Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's Parenting Podcasts for Monday, August 14th,

your eyeballs are going to fall out of your head edition.

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.

I'm Zach Rosen.

I am also a host of another podcast that's called The Best Advice Show, and I'm the dad to Noah, who's 5, and Ami, who's 2. We live in Detroit.

Today on the show, we're welcoming back Phil Macyac. He was here last time to Laude your favorite TV show,

Bluey. He's back today to talk about one of the hottest parenting topics around, screen time.

That's also the name of his new book, which traces the history and meaning of this complicated topic.

We'll hear Zach's interview with Phil right after this break.

We're back.

Zach, what can we look forward to in this interview you did with author Phil Mastyak about screen time?

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, the phrase screen time emerges in the early 90s. And he talks about this Mother Jones article where it first emerged. And like, just the meaning of screen time itself has changed so much because, you know,

when we were growing up, of course, like screen time was like our TVs and like if we had

computers.

But now like screens are just ubiquitous in kind of a wild way, you know, with phones, even our like refrigerators,

some of them, not mine, but fancy people have screens on their fridges.

Like, screens are everywhere.

And so our relationship to this, this moral panic that he describes has also evolved.

So we talk about that.

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