Good Inside with Dr. Becky · Good Inside

Screens without Shame: Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price

January 27, 2026·48 min·3 clips

Catherine Price says tech companies hire thousands of engineers to hack brains the way slot machines do.

1. Good Inside with Dr. Becky focuses on screens without shame, using Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price to address phones, children, and parental guilt. 2. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, and Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up with Your Phone, bring research and practical parenting guidance. 3. The episode asks what parents should actually do about phones, attention, and family connection, not just what to feel guilty about. 4. Haidt says mothers around the world moved quickly after The Anxious Generation, including a Brazil effort that introduced school-phone legislation through a female legislator. 5. He says that Brazil legislation passed in 10 months and that Australia raised the age to 16 last week. 6. Haidt says the biggest surprise is that people already saw the problem but needed a concrete path for action. 7. He also says the deeper problem is larger than mental illness and includes attention, reading books, and sustained focus. 8. He describes his NYU class of about 30 undergraduates, where roughly a quarter spend four hours a day on social media or more. 9. He says those students regain homework time and social time when they reduce heavy social media use. 10. Dr. Becky connects this to daily rhythms, especially the idea that starting a day with iPad time means starting with “no effort, high dopamine.” 11. Catherine Price says adults report fragmented attention and use standalone alarm clocks so the phone is not the first object touched in the morning. 12. She says our lives are where we pay attention, and that each attention choice is also a choice about how to live. 13. Price argues that willpower is the wrong lens because tech companies hire thousands of engineers to design apps like slot machines. 14. Haidt uses the rider-and-elephant metaphor from The Happiness Hypothesis to say reasoning alone does not control habitual behavior. 15. Dr. Becky says shame freezes parents, while compassion and systems make change possible. 16. Haidt and Price compare phones to training environments, with Haidt arguing that social media use before puberty is closer to exposing a developing brain to alcohol than to learning to swim. 17. The conversation is direct, intimate, and heavily metaphor-driven, with repeated jokes, confessions, and pushback. 18. The format stays conversational and practical, moving from research to scripts parents can use with children. 19. Parents who want concrete, shame-free phone boundaries will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a tech-free parenting chat or abstract theory may skip it.

As heard by us

A direct look at how phone habits at home shape family life, with a practical edge.

The discussion treats screens, phones, and family life as one problem instead of three separate ones. It keeps coming back to the pressure parents carry, and it makes a plain point: kids often learn their device habits from the adults around them.

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Why you'd press play

For the parent who wants a phones-and-kids talk without the shame spiral.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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