We’re kicking off Season 3 of The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel talk through tough topics related to family meals and parenting. Missed our first two seasons? You can check out all of our episodes here.

In the first weeks of the New Year, how can you leverage family time to help you beat the post-holiday blues and stay connected to each other, without retreating to individual screens? We’re talking with special guest Betsy Bozdech, Editorial Director of Common Sense Media, about celebrating a tech-smart New Year with family film recommendations, cautions about AI, and guidelines parents need to know. Make sure to listen for our 2026 Dinner and a Movie ideas, age-by-age breakdowns, and the latest research to help you stay one step ahead of the algorithms this year.

Key Takeaways:

• Go to 2:58 for Dr. Anne Fishel’s guidance for families on setting strong tech boundaries
• Go to 10:40 for Betsy’s favorite family film recommendations
• Go to 13:29 for a conversation about choosing the first media experience for young children
• Go to 16:48 for ideas on making your family viewing experience more interactive
• Go to 24:45 for a discussion about the rise of AI and what parents need to know
• Go to 32:00 for food, fun, and conversation inspiration you can use at your table tonight

Related Links:

• Common Sense Media’s Best Movies of 2025
• Common Sense Selection Titles
• First Movies for Kids: Common Sense Recommendations
• Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun
• Common Sense’s Guide to Teaching Kids Good Screen Time Habits
• The Family Dinner Project’s Technology at the Table Guide
• The Family Dinner Project + Common Sense Media Dinner and a Movie Experiences

Full Episode Transcript:

Bri DeRosa: Hey, welcome back to the Family Dinner Project Podcast. I can’t believe it’s the first episode of season three. Annie, can you believe it? Season three? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: I cannot. I know. It’s very, very exciting. 

Bri DeRosa: I am very excited because we are kicking off this new year, new season with a very special guest.

We have with us today Betsy Bozdech, who is the editorial director at Common Sense Media, longtime friends of ours. And Betsy has been working there for almost 20 years, helping parents navigate media choices and find great things that they can watch and read with their kids. And she’s clued me in that she has two kids herself who are 15 and 12, and Betsy says she loves nothing more than using their slang incorrectly in front of them, which means, Betsy, I think we are kindred spirits. Welcome to the show. 

Betsy Bozdech: Welcome to the show. Here’s a little six seven to get us started. 

Bri DeRosa: Oh, no. Oh, no. Thoughts and prayers to all the middle school teachers out there in particular. 

We’re so glad to have you with us, and happy 2026 to all of our listeners. Before the holidays, Annie and I were talking about how the post-holiday letdown is like a very weird period of time every year because you get through all the celebrations, and then we live in New England. I know Betsy’s in California, but Annie and I are in New England where it gets dark and cold and really not that much fun for a while after the holidays. So we were kind of talking about ways to break through the funk. 

Of course, a lot of the ideas that we came up with were indoor activities, and a lot of them were screen based. We know that’s a continual hot button issue for a lot of families, and we thought it would be interesting to have you join us today, Betsy, to talk about some fun family media recommendations. Plus, I know Common Sense has been doing a lot of research and advocacy around what parents need to know about what’s out there in 2026.

So we will be grateful for your guidance. 

Betsy Bozdech: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a great, it’s a pleasure to be here. 

Bri DeRosa: Great to have you. 

So, Annie, I, I’m gonna start off with you and ask you the idea of screen time and family bonding over tv, movies, video games. I think a lot of us do that kind of thing, but we don’t always feel great about doing it.

So coming from your perspective as a family therapist, what are some of the guardrails that you think parents might wanna keep in mind here? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: I mean, I’ll start with the sort of professional guidelines from American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which suggests that no screens under the age of two, which is sometimes hard to abide by, and then one hour a day, but no more, for kids ages two to five. And during that hour, an emphasis on not using TVs or screens as babysitters, but co-viewing with your child so that you can monitor it, you can see how your child’s responding to it. You can talk to your child, you can turn it off, and so on.

