Parenting and girlhood in the digital age
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Accura, precision crafted performance. You're listening to a podcast from Washington Post Live, bringing the newsroom to you live. Good afternoon. I'm Sally Quinn, a contributing writer here at the Washington Post. And I'm thrilled to be joined on stage by Grace Bastidas, the editor in chief of Parents Magazine. You're about to celebrate your 100th anniversary.

Emily Oster, the founder and CEO of Parent Data, and Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of Boys and Men. Grace, Emily, Richard, welcome to the Washington Post.

I want to start out with a personal story about parenting. My son, Quinn Bradley, now 42, was born with a hole in his heart and had open-heart surgery when he was three months old. And he was then diagnosed year after year with many different medical problems. And Quinn and I spent the most

part of his first 16 years in and out of Children's Hospital. He also was diagnosed with a severe learning disability. So he had to go to special schools all of his life where he was bullied and teased. And because of that, my husband, Ben Bradley, and I spent a lot of time with Quinn. We spent all weekends, we traveled with him. We were his only and best friends. And because he was sick all the time, he...

he needed toys and things and so he wanted things, we would indulge him and give him everything he wanted.

And I honestly thought that I was a great mother. I was feeling very smug about my parenting skills and going for Mother of the Year. But as time went along, I realized that I had made some mistakes along the way. And it all came to light a couple of weeks ago when...

Quinn asked me for something, and I said, you know, Quinn, it would be really nice if you thought about somebody else. And he said, it's too late, Mom. You've created a monster. So much for perfect parenting. Anyway, Emily, I want to ask you something. The Surgeon General released an advisory in August declaring parental mental health an urgent public health issue.

But parenting has always been stressful. Why is it different now? Why is it more stressful these days? I think parenting has always been very stressful. And if you look at the data, you can see that the difference in stress levels between parents and non-parents have always been there. If you ask people, how's your mental health or how stressed are you feeling, you see those gaps. But what we have seen is those gaps grow in the past decade.

the past several years and there's a lot of reasons for that. So I think the pandemic was very stressful for a lot of parents, but much more broadly, I think there is this sense, and this is some of what the Surgeon General was talking about, of kind of parenting being almost a competitive sport

that you have something to win, something that you could do right, and by extension, you could do wrong. And I think that feeling of you could do it wrong is an enormous stressor for parents. And there are moments, I think,

increasingly where people feel like every single opportunity, every single thing they do with their kid is an opportunity to mess it up forever. And that's just a really stressful way to live if you think every time you ask your kid to put their shoes on,

and you're rushing them, that's an opportunity to mess them up forever. Because parenting is full of opportunities to tell your kid to put their shoes on. And if Instagram has told you that rushing them out the door gives them a lifetime of anxiety, every single day you worry about that. And I think that's a microcosm of something that happened in the last three weeks. But there's a broader picture of just what are we expecting of parents and how much intensity do we expect them to give in their parenting, which is hard to feel relaxed around.

Grace, you were raised in a house with your mom, your aunt, your sister, and your cousin. Some have called this a "mom-une." I always thought that that would have been a great idea over the years, but so why is this a new concept today, and is it really working?

Well, the concept of "mom-ume," I think the word is new, but this has always existed, especially for certain cultures. So my mom was a single mom, an immigrant, and she lacked the resources and opportunities when she became the main breadwinner and caregiver in our family. So in our culture, there was no shame in asking for help, and neighbors and friends and family members helped each other problem solve.

because it was out of necessity. So when my mom became a single mom, she and my aunt moved in together and decided to raise their children together, splitting household costs, childcare, supporting each other emotionally

by being parents and it wasn't such a foreign concept to us because in Latin culture there is this idea of the comadre and that literally translates to the co-mother. And it's somebody in your child's life who will help you raise your child, instill values and it's always there for you. It's a commitment. So obviously that my aunt was our

our godmother, the comadre. So we joined forces and it made sense for us and it really helped my mom manage. And again, in immigrant ingenuity, she had to get creative to survive. And I think that's something that distinguishes Latin culture and many cultures is that you have to use creative solutions to get by. And

Right now we have one in three families is a single parent home. 80% of those are headed by women. So there needs to be this evolution of what it means to what a family structure is because it's so expansive. There's no such thing as the traditional family anymore. And we need to broaden that and accept that and really provide that support. At Parents, we've even

revamp the taxonomy of our website to focus on co-parenting single parents grandparents and this idea that the caregivers are many people not just mom dad so there's a lot of people that will help you take care of your family my daughter-in-law is Hispanic and she and all of her friends celebrate comadres every year and the culture is very much pro-family but I'm talking about

who get together with children, different groups, and they all get together. I'm just trying to think of myself in a house with some of my women friends and their kids. I'm not sure how well that would work out. Well, I do think that some of us, I mean, I'll tell you in the cone of silence here, that some of us have plans with our best girlfriends. Like, okay, when our husbands have...

gone wherever they need to go. We will move in together and do this together. So I think we have, we all have girlfriends who are... Sorry to tell you this. I knew this was going to be brutal. Richard, I haven't even started on you. Okay, so Richard. So fathers spend much more time with their children now than they did 50 years ago.

In fact, I'm stunned and amazed at my men friends and how much time they spend with their children. Although the brunt of childcare still falls to the woman. But what do fathers need to help them out with this? Do they need more time with their kids? - Well, some of this I think is just a general parenting challenge which we've already addressed, which is true for fathers and mothers. I certainly felt it myself raising three boys.

and including as a stay-at-home dad for a few years. And I think this idea of a competition is very important. If I could identify the year this became a problem, it is the year that the noun "parent" became the verb "parenting."

