Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
I am proud to have been with Common Sense for 19 years now. I had a history working on parenting media and content, and it came together under this perfect umbrella for me because I love movies and TV shows, but I love working and worrying about them in a way that is helpful to people and makes an impact. Our goal is to give parents, caregivers, and educators all the information they need to make the media choices and manage the media choices for their family. Whoever their kids are, whatever shape their family looks like, they know their kids best. We give them the information so they can make the choices that are right for them.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. And as we all do a shifting relationship with technology, I truly believe that we launched into a world of technology before we actually slowed down to think consciously, "How do we want to use this technology?" It got ahead of us in a lot of ways, and it feels like we're reclaiming it, pulling it back in some ways, or rethinking it. I'm curious, as an organization or as an individual who's been doing this for 20 years, how do you think about our relationship with technology before we get into what we're supposed to do about it?

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Yeah, you're right. It really has just— it's like I always say, the amount of content coming at parents, especially, is a fire hose, and for kids a fire hose all the time. When I started at Common Sense, YouTube was barely a thing. Facebook was still only in colleges. iPhones, I think, launched later that year, and now we're looking at AI and constant online. These are kids who are growing up now—digital natives—and are constantly online. And so, yeah, it has been expanding at a rate I don't think anyone could have predicted. What we're seeing now with the rise of AI, particularly, is people saying, "Let's do it right this time. Let's take a moment and make sure we're doing this mindfully and thoughtfully if we can," rather than, "Hey, it's social media—boom, let's go." I think we're trying. But I don't know that we can either. There are so many people putting things out the gate before all the people—the gatekeepers—are trying really hard to hold back just a little bit.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I was going to say, I think it's interesting—I'm glad to hear you say there are people saying, "Let's do it right this time," because it feels to me like all of a sudden I can't do a Google search without AI stepping in there. And I can't do—like my Zoom and my this and my—everything's got AI, and I didn't ask for it.
Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Yeah. Well, I'm not saying the companies are taking that step to "let's do it right." It's the people, like advocacy organizations, nonprofits, and regulators, who are trying to maybe put a pause or just put the brakes on for a minute and say, "Let's think this stuff through."

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah, just slow it down a little bit because there is so much information, and parents—I've mentioned to you before we started talking that parents come to us—we kind of laugh. There are three key issues that parents come to us with. There are millions of issues—meltdowns, yelling, and all this stuff—but the ones we hear most often are, "My kid won't pick up their towels off the floor," "My kid won't brush their teeth," and "I don't know how to navigate technology." And it seems weird that those are them, but those are them because it's all about helping kids manage themselves in a conscious way, right?

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
A hundred percent agree. I have an 11-year-old son, and I would say that totally tracks. He barely hangs up the towel, brushes the minimal teeth, and is really, really hard to pull off the screens.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Great, and that's true for 11 and 17 and 24—maybe 59.

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Yeah, I know. We always—one thing we advise people—is "model the behavior you want to see in your child" when at all possible. That's something for parents to remember. But I think, yeah, it is a struggle all the time. Kids need our help to regulate just about everything. Right?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And when you use that word "regulate," as an adult with neurodiversity, part of what we struggle with is self-regulation. So you're dealing with something that needs to be regulated in order for it to be safe and healthy. Yes. And I think what we're talking about is helping our kids develop a safe and healthy relationship with technology.

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Yes, for sure. We've always been about balance at Common Sense and sanity, not censorship. It's really all about—there's that saying—"all things in moderation, even moderation," right? I think we all found during COVID that you can't say, "Oh, screen time is two hours a day," and that includes FaceTime calls with parents or doing school. Like, what is screen time anymore, right? And what I hear a lot from researchers, including the ones working with us, is that it's really about quality over quantity. It's not just how much time you're spending with the device, but what you're doing on it. Are you doing schoolwork? Are you being creative? Are you connecting with other people? Or are you just zoning out on SpongeBob clips—which my 11-year-old does, happily, many times.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yes. Right. So what do you think is important for parents? From the start of this conversation, what is important for parents to understand about the digital natives they're raising? Most of us parents—not all of us, but most—are digital transplants, but we're raising digital natives.