Of course, choosing age appropriate material screening at first, if there’s no rating, so like for YouTube, I think that usually does not have ratings. So you wanna look at that before you share it with kids. And then avoiding screens, regardless of what age, during bedtime. Um, and as we would say, usually during mealtime, except for our program, which we did with Common Sense Media, which is Dinner and a Movie. So there are ways to have your cake and eat it too, have your movie and your food. 

But generally when I work with families, are there times of the day that are screen free that are just sort of protected? And usually families will say, or I hope they’ll say, bedtime and mealtime. So that would be one sort of a set of guidelines.

Another thing that I think is really important is not to keep TV or other kind of, well, TVs on when you’re not in the room as a kind of background noise. Research has shown that when families do that, it increases the screen use kind of across the board. So that’s sort of another kind of easy tip for decreasing the number of hours that kids are looking at screens. And then I, I guess I have some questions that I ask families, which gets at sort of their relationship to screens and technology. 

What are the ways that you think screens enhance your relationships with your children or with your parents or with your partners? Um, what are ways it detracts from those relationships? Is there anything that you’re doing less of because you’re spending more time on screens? Anything that you miss that you wanna remember to do that you’ve sort of put aside because you’re spending so much time watching TV or watching YouTube or whatever? And do you ever set limits on your kids when it comes to watching video games or TV? Um, and how does that go? 

I think parents, not you two, but I think most parents don’t like to be in the position of looking kind of clueless and one step behind what their kids know about technology. And I think that can get in the way of parents doing what they need to do, which is to set limits even if they don’t understand all the slang and so on of technology.

So sort of encouraging parents to weigh in because they do know best in terms of what’s good for their kids’ mental health, even if they don’t know the, the latest memes and tech crazes. So that, that would be my kind of starting thoughts about how I think about it as a family therapist. 

Bri DeRosa: I think that’s so helpful, Annie.

And Betsy, what about the team at Common Sense Media? What about you in your own home? Like what, what other thoughts do you have? How do you guys think about these things?

Betsy Bozdech: Very similarly, a lot of the things Annie just said are things that we recommend all the time, you know, and I think they’re a great base layer.

I think one of the things that a lot of parents, especially since COVID, have realized firsthand in their own homes and then has been supported in the research, is that a lot of the time – I mean, quantity of screen time is very important, but ultimately the quality matters too. Like if that, even if you go over an hour to two hours, if it’s really high quality educational media, then that’s gonna be way different than 45 minutes of AI slop, right?

So you really wanna keep the quality in mind as well as the quantity. I think that, you know, it’s really interesting to me now that so many kids, especially as they get older, you see a lot of the family going on their own device and doing their own thing. And so you’ll see this is something like dinner and a movie or a TV show and a movie or a special and a movie, whatever is, or even watching YouTube as a family, if you do it all together, that really brings everyone back in and you have that, that couch moment and stuff. And so in some ways it’s like, doesn’t feel like screen time in the same way at all. It’s like, oh, let’s sit down and watch a movie together, ’cause we’re all together, we’re all spending the same time. To me that’s very different than my 15-year-old going off and going down an Instagram hole for 45 minutes. Or you know, an hour of Roblox’s latest update, which is what my 12-year-old lives for. 

So I think those kinds of keeping it realistic and practical while trying to maintain a lot of those guidelines, and yes, not doing it right before bed and making sure that you do have those times together when no one is on a screen. Or that you have to like, ask permission, like my husband and I’ll be at the dinner table and we want, somebody will talk about something. I’m like, “Permission to look it up on Google and confirm?” You know, so we have to get buy-in from everybody. And I think even just that little bit of friction helps remind people that it’s not just a default behavior. 

But you know, all of that said, we are all only as perfect as our ideals. Right. And, you know, I have 15, 12, they’re starting to be a little bit, you can’t control it as much as you used to be able to. Obviously we could always shut the internet off, but you know, you don’t wanna do that either. It’s really where they live so much of their lives. Kids today, like that’s where their friends are, that’s where the common experiences are. So it’s really that balance and also modeling the behavior that you wanna see in them.

