Beyond the good-bad parent binary with Ash Brandin, The Gamer Educator
Part 2 of 2: How self-compassion can replace self-criticism when it comes to screen time decisions
"A naysayer could say, well, kids can practice life skills outside of a screen. Absolutely, they could, and they will. But just as practicing life skills on a screen does not negate practicing them outside of a screen, the reverse of that is also true. We don’t want kids to ignore an opportunity to practice a skill in a digital world just because it’s in a digital world.” — Ash Brandin, author of Power On and the brains behind
Last week, I began a conversation with Ash Brandin, the author of Power On and the brains behind
, about the power of bringing curiosity instead of shame to moments of parental guilt and burnout.We also talked about how the screen time conversation connects to other feminist issues and writers, such as
and her work on the leisure gap, on the notion of rest as resistance, on what she calls Human Giver Syndrome in her book, and Amelia and on the burnout-inducing impact of that concept. As it turns out, there are so many other more ways to think about screen time, with both critical thinking and compassion, that take us beyond the “good-bad” binary that typically flattens caregiver conversations about tech.In this part of the interview, we explore the gray areas between “good” and “bad” tech use and parenting in greater detail, making connections between the way we talk about tech and the way we talk about food (something Ash discussed recently with
, who writes about dismantling diet culture). We also place Ash’s work in conversation with that of mindfulness experts and Kristin Neff, and their frameworks for thinking about habits and emotional resilience.I’ve talked to so many people about this interview since Ash and I chatted, and I know I’m going to be linking back to this two-part series many times in the future as well. I feel like I’ve taken away not just wisdom on screen time from Ash, but wisdom about parenting in general, wisdom that can be applied to such a wide variety of things.
I hope this conversation helps you, too, to break free of binary good-bad thinking and unnecessary waves of shame—about yourself, about your parenting, and about using technology to meet the needs of your family members. Instead, may it offer you a heaping serving of critical thinking, curiosity, and self-compassion. I know it did for me.
Before we jump into Ash’s interview, some housekeeping notes:
Be sure to mark your calendars for our next donation-based caregiver circle on Tuesday, December 2nd at 10:30am EST on Zoom. We’ll be discussing burnout prevention. To learn more about what goes down during our circles, click here. To get on the list to receive our Zoom invites, please click here.
Please save the date for our first workshop of 2026: Coming Home to the Body in Midlife on Thursday, January 29th at 12pm EST, with the incredible Kate Carson. More details coming soon!
Okay, back to the brilliant Ash!
Ryan: In the first part of this interview, we established that caregivers get to have needs. That women in particular, and women of color especially, deserve rest. And that tech can be used as a tool to meet those needs.
And yet, I’m betting there are still some people out there who won’t buy this argument. Not because they have a problem with women meeting their needs per se–at least not in a way they’d publicly admit–but because they still have this notion that these needs should be done without screens, in a way that is “better.” I’d love to talk about that with you.
When you spoke recently with Virginia Sole-Smith, who writes about fatphobia and diet culture in America, you both compared this attitude, quite accurately, to the way that Americans feel about food. This attitude that of course, you should eat when you’re hungry–as long as what you’re eating is kale and avocado toast, and not evil processed food.
In both kinds of discourse, consumption of the “wrong” thing still equals bad, and less consumption overall still equals best. Which is a very binary, moralizing view of things.
Ash: Yep, 1000%.
Ryan: So how can we begin to soften this stance of techno-orthorexia, to look at the gray area between “good” and “bad” when it comes to tech? How can we balance critical thinking and compassion? How can caregivers learn how to discern what truly harmful tech content or kid behavior looks like, and to distinguish this from the many ambient, not-so-real, pearl-clutchy, diet-culture-adjacent, “all screen time is bad” beliefs that are circulating out there?
Ash: Oh, God.
Ryan: I mean, I know you wrote an entire book about this, so maybe this question is not entirely fair.
Ash: I know. I’m taking a second to just think about which way I want to answer this.
[Long, thoughtful pause.]