And that's sometime in the '70s, as far as I can tell. I remember trying to explain to my parents what parenting was. They're like, what's that? What are you saying? I said, parenting. They're like, that's a verb now? I said, yeah, it's a verb now. It's a thing you do. Didn't you do parenting? And they're like, no, we just had kids.

And so behind that, there is a kind of point, which is just the weight we've put on it. And I also think that if people feel like college admissions or the economy generally is very high stakes, it feels like parenting then becomes high stakes. So I think it connects generally to the sense of what kind of world are you preparing your kids for? And if you fail as a parent, they'll fail in the economy. And so it does feel quite existential.

to a lot of people. The other thing I would say is like the Mom-Yoon conversation and the, where are we going to go, by the way, when you say the father's your husband? Is there something you want to tell? The big disco in the sky. Right. I will tell you, by the way, that my wife has a similar plan with her best friend based just on basic longevity statistics. But I would just, I'm going to say that it takes a village. I agree. Families come in all shapes and sizes. I agree.

But some of the villagers should be men. And that we need to be very careful in our inclusion of different ways to raise kids that we don't advertently or inadvertently airbrush out the role of men. The role of fathers has to change because their old role has clearly changed. But everything I see is that dads still matter.

We used to say dads mattered because they were breadwinners, they're providers, protect whatever. That's changed for very good reason. But dads still matter.

And we need to find policies and a culture and a way of talking about this that doesn't somehow see them as second-class parents who are somehow less important. And I'm just going to advocate very strongly that we should be inclusive of fathers as well and that we shouldn't imagine that we can just somehow do without them. I will say that on the other side of the argument is that, yes, dads matter. That's why they all need to be married. That's, in my view, just lies in the face of the evidence that we just heard.

And so sometimes I feel like between a sort of very conservative view of like dads matter, that's why we need to bring back traditional marriage, and a more progressive view which is like, do dads matter really? Like a redundancy notice to dads? Actually, we've got to find a better path between those two extremes.

I had dinner last night with a Swedish friend of mine who's told me that in Sweden they have 480 days of parental leave. And both he and his wife took it, and he said it made all the difference in his relationship with his children, particularly his two boys. And some of the leave is just for fathers? Yeah. Yeah.

Grace, the Surgeon General has also suggested that parents are more stressed because of the, quote, judgmental, perfectionistic environment of social media. On social media, everybody seems perfect, and they all have the perfect children, the perfect marriages, they live the perfect lives, which makes everybody else feel really insecure. So how does this impact parenting, social media?

So yes, social media impacts you a little bit what Emily was saying in terms of this comparison culture and the pressure that you put on yourself and the expectations around us when you go on social media. That's how you measure how well you're doing as a parent. And you come away feeling usually that you're falling short.

So that is really the issue there because we're constantly trying to engage, entertain, educate our children and really just trying to be this image of perfection that does not exist. And even at parents, we've had to shift our thinking on how we provide advice. So we still give you the latest expert vetted recommendations, but we remind you that

do what works for your family you know best because we are cognizant that there is a lot of judgment and self-judgment on social media and it's really key for parents to have some self-compassion and to really just

have a little grace with themselves. And when it comes to their children being on social media, there's this constant, "Am I a good parent? Am I doing enough to protect my child?" Because the onus has been put on parents to keep their kids safe online. So there's that constant we hear from a lot of parents, especially moms, who spend so much time and energy

really worrying about what their kids are doing online, am I doing enough, am I a good person? But again, like I said in the previous video, I'm on social media, so how do I make peace with those two thoughts? - Well, there's so much conflicting information and advice. It's like listening between Martha Stewart and Ina Garten. You know, whose recipe to follow.

Richard, you've dedicated your career to thinking about the issues of facing boys and men. What do you think of the biggest issue? And how does this issue impact the boys' relationship with each other and with girls? Well, it depends where we look. But if we just look in the education system, which probably is the most relevant place to start for parents, we just see that there are just some very big gender gaps now with boys falling a long way behind girls in school. And so they're

Girls are twice as likely to be at the top of the high school GPA distribution. Boys are twice as likely to be suspended or expelled. Almost one in four boys have a, quote, developmental disability, twice the rate of girls. In colleges, of course, we now see a very big gender gap, really reflecting what happens early in that. There's a bigger gender gap on U.S. college campuses today than there was in the 1970s when we passed Title IX. It's just the other way around.

So we've reversed the gender gap, but it's a little bit bigger now. I'm not necessarily saying it's the same reasons. It's clearly not. Or that it has the same implications. So I think that the education system as a whole in the US now has just been proven to be not quite boy-friendly enough. And I think a lot of parents are struggling with that. And sometimes they end up blaming themselves. Back to this conversation before, which is like, why is my boy struggling so much in the school system?

And it could be the 10% drop in the share of male teachers, some of the retreat from vocational training, some of the atmospheric things in the classroom, the decline of recess. These are all questions rather than answers. It could just be that the school's not quite boy-friendly enough. But I'll say something maybe a bit provocative, particularly in this audience, is that just as in the workplace, we really struggle to not have a default male manager or leader. We have just a sense of that's the default. In the education, I sometimes think we end up with a default female student.

And so we sometimes run the risk of treating boys like malfunctioning girls in the school. And I was saying this earlier, or as parents saying, why can't you be more like your sister? Right? More organized, more on top of it. And I just mentioned I've raised three boys, but I found myself saying to myself, why can't you be more like your sister? Even though you didn't have one, I invented one.

