Here is the full transcript of Internet Safety expert Jesse Weinberger’s talk titled “The Danger of Instant Gratification” at TEDxUrsulineCollege 2014 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Challenge of Parenting in the Digital Age
How do I tell my child, “No”? This is a great question. This is a question that I’m asked constantly. The last time I was asked this question was actually last night, less than 14 hours ago.
See, I travel all over the United States and I teach teachers, students, parents, and law enforcement officers all about Internet safety. And Nick, who was talking earlier about Internet addiction, I don’t know if he’s still here. First of all, we’re both from Queens, New York. If I knew so many New Yorkers were going to be here, I would have been far more excited.
Not that I’m not excited, but I would have been far more excited. So Nick was sort of preaching to the choir to me and I was sort of nodding my head off his shoulders as he was talking. Because this issue of saying no or this issue of engaged parenting is more critical than ever in this digital sphere.
And the reason why it’s more critical than ever in this arena is because whether your children are 2 or 22, they’re up to their eyeballs in technology. And perhaps even less than Nick, I’m a programmer by trade. I believe in tech education. I work on one-to-one programs, putting devices in the hands of children.
The Importance of Setting Boundaries
I believe in all of these things. I also believe that sometimes the biggest answer and best answer is to smash a ball-peen hammer to the front of your child’s smartphone. And there’s something very cathartic and cleansing that happens when you hear that glass tinkling as it hits the ground, it’s awesome.
So what’s the issue, right? The biggest issue in terms of Internet safety is what Nick was talking about, this lack of frontal lobe completion. Now when I talk to your kids and kids like them, what I tell them is your turkey popper hasn’t popped yet. You’re not done cooking, right?
And when I was in Colorado in a very rural area, I had blank faces because they grow their own turkeys on their own farms and they had never seen a turkey popper so we had to change the metaphor. Either way, the front part of their brain, as Nick was saying, the part that tells your child it’s probably not a good idea to take a picture of his junk and send it to 25 of his closest friends, that part of the brain is not done baking.
The part of the brain that is done baking, by the time they’re tweens, is an area called the nucleus accumbens. That part of the brain is pleasure-seeking. So to review, the pleasure-seeking part of the brain is going “womp, womp, womp, womp,” and the frontal lobe that says, “Yeah, that’s not a good idea,” not so much.
The Dangers of the Internet
So how could this possibly go wrong? In all of the possible issues in Internet safety, here’s what I’m not going to talk about today, right? I’m not going to talk about sexual predation. I’m not going to talk about the fact there are 750,000 sexual predators online at any given moment, like now, and now, and now.
They’re not looking to hang out with us. They’re looking to troll your son’s Instagram so that he can sit in his basement and look at the pictures from your last son’s baseball tournament. I’m not going to talk about the fact that your daughter’s probable cyberbully is her best friend, because in 50% of the cases, it’s always the best friend.
In 58% of the cases, children cyberbully out of revenge because they’ve been victims themselves. We’re not going to talk about that. We’re not going to talk about the fact that 11 and 12-year-old children are routinely engaging in sexting behaviors, and the fact that in the best-case scenario, they can be publicly humiliated.
In the worst-case scenario, they’re losing scholarships, losing job offers, and possibly going to jail for felony child pornography. We’re also not going to talk about the fact that your children, yes, your children, your darling sweet angel babies, are consuming copious amounts of pornography, that the new age of onset of pornography consumption is eight years old, that the new onset of pornography addiction is 11 and 12 years old.
The Problem with Instant Gratification
We’re not going to talk about that. Aren’t you glad? We’re not going to talk about any of those things. So even if we ignore all of the obvious risks of unsupervised, unmonitored, unfettered access to internet, even if we ignore everything Nick said about internet addiction, about dopamine levels, even if we ignore all of that, there’s something else.
I have Ginsu knives to sell you. Wait, there’s more. We’re raising an entire generation of children who will never say, “I don’t know.” Do you remember your parents saying to you, “Stop saying you don’t know”?