Like if I am sitting there zoned out on my phone, it’s really hard for me to pass judgment on my kid who wants to do the same thing. So a lot of modeling, a lot of giving each other grace and trying to remember that we’re all in this together as a family. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Well said, Betsy. Thank you. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I mean, I, I hear so much in there. Right? And two of the things that really come to mind for me as I’m listening to both of you are, you know, one, Annie, I know we’ve always said at the Family Dinner Project, we want people to think about, you know, device use and technology use as how is it bringing you closer? Not how is it disconnecting you, right?

So for, you know, Betsy, your example of like permission to look it up at the dinner table. We have games on our site that use a phone or a device at the dinner table, but it’s a way of making everybody at the table interact differently as opposed to using that device to like text with somebody who’s not there. Right. There’s something about like, how does it help you focus on who’s in the room versus how is it taking you away from that experience? So I think that’s, you know, kind of like thing number one. 

And then the other thing that I’m always musing on is, to your point about quality over quantity, there’s something different – in my house we’ve always talked about like consumption versus creation. So for example, like right now, my 16-year-old is trying to write a novel and if he’s on his screen a whole bunch because he is creating his world, right, I have a hard time being like, Hey, that’s too much screen time. Whereas if he is on there hanging out on YouTube and being exposed to some potentially scary algorithms, that’s a whole different calculation, right? 

So always thinking about where are we with creation versus consumption? Are we being passive or are we being active with our media? 

Betsy Bozdech: Yeah. I feel the very same way. My son is a big gamer, but he also likes to make things in scratch. And if he’s making something in scratch, I feel very differently about that than an hour of grinding away at Roblox.

Bri DeRosa: Right. Totally. 

So that being said, that’s part of why we created Dinner and a Movie, and part of why we have partnered with Common Sense over the years for some of these family technology experiences that we’ve talked about. And we haven’t done a new dinner and a movie together in a while. But you are sitting with us and I wonder, if we were to do a dinner and a movie for the start of 2026, do you have any up to the minute kind of recommendations for that?

Betsy Bozdech: This is what I live for. This is my job. 

Bri DeRosa: I kind of thought, you know, you might have some fun family films or experiences that you would recommend for different age groups. 

Betsy Bozdech: Yes. Well I do, well we, you know, at the end of 2025, we always do an annual, we do an annual list of the best movies every year.

So the sort of the best of 2025 was on my mind pretty recently. Um, we have our common sense selection seal, which is how we sort of acknowledge and recognize really the best of the best. And so I was kind of looking over those and I think there are some great choices from the best of the best, uh, kids and family movies from 2025 that I’d love to recommend.

I think, I mean, right off the top of my head, K-pop Demon Hunters is a super obvious one because you can just do ramen and couch for tweens and up. I think, you know, probably the bulk of the folks listening have probably seen that. I’m gonna say it’s a safe, it’s a safe bet, but there are some other ones, and I was trying to kind of think of it in terms of theming the food as well as the movie. 

So like Lilo and Stitch jumped out at me for sort of that five to seven bucket, you could do like Hawaiian barbecue as you watch this like really sweet story about sisters and friends. Getting a little bit older, if you are a family that enjoys some meat and potatoes, like Viking fare, you could go for How to Train Your Dragon. The live action version that they did last year. It really was super impressive the way that they brought those dragons to like life. I mean, they looked real like you could actually be riding a dragon, so that’d be a really fun one for sort of that eight to nine younger tween range.

Older tweens, there’s one that we really love called Rule Breakers. It’s a documentary about girls in Afghanistan breaking stem barriers. So if you have Afghani food around you, you could pull that in and watch a really inspiring documentary. And then for teens, really one of my favorite movies of all last year was, uh, Rental Family with Brendan Frasier about this, uh, uh, sort of an, an American actor living in Japan who still is kind of waiting for his big break after many years and ends up working for an organization that rents him out as a stand in family member.

