On Children, Meaning, Media and Psychedelics

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2024

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I feel that there’s something important missing in our debate over screen time and kids — and even screen time and adults. In the realm of kids and teenagers, there’s so much focus on what studies show or don’t show: How does screen time affect school grades and behavior? Does it carry an increased risk of anxiety or depression? And while the debate over those questions rages on, a feeling has kept nagging me. What if the problem with screen time isn’t something we can measure? In June, Jia Tolentino published a great piece in The New Yorker about the blockbuster children’s YouTube channel CoComelon, which seemed as if it was wrestling with the same question. So I invited her on the show, and our conversation ended up going places I never expected. Among other things, we talk about how the decision to have kids relates to doing psychedelics, what kinds of pleasure to seek if you want a good life and how much the debate over screen time and kids might just be adults projecting our own discomfort with our own screen time. We recorded this episode a few days before the Trump-Biden debate — and before Donald Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate. We then got so swept up in politics coverage we never got a chance to air it. But I am so excited to finally get this one out into the world. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “How CoComelon Captures Our Children’s Attention” by Jia Tolentino “Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion?” by Jia Tolentino How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell Book Recommendations: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry In Ascension by Martin MacInnes When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Jeff Geld, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. And now for something completely different.
0:27.0	We recorded this episode right before the first presidential debate.
0:31.0	And there has been such a crush of political news since then that there hasn't
0:35.4	really been a moment that felt right to release it. But I loved this conversation
0:39.7	and in a funny way it's more relevant now given how much the election has come to
0:45.0	revolve around the reasons people do and don't have children and the meaning of
0:50.1	that choice. So a few months ago, Gi-Toldtino published a big piece in the New Yorker on
0:56.2	Cocomelon. Cocomelon, if you do not have a two-year-old, is a show that every really little kid really loves and every parent has a more
1:07.1	complicated set of emotions about. But it's something Tolentino wrote at the end that was what really caught my eye.
1:14.5	She said, I found myself wondering if we'd be better off thinking less about educational
1:19.2	value in children's media and more about real pleasure, both for us and for our kids. In a way
1:26.5	this is an episode about real pleasure which is not what I went into it thinking
1:31.2	it would be about. It's about the tension between pursuing pleasure
1:34.6	or what I might call meaning and pursuing the kinds of achievements we spend most of our
1:39.8	lives being taught to prize. Honestly I think this gets much more to the heart of the
1:44.7	questions people ask about having children than all this political rhetoric about
1:49.2	cat ladies and extra votes and tax rates. And I don't think it's an accident that in this conversation
1:55.4	as we're trying to talk about the value of what we can't measure against the
1:59.6	value of what we can, we end up finding ourselves in the language of religion, of psychedelics, of emotion.
2:06.5	These are questions where I think we've culturally lost some of the vocabulary that we used
2:11.0	to have to talk about just what it means to live a good life, not to have a higher income or a better job, but what is a good life?
2:18.0	Giatontino is the author of the great book of Essays Trick Mirror, one of my favorite books about being
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