Let’s Try That Again

child development x technology design: raising kids in a digital world

There is so much information out there that we are constantly bombarded with – especially if you are a parent – around how, why, where, and how much we use and interact with digital technologies and, of course, it’s impact on our well being. Whether it is streaming something on YouTube or Netflix, playing video games, engaging with social media, or just being on your phone, the message is usually one sided: a lot of doom & gloom baked in with "it's just bad for you." Books like Jonathan Haidt's best seller, “The Anxious Generation,” argue that the exponential rise in rates of adolescent mental illness is a result of the mass adoption of smartphones, along with the advent of social media and addictive online gaming, what he calls “the Great Rewiring of Childhood” – a childhood that has apparently shifted from primarily a play-based one to a phone-based one. Although I do agree with some of what he says, such as how schools should be phone-free spaces, tech companies who design apps, games, social media, and now, AI tools – should be legally compelled to make these experiences safe for children, and also how the age of social media use should be raised. However, I don’t think the moral alarm and panic that also surrounds this messaging is that helpful. This is why I find the work and research of my guest in this episode to be SO refreshing.
Dr. Katie Davis, an Associate Professor at the University of Washington (UW) and Director of the the university’s Digital Youth Lab, wants to help parents make sense of the often-confusing landscape of research and media messages about kids and technology. In her latest book, Technology’s Child, which we discuss in this episode, Katie explores digital media’s role in the ages and stages of growing up. She draws on her decades long expertise in developmental science and design research and asks what happens to the little ones, the tweens, the teenagers when technology – which is ubiquitous in the world we inhabit – becomes a critical part of their lives? Instead of setting up the dichotomy of is it good / bad or asking how much is too much or completely removing all devices, she urges us to consider how we can use what we know about technology’s role in child development to help children of all ages make the most of their digital experiences. As she argues, self-directed experiences of technology, one initiated, sustained and ended voluntarily, can actually support healthy child development, especially when it takes place within the context of community – whether it’s a relationship between parent and child, an online community, friends, or within the school. 

Free without Freedom: life after prison

Here's a disturbing statistic: "with just 5% of the world’s population, the US accounts for close to 25% of the world's prison population." As my guest in today's episode, Lauren Kessler, argues in her book "Free," at any given moment millions of Americans are enmeshed in the American criminal just system. And while most are released back into society, within just three years almost three quarters of those freed end up back in jail. In our conversation today, Lauren and I attempt to shed light on why so many freed prisoners find it so hard to reintegrate back into society. There are many structural and institutional reasons for this, such as the lack of governmental assistance, little income or no housing options, lack of work experience (even though many prisoners work in jail), the lack of support for drug addictions or mental health issues, and so on. Furthermore, as we discuss in this episode, the US prison system doesn't seek to rehabilitate prisoners, some of whom can end up spending decades behind bars. Instead the prison complex’s primary job is to punish, and this punishment involves violence, dehumanization, the extraction of free labor, extreme isolation -- anything to shatter a person’s sense of self, stripping them of agency & personhood, and their dignity. As Lauren stresses in her work, it's the re-learning of how to be a human being again that can often times be the greatest obstacle for individuals set free. 
To learn more about Lauren's work, please visit her website at: https://www.laurenkessler.com/ 

Group Living: Reimagining Home & Family

For our first episode of the new year I wanted to share my conversation with one of the most delightful guests I've had the pleasure of speaking with: Lola Milholland, author of "Group living: and other recipes." It's part cook-book, part memoir, and wholly a manifesto for rethinking how we live. For as long as Lola can remember, her home was always brimming with people: from her parents' eccentric friends stopping by for an impromptu dinner party, a steady stream of foreign exchange students, to a group of Tibetan monks. Today, Lola lives in a communal home with her brother and house-mates, where they all share resources, labor & responsibilities, and delicious home-cooked meals every night. Lola lives in Portland, Oregon, and runs Umi Organic, a noodle company with a commitment to providing nutritious public school lunches. In our conversation we talk about everything – from her non traditional upbringing by her iconoclastic hippie parents, organic farming and how she came to run a noodle making business, nuclear families - and nuclear war - her obsession with mushrooms, and what really is at the heart of her memoir: that perhaps it is never too late to begin reimagining some of the structures at the very center of our lives – that is, how we live, whom we live with, and what constitutes family.
To learn more about Lola and her work please visit her website at https://www.lolasbeef.com/
To try Lola's delicious noodles please visit their website at https://www.umiorganic.com/