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Yep. What we hear over and over again is their lives are online. If you say, "You don't get your phone for a week," you're basically taking them away from their social life and their friends for a week. Sometimes that might be the consequence you want to have, but you need to think that through. It's not as simple as saying, "I want this thing out of your hand." You're interfering with their connections. They really live life online. That includes social connections as well. I see my kids talking to friends all the time. It looks different than when I was their age, but they are having those conversations. They don't distinguish between digital life and regular life as much.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
It's such a comfort zone for them. It's so familiar. There are experts out there proposing not just tech diets, but eliminating technology—taking it away from kids and going back to whatever era that was. What are your thoughts?

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
I don't know. I really like the balance approach we take. For many kids there are safety issues as well. Being in a position where you can have your kid not be in any sort of connectivity and know they're safe and doing OK is a privilege. There are a lot of people who, if they need to use public transportation, if their kids are going to school on their own, if they're navigating activities by themselves, they need a device to be safe. We need to remember it's not as simple as saying yes or no. There's a lot of gray area. My daughter is in high school, and her school does a "phone hotel" approach where they all have to put their phones in a numbered slot at the beginning of each class and pick it up. I think those kinds of ideas where you can meet in the middle and have controlled access are more realistic.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Cool. So my kids are now young adults, and they got hit by probably the worst years of technology because they really did get it before any of us had any clue what we were giving them. And they're so good at getting around the things we thought we were putting in place.

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
That's true too. Literally the only thing that works here in our household is that the internet has to shut off at a certain time.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Which you can do with an 11-year-old, but it gets harder when you have a teenager and other things, and…

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
We did try it, and then for a little while the only app that she could use on the phone, other than texting us, was the weather app. So she got really good at telling you the forecast for the next few days, because, if that was the only thing she could do.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus
That's what she was doing. Love that. Well, and this isn't funny, but let's take a quick break and we come back. I've got a question to ask you. All right? I'm really loving this conversation with Betsy Bozdech, MSJ from Common Sense Media. I want to pose a comment to you. My son, my youngest child, is 24, and he said to me about a year ago, "Mom, there is no kid my age that has not been traumatized by the." Now I understand that's in part because he was exposed at a very young age before we had parameters in place. But I also suspect, even with all the best intentions and parameters, there's a lot of that happening. So let's make this real a little bit. They live online. It's part of their social world. It's a fundamental component of their entire lives, and it can be dangerous. So talk to us.

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Yeah, no, it absolutely can be. I'm not disagreeing with you. I've worked at Common Sense for 19 years, and my own kids have come into contact with content that they weren't ready for. In those situations, what I've told them is it's really natural to be curious and to be, to want to find things out. What you need to do is remember that the internet is everyone. It is not just people who want to answer your questions helpfully or thoughtfully. Because we have a really good relationship and they felt comfortable talking to us about the content they'd seen, we were able to have meaningful conversations, tell them they weren't doing anything wrong, help them process what they saw, and then come up, work together, with limits. When my daughter ran into some nasty content when she was younger, she asked us to limit the websites she had access to to help her not come in contact with it anymore.

We had really positive conversations about moving forward and didn't yell at her, didn't blame her, because she wasn't doing anything wrong. She was just being a kid. If we have those dialogues with our kids—and they're not going to tell us everything; we need to know that—it's also nice to sometimes look at those histories and do things like that to make sure you're checking in. I hope that if it's not a parent, there is another trusted adult they can talk to if they've come into anything and have questions.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So what you're really saying is that we're not likely to be able to shield them from everything, no matter how hard we try, but we want to create a really open, trusting environment.

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Exactly what our Common Sense founding editor-in-chief, Liz Perle, used to say: "We can't cover our kids' eyes, but we can help them to see." I think that is one of the mottos we live by here at Common Sense. We don't want to say no to everything. We're not trying to censor everything. This is about sanity and finding the ways to say yes to the things that kids want to do and are excited about, and that you can maybe embrace as a family, but do it in a smart, informed way that helps kids be really critical thinkers and smart digital citizens.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I've got to say—again, I'm telling tales of my 24-year-old today—but he actually came into the kitchen yesterday, and he had put some measure in place to protect himself from himself. He's studying for LSATs, and I don't even know what it was, but he had put some parameter in place to protect himself from himself. And I was—look, I guess I'm telling tales of my husband because I'm like, "Could you tell your father about that, please?" So they really do actually know that they want a relationship with technology that's healthy.