My mother used to say this all the time, only she’s Cuban and has an accent and sounded different, but it was the same thing, “I don’t know.” Now, nobody doesn’t not know because if they’re sitting in the cafeteria and someone goes, “What’s the name of the guy that sings that song, ‘I like big butts and I cannot lie’? Who sings that?”
They don’t go, “I don’t know,” five phones come out of five back pockets, like a ricochet, and they find out. So what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with finding all those answers right away? That’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world.
The Value of Learning and Memorization
The problem is what instant gratification leads to. The problem is that in many schools, did you know, they’re not teaching the state capitals anymore?
Not teaching that. And so I asked, why would you not teach the state capitals? This seems kind of important.
Well, and the reason that it was explained to me is that, you know, if kids really want to know that the capital of Ohio is Columbus, they can kind of just look it up. Yeah. But that’s like saying that the process of the memorization, the process of the learning, the process that has to take hold in order for the child to retain that information doesn’t have intrinsic value, and I have an issue with that.
So why wouldn’t we just extrapolate that to all education? Why teach history when you have Wikipedia? Why teach algebra? Why teach algebra? No offense to my friend, the math professor.
When you can just teach someone how to use a calculator, right? How is the tool replacing the learning? But what do we know about learning and what do we know about education lately?
The Importance of Grit and Perseverance
We know a lot, and we’re ignoring all of it. I have a hero in life. It’s become kind of a stalker-ish sort of relationship. Her name is Angela Lee Duckworth, you know? She is a brilliant scientist, she’s a brilliant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. I had the chance to meet her, and I had to stop touching her. Like I really, she really is one of my life heroes. If I can make a little bobblehead of her and stick her on my dashboard so she can bobble with me everywhere I went, I probably would, which again, sounds slightly stalker-ish.
What we’ve learned from Angela Duckworth is this concept called grit, right? What she’s learned is that children who are gritty will be more successful in life. What is grit? Grit is your ability to persevere past failure. Grit is your ability to have a long game versus a short game.
The Power of Growth Mindset
Grit is your ability to have a goal in the distance and go after it with single-minded focus later, not now. What else do we know? We know from another scientist named Carol Dweck, who wrote an excellent book called “Mindset.” If you have not read it, you must read it. She teaches this concept called growth mindset. You either have a growth mindset or you have a fixed mindset. What is growth mindset?
Growth mindset is the belief that your brain is pliable and growable, because it is, if you apply very specific, deliberate practice tactics. If you practice in the right way, your brain will literally grow. We know from her research that if you teach this concept to children, if you tell children, “Suzy, your brain will grow, literally, if you do these things,” that she will be a more successful student and she will succeed at higher and faster rates.
The Talent Code and Deliberate Practice
We know that this is true. The last thing that we know for sure, or many other things that we know for sure, but including this, there’s another great book called “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle, another book that you should read. I’m giving you lots of homework.
Another book that you should definitely read. That book says that talent doesn’t really exist as we perceive it or have perceived it for years, that your talent is not set in stone, that your IQ is a movable number, that all of these things are improvable by a deliberate practice.
What is deliberate practice? Deliberate practice is not playing the same song on your violin from beginning to end. Deliberate practice is not going out, I’m sorry, gentlemen and ladies, and going out and playing 18 holes of golf. That is not deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is picking the two stanzas in the song that you’re tripping over and playing just those two stanzas for 4,000 times in a row. Deliberate practice is picking the portion of your golf swing that doesn’t work and repeating just that 4,000 times. When children engage in deliberate practice, we know that they succeed faster and farther.
The Clash Between Instant Gratification and Success
If we know that these things are true, we know that grit is a thing and it’s valuable. We know that growth mindset is a thing and it’s valuable. We know that deliberate practice works.
