Summer of COVID-19: Teens and Screens?

03:42 Under the adept moderation of Dr. Robert Bilder, Director of the Tennenbaum Center for the Biology of Creativity and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at UCLA, three experts offered their insights on the impacts of screens on adolescents, ways for parents to facilitate productive conversations about online activity with teens, and the ways in which nature can be an antidote for loneliness and stress during these isolating times.

05:04 Dr. Paul Weigle, a child and adolescent psychologist at Natchaug Hospital and Chair of the Media Committee at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, discussed the developmental needs of adolescents, the impact of screen use on adolescent behavior, health and well-being, and strategies for guiding teens toward healthier habits.

19:40 Dr. Delaney Ruston, a physician and filmmaker of documentaries for parents, presented on the importance of parents and teens sharing their stories and pathways to solution-based conversations about adolescent screen use.

34:06 Richard Louv, a journalist and author of 10 books, shared his knowledge about the benefits that adolescents experience from spending more time in nature and how the pandemic and increasing technology use has deepened the need for engagement in the natural world.

51:36 Finally, moderator Dr. Robert M. Bilder, utilizing his recent research, illustrated how screens affect creativity and suggested ways parents can encourage teens to create.

[Dr. Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra]: Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today for another Ask the Experts workshop presented by Children and Screens. I am Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra, the organization’s president and founder and I am your host today. For those of you who have joined us for the first time, Children and Screens is one of the nation’s leading nonprofits that advances and supports internet interdisciplinary scientific research into the cognitive, psychosocial, emotional, behavioral, and physical effects of digital media on toddlers, children adolescents. We bring together clinicians, researchers, public health experts, educators, authors and the public to explore what the science says about these topics. During the pandemic, in addition to our workshop series, Children and Screens is providing research funding for studies that investigate the impacts of technologies during this time period and beyond. Both the wonderful ways screens are helping us to connect, and have the increase in screen usage may be negatively impacting children and teens development. This summer, teens are experiencing a new normal 24/7 screen time quarantine protocols, canceled activities, remote internships, virtual graduations, a social justice movement resulting with really a lot of exposure to violence on the news and more have left many teens and their parents unsure of what to do next. Indeed, what does the summer at home leave many teens? Is it okay that my teens are spending hours every day playing video games? Online with their classmates? Texting at the same time and on snapchat? Is all this news okay for my team to watch? We know that you have many questions about your kids and screens and we’re here to help. We hope that the discussion today about managing your summer on and off screen will help facilitate conversations with your teens and other family members, and that our answers to your questions will help you manage this unusual time. I’d like to extend a big thank you in advance to our outstanding panel of experts for being with us today. Our panelists have reviewed the questions you submitted and will answer as many as they can. If you have additional questions during the workshop please type them into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. We’ll answer as many as time permits. We are recording today’s workshop and hope to upload it to a video on YouTube in the coming days. You’ll receive a link to our YouTube channel tomorrow where you’ll find videos from our past webinars. It is now my great pleasure to introduce our moderator dr. Bob builder. Dr. Builder is the director of the Tanenbaum Center for the biology of creativity and a distinguished professor of psychiatry and psychology at UCLA, and has more than 30 years experience in research on bringing behavior relations with experience in clinical neuropsychology, neurophysiology, structural and functional neuroimaging and genomics strategies, as well as these are applied to the study of both healthy people and those with various neurological and psychiatric syndromes. We are delighted to have Dr. Builder with us today to share his experience. Welcome.

[Dr. Bob Builder]: Thank you so much Pamela, this is a great honor. Thank you so much for including me and what an amazing panel that you’ve assembled to address the topics that couldn’t be more timely today. You know I think as we’ve encountered multiple challenges going from acute stress to chronic stress and fresh stress, we really need to hear from the experts that you’ve lined up today and I’m looking forward to a really exciting panel. I’m worried about being a moderator because moderation has never been my strong suit, but that’s okay we’ll do our best, and I’m very excited to at least listen, learn and be able to ask questions that are coming from you in the audience from our distinguished panel. So first up, we have an amazing Paul Weigel, he’s an MD. He is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Natchaug Hospital Hartford Healthcare, and he’s chair of their media committee of the media committee at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He’s written and taught extensively about adolescents media use including papers about tech addiction, social media interactions, and impacts on teens mental health and much much more. So let’s get on to it. Paul took it away please.

