Aaron, I'll give it to you.

All right.

Um, well, I wanna start, you know, by evening the playing field here and acknowledge that what you can't see off-screen is that my 11-year-old is sitting on the couch on his tablet while I'm doing this.

Um, so I am in the trenches with you.

Um, you know, and, and a- and a lot of this, uh, is, is about finding balance rather than some sort of, uh, perfect number of hours or, um, a You know, magic number in terms of how much time our children should be interacting with technology.

Um, but, you know, and I, and I can't say what that amount is specifically for any individual.

Um, but what I can say with certainty is that as parents, we are in the best position to make those decisions about our child's developmental, balancing our child's developmental, emotional, family, school, academic, cognitive, and leisure needs, um, with input from, you know, somebody who may be more of an expert on technology and the way it affects our brain development, but that each one of us as a parent is the expert on our child.

This is you, Aaron.

Of course, of course

...

but, um, [laughs] but, uh, you know, I, I agree that, you know, we're, we're not, we're not necessarily meant to...

We're, you know, when we mature, we're not really meant to cry in public.

We can.

But you know, w- w- but we, uh, but it's so important that we then have a place to reconnect to our feelings when we get home, right? Like, when I go to a conference or something, I don't like it, so I'm just kind of armored up, and I don't feel tired.

I don't miss my family.

[laughs]

So do you want to talk about this or is this mine?

Sure.

I'm happy to.

So the word here is attachment.

But what attachment refers to is the science of connection.

But substitute any word you want for this.

The founder of attachment theory, John Bowlby, I've heard this story told by his son, when he came up with this concept of understanding this relational drive that parents and children have.

It's a beautifully tempered response to greet them in that kind of way when they first get off the bus.