing lighting up every alarm in the research, the thing that Australia banned, that Height calls the primary driver of the youth mental health crisis is social media. Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and the smartphone that delivers it at 2AM in a bedroom with the door closed. It breaks my heart that this is literally the experience of so many kids in our country today.

They just don't have the maturity to manage a phone, and the data on girls is especially hard to hear. Rates of anxiety among teen girls increased one hundred and thirty four percent between 2010 and 2018. Depression up one hundred and six percent. And the timing isn't a coincidence. That's exactly when smartphones and social media became standard issue for American teenagers.

Facebook's own internal research leaked by a whistleblower, we gotta love conspiracy theories and whistleblowers, concluded that Instagram makes body image issues worse for one in three teen girls. They knew, and they kept going. Watch me get banned for this. This is why limiting screen time for teenagers, specifically their access to social media, isn't just household preference. It's what the data is screaming.

And as I mentioned before, I recently taught a digital literacy unit to the high schoolers at our co op. And on the very first week, I assigned the documentary to watch with their parents, The Social Dilemma. It's on Netflix. Eye opening. You've probably already seen it, but if you're in a new phase in your parenting, a rewatch might be in order.

But okay. So social media isn't the only thing that we need to talk about because something else is happening, and it's showing up in younger kids. Have you heard the term TikTok brain? Pediatricians have started using that term, and the research is catching up on what they have already been seeing in their offices. So TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, they're all designed around the same mechanic.

Short bursts of content, algorithm driven, constantly refreshing. Every swipe is a small hit of dopamine. Your brain gets a little reward, and then it wants another one and another. And over time, and this is the part that matters for you listening today, the brain starts expecting that pace. It gets calibrated to fast constant stimulation.

I was telling the kids at co op that the dopamine hits are just very similar to slot machines in Vegas. And then what happens when your brain is accustomed to that, when you ask your kid to sit and read for thirty minutes or focus for twenty minutes on a math lesson, they have a hard time. Maybe they even can't. And it's not because they're lazy or that something's wrong or maybe not even a learning disability if that's what you're thinking. It could simply be because their brain has been trained to need something new every fifteen seconds, and everything else feels unbearably slow by comparison.

A large review of nearly 100,000 people found that heavy short form video use is directly linked to weaker attention, reduced focus, and more difficulty staying on task. The pediatricians were calling it TikTok brain. Researchers are calling it popcorn brain. Restless, jumpy, always reaching for the next thing. And if we're honest right now, because I'm thinking about my own behavior, this is not just a teenager problem.

It's a problem for us too. The sad thing is they are seeing this in young elementary school kids. And that right there, that's not about the time or the hours spent on screen. That is about what type of screen. A kid who watches a two hour movie is having a fundamentally different neurological experience than a kid who scrolls YouTube shorts for even just twenty minutes.

One requires sustained attention, and the other actively dismantles it. Okay. So let's take a breath. I know that was a lot, and I wanna sit with that for just a second before I tell you the part that genuinely stopped me in my tracks as I was putting all this together. Because when I was reading through all of this research, the height data, the AAP guidelines, the brain studies on short form video, I kept noticing something.

Buried in all the alarm, all the legislation, all the government panels trying to figure out what to do, there was a list. A list of what researchers say kids need to be protected from the worst of this. On that list, kids need less unsupervised time alone with a smartphone. Duh. Kids need more face to face time interaction with real humans, not just same age peers in a classroom, but people of different ages in different contexts having real conversations.

Also on the list, kids need boredom, actual unstructured, nothing to do boredom, because that's where imagination lives. And imagination is the muscle that short form video is quietly atrophying. Kids need adults who are present, not hovering, present, in the room, reachable, part of the day. They need a life that happens mostly offline, errands, projects, physical activity, conversations that don't come up with a like button attached to it. I was reading that list, and I just was thinking, wait a minute.