It’s apparently based on an actual kind of business thing that happens in Japan, and it is just the sweetest drama about the power of human connection. And so you could bring in some sushi or teriyaki, or Miso soup and edamame, and just have a really nice movie night with that one for teens. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Betsy. I love those, but I have another question to ask you. So, um, and I promised my son, I would ask you this. So I have a three-year-old granddaughter who’s coming to visit. She has never watched screens, but my son is open to the idea that she might be ready to watch her first movie or first TV show. And we were both wondering what you might recommend as a kind of initiation.

Betsy Bozdech: For sure. I think, I mean there’s actually, for the last many years we’ve been in a really good time for preschool TV, and I really would start small. I wouldn’t go for like a full length feature at that age, ’cause the attention span and the interest is not there. But you know, like everything from, like Daniel Tiger has really nice specials available, and Curious George.

So, or some of, I mean, my favorite show when my kids were toddlers was, uh, Timmy Time, which is about a preschooler sheep and they’re, it’s nonverbal. It’s just lots of little animal adventures and the adults just kind of go, ha ha ha ha ha. And it, it was so nice ’cause so many shows for preschoolers, sometimes you don’t want to hear the voices for that long. But, um, that was one of our favorites, but I really think like, yeah, a special, like it’s, I mean, it can matter less the time of year when someone’s three, they’re into what they’re into. 

But one that my kids and I watched a bunch in the fall when they were little was the, like Curious George’s Halloween Boo Fest. It was about like 40 minutes long. It was seasonal, like there was like a tiny little bit of a scare, but nothing that would linger. And I think they have those kind of for every season. So like whatever season you’re into, you could probably find a Curious George special that’ll go along with it and he gets into trouble and well, that’s a little bit tense, but it’s so kid appropriate. It’s just great. 

We actually have a list of first movies for kids on the Common Sense website when they’re ready for that feature. When my daughter, I guess she was about four when we did her first movie in the theater, and it was Frozen, she was right at the age of Frozen. And for us, what really worked well was preparing her. She, even to this day, she likes to know what’s gonna happen. She doesn’t like not knowing what’s gonna happen. So we got the little read along book and we read that over and over and we listened to the soundtrack. And so by the time we went to the theater, she kind of knew the big beats to the story. She wasn’t too startled by anything.

And I mean, I was a little bored as a consequence ’cause I’m like, oh yeah, this is where this happens and this is where this happens. It’s worth it. It was great. And um, a prep, depending on the kid, a little prep can help, or waiting and watching at home, especially if you are gonna try a feature, because if it doesn’t go well, you can pause it, you can stop it. You can take a break, you can have a snack. You can turn the volume down, you can turn the lights up. There’s so many options. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Oh, those are great, great ideas. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, you are throwing me right back. Curious George Halloween Boo Fest with No Noggin. Your tiny scare there.

I’m gonna be so curious what you guys end up choosing.

Anne Fishel: Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: Because yeah, Betsy’s right. This is a really good time for children’s media, I think. 

Betsy Bozdech: Yeah, yeah. For little kids. Yeah. And then there’s that tween sort of desert, and then you, there’s good stuff for teens too. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. What about like, I don’t have littles anymore, but I keep hearing everybody talking about Bluey for little kids. 

Betsy Bozdech: Oh, Bluey is wonderful. Yes. Mine are actually a little bit too old for Bluey too. But I know parents who are huge fans. Everyone I work with who has younger kids, they swear by it. Common Sense Media honored that show at our awards last fall. It was one of those rare shows that really does have the same appeal for adults as it does for kids.

Bri DeRosa: So there you go, Annie. There’s another one. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Lots to look forward to here. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, I think there’s a lot of great stuff out there, Annie, and, and you’ll have to keep us posted. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: I will, I will.

Bri DeRosa: So to the whole question of the reasons why a young child might not be spending a lot of time on screens, and the reasons why parents of kids at any age might be hesitant to introduce screen time as a bonding activity. You know, it does feel like we live in a very passive consumerist society sometimes when we’re all just like on our screens, and I wonder, do we have recommendations for how parents can make this shared media experience feel a little bit more connected, a little bit more active, not just like a couch and ramen? 

