Care and Feeding | Slate's parenting show - Your Eyeballs Are Gonna Fall Out of Your Head
Care and Feeding | Slate's parenting show
Slate Audio
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2023
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode: Zak Rosen talks with Phillip Maciak, TV critic with The New Republic, teacher at Washington University in St. Louis, and author of the book, Avidly Reads Screen Time. He explains where the concept of screen time started and how it became this marker of good (or bad) parenting.
Recommendations:
Zak: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie + The “Mouse Game”
Jamilah: The Barbie movie
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Podcast produced by Rosemary Belson and Maura Currie.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's Parenting Podcasts for Monday, August 14th, The Your eyeballs are going to fall out of your head edition. |
| 0:11.4 | I'm Jamila Lemieux, a writer, contributor to Slate's Karen Feeding Parenting column and mom to Naima, who's 10, and we live in Los Angeles. |
| 0:19.7 | I'm Zach Rosen. I am also host of another podcast that's called The Best Advice Show. |
| 0:24.3 | And I'm the dad to Noah, who's 5, and Ami, who's 2. We live in Detroit. |
| 0:29.2 | Today on the show, we're welcoming back Phil Macyac. He was here last time to Laud, your |
| 0:34.1 | favorite TV show, Bluey. He's back today to talk about one of the hottest parenting topics around, screen time. |
| 0:41.0 | That's also the name of his new book, which traces the history and meaning of this complicated topic. |
| 0:46.1 | We'll hear Zach's interview with Phil right after this break. |
| 0:55.2 | We're back. |
| 0:59.7 | Zach, what can we look forward to in this interview you did with author Phil Mastyak about screen time? |
| 1:14.3 | So Phil is a TV critic as well as an author and a professor, and he writes just really smartly and historically about the emergence of, you know, the moral panic that is my kids are getting too much screen time. Like that, that has been going on for for quite some time. And in fact, |
| 1:19.8 | the phrase screen time emerges in the early 90s. And he talks about this Mother Jones article |
| 1:25.8 | where it first emerged. And like, just the meaning of screen time itself has changed so much because, you know, |
| 1:31.6 | when we were growing up, of course, like screen time was like our TVs and like if we had computers. |
| 1:37.7 | But now, like, screens are just ubiquitous in kind of a wild way, you know, with phones, even our like refrigerators, |
| 1:46.1 | some of them, not mine, but fancy people have screens on their fridges. |
| 1:49.3 | Like, screens are everywhere. |
| 1:50.6 | And so our relationship to this, this moral panic that he describes has also evolved. |
| 1:55.7 | So we talk about that. |
| 1:58.3 | And, you know, we start out by talking about our kids. Phil's also a parent. So I asked him |
| 2:03.0 | how he talks to his kids about screen time and, you know, how he is able to talk about screens, |
| 2:11.1 | this thing that he's, you know, devoted his life to without stigmatizing it. And with that, |
... |
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