You're kinda describing the typical homeschool life. The regular chaotic, we didn't finish math and someone cried kind of homeschool day. The one that you actually lived this week. Our kids aren't in a classroom stuck with 30 same age peers with a phone in their pocket and a lunch period with no adult in sight. They're with us.

They're with their families, their friends of all different ages. They're experiencing the real world because they're living it with us. And the research says that is the anecdote to all of this. When someone asks me how to limit their kid's screen time, my first question in my mind is always, well, what does your day look like? Because a kid who is busy, connected, and a little bit bored in all the right ways, they don't actually need to reach for the screen as much.

The screen fills a vacuum and homeschool life by its very nature, now not by our perfection, it creates fewer vacuums. Now back in the day, because I started homeschooling a long time ago, the issue with screens wasn't my primary reason for homeschooling. Now interestingly, I hear a lot of moms that that is one of their top reasons for homeschooling But back then, I wasn't worried about the dopamine hits or thinking about the three, six, nine, twelve rule. I was just trying to educate my kids, give them a beautiful childhood, a fantastic education, and keep everybody alive. But it turns out, the lifestyle that I was building for completely different reasons was quietly doing something that I didn't even have language for yet.

And maybe that's true for you too. Or maybe you are homeschooling, screens are one of the primary reasons. Let me know in the comments if that's you. We're seeing a lot more of that with the issue of Chromebooks in the schools. Okay.

I have something huge for you coming up. You're not gonna wanna miss it. But before that, I wanna come back to Virginia for a second. I mentioned earlier that Virginia passed a law capping kids to one hour of social media a day. And when I dug into how they're actually enforcing that, I had to read it twice.

I was like, oh, what? The law requires platforms like Instagram and TikTok to use, and this is the actual language, and I quote, commercially reasonable methods to determine whether a user is 16. If they identify a minor, they limit the account to one hour per day. Sounds reasonable, especially on social media. But then a reporter in Virginia tested it, and when a child's Instagram account hit the sixty minute mark, a notification popped up five minutes left, and then the hour expired.

And at the bottom of that window, a button that said, ignore limit for today. I don't know if this is still the case, but this is what the reporter found. One tap, just no parent, no verification, just ignore it. Do you have a teenager in your home? What do you think is gonna happen?

Yes. You heard that right. Now I'm not mocking legislators. They're genuinely trying. I do think they're out of place with this, but I want you to feel the full weight of what that means.

The most powerful government in the world with all its urgency about this massive crisis that is very real produced a law whose enforcement depends on Meta, choosing not to put an ignore button on the screen. And Meta put an ignore button on the screen. In your home with your kids today, you have something that no law can manufacture. You're actually there. You know what your kids are on.

You control the devices. You set the norms. You are not waiting for an algorithm to decide whether your child deserves five more minutes. See, homeschoolers already have the answer to the screen time problem that the rest of the world is spending millions trying to legislate into existence. Because the structure of our lives as homeschoolers, because we are present, it puts the levers in our hands.

Now, I'm not saying it's easy. We're dealing with this in our home right now. And just setting up the devices to be safe could be a forty hour work week. Don't ask me how I know, but I know. Now I don't know about you, but I find that really encouraging.

Now before we move on, I wanna say thank you so much for being here. And as you know, our sponsors are what makes this podcast free to you. And I loved putting together all this research and that there's a framework coming up at the end of the show that I'm gonna go into that I think is really gonna help you a lot. Now let me ask you, if you have gotten any value from today's show, the way to say thank you is simply to engage with the show on whatever platform you're on. If you're not subscribed yet, please do that first and put on the notification to get the bell when a new episode drops.

We love comments. Please make a comment. Send this show to a friend. Maybe do three things today just to say thank you for the show. And the reason why I asked that is because it's the robots behind the screen that decide if a show is worth putting in front of more eyeballs.

And the way that happens is completely free to you, and it makes a huge difference if that's simply your engagement with the show. Plus, we love reading your comments. So maybe you were doing that right as I was talking. A lot of you tell me that you do that already. You know when this part the show comes up and you just do your little thing.