[Dr. Paul Weigel]: Thank you Bob. It’s a pleasure to be with you today as a child adolescent psychiatrist. I am consistently working with these issues to help improve the health of my patients and also the teenagers that I have at home as well. So my plan for the next ten minutes is to talk a little bit about the developmental and health needs of adolescents, talk a little bit about screen time, what has become the new normal, what a healthy balance looks like and how parents can help their kids to achieve it. So when we’re thinking about the needs of adolescents of course the first need that comes to mind is physical needs, the need for adequate sleep, for a healthy diet, and for physical movement and exercise. But of course there are psychological needs as well. And adolescents are at this critical juncture where they need us parents to provide structure for them. They desperately need structure in their lives in order to be healthy but at the same time they also require autonomy. They really need to be allowed to you know make some of their own decisions and even when those decisions you know might not always turn out positive. And so finding this balance between these two is the challenge of parenting and adolescence. One of many I suppose. Adolescence also need opportunities for mastery. This is mastery over the skills they’re going to need to have productive lives as adults, and there are many of those. Adolescents also this is the time in their life where they’re are trying on different identities to see what fits and they need opportunities to practice that, and that often comes socially and some of that they can get the social media, others they really need to experience sort of in person. And of course that’s a bigger challenge than ever in our current situation. Finally adolescents need their family. They won’t admit it often and and sometimes they do their best to subvert it, but my clinical experience and studies show when adolescents become withdrawn from their families really their health declines significantly, their mental health especially. So something important to remember is that they do need us; they’re not adults yet. So what has become the norm with screen habits for young people in America? Well the best study that that I know of is the Kaiser Family Foundation study which was taken over by the Common Sense Media survey, which every five years surveys young people on their screen habits and amazingly when we look at the difference between teens in 2000 and teens in 2019, we found that the average amount of screen exposure has practically doubled, and the biggest increases of course are in the internet and video games. So on your average day, a teenager has exposure of 7 hours and 22 minutes of screen entertainment, not including schoolwork or anything like that now. This this numbers a little bit inflated because at time, screens are times teens are exposed to multiple screens at once and those could get Canada’s double, but really screen media has come to really dominate the free time of young people and who are spending more time engaged in screen media than they are going to school even when they were going to school. So what has this change happens as adolescence is being moved really on two screens to a large degree? Well, one really wonderful positive change is that adolescents are engaging in much less risky behaviors so teen pregnancy has plummeted, violent crime among teens has dropped significantly, alcohol, cigarette, drug use and fatalities, teen fatalities, and car accidents, all declined because teens are engaging in these risky activities less. However, we’re also seeing significant declines in healthy behaviors among teens. So socializing with friends, learning how to drive, reading for pleasure, books that is of course or magazines, and getting sufficient sleep. The last graph here shows the number of teens who get less than seven hours of sleep and most need more than nine, and we can see that that has really increased in recent years with the rise of screen media. And the obesity rate among teens in America has continued to climb thirty percent higher since the year 2000. So in many ways, it appears that the amount of screen habits that young people are engaging in are getting in the way of these things: healthy sleep, healthy diet, exercise, social get-togethers, and so forth. At the same time, we have seen significant increases in, very concerning increases, in rates of depression and anxiety among young people, and the suicide rate among teens has grown significantly in in recent years, and the data on this is mixed. But it does appear that those who are online the most, those runs between the most, do appear to be at the greatest risk. So what about COVID now, enter COVID and this was an article from “The New York Times” that I wanted to share. Coronavirus ended the screen time debate, screen one, and it really made a significant difference in the lives of so many young people. One survey of 3,000 parents indicated that the screen time among their kids had roughly doubled since COVID began and I’m looking forward to the fact that without the responsibilities of distance learning, screen time is only likely to increase for many youth. So what can we do about this as parents? What should we do? Well so of course, we’re all familiar with the food pyramid, and this is sort of an activity pyramid of healthy habits for young people, and it is really important to be mindful that that young people have a sufficient time in their day that they’re devoting to these activities, physical activity of course, meals and self-care are so important time for, time spent with the family socializing in person when possible and safe, doing activities of academic value which of course reading. or other masteries feel such as chores which teach responsibility. And that you notice that the biggest area at the bottom of the pyramid is sleep. And sleep is so important for the physical and mental health for young people. It really is the foundation of health for a lot of our teens in a way that is not always easy to tell, but sufficient sleep is protective against depression, against anxiety, against obesity, junk food diet, and is essential for learning. So oftentimes that if there’s one thing to focus on, sleep is often the most important. So when we’re thinking about guiding teens towards healthy habits, we need to remember that teens do their circadian rhythms, their sleep wake cycles are different than those of adults. They have a longer circadian rhythm, a 25-hour which essentially is like kind of being on jetlag every day, which this is why it’s harder for teens to get to sleep, but it’s also why it’s important for teens that they sleep at a regular time because left to their own devices, literally or figuratively, teens are very often inclined to stay up later and later until they’re really sleeping during the day and up at night, and when this happens, which I often see with my patients, this is detrimental of the other health behaviors that I mentioned. They’re not eating healthy meals typically. They’re not getting exercise at night, or doing chores, or doing healthier activities. So oftentimes, the most important thing I can do is to help regulate sleep. Now sunlight and ambient light and being awake is really what resets the adolescence clock. So that’s why it’s really important for teens to have light exposure and be out of bed in the morning, preferably at 8 o’clock in the morning, which is sort of ideal although far from what many teens would like to do. And sometimes in it, and screen media has only exacerbated the issue because young people are engaged and excited, and it is of course important for as much as we tend for parents to be role models, that means putting away the phones at dinner ourselves and maybe considering following some of the same rules, having our phones charged downstairs at night that kind of thing. So also, of course anything we can do to help promote healthy activities really decreases the need to monitor screen time and I believe Richard and Delaney will talk about that more. Of course going outside is super important, but obviously something like this doesn’t count. When we’re talking about, when we’re talking with kids about screen habits, it’s important remember that younger kids really need us to impose the limits for them, but as teens get older, they really need to as much as they can be granted more autonomy over their own decisions. And so it’s ideal for parents to serve more as a guide and less as a police officer to especially to older teens and that can be helped by playing video games, watching TV shows with our kids, and sometimes that means watching shows or playing games we’d rather not, but that can really help to open a dialogue and that’s what we want, is an open dialogue with kids about screen habits and choices so that we can encourage critical decision making. And now this is easier said than done of course, but it’s so important to remember that when having these discussions with teens, it’s important to be curious, authoritative , to be interested in their perspective and to validate their perspective, and to avoid being judgmental as much as possible. So some resources for parents that want to mention, I really like the book “Raising A Screen-Smart Child” by Julianna Miner and I think that the built-in parental controls on Windows 10, on iPhones, on Xbox, or Playstation can be very very helpful in taking away some of the conflict. However, of course kids can sometimes get around these controls, so these are more of a compliment for supervision than they are a replacement for them. Finally I do want to mention that that as parents we don’t need to be perfect you know kids are very resilient, and certainly we don’t always need to get it right, but if you’re concerned that you really are unable to help your teen, or to control their unhealthy media habits, or if you’re concerned that if you tried they might try to hurt themselves or to hurt you, that is a red flag that this is a teen who really needs help and and if that happens, it’s really important to seek out help from a qualified mental health professional because treatment works. That’s time to power off for me, but thank you very much.

[Dr. Bob Builder]: Thank you so much Paul, that was really terrific. And yeah, I’m sure the audience is gonna be getting a lot out of that. Thanks for not only telling us some powerful information, but also providing us with a lot of you know really valuable tips. And for the audience, I want you to know that on the Children and Screens website, an institute of digital media and child development website there’s a lot more tips that you’ll have, that you should check out. Let me try to get one question in for Paul, and I loved your pyramid showing about the allocation of time and how important that kind of structure is for our teens in helping to guide their sleep and other activities, and then trying to help them find the right activities in structure, but I think that finding the balance between being a guide versus being a cop is challenging, and I wonder how you recommend parents pursue that that delicate balance.

[Dr. Paul Weigel]: Yeah so certainly whenever possible you know, it is better to guide kids to make their own decisions, and unfortunately this does really depend a lot on the maturity and and the issues that the teen is having. Unfortunately, those who have sort of an addictive habit and really are, they can’t regulate their own screen use and have the most problems because of extra excessive screen habits, are often the ones who need those firm limits the most. And this can make for some significant conflict sometimes. And this is where again you know pulling in the help of a mental health professional can be valuable, but I believe that Delaney will be talking more about some of the ways to maintain an open dialogue about screen media habits so I’m gonna hold off.

