Ryan Vet on Let There Be Joy: Raising Kids in the Digital Age

Thanks, Shannon. Thanks for having me.

Well, I appreciate that.

Thanks, Shannon. And I think it's one of those things that sounds cliché and simple, and yet we live in an information age where we can get the answers to any of our curious questions, but that doesn't necessarily satisfy our curiosity. Having information is different than actually staying curious. So since you brought up your brooch, let's play off that a little bit. A book I just finished reading called Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Herzog — if that title doesn't intrigue you, then I don't know what will. But I read this book and it's about animal and human relationships over history. And one of the things that you would think is there's cat people and there's dog people in the world. We have this idea in our head. And he unpacks it in his book. He was curious about this idea, and so he started asking cat people whether they were actually cat people or not, or dog people. And ironically, many people who own cats actually would say that they are dog people. That's the interesting thing about it. And so part of staying curious is not taking everything at face value and understanding why things are the way they are. And that's a lot of where I spend my time in human formation.

My friends, my small group, other people that are in my community are often my guinea pigs for my bad stories, my bad jokes that I ultimately don't use on stage if they flop there. But also, we have a couple in our small group that have cats. And so they walked in, and I asked the husband, "Are you a cat person or a dog person?" Now, he's naturally pretty shy, and so he turns red and he looks at his wife and he's like, "I'm actually a dog person." Like, Hal Herzog was right in his book. But I say all of that — and it was not where I was going to go with that — but I think as we were talking about these three ideas, one of the things that I think allows us to find joy in our world today is this idea of staying curious. Because again, when we have any information we want at our fingertips, when we can ask the robot friend sitting on our counter what the weather is today or how long it's going to take to get to work, that eliminates curiosity. It answers questions, but there's a big difference between that and trying to figure out how something works. If you think about a kid and they have their crayon box, they always go for the purple or the blue or the green when they're drawing skin on someone's face when they're young. Why? That's not an experiment. That's just how they're seeing the world. They're seeing it through a different lens. They're seeing it with curiosity. But the more information we get, we actually start to lose that curiosity that we are born to have.

And I think we think that access to all this information technology makes us more well-rounded. But there's a big difference between being formed by experiences and actually just getting information. I think of the movie Slumdog Millionaire, which is so fascinating. That movie — and it's been out for over a decade and a half, so if you haven't watched it, it's not even a spoiler alert at this point, you're just behind — but he learned through experiences, staying curious, and that's how he won the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, or the equivalent of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, because he experienced things. And that experience turned into insight, and that insight turned into wisdom. And I think that's what we're missing so much in this information age. We can go read a book on parenting, for example — and I know you and I have talked about the word parenting, and that's a relatively new word within the last 40 years. Not that it didn't exist before, but as far as adopting parenting styles. And now almost three quarters of all millennial parents say that they have a parenting style that they conform to. And that's not being curious. That's applying information. Nothing wrong with that. But I think one of the most valuable things we can do in today's day and age is just stay curious. When I started researching what I was doing back in 2008, I will never forget, we found a chart and it said as society's knowledge is going up, our wisdom is going down.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think the question, when I think of specifically raising the next generation and when it comes to staying curious, is what forms people. And that's really the question. Whether it's the device in their hand — hopefully not that often — whether it's the kids that they play with on the playground, but even the parenting books. And I don't want to knock parenting books, because I do write a lot and some of that covers into the parenting realm. But if you have more than one kid, you know, or if you've even been around more than one kid, you know that they're not the same, and you cannot parent them the same way. The same discipline structures or reward structures just don't work. And one of the concerns I have with the information is, yes, people say, "I'm curious because I read a book, or I even listened to a podcast." I mean, we're on this podcast now. But sometimes that can be just as damaging if you take this and apply it as gospel truth and don't stay curious enough to say, "Hey, what can I glean from that that's helpful? And then what actually makes more sense in my particular context and with my particular kids?" I've got three kids and I cannot treat them the same. I treat them equally, right, with love and respect, but the way I discipline one wouldn't work for the other one. The other one would just laugh at that. Or the way I reward one, the other one would scoff and say, "That's a dumb reward." And so you really have to take all of this and try it out. And that's what staying curious is all about. It's not just the information, but applying that information.