Anyway, I appreciate it so much. Thank you in advance. Plus, I love seeing you guys show up for each other in the comments. It's just really cool to watch. Before we get to the practical part of today, I wanna tell you something that I wish someone had told me.

And that is when you pull back on screens, the first few days are going to be rough. And not everyone's a little grumpy rough. Oh, no. Mm-mm. I'm talking about what I call the ugly detox.

Your kids will be bored, restless, agitated. They'll feel like nothing satisfies them, and it's gonna make you wanna just hand the phone back just to make it stop. And that feeling, that crawl out of your skin boredom feeling, it has a name, withdrawal. When screens get reduced, dopamine levels drop, and the brain does what brains do when they've relied on something for so long and it suddenly disappears. It complains.

Well, it claws. I think complains minimizes it. It can make life really unbearable for a while. That's the ugly detox. And that's exactly when most parents give up.

The boredom shows up. Everyone's miserable. The path of least resistance is just right there, and twenty minutes later, there's a screen back in somebody's hands. Which means that ugly detox that is required for this, it never actually ends. It just gets postponed until next time.

So something we advise moms in Thrive Homeschool Community is actually when you're gonna do a screen detox, you gotta plan for it in other ways and prepare for it. Maybe simplify your life during that time so that you can help your kids with the process. And this might sound familiar. Right? Most of us have been there more than once.

So two weeks is the number that keeps showing up in the research. A Danish clinical trial found that two weeks of reduced screen time produced real measurable improvements in emotional symptoms, behavior, and peer relationships. And then a Georgetown University study of nearly 500 people who cut out screen time for two weeks, they saw anxiety and depression improvements in the same ballpark as cognitive behavioral therapy. I mean, wow. Two weeks?

Two weeks. That's just long enough for this ugly detox period to pass and for the recalibration to actually take hold. Some of you may do periodic screen fasts. If you're in Thrive Homeschool Community, you've probably already heard about them because so many of the moms in Thrive Homeschool Community regularly implement screen fasts in their homes and swear by them. A 2025 study found that one week off social media reduced anxiety by about 16 and depression by nearly twenty five percent in young people.

That's one week. Those numbers are worth sitting with. Also, they're the light at the end of the tunnel. Right? The ugly detox phase is just the price of admission for this, but what is on the other side is so worth it.

So what does this detox actually look like? Well, the good news is that it's simpler than you think because all that research, height, the AAP, T Serran, the attention span studies, it basically collapses into four main questions. When we come back, I'll give you those four questions they want families to ask themselves regarding screen time for your kids. And they are so good and so helpful, and they simplify this thing. We'll get into that right after the break.

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Kids love it and parent educators love it, and it works. Visit lovevery.com/christyfaith today and use code Christy 10 to get 10% off your purchase of the reading skill set by Lovevery. That's lovevery.com/christyfaith. Anyone else notice the quality of grocery store food getting worse? I'm not talking about prices.

I mean the food itself. Strawberries that taste like nothing, lettuce that's slimy by day three, chicken that looks grayish, and you're standing there thinking, I'm paying more for this? Listen. I promise you are not going crazy. We've been feeling it too.

And for years, I thought there was just nothing we could do about it. That's just how groceries are now. But then I started ordering from Azure Standard. They're a family owned company. They happen to be homeschoolers as well.

Real Farms Organic Standards delivered to a drop point near you. And I have to tell you the story. We ordered a box of oranges, and the first orange I pulled out of the box, I peeled it, I pulled off a wedge, and I stopped. Time machine, Granny and Gramps' backyard, their orange tree. I forgot food could taste like that.

And the chicken from Azure Standard, I've never had chicken this good. It's scary how accustomed I got to fine. Visit azurestandard.com. I'll put the link in the show notes. Real whole food without the bougie health food store price tag.

One bite, that's all it'll take. Alright. So let's get into those four questions. Question one is, where is the screen? Because screens should be in shared spaces only.