[Dr. Bob Builder]: That’s great, thank you so much Paul, and yet we have two fantastic speakers there. I mean I’m very excited to hear from Delaney Ruston and I’m going to introduce her in a second. I want to make sure everybody knows though that we also have Richard Louv coming up next, so don’t tune out when Delaney is done. Make sure you stick around for Richard’s exciting presentation, but first let’s hear from Delaney. Delaney Ruston is also a physician and director and producer of “Screenagers” and “Screenagers Next Chapter”, award-winning documentaries for social change. Dr. Ruston has been a researcher and physician at major medical schools and has spent years providing primary care to the underserved. Dr. Ruston take it away.

[Dr. Delaney Ruston]: Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here because this is so hard parenting in this tech revolution and I’m there with you. Nine years ago I was struggling so much. I was an emotional wreck. I would get so mad at my kids as they begged for more screen time and they toggled back forth, and they were sneaking it and then I get mad, and then I would feel guilty that I got mad, and I kept doing this thing called the grab and stab where I would just grab whatever device was in their hand and just stab them with my eyes. And that was not working, it was just making the stress more. And so as a mom, I really needed help like what to do and as a physician. I wanted to understand the impact of the screen time, so I decided I was gonna make this documentary. I didn’t know actually at the time, it was called out of control. It became screen eaters, but in my head I just felt like it was out of control. And I said this is gonna be easy, there’s lots of families who are struggling, so this won’t be a problem because I had been working for years doing documentaries on mental health issues and that can be really hard to get people to come forward. And yet when I went to parents and said hey “can I film what’s going on?” They said no absolutely not, and it was a big revelation to me to realize how private parenting is not only as a culture do we think of it as a unique on its own unit, but also it’s the most important thing we do and so of course we’re gonna feel judged and yet we’re in this tech revolution. So I realized this tech revolution really warrants a parenting revolution where parents are actively coming out and sharing with each other what they’ve tried, what works, what doesn’t work, where they’re finding the courage to be vulnerable and saying to other parents “you know can we do a tech free carpool, or can we work together and have fortnight go off at a certain time, or when you come over can we all put the phones away” and then it needs as parents for us to be in schools, and other places advocating for change, for tech balance. And I think the greatest ammunition that we have for a revolution is that of the love of our kids. It’s powerful you know I think about our host today Dr. Pamela Hurst Pietra, and she and I were talking years ago when she was starting Children and Screens, and yes she wanted to start this as a doctor, but most importantly she told me it was her as a mother, her love for her kids and all kids that she wanted to see things better, and she wanted to do it to bring all the researchers together in this field and to figure out what the main needs were to get funding to them from research which the government and other people were not doing. This is one parent who is not does not sleep much to do which she has been doing. It’s pretty amazing. What I hope from all of you today is that you don’t feel like you have to start a big organization, but if you take home one message from me it will be that I hope that something that you learned today as we move through this webinar if there’s anything that you try and it works or they learn from to tell five other parents about it. That’s gonna make a big difference. and you know my work and passion has been all about how do we get kids and adults from all backgrounds together to talk about solutions and particularly using communication science. That’s what I did after my residency. I was researching communication science and now it’s that lens on what’s more effective/less effective. I really have moved for several years now researching this for teens. I want to give a few ideas now and then more will come up in the Q&A and actually show a clip from the film teenagers next chapter which just came out recently that looks at skills for parents and for kids and teens around stress anxiety emotion and screen time issues. So let me start with what I call the three P’s: people, positive, and policies. So people, it’s really so effective is that when we share with our teens stories of other people when it comes to things like sexting or screen time use etc. That’s why I purposely made these documentaries that have stories of other people, so that kids and teens see the stories, and then it’s a launching point for conversations. Or for example, I started four and a half years of blog that’s weekly: Tech Talk Tuesday, which is all about getting parents and kids to have conversations, but you don’t have to see the documentaries, or this there’s plenty of vignettes on Children and Screens website and others but it’s very effective. The second P is that of positive. I was surprised how negative I was being around screen time. I would do this scare tactic like you think things are gonna disappear on Snapchat, they’re not going to. And then my kids didn’t want to negotiate like screen time limits and it was funny because as a doctor I know scare tactics don’t work, but I kept trying and I realize that in society. Also we’re using this scare tactic you know saying that screens are ruining the generation and all of this. All of this is making them defensive so I needed to become positive. And so when we do our weekly talk about screen time in our lives “Tech Talk Tuesdays” we always start with something positive about technology and there are so many and that just brings their defensiveness way down and we can have better conversations. Families that I work with where they’re having World War 3 in their home because of screen time issues which right now with COVID lots of parents are telling me how they don’t like how the energy in the home is with all the screen time. What I often recommend is a three-day tech lovefest, that you as the parent get to spend three days talking about all the amazing things about technology, all the things that we that were the last generation that couldn’t look up what you can do with leftover coffee and have ten ideas right there, or also anything right. I mean we are the last generation to know it’s incredibly different, and I could talk for days and days about positivity. When families do this they say “Delaney it really resets things”. And then the third P is about policies and programs, and it’s parents stepping forward to get involved in schools or after-school programs and being advocates for our kids. So one of the programs we started with something called “away for the day”. And it’s all sorts of resources on the awayfortheday.org website, where parents have taken things to schools and like middle schools in particular and literally changed the policy so that phones are away for the day, so that kids particularly those who find it aversive to have to do social contact that they start to do that more because they can’t turn into their screens. I often think about Bill Gates and how he talks about how socially awkward he felt particularly in middle school, and how he went to the library and became friends with the librarian who would help become a mentor to him and he often talks about her in the work that he does, and we want to engage that. But there’s something else that I feel deeply about in terms of programs, and that’s the one I want to share right now from Screenagers’ Next Chapter. I think if I had a magic wand, first and foremost I would have older teens teaching younger teens about technology and social media and communication. And I have the privilege of filming one such program in Massachusetts. And the video then continues just for a moment into a little sound, a part about how important it is to be face to face with their friends. It’s just a minute and a half. It might very well lag a little bit because of zoom, but if you do want to see Screenagers or Screenagers Next Chapter with your teens, those can be found at teenagers movie websites and people can now see them online and we’re doing it through communities with discussions. And right now, we’re going to go ahead and queue up that clip. “Our generation we mainly grew up with phones and we had face-to-face communication so I’ve had that situation where when I went up somebody apologized, but I really had no idea how to approach it because I always use a phone to apologize. I know I had that happen like probably like three days ago. I was driving to my friend’s house and we had to have a conversation. and I was so nervous. It’s one of my best friends and it was so hard for to like sit there to her say like I felt this way about something I did and then have myself like not jump in and say ‘well that’s that’s not right’. It’s like I had to sit there and think about what she was feeling and not just defend myself the first chance I got. got it made you feel that way. I remember Vanessa talking about when she had the situation with her friend and that was a better way of communicating because if not like how I would usually do it, barging into a conversation we really never get the point across and it just comes into me defending myself. not just reacting but instead using skills. It’s hard work, but it clearly fosters better relationships. and the data shows that spending more time in person with others is strongly correlated with greater happiness. Particularly for teenagers, we know that experiences with their peers are among the most important experiences that they have. If my teenagers were to play video games alone in their room all day and rather than spend time with their friends that would concern me.”