I had an imaginary daughter that I would compare them to on a regular basis. And they failed every single time. But the serious point behind it is, I just think, if we're serious about gender gaps, we have to be serious about them in both directions. And right now, the gender gaps in education, especially for working class boys and boys of color, are pretty wide. Emily, you've actually had Richard on your podcast to talk about the state of boys and men today. What does the data say about boys being left behind?

So the data is pretty clear. I focus mostly on parenting, so we sort of look at performance of boys. And one of the places this shows up initially is in kindergarten. So if we think about what

what is the readiness of boys versus girls for sort of entering kindergarten, particularly in a world where the expectations we have in this early childhood education are much more that kids will be able to sit still and focus. You know, I talk a lot to parents about the idea of redshirting. So should I hold my kid back so they enter school when they're older? And it turns out, like,

the kids who are younger for their grade on average, particularly boys, we see an increase in ADHD diagnoses, which seem to be not necessarily reflecting diagnoses that would have happened anyway, but seem to reflect diagnoses that are happening because the kids are younger. And so you're saying, well, this kid isn't able to focus like I expect.

But if your expectations are driven by what you expect from a girl who is almost six and what you have is a boy who has just turned five, those are really, really different in terms of development. And we probably shouldn't be thinking about our expectations the same. And that sort of shows up in the data. And again, it's really a complicated space because it

It overlaps with socioeconomic status, it overlaps with race, it overlaps with class. It also overlaps with heterogeneity across kids. Some kids can sit still for a long time, some kids can't. And so there's a kind of need for some of this educational system, this really comes out in the data, to be a little bit more

thoughtful and flexible in a way that we maybe haven't been. And I think there's some interesting ways that policy could think about how could we generate that flexibility in a way that wasn't just the way we currently have it, which is if you're a person with a lot of resources, you can decide to register your kid and do whatever is the best thing for them. And if you have fewer resources, you don't get as many options. That's obviously a terrible system. And thinking about a better system is sort of core to making progress on this, I think.

Richard, this is where it gets brutal. Oh, wow. I thought that happened right from the beginning. We've seen the different models of masculinity in politics this year, particularly at the Republican Convention where Hulk Hogan, all the machismo that's going on in politics today, Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt at the Republican Convention.

What kind of signals are today's some political leaders sending to our kids boys and girls? The performative masculinity that we saw from the Republicans and the spaces that they went into I Was intended I think to send a signal to men especially young men We see we see you we like you and we like the stuff that you like and

And they, i.e. the Democrats, don't see you and don't like you. And they, as in the Democrats, if they consider you at all, they don't think of you as having problems. They think of you as the problem. That was an effective message. And rather than what I would have hoped to see, which was a genuine and substantive debate about some of these issues we're talking about, which is what's happening with our boys, what's happening with our men, why has the suicide rate

among men under the age of 30, risen by 40% since 2010. Why are we losing 40,000 men a year to suicide? 10,000 women as well, but four times as many men as women to suicide. Where's the conversation about that? And then relatedly, what kind of masculinity do we want? And I think particularly with the pick of Tim Walz, and perhaps with the cover of having a female at the head of the ticket, there could have been a really good conversation.

Imagine a push for more male teachers. Imagine a push for service-oriented masculinity. Imagine Tim Walz or others on some of these podcasts discussing a different version, how to be a man today. This is an interesting and a difficult time to have this conversation. We didn't have that conversation. But the reason we didn't have it was because one political party, the Democrats, decided to just not talk about that at all, and they just completely ceded that ground. And in politics, in a contest between something and nothing, something usually wins.

And I'm afraid that there was just deafening silence on these issues from the Democrats. They didn't compete for the votes of men, and partly as a result, they didn't get them. And the reason for that is they thought they would get enough votes from women to counteract their losses among men. I understand that calculation, but it turned out to be a very bad miscalculation from their political point of view. It seems to me that to be a real man, you have to have a lot of tattoos. Do you have any tattoos? LAUGHTER

Go ahead. Who will we tell? I do not, but my middle son, who teaches fifth grade in Baltimore City Public Schools, God bless him, he has a tattoo. And he's, like, I couldn't be prouder of him because he's a guy. He would say he's a guy's guy. And he's teaching fifth grade in Baltimore City. And that's the kind of conversation I want us to have. Or, like, when I was at home being a dad and stuff, like,

We can have a conversation about masculinity. And not only can we, we have to have a conversation about masculinity in a positive way. We have to have competing versions. We have to have a good faith conversation about this. I understand it's a difficult time to make that argument. But honestly, you cannot ignore these issues. You cannot ignore these questions and then wonder why the people who are not ignoring them are getting all the attention. I've got a tattoo. LAUGHTER

I don't know what that says about my insecurity about my femininity. Emily, we started this conversation talking about the US Surgeon General's warning on parental stress. His remedy to this problem is more kindness and less judgment, as well as more community support for parents. But nobody's mentioned love. What about love? Where does expressing love to your children come in?