By the way, we do plenty of that. I’m cool with it, but I understand that, you know, if you’re looking for a family bonding experience, you might not feel like sit, watch, consume, and go is the the play that you want. So like, what do we think? How do you make this more engaging? 

Betsy Bozdech: Watching is obviously the sort of easiest thing to do together, right?

Like you don’t have to like, you don’t, parents don’t have to know how to work a game controller or do anything like that to sit and watch something. But you can talk about what you’re watching. We have, on all of our reviews, suggested discussion questions for families to talk about with kids about not only the, not just the plot, but like the media literacy aspect of it all.

And you know, why do you, if this is based on a true story, why do you think they might have changed the facts? Why would they do that? Or what’s the impact of this? How does the violence in this compare to what you saw in the other thing? Or what are the themes? So, and, but that of course, that also you don’t want it to feel like homework, so you sort of wanna, you know, sprinkle that in. 

But I think you can do obviously more interactive stuff too. Like you can take, if it’s YouTube that they wanna watch, you can, most TVs, you can put that on a big central tv. Now it doesn’t have to be on an iPad or a phone or whatever. It can be right in the family room. If you show that you are up to do that, like show me what you’re watching. I wanna see what you know and teach me. Who are the people, where did you hear about this meme? What is, you know, I didn’t know that my son had watched apparently several hours worth of Simpsons clips and knew who all the characters were. Because nowadays kids, they’re not necessarily seeking out these episodes of TV shows, but they’ll watch compilation clips and all of a sudden like, be familiar with a show.

And I’m like, great, let’s sit down and watch that together. Tell me, you know, what you know about them. And if you are up for it, the truly interactive stuff, the gaming is a great thing to try out, and I think we do recommend that parents give that a shot. I mean, and we’re not all gonna be able to like keep up with all of the different gaming, but there’s all different levels of games too.

I mean, not everything is like a, you know, coming at you from all directions shooter kind of thing. There’s, you know, party games and trivia, like there’s a company called Jackbox that does these party packs for Switch, where you can like do trivia and interactive games together and everyone’s holding a controller. There are some gentle games like Animal Crossing where all you have to do is be able to like move your little guy around and fish and trade things. There are sports games. My son and my husband like to play, you know, FIFA soccer with each other sometimes. And they’re both soccer fans in real life. So then they can go battle it out on the field.

Even word games, and those are like the casual word games, like even Wordle and stuff like that. We have a family text thread where everybody plays and then shares their result every day. And so it’s a very low touch way for my son to check in with his grandparents. And so I think there are a lot of options if you’re willing to sort of tiptoe in and feel the water and see what you like.

Dr. Anne Fishel: And also be willing to not be as good at it as your kids. They love that. Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: And that’s really important. And I, you know, I would just add, there are a couple of other things that you can do if people are up for it, right. So like you can actually turn your watching experience into a bit of a game, where you can shut off the sound and the subtitles and then see if you can guess what they’re saying. 

Betsy Bozdech: Like a Whose Line is it Anyway improv game, basically. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, exactly right. And all of a sudden, like you’re watching a war movie and it turns into a rom-com, you know, you’re like, wait, what? Um, but that can be really fun and creative and then obviously you can always go back and find out what you missed.

And I think also just, to your point about like knowing what kids are up to and what they’re consuming, and you don’t even have to, it’s great if you do game with them, but, um, like I know one of my sons really likes history and he plays a lot of kind of historical battle strategy games online that are really not, we’re not gonna be able to go there with him. Right. But we’ll have him play in the same room with us. So he’s on his computer and we are checking in like, oh, hey Napoleon, how’d that battle go? You know, who are you playing as today? And he’s like sharing his, you know, the pathos of trying to organize the Russian front. Right. And, but like, we know what he’s doing and we are engaging with him around it kind of casually while everybody’s in the same space. 

I think the, the openness, showing kids, especially as they get older, that you’re open to that kind of show me what you’re watching on YouTube. Tell me about that game and, and just making it part of the environment is really important because we’ve been able to now have conversations about like, he’ll bring up, you know, I’m trying to figure out what I watched because my algorithm is serving me some really scary ads that I, I am not interested in. What do you think it was? And I’ll be like, Hey, well let’s, let’s take a look, shall we? Like, let’s, let’s pull up your YouTube and just see like what your, your watch history has been. 