Ash: So I have a whole chapter in the book that’s devoted to “The Research.” But I honestly don’t really like talking about it very much, because very quickly, it becomes clear that this kind of aversion isn’t about the research at all. It’s much more about our own moral associations with screens. I’ve seen this happen in real time, where even if you give someone something that’s kind of irrefutable, or shows that actually, this piece of evidence was biased, or outdated, et cetera, people will say, “Well, I still don’t believe it. Well, it’s still bad.”
So I think this goes back to being able to be curious about this question of, “What is it that I’m most afraid of?”
Because otherwise, I could tell a caregiver, you should be caring about this. You don’t need to be caring as much about that other thing. But in some ways I might just give somebody else another thing to fear.
So if there’s something they’re already really, really worried about, then I mean, maybe start there. Because we can have a bad relationship with anything, right? We can have an unhealthy, unsustainable relationship with exercise, which can be beneficial in other contexts. So often, it’s not about the thing, it’s about our relationship with the thing.
That’s one of the reasons that I don’t like advice that is so myopic, and so focused on, like, the number of minutes, the pace of the show, the rating, the this, the that. Because you can have a child who is watching, or playing something, for an “acceptable” number of minutes, but that’s not the real issue.
To go back to what you said earlier about Fortnite and kids in the Bronx, if Fortnite is the only way that a kid will be able to socialize with their friends, that relationship to Fortnite is more concerning to me than how many minutes they’re playing it. I’m more concerned about the fact that this is the only way that this child can feel connected to other people outside of school.
This might be because of circumstances beyond their control, right? It might be because they have to go home, and then they can’t leave the apartment, because there’s not a caregiver at home to go with them, and they don’t have a safe alternative. But it also might be because this child thinks, “If I want to feel like I’m in a group, if I want to feel like I belong, I have to play Fortnite.” I’d want to zoom out and think, “Are they able to meet this need in other ways? And do they know what need it is they’re meeting with Fortnite?”
For a kid who is very attached to Fortnite, I might ask: would this be as fun if you played it by yourself? If no, then okay, maybe it’s not just about the specific game. Maybe it’s that this is how you get to see other people. Do other activities or hobbies you engage in make you feel this way? Meaning, do you have more ways of meeting this need? Are you getting a variety of things? Because like food, it’s not so much that one food is “bad,” but moreso that we don’t want any one thing to be the only way of meeting a need.
So, paying more attention to our relationship with the thing than than a seemingly objective metric, I think, can go a long way.
Ryan: Thank you so much for answering that question in that way. You just took a question that somebody might have about your work, and you modeled the shift in thinking that you yourself have gone through, and the non-hierarchical approach that you take as a musician, parent and teacher. Like, “I see that you would like to hand me the expert crown, but I’m going to hand it back to you. I also get the question you’re asking me, but let me offer a more empowering way for you as a caregiver to frame this question, and to answer it yourself, by noticing what’s happening in your home with your child.”
This is the Simone Biles jump that I’ve seen you make over and over again in this book. It is really taking us from “Here’s how we normally think about this” to “Actually, here’s a different, more spacious way to think about this.” That, to me, is a powerful act of mindfulness.
Using mindful inquiry to make decisions about screen time
Ryan: At the heart of your work is noticing, right? You have written that notice is a workhorse word in your house.
Ash: Oh, yes.
Ryan: If we are going to begin a mindful inquiry about whether our children’s tech habits need to change, then beginning with noticing makes a lot of sense here. It is also very consistent with the way mindfulness and addiction expert Jud Brewer thinks about analyzing habits as well.
In his parlance, bringing mindfulness to habits, both beneficial and harmful, begins with noticing: What’s the cue? What’s happening inside? What’s happening first? Or, as you might say: what’s the need?
After that, it’s about noticing: what’s the response? What’s the behavior that is usually triggered when that cue arises? This can lead to noticing, “Oh, whenever I feel stressed, I pick up my phone.” Or, “Oh, whenever I feel like my teachers were super extra bossy at school, I really want to have more autonomy and be on my own tablet. I don’t want to watch movies with other people.”
Finally, there’s a gentle inquiry: well, is that good, or not?
Ultimately, you have to kind of co-define “good” with your child. But it’s the same kind of tuning in, and trying to know, as you might try on if you were intuitively eating: How do I feel when I eat this food?