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Yes. My daughter will put limits on her own Instagram time too, on weekends when she's like, "I don't want to waste my whole day."

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. So a lot of parents are listening to that going, "No way, my kid would never do that." So what's underneath their ability to make that choice?

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
I think recognizing—like, in my daughter's case—sometimes it's, "Oh, I don't want to feel at the end of a day like I wasted the whole day." Not everyone is going to have that feeling. But if, again, you're setting those—having the conversations up front and setting the guidelines, like: we have this stuff to do this weekend or this day, and you know there's going to be some time in there for that. How can we work together to ensure that you get the sort of chill, zone-out time that you need, but also have time to do these other things, like get outside and touch some grass, talk to a friend—come back on screens, but make it family movie time. Let's have a time sitting on the couch. In my household, setting those expectations early is much better than coming in at the end of the day and saying, "You've been on your phone all day—what are you doing?" Maybe try to make it a team effort to work together and plan things out rather than circling back around and making them feel guilty after the fact.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
You know, at the very beginning of the pandemic—literally March of 2020—we were hosting a Digital Sanity Summit. Which you would've thought would have been a great time, but it turned out to be a terrible time. We still had the recordings available. It was a major conversation. What was interesting was that parents, I found, at the beginning of that time were so demonizing their kids' technology. And then the world shut down, and everybody realized how much we needed technology, and now we're in this dance between how do we embrace it without demonizing it, but still recognize the danger.

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
I agree with you. That's what we try to offer—a lot of resources to help do exactly that. We have parents' ultimate guides to everything from Roblox to YouTube to your teenager's digital world, and we ask and answer lots of parent questions to give the resources that parents need. Offering that kind of advice, plus the approach of talking and listening and being together on this—and trying not to get into these blame situations—really helps. And modeling the behavior, like we talked about earlier: if you can also show that, "Yeah, I can put it down—let's go for a walk together." I mean, my daughter will get on me just as quickly as I'll get on her. If we go for a walk and I get my phone out for something, she's like, "Work together right now. What are you doing? This is my time." Right—exactly. She's not wrong. I don't think tech is a demon. It's a complicated piece, but an inescapable piece of everyone's lives. It's about finding that safe, smart approach that lets you say yes to some things. I think that helps—if you're showing your kid you can say yes when they're finding balance and being responsible, then they know that if you say no, it's a little bit more powerful than if it's just a blanket no all the time.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. If all they expect to hear from you is "no," then it's really hard for them to begin to trust the capacity to team up with them. Exactly. So let's tell people a little bit more about Common Sense Media, and then we'll wrap our conversation. The resources of Common Sense Media are wide and deep, folks. All the information is in the show notes. CommonSenseMedia.org is where you get advice and reviews for parents, and there's also a link there for educators, because I know a lot of you are educators. And what you were saying to me, Betsy, earlier, is that a lot of the parents like the educator stuff and the educators like the parent stuff. So CommonSenseMedia.org is where you're going to get all the advice and reviews, and what kinds of advice?

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Well, you did a really nice job summarizing it there, thank you very much. The advice is focused in these ways: we have a Parents' Ultimate Guide series, and we have a bunch of standalone Q&As. But those PUGs—we call them the PUGs internally; we always picture little pug dogs—are Parents' Ultimate Guides that address all the major digital topics and concerns parents have. Like I said, everything from Roblox and Minecraft and YouTube and Fortnite to when to get a first cell phone and how to manage AI chatbots. That's one of the newer ones we've put up because that's happening a lot now, for better or worse. We also deal with age-by-age guidance: what's going on with your 3- to 5-year-old, your 7- to 9-year-old, your 13- to 15-year-old. That brings in a lot of the child development research that all of our content is based in. We have worked with experts over the years to develop guidelines and rubrics around our reviews, and we bring that same knowledge into our advice. We have 45,000+ reviews at this point—movies, TV shows, books—all the things kids want to watch, read, and check out.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So, how do you navigate that in the realm of complex kids? Developmentally, if you've got something for 7- to 9-year-olds, but the kid is developmentally 6 and chronologically 9, how are you addressing that?

