How a Neuroscientist Talks to His Teens about Tech
Last week we had the privilege to speak to Kigumi supporter Dr. Joshua Gold, Professor of Neuroscience and Co-Director of the Computational Neuroscience Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, about his experience raising three digital natives. Despite Dr. Gold’s professional expertise in the neural basis of decision-making and how the brain can take uncertain information from a variety of sources and form categorical judgments that guide behavior, he is still unable to understand why his 16-year-old chooses to watch TikTok videos about cats. Read on to learn more about how he navigates parenting in a digital age.
Kigumi: You have 3 teens who are digital natives. Back when you were becoming a first time parent, what was your approach to technology and parenting?
Josh Gold (JG): At my job [as a neuroscience researcher and professor], I'm pretty immersed in technology and I used to work at Apple a long time ago, so in terms of knowing what the technology is and what's available I feel pretty confident. When I worked at Apple, I worked on one of the early handwriting recognition systems for this thing called the Newton, which were like personal digital assistants and precursors to smartphones. So when I became a parent it wasn't a question of becoming familiar with the technology. But of course, navigating it with children is a totally different thing.
I certainly wouldn't start by saying there were specific conscious decisions that made everything work. It's being a parent, you just kind of stumble through. For my kids when they were toddlers, it was about how much time they were on the device. I remember they had little iPads, that was the technology they were using when they were small. Back then it was just trying to limit the time. Now, there's also a lot more content for kids, which is different than when I was young and there were cartoons on at certain times. So we kind of stumbled through all of that.
Kigumi: A major question for parents is at what stage of adolescence to give their kid their own phone. When did you introduce phones?
JG: The big thing was our kids didn't get phones until they were 13. They were really the last kids in their friend group to get phones. The reason was that they were starting to go off on their own with their friends, and they needed a phone in case they needed to call us. We were pretty firm about waiting until 13 years old, and they didn’t make too much of a fuss, so we managed to stick to it. It was like a gut feeling, it felt like 13 was about the right age. In the end, you're making a decision that you think is reasonable. There's no hard cutoff when your brain is all of a sudden capable of doing something like using a smart phone responsibly. It's a pretty gradual progression of how your brain develops.
Kigumi: Did you have any rules, or what we have now in my generation of parents called “tech / media use family agreements”?
JG: We're not super rule-based in our family. My kids are pretty reasonable and it's more about leading by example. We also have a lot of everyday conversation about these [tech or social] things where it just comes up and then that conversation reflects shared values about how to use tech in our household. The interview questions you sent me I put on a Google Doc and I shared them with my kids and asked them for what they thought, because I figured that they would probably remember better than me and have better perspective. So here is what the oldest had to say and I should mention that she [jokes a lot]:
“I think bullying is quite effective to keep each other from using technology irresponsibly, like when we made fun of Amina* [the youngest sibling], for believing a Tiktok that was fake [and that stopped her from falling for fake videos]. Also the time I went into Brendan’s* room when he was watching basically a propaganda YouTube channel to tell women they should stay at home and cook…she clearly paid for her videos to reach more people. So I watched it with Brendan and made him pause the video every time the influencer said something stupid and made him explain why it was stupid.”
Kigumi: So they role model and learn from each other, watch out for each other, and already have a strong relationship as siblings.
JG: Yeah. If I start a conversation with one of them I will always learn something about the other two, they are close. The one kind of formal thing I've done is I sat down with each of them when they've got their phones and go through the privacy settings just to make sure that everything's kind of set up right. I should also say they just don't really use their phones as much as other teens. My oldest daughter, I think she just doesn't use her phone except to talk to her sister and friends.
The only thing that I've ever worried about is my youngest daughter [who is 16]. She does spend a lot of time just sitting there watching Tiktok videos. And they're just dumb. I don't think she's going down rabbit holes of harmful things - she only watches cat videos and those strangely satisfying videos of people doing cake decoration. I just don't understand how you could sit there and watch that for so long, and I would prefer that she was doing other things. But then I think about it and she does get out of the house and sees friends and goes to the gym. So [since she has a pretty balanced life] I don't know how useful it is for me to push the part about [TikTok].