So I feel like just having that kind of openness really helps with their, their ability to feel comfortable with, with that kind of conversation.

Dr. Anne Fishel: I wanna just offer kind of another perspective on watching movies and other things on screens, which is the possibility of talking at a later time. I was remembering as a teenager, I went through a very wild stage myself, and I would come home at all hours of the night. My father would be waiting up for me on a comfortable armchair, and he would pat the chair next to him and he would say, come sit with me, Annie. Let’s watch the late, late, late, whatever, two in the morning, movie together, and we would watch Hepburn and Tracy, and it’s a wonderful life, and Mr. Smith goes to Washington. There would be no questions asked about where I had been. 

I mean, I, I’m not recommending this really as a parenting strategy, but I’m just saying for me at this, at that time in my life, it was just what I needed. It was an experience with my dad. Totally nonjudgmental, but a very lovely connection. And to this day, when I’m feeling down or upset, those are the movies that I go back to and I watch, and it’s a, like a little visit with my father who’s no longer walking the earth. 

So, and you know, and families that I work with, you know, I’ll say, are you having dinner? And they’ll say, no, we wouldn’t know what to talk about. And often the, the kind of on ramp is, do you watch TV together? Can you sit together and have that shared experience? And often families can build from that, you know, connection can be made without a lot of conversation, is my somewhat subversive contribution as somebody who’s promoting food fun and conversation.

Sometimes I think there’s a place for all of it. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. I mean, you say you don’t recommend that as a parenting strategy, Annie, but there’s something there about your father’s acceptance and lack of judgment in that moment where instead of interrogating you, which is probably what a teenager would expect, he just welcomed you home and made sure that that was a safe place for you to land.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. 

Bri DeRosa: I actually think maybe that is a, a parenting strategy we can recommend not, not to, you know, insinuate that you shouldn’t know what your kids are up to or you shouldn’t ever ask questions, but that there’s something about the value of sometimes holding that back to make it safe to come home and safe to land. Yeah. I think maybe there is something there. 

Betsy Bozdech: I totally agree. Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: So. Speaking of safety though, uh, you know, back to that sort of like algorithm, scary rise of AI, you know, the, the robots are here, Betsy. And I, I know Common Sense has, has been doing a lot around this entire kind of online safety, digital world stuff. Talk to us a little bit about this. I have so much curiosity about all of this AI stuff and, and this toxic algorithm, bad social media trends, all of it, new year, new tech problems. What do we need to know? 

Betsy Bozdech: Yeah, I mean, so. I mean, yes, it is an onslaught of AI right now. And the, I mean, but it’s not just like one thing. It’s not, you know, there are so many different, it takes so many different shapes. Like for instance, we, we do some AI risk assessments, risk assessments of AI tools for kids and families. And you know, we have, late last year we came out and just said, we do not recommend any AI companions for kids under 18, period, because there’s just a lot of confusion around communicating with a, a bot that can take on a human persona, and that’s just not safe.

So that is sort of a line we’ve drawn in terms of like, these are also tools that are embedded in the apps that kids are already using, like I think we’ve all come across, I’m sure the AI overviews now that are, you know, very tempting to just, okay, I got my answer and move along. But if you do it often enough, you will encounter a hallucination. It is just made up. It wants to make you happy, it wants to answer your question. It is just gonna say something. It told me I didn’t have the phone that I was holding in my hand when I asked about some feature of my iPhone 16. It’s like, you must be asking about a different phone ’cause that’s not out yet.

And I was like, Really. Okay. Um, and that’s very minor. That’s not a, you know, that’s a low stakes situation, but it, it’s just like, I mean, we used to tell kids about Wikipedia. You can’t take it at face value. You need to verify, you need to ensure that it’s a great start. It’s a good piece of information, but it’s not the only piece of information.

