Is My Child A Monster? A Parenting Therapy Podcast · Leslie Cohen-Rubury

How To Talk To Your Kid About Phones With Special Guest Max Stossel

August 12, 2025·50 min·2 clips
Every time we're hitting one of those little red icons, we're playing that slot machine.
Leslie Cohen-Rubery interviews Max Stossel, founder of Social Awakening and former social media strategist, about how smartphones and social media function like slot machines for kids' brains. They discuss practical strategies for parents including delaying smartphone introduction, asking 'how does it make you feel' instead of 'do you like it', modeling intentional device use, and choosing bigger shared screens over isolated small ones.

As heard by us

A steady, useful conversation about phones, modeling, and the strain of constant reachability.

This episode lands in the hard middle of parenting in a phone-saturated world: how do you talk to a kid about screens when they are shaping self-worth and development at the same time?

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Why you'd press play

Talk about phones without turning it into a lecture or a fight.

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