[Dr. Bob Builder]: It’s really fantastic, really fantastic. Delighted to see, Delaney, my buddy Danny Pine out there in that last clip that’s really beautiful, really beautiful. Thank you so much. That was an incredible presentation and yeah I think that screening Screenagers with one’s own team sounds like a great great activity, but I was wondering if you know you’re highlighting how to turn the conversation positive and focus on the positives of technology. I wondered if you could share with us you know a couple of the ideas whether it’s focusing on particular platforms that help to provide a more authentic experience. I remember being very troubled when Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook was the way to develop an authentic personal identity and I felt that I wasn’t sure that was true, but I would like to hear from you. What do you think are the things that teens can do to be positive in their interactions? 

[Dr. Delaney Ruston]: I mean oh that they can use positive in their interactions. Well I just, you know, we talked about the positives in general a new app I just used yesterday how to get my transcripts onto something, or you know they will talk about how they are enjoying TikTok and then how they get rid of it because it’s taking up too much time. But you know we first talked about, well, why because it is super engaging to see people doing funny things and how that works in the brain, but there’s it’s really just that celebration of all the you know TED talks that we can show our kids to give them the things that we worry. We worry they’re losing respect for  people’s perspectives and so we talk about great TED talks with people that we will watch together. I mean the positive things on screen time provides it’s endless, and I add that we know that only 3% of the time that kids and teens are on screens it’s content creation. So I do, they know that I love that when we talk about something fun like using Premiere Pro to edit a video, for example, is something they know I really appreciate is how we use technology to foster creativity and have time off of screens to foster creativity as well.

[Dr. Bob Builder]: that’s beautiful and thanks for the shout-out to creativity. I’ll come back to that in a couple of minutes. But meanwhile please do remember that advice tips like this and more are available on the Children and Screens website. But let’s move along because we have a fantastic presentation coming up from Richard Louv. For those who don’t know Richard, he’s a journalist and author of 10 books including “Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature Deficit Disorder”. It’s also written the nature principle and vitamin N. His new book is “Our Wild Calling”, how connecting with animals can transform our lives and save theirs. In addition, Richard is the co-founder and chair emeritus of nonprofit children and nature Network which supports a new nature movement. It’s really fantastic, Richard. looking forward to hearing from you. 

[Richard Louv]: It’s really great to be on a panel with such distinguished panelists and speakers. First, I want to say that the emphasis on being positive and not totally negative to that technology is really important. There’s a bumper sticker slogan in one of my books, “The Nature Principle”, which is the more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need. It’s an equation. It’s a question about budgeting, budgeting of money, budgeting of time. It applies to families; it applies to schools. And the research suggests that when we burn out, whether it’s our teenagers or ourselves, when we burn out from too much screen time, the best way to regenerate our brain is to go outside in nature, and it doesn’t take a lot. So these two things work, together with technology and nature. We need both and our lives are gonna become more technologically. We certainly discovered that in the last few weeks zoom now dominates our lives, so many of this. That’s not going to go away. So we may have to make a conscious effort to balance that neurologically with experiences, the direct experience in nature, as direct as we get them. COVID has actually raised the value of nature even though we’re spending more and more time on screens. COVID has actually increased the value that played, people place on nature. you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. and now all the hunger to go to the park to go outside to find some nature we’ve seen again and again in the parks until the parks were overcrowded and they’ve had to pull back on that. That’s evidence I think of a deep hunger that people have naturally for nature. The most recent book that I wrote is called “Our Wild Calling” and it is about our relationship with other animals whether it’s companion animals or wild animals. And one of the themes of it is human loneliness in isolation. There is an epidemic of loneliness going on that medical folks sometimes call an epidemic. They’re finding that some of the diseases associated with human isolation are now worse because of loneliness and they are because of obesity, or other causes of really morbidity. This has been recognized that tech gets blamed a lot for that and certainly there’s a lot of blame to go around. I make the case in Our Wild Calling that there’s something else going on. This loneliness that we and our teenagers and our kids feel so deeply is rooted in a much deeper loneliness which is species loneliness. As a species were desperate not to feel alone in the universe. Why else would we look for Bigfoot? Why else would we look for life on other planets when it may not be good to find intelligent life on other planets? It’s because we’re desperate to feel and not to feel alone in the universe. The urban parks that can have the best impact on human psychological health happen to be the ones that are the ones with the greatest biodiversity. So this species loneliness we need to take care of that particularly as we have withdrawn more into the indoors as I say nature has become seen in greater value by people, nearby nature in particular the nature outside your door if you’re lucky enough to have a yard, the nature of your yard, the nature in a window box. This the wraptor building a nest on the ledge across the street in an urban neighborhood. All of those things now are taking on greater value. When I wrote “Last Child In The Woods”, the first of these four books about what I call nature deficit disorder, I could find about 16 rigorous studies about the impact of nature, both of them the deficit of nature in people’s lives but also the positive benefits. I can only find about 60 rigorous studies and I thought were good enough to quote. That was in 2005. I thought that was astounding that something so large as the impact of nature on human development had been virtually ignored by the academic world. Some good news which is to children and nature network which was a nonprofit that grew out of “Last Child In The Woods” has a research library. First we worked with folks at Yale and now at the University of Minnesota. We’ve got an online research library that anybody in the world can go to for free and learn mainly about the benefits of nature for teenagers, for children, and for adults. It’s gone from about 60 studies to over 1,000 studies and they all point in the same direction which is that this may be fundamental to human development, may be fundamental to raising healthy kids and raising ourselves throughout our lives, to have that association with nature. Some people attribute this to what Lydia Wilson calls the biophilia hypothesis, which holds that we are hardwired genetically to have an affiliation with the rest of nature. We need it. When we don’t get enough of it we don’t do so well. So the recent studies, many of these 1,000 studies have shown over 50 of them that have pointed to nature playing in nature as a key role in development of pro environmental behavior, particularly by fostering an emotional connection to nature. Healthy urban ecosystems can lead to more cohesive neighborhoods, reduced aggression, lower crime, or reduced attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children and adults, and other mental and physical health indicators. Experienced in the natural world may serve as a buffer to depression and anxiety. It’s particularly important right now. It can help to reduce obesity and myopia. It can boost the immune system again particularly important right now. It improves social bonding, reduce social violence even within the home. It may even help raise standardized test scores and graduation rates. There’s some real interesting studies about schools that have greened themselves. I don’t need some solar panels. I mean they actually have school gardens and they go on field trips that forget things that schools don’t do much of anymore to nature. The test scores, standardized test scores are higher in those schools and these aren’t self selected kids. They’ve, they factored in socioeconomic background in those studies. As a result, gardens and natural schoolyards are far more common in schools today than they were just a couple years ago, nature preschools are booming as of 2017 they’d increased about 500 percent just in eight years and they’ve increased possibly as much of as they have, just in the last few years since 2017. They’re seen as more and more important because in the age of coronavirus, social distancing is easier outside in a natural or learning area. Even so I had a good lunch, it was requested with a professor who was one of the lead people on what was is being billed as the largest study ever done on teenagers, on what affects their outcome as adults, not sure why I was asked to go to this lunch because when I asked about what they’re looking into in terms of how nature experience affects teenagers and their development, they didn’t have one question on the survey. Yet I hope they have since then put something on there. But this is still a hard sell to people to say that nature experience is really fundamental to our health and our children’s health and our teenagers’ health. One of the ways I think to deal with this rather than saying no to everything is to suggest that you know there are superpowers involved with connection in nature. I talked about the hybrid mind. The best way to explain the hybrid mind is I met a guy at a hotel who teaches people how to become pilots of cruise ships. and he said he gets two kinds of students. One kind of student that grew up mainly inside on couches playing video games. He said they had talents I need they’re really good at electronics. I got a lot of electronics on my ships. The other kind of student grew up mainly outside or a lot of time spent outside whether they were in rural areas or parents were camping a lot whatever it is. He said that kind of student also has a talent that I need. That kind of student can actually tell where the ship is because their spatial senses have been developed. all the spatial senses of the kids of the young adults you grew up mainly on screens had atrophied. and I think there’s a lot of research that will support this. The people who study the human senses no longer talk about five senses. They talk conservatively about nine or ten human senses. They all have names. Some of the people who study human senses talk about as many as thirty human senses. We have some of the ability. That’s to use echolocation to get ourselves around. In the dark we have much better noses than we think. We can track through the woods just with our noses a trail of scent trail. We have these abilities that we tend not to use. The more time we spend on screens the more we try to block out as many of those as many as 30 or more senses as we can. That to me is the very definition of being less alive. I don’t know any parent that wants their child to be less live with their teenager. When we talk about these as superpowers of developing a hybrid mind that balances the technological mind with the natural mind, that’s a more powerful mind. I think the future is going to belong to people with hybrid Minds. I think that’s a good argument to use with teenagers. These are superpowers that have been neglected. In any case I think I’m running out of time here and we’ll probably want to go to the next section for questions. 