I'm going to ask each one of you this. So you might want to mention a personal story. So one of the people I've talked to in the last few years is a woman named Jennifer Wallace, and she has a really great recent book. She talks a lot about the idea of mattering being a really important thing with kids and of the sort of distinction between pushing our kids to achieve and making it clear to them that they matter and that they matter for reasons that are beyond

kind of what grades they get in school or whether they're the captain of the field hockey team or the other things which are sort of come up often in these conversations about stress. And one of the things that has really stuck with me is she has this idea that when your kid comes home, you should be so excited to see them. Like as if they're like the greatest thing, like they walk in the door and you're just like, oh my gosh, hi, I love you. And you know, I do that with my 13 year old. And like 90% of the time, she's like,

Hello. But occasionally, she's like, oh, that's nice. Did you want a hug? I'm like, yes. Love a hug. Thank you. And I think that for me, that's been a really-- that sort of idea that sometimes our kids need to know that we are so excited about them. And no matter what, we just cannot believe that they're here to see us. I think we could do more of that. SPEAKER 1: Richard, love. RICHARD LOVELL: Yeah, so I'm a big believer that kids

And probably all of us believe our eyes even more than our ears, which is why I love this story. And so I do think it's more important to be expressing love and telling our kids that we love them, et cetera. But it's much more important to show that through the hugs, through the visits. I mean, it's a cliche, but just the showing up bit and this attention that Emily's talking about. I think that the greatest gift we have now to give our kids is attention. And it's unconditional attention. And so it doesn't have to be a huge amount of time, but just...

Like, am I going to make the time to go and have dinner with my son? Now that they're grown, am I going to take that time to give them a hug? I think that's really what counts. I sometimes think some people have become a bit more formulaic. But I love you. Great. But you have to show it, not just tell it. Grace?

I agree with everything here. I'm going to steal this idea immediately. Yes, giving your children the full attention, looking them in the eye, putting away your phone, really listening to them and really just being empathetic as well and reminding them that you're here for work.

for any conversation, no judgment, but just listening to your kids shows them that you care, shows them that they're loved, that they're special, especially in this world we live in where we always have a device. Just putting that away and giving them your full attention, I think, says a lot. Thank you.

Okay, we're out of time and we're going to have to leave it there. Grace Bastidas, Emily Oster, and Richard Reeves, thank you so much for this illuminating conversation. The following segment was produced and paid for by a Washington Post Live event sponsor. The Washington Post Newsroom was not involved in the production of this content. Hi, everyone.

I'm Kathy Baird. It's nice to be here. I'm pleased to be joined by Claire Casey. Claire is president of AARP Foundation, a charitable affiliate of AARP that works to reduce senior poverty. One of the ways they do this is by helping older adults fight age discrimination and stay in the workforce.

As technology and economic forces are transforming the labor market, women are at the forefront of that disruption, which is no surprise. Claire is with us today to talk about these changes and what they mean for women. Welcome, Claire. It's so great to have you. Thank you for having me. Great to be here. Thank you.

So we're going to start more broadly, and then we'll get into some specifics. But as we talk about this topic, what are the major changes that are shaping the economy, and how do you think they will impact the workforce? Yeah, so as someone who sits at the top of an organization focused on keeping people at work, getting them back to work, we spent a lot of time over the last couple years trying to understand what was changing in the workplace. And it's actually a

incredibly interesting period in history to be working in, but there are some real massive shifts afoot. By some estimates, 60 million people in this country between today and 2030 are going to change occupations, not change jobs, change occupations.

And that's being driven by a number of big, big trends. One is our longevity. Our healthcare workforce is growing at four times the rate of the general economy. So that's driven by many, many, many more older people.

The second is that we've made a once-in-a-generation investment in changing the structure of our economy. We've put $2 trillion of investment into new infrastructure to be greener, cleaner, more efficient, and also set up the third one, which is this massive technological change. We already had digitization. We already had automation. Now we have AI coming like a whirlwind and hitting all of us.

And we're seeing that as creating enormous productivity gains for some workers. It's also going to displace a lot of workers and what they used to do. When you combine AI with robotics and automation, suddenly a lot of jobs that people used to have will no longer exist.

and lower income workers are really at the, they're the population that is most vulnerable when we think about that shift. And so it's really front of mind for us at AARP Foundation. And I think it needs to be front of mind for all of us as a society.

Yeah, we were just talking about AI back in the backstage area, too. So this is the topic of today. But how can you describe what this disruption means specifically for women? Yeah, so as in the case of many more challenging things, women are really disproportionately impacted by this.

I said that low-income workers are in those fields. The fields that are gonna be declining are also fields that are dominated by women. We're talking about office support, food service, production lines. 72% of administrative and office support workers are women.

So as those roles decline, I think women have about a 50% greater chance of being in a job category that will be declining over the next coming years than men, 50% more likely. So we are really, as women, concerned about women. This is something we really need to be focused on. Last year was the first year in many, many, many years that the gender pay gap increased. Let's let that sink in for a minute.

You mentioned earlier in your setup longevity. So people are living longer lifespans and people want and need to work longer. But many people actually leave the workforce long before they're ready. Why is that happening and what trends are you seeing? Yeah, so again, we're coming from AARP Foundation. We're focused on that lower income worker. And so when you look at the experience of an older worker, anyone older, independent of skill level, income level,

If they lose their job or they have to leave for caregiving responsibilities, I've recently taken on caregiving responsibilities. I'm lucky enough to be in a job that A, allows me to do that and gives me the flexibility to do that. That's not the case for everyone.

But there are a lot of things that will pull us out of the workforce temporarily. If you're an older worker, you're 40% more likely to enter the long-term unemployed. Only one in 10 older workers, when they get back into the workforce, ends up in a job that pays them the same or more than the job they left.

So it is really, really scary. And then again, for lower income people, the situation is worse. So only a third of lower income workers in this country will be continuously employed through their 50s.