Kigumi: It sounds like you have a strong line of communication with all three of the kids. That reminds me of all of the things that we already hear about how parents can successfully teach their kids to avoid cyber risks, and how a lot of it links back to simply knowing each other as family members first and foremost and knowing about each other’s lives and interests in a natural way.
JG: I would say that the single most important thing for us is how close the kids are to each other. I have no idea how you foster this, but my kids are all close, and they all talk to each other. Any conversation I have with any of them, I learn about all of them. So it's not like I need to figure out Amina, figure out Brendan, etc. They talk to each other, particularly the girls [who are 5 years apart], they talk all the time. Although talk may not be the literal word. I ask the 16-year-old all the time “did you talk to your sister recently?” And she’ll say “Yeah.” I’ll say “Well, what's she up to?” Then she’ll pause and try to explain. She's like, “When I said, ‘talk’, that just means we have each other on video and keep on doing what we're doing. I could have talked to her the last few days in a row, but not said anything that has any information content that I can pass along to you.”
The other thing I feel super lucky about is my oldest is the most responsible and that makes everything so much easier. One time, [our middle child] was 11 and he was texting with a bunch of friends, and they were just saying stuff, and one of the parents got really upset, and someone got in trouble and we had to sit down and talk to him. I remember his older sister was 13 or 14 and she just joined us at the table. We hadn’t decided to have her there, that was just the most perfectly natural, that was her relationship to us. So all the questions you're asking [with KiguLab] to figure out how do you talk to a teenager? Well, the answer is it's a lot easier for a teenager to talk to a teenager, and we had a teenager that would talk to the other teenagers, and that made it a lot easier.
Sidenote:
KiguLab is our new edutainment platform for digital natives 8-18 years old launching summer 2025. It’s designed for kids to teach other kids about digital well-being and AI ethics and share advice and experiences with each other about these topics. If you’re interested in signing your school or educational community up email info@kigumigroup.com.
Kigumi: You mentioned an interesting thing that I want to circle back to, which is privacy. Obviously there's a safety element where you should always enable parental controls on their devices. That’s just hygiene. And you obviously are in a situation where there're checks and balances with your three children. Beyond that, is there a way you think about respecting the boundaries of what is private digitally for your teen? Do you think they have a right to digital privacy?
JG: That’s a good question. The only time that we monitored any of that was after that thing with my son. It was maybe for another six months or so, and remembering correctly, like the main outcome from that is we ended up catching that one of his friends said a couple of things about self harm, and we contacted their parents and got them help. But in the end, after the six months it didn't feel like there was anything we needed to monitor further. Maybe we’re naive. This point came up last night during dinner with the kids. I was talking to them about this stuff, trying to get more information, and my son's girlfriend said that when she got a phone, her parents monitored all her accounts for some number of years. They had shared access to all her accounts, and to her, that was the natural way of doing things, she didn't describe it as some big violation of privacy.
Kigumi: So every family is different. It sounds like you are able to take a relaxed approach because you had a few very important things in place: you have pre-built trust between you and your children; you have a sense of proportion about when things go wrong; and you have a way to address things when things go wrong instead of sweeping them under the rug.
JG: I would never claim that any of these choices are the perfect parenting choices, and that's why my kids have turned out well. There's just a certain amount of luck involved. The thing we haven't talked about that's 100% obvious that helps is what their friend groups are, that plays such a role in all of this. I was lucky that my kids all had trustworthy friends, they were people who you know and whose parents you know. Even if we weren't best friends with the parents, we knew they were good parents.
Kigumi: I'm going to retitle this interview “The world's most functional family.”
JG: I'm just lucky. My kids, they really know who they are. And that's been the most amazing part of my life, is to see them be that way.
*Names have been changed