[Dr. Bob Builder]: Thank you so much. That was really really truly inspiring. And yeah, I’m really stunned thinking about how we can enable our superpowers to not be blocked, how we can promote them through nature. And indeed, there are some questions that have come in from the audience that have focused on what’s being done in curricula nowadays to try to develop these superpowers. Are there nature-oriented curricula that are really you know addressing this imperative to you know for physical and mental health to be involved in nature to connect to animals, etc?

[Richard Louv]: Natural school yards are really booming in schools. It’s kind of a counter movement to the I think over emphasis on technology and my passing schools. And again, I’m not a high tech. The more high tech we need the more nature we need. Much of this is being done outside of school in after-school programs in summer programs and camps and all of that, but increasingly teachers are focused on this. One of the studies shows the teachers get to take their students outside in nature. They don’t burn out as early as teachers who were locked into that cubicle with them. And again, the emphasis in recent years has been on you know “No Child Left Behind”, and there’s a lot of good things that came from that. But over testing, spending more and more hours in the school. They’re canceling recess. This is not a good idea. There’s a lot of research that shows the recess raises test scores. We cancel that along with art and music nature is in there in terms of racing test scores. Some of the things that are just being done outside of school, and I should say something here about what parents can do right now. First off, even using technology as is possible, possibly right now particularly because of the people being locked inside. You know people can use digital cameras even in their yard and bring back great pictures of nature and share them. You can be a sound catcher. You can use your cellphones to record natural sounds. You can do a noise study of your neighborhood if you can get out into your neighborhood. A lot of these ideas are in vitamin N which is 500 things that people can do. You could be an electronic wildlife watcher. You can go on to Cornell University’s bird watch. You can actually you know participate as a citizen scientist in that. Also in terms of pure nature you can find a sit spot in your yard and just wait for nature to show up. You can do that in schoolyards also this is being used where you’re quiet. You’re not doing science experiments. You’re waiting for nature to come back because you disturb it, and when it comes back some amazing experience. You can create a neighborhood wild watch even on Facebook. You can do this with your neighbors, the retirees that live around the corner from your parents. You can watch the animals that are actually coming into the cities. They were coming into the cities before COVID, wild animals. You can watch them observe them and report them to each other. You could actually learn to love them by doing this and sharing that information. There’s one and in “Rock Calling” I write about a guy program that teaches bird language and takes hundreds of people out into the woods including teenagers who I interviewed who learned bird language not so much how to talk to them, but to actually know what the birds are saying and that’s fascinating. And then finally, I think it’s important as I said this last book is about our relationship with animals and that means pets too. Pets are extraordinarily important now for stress reduction for that sense of loneliness, but so are the wild animals right outside our window even though we don’t know very much about how they affect us. In turn there’s not that much research about how they affect our mental health and so forth. One of the suggestions I make is that parents, families sit around the kitchen table or in the living room and tell animal stories you know. The parents can tell about that animals they ran into in the woods to change their lives. Did something happen between them and that goat coyote? Or that Fox that they’ve remembered their whole lives? Kids have stories too, if they don’t tell them very often because they get embarrassed. Many of the people who told me stories for a wild calling had never told those stories before. but the more they told the store, the more meaning they found in them and they were excited about them. And I think that that opens doors into different ways of knowing the world which is really what all of this is about.