With tech, this intuitive inquiry might look like: How do you feel when you play Fortnite? What is it giving you? What are you getting out of this? Does that need to change? If so, is it even possible to change it?
Ash: Right.
Ryan: As you’ve said, sometimes I can’t come up with an alternative to the tablet for my kid tomorrow. I have to go to work. If so, let’s at least lose the guilt and blame about it.
However, if change is necessary and possible, then you provide a whole framework, in your book, for different ways that you can do that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but what I took away from the book is that this part really is all about bringing mindfulness to this question of, “What is the relationship that is unfolding between my child and the thing that we’re talking about?” Not just about the research, which is very noisy, as you’ve noted, anyway. Or the ratings for this or that new thing, because there’s going to be a million new things. You talk about that being overwhelming for caregivers.
As with any new friend that’s coming into our child’s lives, we don’t necessarily know everything about that person. But staying curious about the relationship probably makes more sense than making hard and fast rules about how you can be friends with this kind of person, and you can’t be friends with this other kind of person.
Ash: Yeah. And I completely get the urge—because it’s a place that’s very easy for me to go to—of wanting those hard and fast rules. Because ultimately, we don’t want to do it wrong, right? Especially when we’re talking about kids, we feel—rightfully, for obviously good reasons—that we want to do right by our kids, and don’t want to do something that could be harmful. That’s obviously not a bad instinct.
And, we are fed a lot of messaging that implies that one quick decision made in isolation is going to be some flipping a switch that we can never possibly undo. I can think of very few things in parenting where something is going to have that demonstrable an impact. If something were going to have that demonstrable an impact, it’s probably more related to our relationship with our child or our own reaction than serving the wrong food, or allowing the wrong show once or twice in isolation.
What is probably significantly more impactful is being able to model being willing to say, “I don’t know,” or “That didn’t work, so I’ll try something different.” We kind of don’t want that to be happening, with our child as the medium, right? I understand that. And, we also recognize that that’s also true, that this is what’s happening, even if we don’t want it to be true.
And I think even if we are allowing ourselves permission to say, “Okay, well, maybe I do let them play, but it might go poorly, and then I guess we figure it out together”—there’s obviously a real dysregulating loss of control in that. That feels so scary too. We still think, “But will I know what to do? And what if it’s something I can’t handle?” We can anxiety-spiral about all of those things. But there’s no amount of preparation that we could possibly do that’s going to prevent every eventuality, right?
So, obviously, in ways that are developmentally appropriate, I think the more that we can find ways of getting in there and sitting in the mess sometimes with our kids, and saying, “All right, well, that did not go the way we wanted it to, and what can we try next, and what can we do differently?”—that curiosity can inoculate us from self-blame.
I think it then also immediately does that for our kids, because we might be quick to blame ourselves, but we don’t want to see our kids do that. And so getting into that with them, and sitting in that with them, is such a powerful way of showing that they’re not having to do this on their own, and that if something doesn’t work, that there’s not going to be shame for them either. It’s just information. We can get playful and curious about it.
That’s a much more sustainable lifelong skill that we want our kids to have, and we also deserve that as well.
“We are fed a lot of messaging that implies that one quick decision made in isolation is going to be some flipping a switch that we can never possibly undo…If something were going to have that demonstrable an impact, it’s probably more related to our relationship with our child or our own reaction than serving the wrong food, or allowing the wrong show once or twice in isolation. What is probably significantly more impactful is being able to model being willing to say, “I don’t know,” or “That didn’t work, so I’ll try something different.” — Ash Brandin
How self-compassion meditation can support us—and our kids—with tech
Ryan: What I’m hearing is that when we are really trying to over-research, and then really script everything out and make sure that we don’t make any mistakes—which brings us back to diet culture, and orthorexia, and the endless parental quest to get it “right” instead of tolerating uncertainty—we’re missing this opportunity to sit next to a kid and model self-compassion. Which makes me think of mindfulness researcher Kristin Neff.
Neff has found that the three most essential components of cultivating self-compassion center on these three questions:
What hurts?
Who else feels this?
And what’s the medicine?
This aligns pretty perfectly with what you’re saying.