So how does that apply to instant gratification? The problem is that it doesn’t. So consumer world and technology world give the appearance that heavy lifting is for people who don’t have any talent. The only success that’s worth having is the success that comes easily. Everything we see and everything we buy tells us this.
You used to whiten your teeth in 30 days, then 20 days, then 10 days, now instantly. If Viagra came up with a topical formula, every guy would carry a little paint roller in his back pocket and it would be on like Donkey Kong because we want it now, now, now, now, now and we won’t settle for anything less.
Instant gratification and the belief in instant gratification stunts your child’s ability to build the skills that allow them to be critical consumers of media. They don’t know how to do this. I will speak to over 50,000 students this year, they don’t know how to do this.
The Dangers of Unrealistic Expectations
They think that the Photoshopped, airbrushed girl in the magazine looks like that when she wakes up in the morning and so if we just buy the right wrinkle cream or lose enough weight or buy enough Spanx, there aren’t enough Spanx in the world to make you look like airbrushed Photoshop. I’m sorry to tell you, it’s not going to work.
Valuing and believing in instant gratification proves to your children that their success either has to be instant or clearly that means they’re not good at it and they’re going to fail and they’re just going to move on because they don’t understand that earning comes at the end of the hard work, not at the beginning of the hard work. So here’s my challenge for you.
When your five or six or seven or eight year old or older child shows you a picture that he drew just as an example of the garden, his little house, every kid’s little house looks the same. I don’t know why, but it does. I’m sure there’s some psychological reason for that.
Don’t just look at the picture and go, “Oh, good job.” First of all, you sound like a moron, okay? So what I’d like you to do is to just remove the term, “Oh, good job.” It’s always preceded by the “uh,” I don’t know why.
The Problem with “Good Job”
“Uh, good job.” Get rid of the good job. My five foot tall Cuban mother who talks like Ricky Ricardo hates that good job phrase. Only she says “good job,” right?
And she would say to my kids, because I started out good jobbing my kids, right? My son. You always screw up the first one. The second one, you’re better. And my mother used to go, “I see good job, good job. You don’t kill the cat. Good job. Good job. You don’t kick your sister. Good job. Good job. He’s not supposed to kill the cat. Good job.”
Why do we good job, sorry, why do we good job the things that they’re supposed to do? Because we give, we front load the praise and expect the, the, the earning or the striving to come after. Good job implies that you’re not paying attention and you don’t care enough to offer actual feedback.
Focusing on Effort, Not Outcome
Good job says that you’re okay with just okay. While you’re at it, hand him a participation trophy, right? Pat him on the head. And since I’m psychic, I can tell you that I have visions of you having a 32 year old son living in your basement.
Just telling you, if you’re okay with that, by all means. So if you’re not supposed to say good job, what are you supposed to say? Choose your own words, but we need to focus on the effort, not on the outcome.
You need to look at that picture of that garden and say to your cute little son or daughter, “I love how you painted every blade of grass individually. That must have taken a lot of work. I love how you use two colors of yellow in that sun. That seems to me to be an improvement on the last time that you painted that sun.”
Give them accurate feedback. Pay attention to what they’re doing. Focus on his process. Focus on his effort because the day will come when he does fail and he does need to strive and you’ll be able to show him that all of the failures along the way were just road signs telling him where he needs to go if he wants to go further and to succeed farther.
The Value of Adversity and Scarcity
Adversity and scarcity breed character and creativity and resourcefulness. Some of the best childhood memories come from playing in the mud with a box. They should also eat dirt, apparently. They need to eat some dirt and less YouTube, no question.
Your job as parents is a singular thing. Get them not dead and out of your house. That’s the job, right? Like I explained to my 16-year-old son that even the sheets are optional. Like by law I have to give you a bed. The sheets are extra.
So if you can get them not dead and out and add some love in, I’m not, you know, I’m not crazy, add some love in and create a human being who gives more to the universe than that which they take, then you’ve won. Thank you.