And so there's this imperative to figure out how to do this better, create pathways back into work, and create pathways for people to stay relevant, develop the skills they need to remain valuable to their workplaces, and to make that an inclusive approach. I'm a few years till 50. I'm almost there. It is scary to me that a 50-year-old is not someone that an employer thinks is worth training or retraining or upskilling.

So we've got to do a big shift in mindset. So those are some barriers, and I know there are others, which I'd love to hear about more for older workers who are seeking new skills to stay employed or change careers. What are those barriers? Yeah, I mean, I think it's...

- It's a simple answer, it's ageism. And it's ageism we have about ourselves and it's ageism that we have about others. I spend a lot of time talking to workforce organizations, going to economic justice events where people are really focused on how to improve the working lives of lower income people in this country. And it is extraordinary to me

how much that is just exclusively focused on young people. Not that we shouldn't be focused on young people, but we live in a country where we have to keep working and we have to stay relevant. And skills are changing faster than they've ever changed. IBM did this great report talking about the lifespan of a skill.

And it's down to two to four years. It's halved over the last few years. So when you're 50, you might have 20 years of work. You might need to upskill four or five times. How do we change our mindset about ourselves and about others to say that's worth investing in? I can learn and try new things. And so can they.

So on that note, what successful models for helping workers get the new skills they need to stay employed or find pathways back to work and how do we make these models better? - Yeah, so that's a great question because I think it's where there's a lot of hope.

We're actually really good at this. U.S. companies are great at upskilling their workforce. They're great at investing in people. Apprenticeship programs are proven tools to get people into better, more sort of what we call like decent work. Jobs that have benefits. Jobs that will set you up to actually be able to retire one day. We know what works.

I think we have two gaps. A, who's viewed, and sort of getting back to ageism, sexism, who's viewed as worth investing in as one. And also that we have large segments of our economy, huge employers,

that really don't have the resources to do what big companies do so well. So small and medium-sized enterprises that are going to need to adapt to technological change don't really have the infrastructure to upskill their workforce. It would be easier for them to fire the person who doesn't have the skill and hire someone who does because they don't have that capacity.

So how do we start thinking about supporting SMEs and giving them the tools to keep their workers, keep the people who they trust, who are great, and just help them evolve to remain relevant? I love these practical takeaways that you're giving us. And I want to get into more specifics of that because this is a room full of engaged citizens and change makers. So what is at stake for us if we don't act? Yeah, I mention this to people all the time. I think a lot about

When I was growing up professionally, I'm trained as an economist. And in the 90s, when I was learning economics, that was a period where the big focus in terms of particularly global economics was around trade and around what happened in this country after NAFTA. Now, NAFTA was great for the country overall. GDP went up. It was a net benefit. But there was a profound failure there.

to focus on and invest in transitioning those workers and those communities that got left behind by NAFTA. I was in Reading, Pennsylvania two years ago, and it is astonishing to me to see that town, which could be a vibrant economy that is a generator of growth and of good lives, of opportunity. It is still carrying the weight of losing its industries 30 years ago.

So we have this in front of us. Again, we are talking about millions of workers, and it scares me. We've got these AI companies investing in studies on universal basic income, something that I don't think is politically feasible in this country today. I think it's a bit of a distraction. What are we going to do for workers? How do we keep them engaged? How do we build opportunity? Yeah, I think there's a lot that could be done so we don't end up with millions of more people who feel hopeless

and who feel like there is an opportunity for them. Because I think we've seen what that's produced for our society and for our politics. I like the message of hope a lot. I think specifically sort of my final question, what can we do to help older workers navigate the technological shifts, which we've discussed today, AI, et cetera, that are shaping all of our workplaces? Yeah, so I would say this. I think it actually starts with us.

I sat on Monday night at a dinner and I met this wonderful woman named Joey. She's 78 years old. She's just about to step down from being the chair of the board of a great foundation out in Colorado. And she said to the table, "I wish at 50, 28 years ago, I had realized or understood how much I had in front of me, how much I would do, how many new skills I would learn,

And I was really inspired by that idea that she's looked back and said, "I would have made different choices. I would have acted sooner if things didn't feel like things were ending rather than beginning." So I think we really have to get comfortable doing things that are uncomfortable. Trying new skills, saying the job I'm in may not exist and I want to get ahead of that. So if we start doing it for ourselves, I've been thinking a lot about how we also talk to each other and what we talk about.

I think it's a little uncomfortable to talk about picking up entirely new skills. Not, you know, I picked up knitting or I picked up a new language, but like I got really good at using Claude to draft a, I used it this morning to draft my holiday card.

But picking up new things, trying new things, because if we're doing it ourselves, if we're talking about it with each other, menopause is having a moment because women started talking about menopause, but we hadn't been, right? So how do we do that? And if we do that, how do we open a conversation where everyone is saying,

Older people are still valuable in terms of training. Women are valuable. And let's invest in that value. Such a great message from Joey and also from you. Claire Casey, president of AARP Foundation, thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you. And now we'll continue with the rest of our program.

And now back to Washington Post Live. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Perri Peltz, and I am so happy that all of you could be here to join us for what we all believe is an incredibly important conversation about social media and our children. I am joined on my left. Tammy Rodriguez is here. She is Selena's mom.

Laura Marquez Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center who's trying to bring these companies to account. And Larissa May, the founder and CEO of Half the Story, which you'll hear a little bit about in a little bit. I want to start, I want to take a moment because I was struck on that video, Tammy, that you said that people judge you

for sharing Selena's story. And I just have to take a moment because, first of all, to acknowledge the profound loss that you and your family have experienced and the incredible courage that it takes to come and sit on a stage like this and talk about your child and her death. So I just want to say thank you. We all owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

Tammy, Selena was just 11 years old when she died by suicide. And it was called an extreme addiction to Snapchat and Instagram. Tell us about your beautiful daughter, Selena, and what happened. Sure. So I'll tell you somewhat about her life. And actually, I started off, what I wanted to say was that I'm here to provide a little insight into what social media addiction looks like.