But then it’s also embedded in, you know, you can’t get away from it in the Google suite of products. It’s in like, let’s, can we suggest things to you in meta products? Can we do this? Can we do that? And it’s all sort of promising that it’s gonna make their work, their studying, their mental health better.

So it’s just really more critical than ever for parents to sort of keep those lines of communications open. And as we were saying about movies, leave the judgment at the door. Make sure they know that they can come to you. I saw this. I don’t know what to make of it. I am, I used AI to write a school assignment and I, you know, feel bad now, or I got caught, now what do I do?

You know, like to be ready to help them and support them, not to like shut them down. Most of these tools are designed for efficiency, but if the task that you’re working on includes like behavioral implications or mental health concerns, that is really not where kids should be focusing their attention. They really need to be talking to parents, to trusted adults, to, you know, care providers about those things, not the robots. 

We have curriculum for all grades and of materials online that are free for parents and for educators to really hopefully help reinforce this. It’s part of learning to be a digital citizen, which is a curriculum we’ve done forever and it’s very easy to want to take the easy way when it’s offered to you. But I think one thing that has worked very well in terms of making my own children not be super excited about it is to bring up the environmental impact aspect of it. My daughter, who is very concerned about all of that stuff, once she learned about the water implications and the electricity implications was like, why would I use those tools? Nope. Not gonna do it. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Betsy. Just to add to that, if that doesn’t work, say, do you want corporations to be making money off of your experience and your attention?

Bri DeRosa: We’re commoditizing our attention, right? Yes, absolutely. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: And the other, the other one is, you know, I’m always kind of putting the neuroscience in front of my kids about, like, you know, what have we learned about the difference between taking notes longhand or taking notes on a laptop? What have we learned about the critical thinking that’s involved in writing your own paper versus having it drafted by chat GPT, right? Like, what are, what is all the emerging science saying about whose neurons are growing? And whose are not, right?

And so, and that’s always developing and something that you can always go like, Hey, I saw this new study, what do you think about it? What have you, what have you seen amongst your classmates? So there’s a lot that you can kind of, I think, put in front of kids so they can be curious, cautious consumers.

Betsy Bozdech: Yep. And interestingly, I saw recently a story that talked about how Blue Book sales had just shot up in the last year because a lot of academic institutions are going back to that for finals for papers. That, that specific statistic I thought was fascinating. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. I think there’s a lot of approaches out there that are gonna change that game.

So, uh, Betsy, any technology resolutions for families for the new year? I hate New Year’s resolutions. Hate them, hate them, but like, if we were to aspire, you know?

Betsy Bozdech: I think, I mean, you know, if, we’ve talked a lot about some of the, the basic, I think things that we recommend, the, you know, practicing what you preach, modeling what you wanna see in your kids, turning off the tv, those are sorts of things, and I think some of you can take grains of what we’ve been talking about and say you could make it your resolution to learn something online with your kid. Find a DIY video and learn a new, new hobby together. Try a new thing, or say once a week you’re gonna do some kind of play or watch together time. You could find a site or an app that is for a cause that you care about and either donate your time or your money, but you can use the internet to do that research and find it.

Oh, and then one that’s really good for parents if they haven’t done it already is to carve out the time to check out and learn to use and enforce some parental controls. Um, you know, know what your options are and figure out what will work for your kid and work with them. Like my, my daughter decided on her own to take Instagram off of her phone, and she can request time from us, but it involves setting up the screen time, right? So she has to send in that request and that means she can get it when she really needs it or wants it, but she can also take it off her phone. So that was a real happy medium for us. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: I think I just read this, that parents can now link to their kids’ use of chat GPT and impose controls on that. 

Betsy Bozdech: I think so. I mean, all that stuff, I mean, that is the challenging part of the parental controls is they’re evolving all the time. It’s like every week some new option, new supervised account, new this, new that, comes out. And it’s great to have those options, but you do have to make the time and put in the energy to figure out how to make it all work for you and your family.

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which can be overwhelming, right? And I think that’s, that’s one of the things that I always come back to when we’re thinking about tech use and families is like, we have gold standards, right? 

