Well, hello there and welcome back. My name is Stephanie Safarian, and you're listening to Episode 571 of Sustainable Minimalists. This is a listener-supported show about intentional and eco-friendly minimalist living. And on today's show, I am offering you a cautionary tale about screens in my household. We're also discussing Jonathan Heights's

absolute banger of a book, The Anxious Generation, which I recently read. If you have not read it

yet, I won't give too much away today in the episode. However, stop what you're doing right now, pause my voice, and request it

from your library. I believe this should be essential reading for everybody, not just parents.

The book is really just that good. So now on today's show, it's just me and you. I have not

created a me-only episode in a long time. So if you missed them, I'm back. Hello. If you really wish this was an interview, I'm sorry. We'll be back with an interview next week. But today it's just me and you. And I'm talking about what happened when my husband and I gave our eldest daughter.

She's 11. Her name is Ani.

A little bit of freedom with regard to screens.

Now, I'm going to tell you the story, but I'm just going to give you the ending of the story right now so that you know where this is going.

We gave her a bit of freedom with

screens. It was an absolute disaster, and so we took them back. That's where the story's going

today. Throughout my saga, and it is a bit of a saga that I'm relaying to you. Throughout the saga, I will be interspersing

a bit of research, what research says about the impact of screens and phones, particularly

social media on our children. I'm also going to be interspersing some of Jonathan Heights' wisdom as we go through

today's episode and we will wrap it all up with a bow with some action steps and tips from

somebody who made a big mistake and then course corrected. So that's what we're doing today.

Now, before we talk about the big

fat parenting mistake that I made recently, I want to give you a little bit of background. So

if you've been listening to this show for a while, you already know that my husband and I,

we tend to err on the side of caution with regard to our children and

screens. They do not have any personal screen devices. They do not have unfettered access.

We're not anti-screens, right? Like, they do watch television, but they don't watch it every day.

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