I mean, why do we keep getting trapped in all of these all-or-nothing conversations about technology?

Yeah, that's a good, great question, and, you know, I think, yeah, you sort of, you, I, I like the direction you were going in it because as a pers- as a teen, and, you know, both through my work and then I'm a father.

I have a, I have a 13-year-old son, and his life happens on the screen, right? And so the second you start to talk about how the screen, you know, you start to, the, if you start to regulate and try to make choices about the screen, it's the same thing as telling him where he can go, who he can hang out with, what he can and can't do.

It's not just the screen, right? Like, so much of his life is there.

And so for a parent, it's really hard to have empathy around not just, like, hey, this is, you know, the place where you're watching videos or playing games or doing what seems like really tr- like, you know, maybe optional tasks, where from the teen perspective, this is their life.

This isn't, like, part of their life.

This isn't a slice of their life.

Right.

So Jason, from a developmental psychology perspective, why would you say the adolescent brain becomes so focused on peers and belonging?

Yeah, that's a great question, and one of the things that happens to all of us, right, all of us go through this phase where we, at one point in our life, we believe that we are really, like we can only conceive of our brain and our thoughts, so that we're the only people out there.

And then we go through this phase that happens to line up with middle school where we all of a sudden, everybody, we realize, we realize that everybody else out there, my friends, my parents, my neighbors, everyone out there is thinking, and we become obsessed with this mirror, right? What if they're thinking about me? What if they think about me? And we assume, because we're coming out of this space where we were the only thing that existed, and our thoughts were the only thing that existed, we just sort of assume as kids that everyone must be thinking about me all the time, which is really, when you come back and you try to look back as an adult, it's something that feels really, really foreign to how an adult thinks.

But truly as a middle schooler, that theory of mind that other people can have thoughts and other people could be thinking about me all of a sudden becomes a people are thinking about me, and what are they thinking about me, and I'm worried about thinking about, them thinking about me.

And it becomes this, this pressure that pushes them and to really think about, like, what is their status, what is their social, you know, and, like, what is their sense of belonging? And, you know, I think, you know, while it can be really hard for adults to sort of directly remember this, I think that what a lot of adults do remember, and a fun experiment you can try with yourself, is that we all have really, really, really strong memories of our middle school and our high school friendships, and that's because we're so attuned to those relationships at those age.

Uh, they form these really strong memories, and, you know, it, it really is that these memories and these friendships and these peer relationships, like this is when they're forming.

This is when we're setting our sense of, setting up our sense of self, and it just becomes this, this really...

So Jason, what would you say to parents who misun- and what do you think parents misunderstand most about executive functioning then?