[Dr. Bob Builder]: That’s fantastic, really beautiful. And yeah, we’re gonna return to some of that in a couple of minutes because we want to have an open conversation in Q&A with everybody as a segue to that though Pamela’s invited me to share with you all a little bit of a few ideas that we have from our studies of creativity at UCLA, and we’ll see if I can connect this to what we’ve been talking about. And one thing that occurred to me while Richard was talking is that my own connection with animals has been enhanced by the pandemic and that there are some advantages to masking. This is me and my dog Maverick bonding with each other and the interesting thing though is that it also connects to the idea of loneliness, and that when I shared this with a couple of my colleagues via the Zoom meetings that we are having constantly, like back a couple of other pictures from my friends and I’ve got a German Shepherd too. And we’ve got some really good-looking dogs out there. And one that is even extremely talented at playing billiards. So you never know what’s gonna happen. And it just made me it triggered me hearing Richard talk about how our connections to animals can really make a difference to us. And you know and talk about connections, I think that all of our work on creativity has focused on how are the different parts of the brain and how are the networks that exist in our brains oriented to promote creativity and how does this possibly connect back to screens and teens. And in order to persuade you, I need to show you colorful images of the brain because we know that evidence that is accompanied by colorful pictures of the brain is much more credible and believable than the same information if it is not accompanied by colorful pictures of the brain. So I wanted to show you these colorful pictures of the brain. This is actually extracted from the entire world literature looking at 10 million articles about the brain intersecting with the term creativity, and the regions of the brain putting it onto a probabilistic atlas of the brain without ever studying a single person. It’s just from the literature and yeah, but what I think gives us a better idea of networks is something we already know about, like how the airplanes navigate the world and this is one of the ways that we actually look at brain networks, just try to look at them in a sort of a graphical model, what’s connected to what. And as you know from your own experience flying, you can’t fly from any airport to any other airport instead there are major hub airports, and that those hub airports are connected to other hub airports and if you want to get to someplace local usually you go to a big hub airport and then get out to another airport. And so this is a much more efficient way to get from one place to the other, and so we’ve used these same techniques to try to study the brain, and you would think that in order to be more creative you want the best brain possible. Well, why wouldn’t you want to have the most efficient brain possible right? Well turns out, it’s just the opposite. What we find is in studying groups of people who are exceptionally creative, exceptional visual artists, exceptional scientists, all compared to people who are very smart but not exceptionally creative, we see that the pattern of small world or more efficient network connections is not the one that’s deployed by people who have big-see creative brains. Instead, they have a more random pattern of connections in their brains. And so you may be wondering “where the heck is this going?” But what I believe connects this to the work that we’ve just been thinking about is that way that digital media and our interactions with screens has developed, it is pushing information to us in a way that is dominating us and constraining our senses in a way that is, I think what Richard was talking about, in ruining some of those sensory superpowers. It’s inhibiting our abilities to do the balanced and complementary tasks of driving the world ourselves, of creating things spontaneously, engaging productively and proactively, and interacting with our environment, and instead being the recipients so that the responsive mode needs to be counteracted by a projectional and forward-thinking mode. And I think that’s what our creative people do in forging these random connections in their brains is that they’re doing what they want to do. They’re not doing what is suggested to them by their devices. And that brings to mind one of the key dialectics we teach in UCLA in personal brain management. You know, what you can do with your brain? Now that you’re learning enough about brain mechanisms to do something with it, Ray Kurzweil has written futuristic works, talking about the singularity when non-biological intelligence exceeds biological intelligence. There are superpowers out in the knowledge that’s being aggregated throughout the world, throughout the internet, throughout the connected devices that we have in the world. At the same time, that’s perhaps robbing us of some of the uniquely human capacities. And I think the counterpoint to the work of Ray Kurzweil is that of a guy like Jaron Linear who focuses on how… what we’re seeing in the development of the internet and of this technology is really a race to abstract things and narrow things further, when instead what we really want to be do doing is developing and putting out there our own selves into the world, rather than letting the world speak to us. So what Lanier recommends is making sure that the experience is ultimately up to you, not the tools. That’s what I loved about Delaney talking about how positive we can see technology, but we have to realize that we’re the ones who are driving the technology. We should never let technology drive us. And it just connects it back to mental health. Some of the work that’s been done in trying to understand our attentional systems and how that relates to depression and anxiety comes from meditation practices, you know. You could divide up the different kinds of contemplative practices into those that focus on broadening our attention versus those that are narrowing our attention. Well turns out that if you look at folks who are anxious, they have a more narrowed attention. And those who have successfully fought anxiety have a more broadened and open attention. And it also turns out that if you engage in contemplative practices that enable you to broaden your attention, that is an anxiolytic that helps to cure anxiety disorders. So I think that while much of our technology has been drilling down our attentional field narrowing our attentional field, and I think as we engage in these zoom meetings, we’re focusing on trying to interact with other people who are only one inch square for hours on end. This is naturally our intention. And I think that the efforts to get out in nature to broaden your attention to drive your own activity. These are some of the keys that that in my view connect the ability to manage technology effectively, get out of the streams manage the screens per cells that will promote a more creative diverse outcome for all of our teens. And I went to do the most rigorous scientific study and just asked my own kids who are now teenagers, just graduated from high school in the class of 2020, but I asked what was most important to them in promoting creativity. and central to that was freedom that they be unconstrained. And so I think again as we liberate our children from the confines of screens, help them to manage screens, manage technology, and engage with the real world which has a lot bigger bandwidth than do any of their other devices. I think that is one of the keys to promoting a more creative future. So with that, I would like to thank all my colleagues who have paid for us to do this fancy research and create colorful brain images. And yeah, so thank you so much. Let’s move on into a more general Q&A. I know we’ve got a million questions from the audience. and I think one of the first questions I’d like to focus on is yeah, , do you play outside imagethat you showed earlier, Paul. How can the teens motivate themselves or can we help to motivate them to get doing something when you know they’re feeling down or anxious? And I’ve run out… I embarrassed my teenagers. Sometimes we go on vacations together and I’ll see two kids next to each other on a bench with their devices playing games, but they’re right next to each other and I’ll actually go up to these other kids and saying “hey you know there’s actually a three-dimensional human being next to you, and the bandwidth of that human that you could interact is much higher than what you can get through your phone”. But what do you do? 

[Dr. Paul Weigel]: So I do think that something we tend to undervalue is the gift of boredom. I think having some time and being able to sort of manage that is very very valuable, but a lot of teens you know these days, especially the ones who engage in the most you know immediate gratification screen media, really struggle with this. And sometimes I think that it’s important to have a little bit of that in order for creativity to happen in order for ideas to happen. Of course, so when we’re thinking about encouraging our kids to do things that don’t involve screens. One of the the biggest draws that sometimes that we can offer is connections with other teens, and of course, we do need to be careful about this in the time of COVID, but you know going on on having outdoor get-togethers with with friends, whether it be going on a hike with family or cousins, or going to do a you know an outdoor bonfire, or something like that with friends, that can be a huge draw. And so that’s something to think about. And of course in my day you know teens would always make these connections themselves, but a lot of teens that I see really need help in doing this. And sometimes when parents help to arrange that kids really take advantage and benefit.