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
It is a little tricky to get into very specific cases like that. What we always tell everyone is that each parent or caregiver knows their kid and their family best, so we give you the information you need to make a choice that works for your family. I hear all the time about people saying, "I take the Common Sense age and add one," or, "I take the Common Sense age and subtract two," because they learn where their kid is calibrated on our rubric and ratings. While we do put age ratings on things, that's based on very broad, general child development. Not every kid is the same as the kids studied in X study or Y study. What is one kid's biggest thrill could be way too much for others until they're much older.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. I had one kid who couldn't handle anything until she was in college, and another watching stuff at 10 that maybe shouldn't have—but that's another story. We've all been there. So, CommonSenseMedia.org is where you can get resources, advice, reviews. I do want you all to know there's also CommonSense.org for those of you interested in advocacy and research. That's the broader organizational resource if you're looking for a deeper dive, or you like your research, or you want to get involved and advocate. That's at CommonSense.org, correct?

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Beautiful. Excellent. So we want to wrap this conversation, and I want to ask you: is there anything we haven't talked about that you think we should be talking about?

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
I just think a lot of it is what we've covered. This tech is really part of kids' lives, and trying to put the genie back in the bottle is probably not the best long-term approach at this point. We need to help kids learn to live with these things productively, reasonably, and with balance. I'm not saying anything new, but I'm reiterating that our approach is always about finding that balance—finding that sane approach to things that often feel way out of our control. If you start early and talk often about making smart choices, that really builds a scaffold you can take from 3 all the way up to 18 to 24, whenever we decide we're done. We're never done. We're never done.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I got news for you, we're never done. And I love that term "making smart choices." My favorite quote you said earlier is "everything in moderation, including moderation." I'm a big believer in that. I've heard you say clearly that we need to model it. I also understand that can be difficult for those of us who are adults with our own neurodiversity. My reminder to everybody is to give yourself grace. We're all figuring this out together. We want to do it without demonizing it. We want our kids to feel like we're on their team, so we have to be careful not to attack it and instead start by acknowledging, "I get that this is important to you. I get that this is your lifeline." Because for our kids it really feels like that. Maybe for our spouses, too—I'm learning something today. So I appreciate that there's no rocket science here, and it's an important reminder. This is hard stuff, and we're all dealing with it.

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Yep. Be gracious with yourself and kind to other people too. We don't know anyone's story or circumstance. There's so much parenting advice in the world. People say, "You're doing it that way? You're wrong," or, "You didn't do it that way? You're wrong." We have to remind ourselves to approach everyone and their dilemmas with kindness so they'll do the same for us.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Beautiful. At Impact, we're all about a collaborative problem-solving approach. We use a coach approach so that parents can be in the process of problem-solving, because we want you to be on your kids' team, and we want them to feel like you're on their team. That's where you'll help them make the best choices. They won't always make the best choices, but we want to help them make better and better choices. And as we used to say to our kids, "At least, if you're gonna do stupid, do stupid smart."

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
Right. And do it in a way that you can support them through it, so they feel comfortable coming to you when they have messed up.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Absolutely. Beautiful. Betsy, thank you. Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for two decades of commitment to this. I hope you feel what an important contribution you've made and what important work it is that you do.

Betsy Bozdech, MSJ
I wouldn't have been here as long as I have if it didn't make me feel good about what I'm doing. Thank you very much.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
All right. Thank you for being here. And to those of you who are listening, next up on the podcast, I don't know, but last up on the podcast was fascinating, and there are 200+ episodes for you to listen to, peruse, and tune in for what's interesting to you. So remember to check out the podcast, tune in to the next one, and as we leave here today, take a moment and ask yourself: What insights are you taking away from this conversation with Betsy? What's one A-ha, one gem, one awareness that you have now that you didn't have 30 minutes ago? And, as always, what's one action you might want to take based on that awareness? What's one thing you want to bring with you into this week? My friends, as always, thank you for what you're doing for yourself and for your kids. It makes a difference. See you next time.