Lion Women

For this last episode of 2024 I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Marjan Kamali, the author of one of the best-selling novels of the year, "The Lion Women of Tehran." The novel, which spans three tumultuous and transformative decades of Iranian history, centers on the friendship between two women, Ellie and Homa, as they grow up, grow close, and then grow apart: "Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences." At the heart of this novel, and of our conversation, is an exploration of the special bond that exists between women - as friends, as mothers & daughters, as aunts & nieces, as grandmothers & grand-daughters - and the strength and power that these bonds can hold when women come together to resist inequality, patriarchy, oppression, and unjust regimes. 
To learn more about Marjan Kamali and her work please visit her website at https://marjankamali.com/

In Defense of Dark Moods

With the holiday season in full swing - and new year's just around the corner - people are feeling ALL the feels such as joy, excitement, comfort, gratitude, but also anxiety, grief, resentment, loneliness. However, the message we receive from everyone - and everything - around us is usually some version of "stay positive!" "brighten up!" "choose happiness!" which implies that we need to quickly fix, push down, and ignore the "darker moods" we may be experiencing. As our guest in today's episode, Mariana Alessandri, argues in her book "Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods," from ancient Western philosophies, to modern psychology and the self-help industry, our dark moods - like grief, sadness, and anger - have been cast as irrational, symptoms of a mental disorder, or as a sign of personal failure and just plain ol' laziness. We begin our discussion with the ancient Stoics to highlight just how long this "broken-ness narrative" has persisted and then move onto the voices of more contemporary philosophers like Audre Lorde and Maria Lugones  who can help us learn how to embrace the dark and to see our painful moods as dignified, as parts of us that make us human. 

Identity, loss, and belonging: in conversation with Morgan Talty

Just in time for American Thanksgiving, my conversation with Morgan Talty - the award-winning & best-selling author of "Night of the Living Rez." In today's episode we delve into Morgan's debut novel, "Fire Exit," which is inspired by and sheds light on the life-changing effects of Blood Quantum, a system of measurement that was historically crafted by colonial powers to determine the degree of a person’s indigeneity, how much "Indian blood" one must have to "prove" that they belong to a tribe. Blood Quantum, a "sophisticated tool of genocide," as Morgan aptly puts it, became a way to regulate and ultimately reduce the Native American population in America. "Fire Exit" revolves around the life of Charles, a man haunted by his previous life growing up on the Penobscot Reservation and by a secret he keeps that he so desperately wants to share. This book has it all -- urging the reader to question what it means to give & receive love, what constitutes family & kinship, what kinds of trauma get passed down from generation to generation, what stories are ours to share & to hold on to, and ultimately, what does it mean to belong?
 

"Does meditation actually work?"

I borrowed the title of this episode from a May '24 National Geographic article, which attempts to answer the question using science -- lab studies, brain scans, heart monitors, fMRI results, etc. The article also conflates meditation with Mindfulness, which is one of the most popular forms of meditation being practiced and taught today. In this episode, my guest, Professor David McMahan, and I don't seek to answer this question of whether "meditation actually works" but instead turn the question on its head and ask: what kind of work does meditation do? The answer, Professor McMahan, argues depends on the socio-political, historical, and cultural context - the "social imaginary" - that the practitioner finds themselves in. And so "the work" that Mindfulness meditation may have done for the Buddhist Indian ascetic twenty five centuries ago, for whom these practices were actually developed, is entirely different than the work meditation may do for the middle-class professional living in New York (or Tokyo or Mumbai) today. As Professor McMahan illustrates in his book, "Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds," The Standard Version of Mindfulness today understands meditation to mean the "non-judgmental awareness of the present moment," and the practitioner is asked to forego any expectations or goal-oriented behavior. This modern description of meditation as bare-awareness, present-focused, as accepting oneself as we are with no judgements and goals has very little in common with the ways in which meditation is described in the early Buddhist Pali canon. And yet there is a tendency for many teachers and practitioners of Mindfulness today to believe that this practice - at least its "essence" - has been passed down from the time of the Buddha to today, completely unchanged, and being able to produce the same "results" and create the same spiritual subjects. 