The living room, the kitchen, wherever the family gathers, not bedrooms and not behind closed doors. The research is remarkably consistent on this. Screens in private spaces are where the hardest habits form and where parental oversight disappears. It's scary. Question two is what kind?

Is this a movie? Is this a documentary? Is this a long form show that they're actually following? That's neurologically different than short form scrolling, like Reels, Shorts, and TikTok style content. It's that scroll mechanic that is what is rewiring attention.

Long form content requires sustained focus, and that does something different. Right? So these can be on the same exact device, but have a completely different effect. So it's worth knowing which one you're actually dealing with. And I think that's particularly helpful for homeschool families.

Okay. So question three is when? Is this purposeful or is this default? So there's a difference between we're watching a movie tonight and the screen comes on because I'm not sure what else to do right now. And both of those happen.

It's important that screen time is a choice and not a reflex. So watch out about that. That actually hit me hard personally. I caught myself just reaching for my phone the other day, and I was like, woah, that's scary. And the fourth question is, what fills the space?

So this is the one that people usually skip. So screens can come out of the equation, but if nothing fills the gap, everyone's miserable and the screens come right back. And research says that the fill is not necessarily another activity. The best fill is boredom. Actual unstructured, nothing happening boredom.

And then waiting. Because kids who have nothing to do long enough will eventually invent something. Every time. The waiting though, that is the hard part. But the waiting is also the point.

So the framework, where, what kind, when, and what fills the space. Start wherever it makes sense for your family right now and fill it with a lot of grace. This isn't easy. If this episode got you thinking, not just about screens, but about your homeschool in general, about whether the life that you're building is actually the one that you intended, I have something for you. It's my free homeschool wellness check, and I thought it was a pretty good companion to this episode.

It's for the mom who takes her craft seriously. The one who wants to look at her homeschool honestly and make sure it's in good shape. If that's you and you could benefit from that resource, it's waiting for you in the show notes. Alright. So we've gone deep today.

I threw a lot of research at you guys, and I wanna end with something that's been sitting with me since I started putting all of this together. You came into this conversation today maybe because screen time is hard, or maybe you just wanted to know if you're doing okay with it. I honestly needed to get up to date myself on all of this, so I'm thankful. Maybe screen battles are harder than you expected when you started homeschooling. After all, you're home all day and screens are right there, and some days survival wins.

I get that. Most of us have been there, and there's seasons. But I wanna encourage you and me too. Because while Australia is passing bans and Virginia is capping kids to one hour and congress is debating what age is too young, we as homeschooling parents who are present with our children, we get to make a decision in our own home. We don't have to depend on other people to enforce it on us.

Plus, just hate it when the government tries to do parenting for us. It's not their place. But this is just one more area where homeschool families get to give their kids something that the rest of the world is fighting uphill to create. And that is such a gift, and you get to give it. Now, before I let you go, if this episode stirred something in you, if you're sitting there thinking, I need more of this.

I just wanna say, I see you, the late night searches, the conflicting advice, the loving your kids so much and still wondering if you're doing enough or doing it right, that wait is real. If you're tired of all that guesswork and crossed fingers with your kid's education, that is a pretty serious thing. Thrive Homeschool Community is something I built because I know that very feeling. Now it's not for everybody and it's not open all of the time, but it is for the mom who is genuinely ready to learn how to homeschool well and with real support and expert training around her. Now, we don't just leave the doors open.

We bring moms in together, kind of think like we have freshmen classes so that you are entering Thrive with other mamas. But if that does sound like exactly what you've been looking for, please click the link in the show notes and get on the wait list if Thrive isn't currently open because that is the only way to guarantee your spot. And I just wanna encourage you today that you do not have to keep figuring out this homeschooling yourself. I'm so glad that you're listening to this show. Alright.

That's all for today. Links for everything I mentioned are in the show notes. Now go love those beautiful kids of yours, and I will see you next week.