Yeah, I would say ask the question: what forms people? Why do people do this? Why do you do what you do? And asking why. It's what the five-year-old always asks. I don't know how kindergarten teachers do it, but why? Why? Why? They're trying to understand why the world works. It's natural. As a human being, we want to know how the world works. But at some point, when we can go to Google instead of ask a teacher or ask a mentor or just observe it, that actually erodes some of our curiosity. That's cognitive erosion. We're taking things that used to be learned from human experience and now we're putting it on a machine. And that's really concerning.

Yeah, exactly. And that's a huge concern. Huge concern.

I think this is one of the most important things, and I've said this for decades in any topic I have, whether that's parenting or leadership. One of the scariest things that I'm seeing right now — motherhood in particular, but across all parents — is that motherhood is being done more and more in isolation. If you look at the generation being raised right now, being born right now, we have Gen Beta already being born. So you've got Gen Z in college, Gen Alpha in grade school, effectively up through about middle school and early high school, and then Gen Beta is being born. We've got a whole new generation we're hardly talking about. And my fear for them is that so many parents are outsourcing parenting. They're outsourcing that to AI. They're asking, "Hey, my kid got bit at school," or "My kid was the biter at school" — I've got both of those in my family — "what do you do with that?" And it is easy, right? We live in an easy world. It is easy to go and grab that information and then try to apply it to the situation. But there's a big difference between that and picking up the phone and calling your own parents, calling a peer who has kids maybe a little bit older, or even, if you don't want to do that, kids that are a little bit younger, and saying, "What would you do?"

But we're so afraid. We've sculpted our self-image so much — and social media has been a big reason we've done that — that we're afraid to be vulnerable and ask a question that, you know what, it's part of life. Your kid is going to get hit or be the hitter. That's just going to happen if they're interacting with other kids. I'm not saying it's right, but that's how we grow and learn that you shouldn't do those things. And it's better to learn it then than to learn it in a much later context. It's like the kid that is five or six or seven years old that slips a candy bar in their pocket in the checkout line at Target. The parent can walk them down and have a conversation. That's formative. That's a really good opportunity. Not that they stole in the first place, but you can have that conversation. But if you don't allow them to have those experiences, and the first time they do that is when they're 25, they're going to prison. And the same thing is true when you're walking or anything else. Babies fall down, and thankfully they wear diapers when they're learning to walk 95% of the time. So they've got a little bit of extra cushion, but they're okay. They're durable. They're close to the ground. They're only, you know, 20 inches tall, so falling doesn't hurt that bad. But if they were to learn to walk for the first time when they're four feet tall, that's a big fall. They're already much more fragile. Even though they're going to be a durable kid, they're still much more fragile than they were even when they were little.

So doing things in community is so important. I think of the redwood trees. There's no redwood tree that can exist in isolation. Their root system is only slightly deeper, by a foot or two, than a palm tree. And yet you see palm trees uprooted all of the time in any storm. But together, redwoods — their roots for the most part grow out horizontally and interconnect with one another, and together, based on their canopy and their sap system, we don't have to get into all the ecology of that, but they actually have almost become fireproof as well when they stand together. Not that they can completely withstand it. So you've got these trees that cannot grow alone and can only survive together, but they're the tallest tree. Hyperion, which is the tallest one, is I think 380-some feet tall. So you have this power of community. It's the same thing with the flying V of the geese. They fly together because the draft of the wings makes it easier for the ones that have been flying behind. And we as human beings are created — you know, if you look at the creation narrative, everything was good until it was not good when man was alone. And I think that's something that we've forgotten, because we've replaced community with technology.