[Dr. Bob Builder]: That’s… that’s beautiful. Yeah, Delaney what do you think? This focus on how do we motivate our teens and then help to offer them positive ways to engage with the world?

[Dr. Delaney Ruston]: I love Paul what you are saying about. It’s not helicopter parenting when sometimes we make these plans and amuse other families for example. And say you know what these are good friends that all go for a hike and then teens might roll their eyes. You also let the team pick other things, but I think that’s that fine line of course. We’re not hyper managing, but we do need to be engaged in that… that is tricky but important because of the draw that free time becomes screen time. And I think that I had to learn the hard way that I was always problem-solving for my daughter particularly because she went through really depression symptoms for quite a while and you see that story in Screenagers Next Chapter, but I wanted to run in and just say “oh why don’t you go outside go for a jog you’ll feel better”. And it just made things worse. And so I had to look at the science and I found a wonderful scientist who has literally put monitors on parents and teens, had the teens doing an unsolvable puzzle on the computer. They didn’t know it was unsolvable. And then the parents were told not to help the teen with the puzzle. And they were measuring each of their stress levels. And invariably most of the parents eventually came in to try to help, and they could see that the stress level of parents went down and that the teens went up. When we go in and try to control, we increase their stress, and that’s why it’s like nails on a chalkboard. So when I started to do instead was to say first and foremost you know “what solutions are you having, you know that the recommendations are an hour of physical activity a day? you know what are you thinking?” so I’m letting them know that I trust their problem-solving skills. And the second, I say yes you know if you feel stuck, I’m here, let me know if you want help in brainstorming. So that, those tricks have really helped. 

[Dr. Bob Builder]: It’s really nice. There’s a great modelling kind of openness in parenting and the importance of listening as opposed to advising. I’m contributing great and unmatched wisdom. There’s another thing that just struck me, Richard, you know, as we’re seeing educational institutions of all kinds trying to figure out what to do in the fall, in the world of COVID mitigation. How many of them are looking to outdoor engaged programs as part of the solution? You can’t be in the classroom. Why not have classes out in the world? And you know or what I’m sure you’ve thought more about this than I have.

[Richard Louv]: I thought about the need to do that there’s lots of things that can be done. I think it’s a little early to know what’s being done though. I hope somebody’s asking that really good question. How are the schools using the outdoors right now? And then you also have to define what outdoors means, what nature means. I mean it’s a lot different in an inner-city neighborhood than it is in a suburban or rural neighborhood, but that doesn’t mean nature isn’t around. I mean birds for instance are in inner cities, and it’s even more important in densely populated neighborhoods for kids to have this experience, so I hope they are looking into that. one thing I was thinking about in terms of the helicopter parenting or helicopter teaching that Delaney talked about. I learned from one mother, she calls what she does “hummingbird parenting”. If she’s a hummingbird parent which means that she doesn’t hover right over kids. She stays as far away as she can, but with visual distance. I remember my wife and I used to do that from our kitchen window we had a, you know candy behind our house and kids, but we’d watch. and the hummingbird parent doesn’t hover right over them. The hummingbird parent stays back, and then swoops in only when the kid is in mortal danger. And with teenagers, that’s kind of enforced. It just happens; it’s not our choice at that point so much, but you can still be a hummingbird parent. I think we have to also not underestimate the teenagers or the child’s ability to choose nature. I visited the summer program at the Mohawk Preservative, New Paltz, New York, and the kids there, I was told the kids there were given a choice for when they were gonna go out and explore and record their nature experiences. They were given a choice between using traditional media pants of paper or pencils, you know old-fashioned compasses and so forth, or high-tech tools to explore and record and overwhelmingly they chose paper and pencils and the old-fashioned media. The kids did. And I think there’s something going on even though so much of this is on their back now with so much technology. I think people our age, we’re a little too enthralled with technology. I’m not sure kids are always enthralled with it. Now, they do it all the time often because they’re not given an alternative. But I remember my grandmother walking with holding her hand in Independence Missouri walking on, she would stop every three feet and point up into the air and say “look Richie, there’s an airplane, an airplane. Every plane that went over again really old, and she was still in awe of that technology because she was born in 1880s. She was still in awe that we are still in law. We’re kind of fearful of technology people who are older. Kids, they’re not fearful of it. So the novel thing now is nature, the novel thing now maybe a paper and pencil paper, pencil on paper maybe using old-fashioned media. Now I’m not sure that’s true. I hope somebody’s really studying that, but I seen that in kids when given a choice they may well choose things that we don’t think they’re gonna choose. 

[Dr. Bob Builder]: That’s fantastic, fantastic. You know I want to make sure that we all have time to talk about what’s going on today. We’ve never been in a time like the one we’re currently experiencing. I think that with the global pandemic going back to mid-march, all of our kids have been taken out of their schools pretty much, separated from their friends. They’re missing critical social experiences from that along with the fears of illness that’ve been going on now for months. That’s past the point at which we usually in mass and in psychiatry refer to things as being acute stress disorders and are now chronic stress disorders. And then within the last couple of weeks, the exposure of these horrific crimes, and the kinds of social injustice that have been with us for hundreds if not thousands of years, being exposed and laid bare. So that’s what’s on the media right now, and I wonder if each of you can be willing to talk for a few minutes about what kind of advice you can share with us parents about the best ways to help to manage those stresses, the kinds of anxiety that are really unique mounting on top of other anxieties that are really unique. 

[Dr. Delaney Ruston]: I would love to step into a moment and just to say that you know, as I made the film Screenagers Next Chapter that looks at stress anxiety and depression, and one of the many stories is with my daughter who is having the ongoing depression. And when I had the rough cut of the film, I really wanted to see “does she really want to be in it, right?” I mean here I am, the mom making the film. I said “Tessa, there’s plenty of stories and science you don’t need to be in it.” And she said “well yeah of course, I’ll watch the rough cut mom, and you know think deeply about it.” And she watched, and she came to me with tears and she said mom when I watch other people’s stories, it’s helping me so much. I want to help others. I definitely want to be in it. And since then she’s gone on the road, and she does Q&A’s with me. And one of the problems that we know I see a lot of in my practice as a physician is that unfortunately, depression and stress in these emotions tell their brain don’t tell other people. you know don’t tell others that you’re having this depression. This is bad and I do a lot of prevention with young people. I say this is what’s gonna happen if you start having depression, it’s going to tell you that you’re different, you’re wrong, don’t tell other people, you don’t deserve help, you’re a burden. I inoculate them with all of this. The key thing is that helping others is the best antidepressant we have. And also, when youth are able to talk about their hard emotions and particularly to talk to others, it gives purpose to their pain and it does help others to come open about what’s going on. So while this is really hard right now that we are seeing this intensity of the civil rights movement and all that’s happening, it is giving many teens a sense of purpose. Of course, unfortunately they have intense black and white thinking, so they’re going to a very much of an extreme. And so as a parent, I just wrote a blog last week about this. I haven’t come tomorrow, but so much of it is validating, validating, validating. Seeing it from their perspective, and before you know not, we don’t have to read with it you don’t have to condone it. We don’t want to change their emotions, we’re just seeing it from that perspective. And then from there with time we’ll be able to help them see a broader perspective. 