And I also want to say, I know a lot of people are quick to say, why didn't you take the devices away? Why didn't you turn off the Wi-Fi? Be a parent. Parent your kids better. But I hope that my words are going to help you to understand how hurtful those words are and wish that it was that easy. Selena was born December 13th, 2009. She was bright-eyed and ready for the world.

One of the first pictures I have of her head is up. There it is. Head is up. Eyes are wide. She was a day old in that picture. So she walked when she was nine months old and she talked very early. She was a fashionista from a young age. She'd play out in the dirt in her party dresses, always had glitter, glitter everywhere in the house. We still find glitter. Her sister calls her the human form of sunshine because that's exactly what Selena was.

She loved school. She was the social butterfly. She included everyone in everything. There was a boy, this is one example, a boy who was new to her school from China, and he spoke no English. And Selena took him under her wing, and she made sure that he was involved in everything.

And then as time went on, I saw how things were changing with her. And you know, I think, Tammy, it would be really interesting if we could bring up the report cards. Yes. Because I think this speaks so much. Yes. And I think to any parent, teacher, grandparent who's here in the audience whose lives touch a young person, you can understand this. Because what we're looking at, the first two reports, 2018, 2019, these are Selena's report cards.

The first one, if you look at the absentee, the number of absent days in the first one is five. The number in the second one, pre, both of these pre-social media, zero. Once social media started, absent days, 70.

That is incredible. And then also, if you look at some of the skills for learning, M's are really good, S is good, I's not good. And you can also see the transformation.

And Tammy, I wanna ask you, tell us a little bit about what you were observing when Selena started to become addicted to social media. - Sure, well she started out where I had gotten her a tablet, you know, and she played the regular games, watched the YouTube kids.

I played other games. So just normal? Normal, yep. And then what happened? She was running out of memory on the tablet, so I agreed and I got her an iPhone. Same thing, she was watching kid-based things. As time went on, I started hearing the change, especially in the YouTube videos,

It was definitely a shift from the kid things. You couldn't get her to stop. Right. Is that right? Correct. Like, give us, for instance, how bad was it? You said to everybody, you took her phones away. Yes. You took her tablet away. Right. So what happened? So there's one time in particular, I was driving and her phone died and she wanted mine and I wouldn't give it to her. She grabbed my arm here so hard that it was black and blue for weeks, the whole top of my arm.

All because I wouldn't give her the phone. And at times, she would leave the house. Is that right? Yes. Yep, she would take off. I fell asleep. She would take off running. And, you know, keep in mind that a lot of this happens when Selena is 10. There was also sexual exploitation. What did you... And I want to point out that Tammy didn't know about the vast majority of what was going on until well after...

Selina died. Right. What did you discover about the sexual exploitation? Well, I found out that she had seven or eight Instagram accounts I had no idea about. And I found out that men were soliciting her for photos and other videos and things.

That's really, it's extraordinary. Laura, I want to bring you into the conversation. Laura is an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center. They are doing a lot of work to try to hold these companies accountable. These companies are in some ways protected by Section 230. But what I want to do, Laura, is back up just a tad because I'm curious, when you look at those report cards,

From a legal perspective or from your perspective as a lawyer, what are you seeing there? So and I'll say let's just take it from a human perspective, right? Because this is not an anomaly. I want to say this is not an unusual circumstance. We work with almost 4,000 families who've retained us at this point in the last, what, three years.

And we see this all the time, right? You have the report cards. I've seen Selena's medical records. I've seen her data. You have a kid that is thriving. You have a kid where the medical records say she's sleeping nine hours at night. She has lots of friends. The teachers are saying she's a joy to have in our class. Social media, you know, enter social media and within weeks or months, typically, it's not usually more than that, everything has changed.

You have sleep deprivation, you have the extreme reactions. We have hundreds and hundreds of children I've spoken to personally and parents. These are kids that had no reported issues ahead of time. Some of these kids, by the way, didn't even have phones or devices at home. They started using on school devices or their friends gave them devices or they found devices. $50 gift card, you can go to Target and get set up with a phone and get right onto these apps.

And so we see these same facts over and over, and it's this, right? It's nothing remarkable. Enter social media. Everything changes. You know, I want to pivot to the lawsuit because in January of 2022, Tammy files a lawsuit with the Social Media Victims Law Center against Meta and Snap.

And I'm reading this because I think it's important. Claiming Selena's death was, quote, caused by defective design, negligence, and unreasonably dangerous features of the products. Noted in that is not the content, right? Can you talk about what that wording, why that wording is significant?

The products. Yes. Right? So the products. So Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, which you probably hear a lot about, essentially it says that these platforms can't be responsible for what third parties do on their platform. It was enacted in 1996, I believe.