Yeah, exactly. You know, Ohio State had a study — it's only a year old now — that said 66% of parents in the United States say the demands of parenthood are frequently isolating and lonely, and 38% say they have nowhere to turn.

And about 80% of them say they want to be able to connect with people outside the home.

80% want to connect. And so you have this idea that we want to connect with other people. But as parents — and I'm speaking as a millennial parent, who are, you know, the majority of the parent population right now — we were raised to curate our image. And so showing vulnerability is really concerning to us. But I want to ask this question, going back to staying curious. The question on staying curious is: what forms people? If your kids see you turning to social media or turning to an LLM like ChatGPT or Google for your parenting advice, and not turning to others, what are you teaching your kids? And if you're living in isolation, you better believe that your kids are going to live in isolation. And as an adult, you've probably had periods of plenty and not, and so you can navigate some of the harder periods than a kid can. But as that kid goes into middle school and high school, if their model has been isolated parenting, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to turn inward, and it's going to be even harder for them, because they haven't had the example of, hey, I can pick up the phone and be vulnerable.

I know who my mom talked to growing up. We knew that number, because it came across our caller ID before they had names on there, and we knew when that was going to be a long phone call. And I don't know what they talked about, but I know my mom had those people. I know who my dad had. I know who he would reach out to. I know he had those people. And they never told us about it. I'm sure they were talking about parenting and other things and life, but I knew they had those people. So I always made sure that I had those people in my life, because it was modeled for me.

Yeah. They got recharged.

Yeah. And there are so many studies that show kids, particularly young men, that have other male figures that are not their father or their caregiver in their home — their chance of being successful in life, I think, if they know six other adult males that they could reach out to, is profoundly greater than anything else. So that gives your kids an opportunity. You're giving your kids a leg up and saying, "Hey, here are some other adults that you can trust, that you know you can reach out to, and you can see how they do life." And it might not be the same way we do it in our house, and we can talk about that. But I think, again, we've just moved to this isolated mindset, because we want to control everything. The technology has given us the ability to control everything in our life to be the way we want it. And that's not real life. It isn't real life, because once you step out the front door, everything — I mean, it can go right, but a lot of things go wrong, and you have to know how to deal with it.

Right.

It's not.

I think this is one I don't talk about enough, because I work with leaders a lot, but I work on leaders understanding what forms the next generation. I think one of the biggest things we've seen — and it's a generational pendulum, meaning it swings back and forth from generation to generation — but kids, for most of modern recorded history where we have data and statistics, which in and of itself is great and a problem, we see that kids become the parent's identity. And we really saw this with the baby boomers. The baby boomers wanted the 2.2 kids, the white picket fence, the golden retriever, and the suburban house. All those things were relatively new. The 30-year mortgage was new to them. Access to credit lines that could buy cars. Garages were relatively new — not that they didn't exist before, but as far as being a staple in the home. Declining birth rates were new, so you had smaller families that fit the five-seat car. All these different things happened around the same time. And so this was the American dream — we're talking specifically about this American idealistic life. Well, those kids were told to be quiet, respectful, sit still in church. They had to attend school. They had to be perfect. But yet their parents were not home. And that's where we have the latchkey kid generation. So Gen X would come home to an empty house, because their parents were working so hard on fabricating a futuristic life that was going to be better. They were going to provide financially, because they grew up in instability and in an era of frugality. So they tried to reverse the curve.