[Dr. Bob Builder]: That’s fantastic, fantastic.

[Dr. Paul Weigel]: Yeah all, yeah thank you. I absolutely agree with that one, when that it’s so important to maintain this open dialog for us to understand what’s going on with our kids. And the biggest mistake that I certainly have made many times and many parents make is to kind of rush to a conclusion, to tell them what the real answer is, and that is something that is ingrained in us and we’ve been doing it since they were little. However, it’s so important to be able to sort of you know, listen and understand where they’re at and make them feel you know validated, and to kind of keep our judgment to ourselves. And the other thing that that Dr. Ruston brought up what I think was fantastic. Advocacy is taking some of that anxiety and figuring out what we can do with it for teens who are you know anxious about COVID you know. Could you know, could giving back in a way like giving blood or something like that, could that be a way that they kind of give back and get a little bit of mastery of the situation? For those who are concerned about the events that are going on in the world, perhaps you know participating in a safe way, an advocacy you know, maybe a way that they can do that. I do think that another important point for discussions that’s relevant here is that sometimes it’s really important to be able to have the right setting for discussions. And when teens are sort of when they’re looking at their phones when they’re distracted, a lot of times it’s starting the discussion there it’s not going to work. So creating these situations like the dinner table like other times that are sort of screen free, maybe driving in a car are really really valuable. And you have to put up with a little bit of withdrawal in the beginning but with your patience, and allow that’s when you know the connections happen.

[Dr. Bob Builder]: It’s wonderful, wonderful. And Richard, I didn’t have if you have thought you wanted to share about how the natural world you know…

[Dr. Richard Louv]: I loved what you all have said and turned that into something positive. And I think we have to acknowledge that this is true of adults too. I find I’m pretty cranky lately you know. This is because the effects are true of us and if we’re honest about it. That helps. I’ve given a lot of thought to the trauma that this is causing, and that we know from the research that an association with nature where there again, whether it’s our pets with other than human life or wildlife or even plants around us has a calming and stress reduction, reducing effect on all of us including teens. But I think at this point we need to turn that into action, and not only consume nature in a way that reduces stress for our teenagers and us but to actually nurture it, to give reciprocity. You know for everything that nature gives us we need to get more back. For instance, not only learning about our yard and the plants in it as a school assignment will resume, but maybe planting native plants in our yard to help bring back butterfly migration routes and bird migration routes to begin, become nurturing to nature. I’ve talked in the past, a lot in the prior books about what I call the dystopian trance, and I think we’ve been in for a long time, even before the current unpleasantness in which I’ve wondered what is it we see what images do we see in our head of what the far future looks like. And I become convinced over time at least in our culture, most of those images that come up right away in people’s minds, look a lot like “Blade Runner” or “Mad Max” or best “The Hunger Games”, at least there’s a few trees. You know it’s a post-apocalyptic future. Well, we’re kind of living in that a little bit right now. What happens to a culture when it only has images of a post-apocalyptic future in its head. Martin Luther King said and demonstrated ways that any movement, any culture will fail if it cannot imagine, cannot paint a picture of a world, the future that people will want to go to. His speech was not cold. I have a nightmare to the extent that we can, with our teenagers, intergenerationally begin to see a future that is different, that is a place that is filled with nature. It is filled with human connection. That is filled with love for each other and for nature, and that we received from nature. What would that look like? What would cities look like if they could become engines of biodiversity, not the enemy? You know what would our workplaces, what would our schools, what would the home we’re in right now look like if it was as immersed in nature everyday as it is in technology? And then, you get up tomorrow morning after making that world the same is true for the pandemic. This one is the ones that are coming. We’ve got all the data we need. What we lack, I think, is the emotion that comes with that, and it’s one of the things that’s increasingly missing in education; it’s increasingly missing in environmentalism. The successful social movements that have moved people from data to action have been the ones in that relationship. To the extent that we can move ourselves from data to relationship to talking about in fact love, we will have a much better chance of escaping this deep dystopian transfer. And finally I was asked to go to speak in Newtown three months after Sandy Hook happened, the killing of the kids in the school. And I was puzzled why I would be asked to speak. I spoke at a Nature Center and I spoke at the little Town Hall New England town hall there, and I asked them why do you want me to do this and they said because we know that nature is healing. We also and I said a lot of three months later, and they said because the psychological folks, the psychologists that told us that there’s a kind of secondary trauma that happens often three months later, after an event like this. It’s a survivor’s trauma. I think we’re going to have a real trauma after this supposedly ends as we re-enter society, as we go back to the cubicles that we work in, as kids go back to the schools. We have to be prepared for that and we’re gonna need nature more than even to meet it now. 

[Dr. Bob Builder]: It’s fantastic. Well you know I’m really grateful to you all for your recommendations. It’s… it strikes me how you’ve all talked about, the importance of connections as we go forward connections to the natural world, connections to each other, and also the importance of finding meaning, and purpose that drives our actions that may be part of the key to navigating a future of our teens and screens, and you know I think the kinds of advice that you all provided that it gives me hope that we’ll be moving forward into a utopian future, not a dystopian one, and one that’s filled with love. But speaking of love, let me reintroduce Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra who could help us close out the session. 

[Dr. Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra]: thank you so much Bob, Richard, Paul, and Delaney for a tremendous workshop with so much to think about, and so many great ideas to support families and teens. And thank you to our audience for coming and for asking the panel such insightful questions. The conversation will continue throughout the summer with weekly workshops about children, screens, and human development starting on June 17th. Please keep your eye to our website which is childrenandscreens.com for more information please share the YouTube video you’re seeing of today’s workshop with your fellow parents, teachers, clinicians, researchers, and friends. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it. When you leave the workshop, you’ll see a link to a short survey. Please click on the link and let us know what you think of the workshop. Thanks again, and everyone be safe and well.