Untigering with Iris Chen

In this week's episode I sit down with Iris Chen, a peaceful parenting coach, unschooler, and founder of the Untigering movement. In her book, "Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent," Iris describes how she started out as a (stereo-) typical Asian tiger mom, whose goal was to raise obedient and high-achieving children. However, her attempts to control and mold her children only led to constant tantrums and escalating conflict, and she soon realized something needed to change - and it wasn’t her children. Through her writing and speaking, Iris shares her journey of healing and shifting from power-over to power-with in her relationship with her children. Her mission is to inspire and support others to make the shift, especially among Asian communities. In our conversation we try to unpack how us first and second generation children of Tiger Parents (you don't have to be Asian to have experienced a strict, authoritarian upbringing!) can work on making better, or at least less fear-based, choices than those made by our parents & grand-parents. We also discuss and try to reconcile the practice of "filial piety," the traditional Chinese-Confucian virtue of showing love and respect for your parents and elders, while trying to Untiger and move away from some of the more harmful parenting practices and value-systems we have inherited from these same elders. And although we end with discussing Iris' work and ethics around unschooling, it is just a small glimpse of her larger vision for cultural transformation, communal healing, and collective liberation. To learn more about Iris and her work please visit her website at https://untigering.com/

Belonging without Othering

In this week's episode I sit down with Stephen Menendian, the Assistant Director and Director of Research at the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. We discuss his latest book, co-authored with john powell, called "Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World." Stephen starts us off with describing what "Othering" is, and how the framework can be helpful in examining - and can work towards remediating - forms of structural marginalization and inequality. Our conversation then turns to what Stephen and john powell both regard as one of the most dangerous forces in the world today, that of ethno-nationalism, and the various "identity entrepreneurs" fueling these movements. We end on a more hopeful note, discussing how all of us can work towards fostering more Belonging - through creating and telling new stories, ones in which we all have a voice and a role to play, and through creating & expanding our identities to include parts that can connect with others. It is only on common ground that we can begin to build the kind of world we want, one based on inclusion, fairness, justice, and care.
To learn more about Stephen and john's work please visit the Othering & Belonging Institute at https://belonging.berkeley.edu/

Childless Cat Ladies and Other Women Without Children

In today's episode I speak with Peggy O'Donnell Heffington, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, and author of "Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother." There has been a long history of women without children being stigmatized, pitied, reviled, envied, and ignored. Within today's political climate - especially with the upcoming Presidential Elections - we have also seen examples of the trope of "the child-less cat lady" being rallied against so-called "non-mothers." With time, understandings and practices of Mothering are shifting to increasingly narrow definitions, where a Mother, today, is understood as a woman who can give birth to her own biological children, "naturally," and within the confines of a nuclear family. As we see unfolding before our eyes, with women being denied access to abortions in the United States, the government has always been interested, implicated, and often times, directly involved, in the decisions women make about their reproductive choices. In my conversation with Peggy Heffington, we dive into some of the historical, cultural, ecological, and socio-political reasons women today -as in the past -are not having children. Indeed, many of the reasons are not new: "history is full of women without children, some who chose childless lives, others who wanted children but never had them, and still others - the vast majority, then and now - who fell somewhere in between."
 
Here's a link to Rachel Treisman's article: https://www.npr.org/2024/07/29/nx-s1-5055616/jd-vance-childless-cat-lady-history
To learn more about Peggy Heffington and follow her work, check out her website: https://poheffington.com/