Well, flip it forward. Gen X did the same thing as Gen X became parents. They became helicopter parents. They overcorrected. This is how the pendulum swings. They overcorrected what their parents did and said, "Hey, our parents were so absent. We're going to be hyper-involved in our kids' lives. We're going to make sure they're enrolled in drama, and after drama they're going to go to soccer practice, and after soccer they're going to go to dance, then they're going to have their tutor, and then they can go to bed." And studies show — and I have all of these studies on my website, you can go deeper — but studies show that millennial kids in the '90s and early 2000s were working, and I'm doing air quotes for those of you just listening, but were working up to 55 hours a week between school and sports and extracurriculars. And guess who was there all the time? The parents. And you see now, Linda Flanagan, who is a big researcher and reporter on kids' sports, says that parents spend almost 3.3 hours a day on their kids' sports, and that includes driving to and from and attending practices. And I'll go back to my last point. The kids, after they get home, they're spending more time at home than millennials did — Gen Z is — and yet they're spending more time at home in their room. Family dinners are almost obsolete. So we're seeing this huge pendulum where the millennials said, "Hey, we were overcorrected. Parents spent too much time, so we're going to give our kids the freedom." Well, now they're giving the kids the freedom in their bedroom instead of out playing in the neighborhood.

So kids are not the identity. This is the problem. We invest so much because we want what's good for the next generation. And that's good. That's a good thing. That's our instinct. We want to provide. We want to make a better life. But we don't think about what we're trading in the process. What is that trade that happens when we say, "Hey, I want a better life for them"? Well, yeah, that's great. But if you take away the ability for them to experience things, or to fail, or to be independent, all of a sudden you're wrapping your identity up in what you think your kids should be instead of letting them grow up. You're raising adults. Kids already know how to be kids. Don't take away childhood from them. But think about the implications of what you're doing today for their future.

Yeah.

It is. Yeah. Every choice has a consequence. And I know that's a slogan you say. I say it a lot to my kids. And consequence, if you break down the etymology of the word, literally means "with something happening after." And that's it. It's not bad. We usually have a negative connotation, but every choice we make today has a consequence. If we knew the impact of social media on kids, we wouldn't have given them phones when we did. If we knew the impact that AI is already having, we would be pumping the brakes. We've had the seat belt moment. We've had the cigarette moment. Many things that I've written about and researched for years and years — we've had all those moments in history. But the problem is now with technology, and I was a big part of this technology, I was in the VC world for a long time, and so I know what we were trying to do, and most of it was well-intended when we were starting out on this journey. But what's really fascinating is, I call it the velocity gap, when technology is accelerating faster than human wisdom can keep up. Meaning: we knew that car accidents were bad, and then as we had the interstate highway system, we realized that cars were going faster, and so we had to implement safety mechanisms like the seat belt and then the airbag. Cigarettes took us a long time to figure out that they could be causing cancer and other things. The problem with technology is it's happening faster than we can keep up, and now everything we're doing is retroactive, and you can't go back. A lot of these things are life and death. Nicki Petrossi of the Scrolling 2 Death podcast — her whole podcast is dedicated to this, and it's really almost scary, some of the conversations she has with parents about technology and how these become life-and-death situations.

So again, we don't need to shape our — our kids are going to be kids. They're going to scream, bite, talk back, do all those things. It doesn't mean you have to tolerate those behaviors. You still have to be the parent. Don't be the friend. But at the same time, you have to raise an adult. So you have to think about: your choice today has a consequence, not today. But what is the choice you're making for your kid right now? What's that going to do to them when they're 25?

Appreciate that, Shannon. I'm pretty easy to find online. Ryan Vet, like veterinarian. It's really fun when I do get to speak at animal-related conferences, whether pet shows or other things, because everyone's like, "Did you make that up? Is that your stage name?" No, that's my real name. But yeah, Ryan Vet. You can find me on any of the major social media channels. I don't post a bunch, but I'm there. And then I do post a weekly essay via my newsletter. There's about 25,000 leaders on there that get it every week, and I've interviewed some great parenting experts there too. So it's definitely a free resource. Doesn't cost you anything, but you can get that to your inbox every week.

I think: put away the phone and find a friend. No longer phone a friend, but find a friend, and just spend time with them, and know that relationships and humans are sometimes awkward and uncomfortable. But just go on a walk with them, have them over for coffee. It doesn't have to be formal or hard. And I think the first step is just doing something in community. So whether that's finding your local church, joining a local community, but just do something in community — it makes a profound difference.