So for example, you have a kid who has now flamed out in Fortnite, and his friends said something really mean because he didn’t do what they wanted him to do successfully. And, now, you’re sitting together on the floor, and there’s an opportunity and there’s agency for a caregiver in that situation to say, like, “Wow. Something big just happened. It looks like you’re having a big feeling about it. What do you think that feeling is?” This is language I’ve heard you use. In other words: what hurts?
And then, there’s a chance to connect to common humanity, to the notion that other people feel this too. An adult might say, “Well, I don’t know anything about Fortnite, but I definitely know what it’s like when my friends are really frustrated that I’m not doing what they think I should be doing.” Maybe there’s even ground for telling a story about that, as your grandparents did across the years and generations with you. Different details, same problems and conclusions.
And then, there’s a chance to ask: “What do you think would help?” As in: What’s the medicine? And really co-creating that answer with a kid, helping them reclaim their own agency, in a moment that might otherwise feel really disempowering and without-choice for them.
In my mind, in that moment, a parent might lack outdoor access, or they might lack additional caregiver support, but they don’t lack agency, and they don’t lack the materials they need to be an incredible caregiver in that moment. They have everything they need to teach into a powerful and protective set of skills. With screens as the place of practice.
Ash: And frankly, we want all the ways we can practice that, right? Because then we can show kids that these are often skills that transfer to every part of their lives.
Adults are very quick, I think, to silo things, particularly related to technology. Like, “Oh, video games are over here, and social media is over there, and this thing is over here.” As if they’re all very different. Kids now do not see those as being different. Often they treat them like there’s not a lot of strict borders between them.
At the same time, I think kids do sometimes struggle to see this sort of skill transfer across different parts of their lives. For example, a student might not understand how listening to instructions in a classroom and listening to instructions from your soccer coach are in fact the same skill. They don’t realize it because school feels so separate to them from soccer. And there’s so much opportunity in the world of technology for our kids to show them how those skills are present, and can be practiced and then transferred to other parts of their lives, so that they’re not seeing them as completely separate. We want them to be able to blend those skills across different parts of their lives.
A naysayer could say, well, kids can practice life skills outside of a screen. Absolutely, they could, and they will. But just as practicing life skills on a screen does not negate practicing them outside of a screen, the reverse of that is also true. We don’t want kids to ignore an opportunity to practice a skill in a digital world just because it’s in a digital world.
Ryan: Absolutely. In a similar vein, I really appreciate the way that you’ve also established the benefits of discussing screen time more neutrally, right? When talking about soccer versus Fortnite, for example, you note that they’re both leisure activities, and thus equally valid. This has the benefit of kind of taking screen time off this pedestal where it becomes The Precious, and kids get very fixated on it. Not because that’s how they experience reality, but because that’s how we as caregivers are talking about it.
Ash: Yes. We also need them to be able to practice skills in those digital worlds because they’re not going anywhere.
Ryan: That’s something you often point out as well, with a lot of pragmatism and acceptance—that they will almost certainly be digital citizens in the future, in one way or another. And we can either teach them how to be good ones, or not.
Even though we might be sort of like the digital immigrant parents, who remember another way, a time before the internet, and thus the old ways and the new ways do feel very bifurcated in our minds. For them, they are the first-generation citizens who live much of their lives there, in this digital world, and they need to be given the skills and tools to succeed in the hybrid landscape that we now inhabit.
Ash: Right.
Ryan: I think your book’s coming at such a beautiful time, given all of this.
I think this is a moment where a lot of people like us who were raised in the 90s are starting to reckon with our own relationships with screens, as the first so-called digital natives—when really, we are the first digital immigrants.
We’re also healing from the pandemic, and what that was like, and what it showed us about our frayed community networks.
It’s also a moment where we as Millennial parents and teachers are stepping into the responsibility, and the opportunity, of what it is to raise this next generation of digital citizens.
In this moment, what I’m taking away from your work is that there are so many applicable mindfulness skills that can be applied by kids in a digital space, and they aren’t cheapened just because it’s a digital space.
Ash: Exactly.
Ryan: This means that of course, we continue to proceed with awareness and even caution sometimes, but that the digital world doesn’t have to remain a source of constant fear or aversion either, just because it has been in the recent past. We have the collective power, right here in the present, to make it a place of possibility.