And so historically we have just sort of assumed that the harms that we're seeing our kids suffer are third parties, right? If there's a drug dealer, a predator, we just assumed because in 1996, in fact, the internet, you know, you had open bulletin boards, you had chat rooms, um, you had this sort of open system that, that gave us access to resources. Um, and it was user driven. That is not what we are seeing. And that is, it's, it's,

What we have are products that are monetizing not just our children, but us. We have companies that are designing specific features for addiction. Things like the continuous or the never-ending feed, things like the like button, and down to how they make it visible to children. It's meant to give children in particular dopamine hits, all users.

uh it is meant to exploit vulnerabilities um i want to say one thing on the algorithms when we talk about selena and you see her data i've talked to hundreds of young girls and they're all getting pushed predators on snapchat and instagram right off the bat right i've also spoken to dozens of adult women and when i asked them none of them have the same experience now recently i've started asking some young adults

and what i've started hearing is oh now that you mention it yeah i was being contacted constantly or i was getting quick ad recommendations for predators that started to slow and then stop around age 16 to 18. and you ask them what did you do different not a thing

The answer is, you know, around 16 to 18, these companies, no matter what age you say they are, the main companies all use signaling. They all have estimated ages. And in fact, they use that data for product development and marketing. Right. So they may say, oh, I don't know. I've seen kids who say they're 97 literally when they sign up for Instagram. And they say, well, we don't know. Well, then why are you sending them ads aimed at 13 year olds?

Right? And these are the pieces these companies don't tell us about. These are the things they don't disclose. And these are the things that have come out through the whistleblower documents and litigation. So before we move on to Larissa, Laura, what is so interesting about this story and what people always ask me when they find out that I'm working on this is, are you really, Laura, saying that the social media platforms, Meta, Snap, et cetera, are actually with purpose trying to addict young children? Yes.

without question, and there are former engineers who will tell you, I mean, one of Meta's first presidents, Sean Parker, said in 2017, "We designed these products to give dopamine hits."

We knew that this could do all sorts of bad things to kids brains. We did it anyway. That's what a hacker does. These companies, there used to be a conference in Silicon Valley every year called the Habit Summit, where they would go and meet and talk about how to make their products more habit forming. Well, when you're talking about an eight or 10 or 12 or 16 year old child,

This is affecting the way that their brains are developing. This is impacting their brains, and these companies absolutely know it's happening. It's in their documents. It's in the public record. And remember, they said publicly at some point the biggest enemy they have, sleep. Larissa, I want to move on to you because when we were waiting to come on, Larissa was talking about the fact that you say you are a survivor of

of the digital world. And I'm curious, when we talk about the dopamine hits, Larissa, you've been there. Did it feel like addiction? - Well, yes, I'm indeed here because I am a survivor of the digital world and I've devoted the last 10 years of my life in hopes to write a new story. For me, I was a lot like your daughter. Bright, empowered, I had so many friends. And then when I was given a phone, everything changed.

From the day that I downloaded Instagram, my brain was never the same. It replaced my sleep, my social connection, and it replaced me showing up to class. When I was the girl who in high school used to show up to school with a fever, I lost everything. Blue light was my baseline. I was going there because I was in so much pain, and I had nowhere else to go, and I was only showing half the story. But when I went to the psych center on campus,

They asked me about drugs, sex, and alcohol, but never about the drug that was in my pocket and the place that the average American teenager will spend 30 years of their life. So yes, I lost everything in my life because of the thing that we all have in our pockets, in these seats, in this room, and people watching all over the world. And when I see kids today, this is our future. This is not just about tech and humanity and whether you believe in mental health.

The youngest minds of our world are converging with technology. The data speaks for itself. Facebook told us, themself, that one in three girls feels worse about themself when they get off that platform. What is it going to take? And I just want to point out also, Larissa, that the use of the word survivor is so important. Selena didn't survive. No. And...

The other thing that people say is, well, these are edge cases. These are not edge cases. And I think it's very easy for people to say, it's not going to happen to my kid or to my student. The fact of the matter is, having now worked in this story, it can happen to anyone. So Larissa, I just want to say also to you that it is so courageous to do the work that you are doing. I mean it, because you were there. You were touching this.

- So let's talk about accountability. - I wanna say everyone reacts differently to addiction, right? So when we talk about edge cases, by these companies' own estimates, you're talking about something like 15 to 20% of people that begin engaging in problematic use, which they identify as like can't sleep, can't go to work, interfering with your relationships.

If it's 5%, if we had been told 10 years ago, hey, this product, Instagram, it's gonna be great, it's great for your kids, just know there's a 5% chance your child will become so harmfully dependent on this product, they will stop sleeping, et cetera, et cetera. There's a 1% chance they'll engage in self-harm and suicide, et cetera, et cetera. That's even at smaller numbers than what these companies have put in their own documents, publicly disclosed documents as estimates.

I promise you, sorry, go ahead Laura. - Yeah, we would have said no. Most parents would have said no. We would have had the choice. - And we are going to give some suggestions, some tips, some things that you can do, I promise. But Laura, I'm curious because in this past January, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings. You might have seen them, right? They brought in the heads of SNAP, Meta, X, Discord, to testify on what they called, what the Congress people called a failure to protect children online.

nothing's really happened out of that hearing, but a lot of bringing everybody in front. Laura, how are children being protected by law at this point? In this country, not at all. I'm tired of hearings. As a parent, I'm here because I'm a parent. My oldest of my younger children are nine.

Tammy is fighting for my children, for all of your children. Nothing is happening. We need Congress, we need the House of Representatives to step up right now. We have a regulation up there that went through the Senate, 91-3,

And now there it is, it's stalled, right? We need something. Other countries are passing things. Other countries are starting to move and we are sitting here while our children are being harmed, even killed by things that we don't have to, these products don't have to do this. They don't have to addict. They don't have to push predators to small children as a matter of engagement first programming. They don't even have to operate at the speeds they are operating their algorithms which are designed to addict when these companies know if they just turned it down a little bit,

consumers would have a choice. I'm going to now pivot a little bit towards the solutions, and I'm going to start, Larissa, with you. This extends beyond politics because right now our kids are not being protected by the political system. Larissa, let me begin with you. This story is evolving. We've all read about Sewell Setzer, the young boy who died from his interactions with an AI chatbot.

So this story continues to evolve. Larissa, what is it that you want to say to families who are trying to grapple? Remember, adults, we can't keep up with kids in their use of social media. Tammy, you know that. You tried to take those devices away. It's really hard. Larissa, what do you want to say?

The first thing that I want to say is that digital wellness is wellness, period. If we do not address the role that technology plays in the social, emotional, and biological health of our children, we are missing the entire story. What I also want to share with you is that in order to rewrite that story from the business of digital sickness and rewrite a new business model and shift into a business of digital well-being,

We need to invest in our young people. I have been fighting for 10 years. Two years ago, I was here in DC with a bunch of teens fighting for COSA. It still hasn't passed. But what I can tell you is that if we build trust with our teens, we open spaces for dialogue and vulnerability, we create educational programming like the Social Media U program that we've developed and are partnering with other organizations like Girls Inc. to reach our most vulnerable young people,

Knowledge is power. Our kids are driving in cars with a drunk driver, no seat belts, and without a brakes. We need to invest in their knowledge and I promise you,

that if we flip gears and we give our kids the dollars and the spaces to create an understanding with one another, to redetermine what it means to be a human, this future can look different. And it's not going to happen from us up here talking to them. It's going to happen to teens talking to each other, which is my goal and my role here is to be that voice for the voices that aren't here like your daughter and to ensure that their voices are heard in every single room where a decision is being made about them.

- Larissa, very quickly because we're running out of time. I loved what you said in the video. Social media is likely here to stay, period. We have to deal with that.

How can young people reimagine, how can you reimagine a life with social media? So my favorite way to do this with our teens is through play. Instead of being the victim, be the player in the game. What we do through our educational programming is simulate, get them in the technology, teach them how to take it apart. How do you build speed bumps? How do you actually interact with the algorithm to try to see and change the things that you are being fed?

We have to teach our kids this because tech is not building it in. So that's what I'm here to do. And it is through knowledge and it is through not just being a victim, but being your own superhero in your story. Laura, before we give Tammy an opportunity to express what she wants everybody to know here, what do you want to add to what Larissa just said?

At one of the early hearings in the litigation in the federal court, the court asked the attorneys for these companies. The court said that you represent billion-dollar, collectively billion-dollar corporations. What duties do your clients have to design reasonably safe platforms? What duties to children, specifically, to design reasonably safe platforms? And the lawyer said, currently, under U.S. law, there is no such duty under 50 states.

That is why we need regulation. Every industry has a duty. Every person, every designer. These are companies that, you know, one of the things that we haven't talked about yet, but when you see the documents that the whistleblower came out with and what most people don't realize, there are meta product development documents with brain scans

that point to the brain and say the frontal lobe. Children's frontal lobes are not fully developed until they're around 24, 25. This makes them particularly vulnerable. There are meta documents that say our PYMK, that is the user recommendation algorithm. I believe it says in the past, PYMK has contributed up to 75% of inappropriate adult minor contact.

That started with grooming, by the way, as the subheading there. And then a Met employee says something to the effect of, this is outrageous. Why haven't we just turned this off? It's still a feature. Why haven't we just turned this off? And so I would say, one, we need regulation because these companies aren't going to do it themselves and our children are dying as a result. And just quickly to add, this takes five people to make a decision for the world. This is not climate change. Right.

This is humans, five or six CEOs that come together. Very powerful CEOs, just to add, right? Our most powerful government in the world is technology. But interestingly, if we had something like COSA in place, it would actually open the playing field because if you stop allowing these companies to make their products so addictive, then designers, ethical designers, will actually have an opportunity to get into this space and our children and we as consumers will have more choice.

But of course, the five people running the world don't want that. Tammy, I'm sorry to make you the last voice in this. No, you're fine. But I want you to be able to tell everybody here, what do they need to know? What is it that our audience members here should take away from your experience and your loss of your daughter, Selena? Well, I just want to say a quick statistic. Yes.

So I recently read that in ages 10 to 14, there's been an increase in suicides. The number of suicides for this group has more than doubled in the last decade, making it the second leading cause of death for that age group. And for me, that's my life. You know, I lost my daughter. My life is very different now. It's the pre-losing Selena and the post-losing Selena. It's very different.

And I just ask that people please monitor your kids' use. Go in there, as Laura has said in the past, use it for a little while, change their algorithms, because they're targeting the kids. Congress owes this to us. Big Tech owes this to the children, I should say, and to all of us. One of the last things in Selena's medical records is a quote where she told the doctor social media makes it hard. Mm-hmm.

Selena did inpatient, she did outpatient, she did partial hospitalizations, all because of social media addictions. On that note, unfortunately, we have run out of time. Obviously, this is a much bigger conversation that could go on. And I just want to say that Tammy...

Laura will be available this evening at Cocktails if you want to continue the conversation with them. I want to thank- And Larissa will as well. She's going to stick around. She's going to stay. I'm sorry, Larissa's going to stay. Larissa, thank you so much. You can find out more about Larissa's work at Half the Story. Laura, you can find out more about Laura's work, Social Media Victims Law Center.

Tammy, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing the story. I so appreciate it. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thanks for listening. For more information on our upcoming programs, go to WashingtonPostLive.com.