But also even just the idea of like, hey, if you have really little kids, they shouldn’t be watching that screen without you watching with them. Sometimes you gotta go make dinner and like them watching an episode of Bluey is how dinner gets made. Like there’s, there’s the gold standard, aspirational. We would all love to be that great. And then there’s just, how does that butt up against the practicality of life? 

The time has gone so fast, but, uh, we’re sort of at the end of our episode here. I wanna make sure that we get to our food, fun, and conversation, which we always do at the end of a podcast episode. Betsy, you already did such a great job on like incorporating food. You, you did the whole dinner and a movie thing for us, but– 

Betsy Bozdech: Alright, my work here is done. 

Bri DeRosa: Done. But I would also say, you know, other things to think about parents, um, if you, if you’re having trouble with like a tie in to the media that you’re watching or consuming, just think about, um, setting up, you know, it’s finger food tonight.

So you’re doing a little charcuterie board or you’re doing something like popcorn chicken that you can grab or, you know, pizza bagels, bagel bites, like little things that you can, it can be really fun to just be like, Hey, raid the freezer for some snacks. Let’s bake everything up and throw it out there and just sit and hang out with something that doesn’t require dishes or utensils.

Feel free to let that night be the night where you think a little bit less about the, um, relative quality of what you’re snacking on and more about like, this is our fun time together, and that might even draw people in a little bit more, make it even more special when you do spend time together. 

Betsy Bozdech: We can use that guideline for the media too, ’cause sometimes it’s really fun to pick something that might be just a little inappropriate or a little bit of a guilty pleasure and just sort of go all in, you know? 

Bri DeRosa: Right. Yeah. It doesn’t all have to be like educational media all the time, right?

So, fun. Betsy, your family sounds like a lot of fun. I bet you’ve got some choices here that people could think about.

Betsy Bozdech: And I mean, we love a good movie night, but like sometimes we just, over, over this past, uh, holiday season, we were doing a puzzle a day, riddle a day advent calendar that helped solve a journey. Like it was a, it was a whole mystery in a box where there was one envelope that led you to another envelope.

And there are non-seasonal versions of those kinds of things available. There’s a, a company that does a, a box that comes to your door called Hunt a killer, which is a murder mystery, which is a little bit of a dark name, but there are also, there’s a company called Hidden Games that does things like that.

Or you can even just do logic puzzles. Um, those are really fun. And then I always have great conversations when I bring up the idea of what’s a movie or a TV show or a book that you love that other people didn’t, or what’s something you didn’t like that other people did. It’s really fun to sort of defend one way or the other, something you love or didn’t like against other people’s opinions.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah, that’s a good one. And one that, that’s sort of in the same ballpark, which is what’s a movie that you never tire of watching over again? And that can also prompt a lot of lively conversation for sure. I can’t believe you wanted to watch Love Actually more than once.

Bri DeRosa: Guilty. 

Betsy Bozdech: Yep. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Or what character in a movie do you wish you could meet or you could wish would be a friend of yours? That’s another good one, I think. 

Betsy Bozdech: Oh, that’s super fun. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, that’s a great one. Or like turning it around and being like, Hey, if somebody made a movie of your life, who would they cast as you? Who would they cast as your best friend? Who, right. You could really have some fun with that. 

Betsy Bozdech: My coworker and I do that at work all the time. Cast the common sense movie. 

Bri DeRosa: That’s really fun. I also, I saw a great thread recently about if you were going to recast a TV show, I think it was The West Wing, entirely with Muppets. All that to say, you can like extrapolate that to any TV show or any movie. Right. If we did this with Muppets, like who would Kermit be?

You can have a lot of fun with movies and TV and conversation. 

Betsy Bozdech: For sure. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. Alright, well I think that wraps it. I am really excited actually, to go forth with some of these ideas that we’ve brought to the table and have a really fun new year and get out of these doldrums with my family. So thank you Betsy, for being here.

Betsy Bozdech: My pleasure. Thank you so much. 

Bri DeRosa: This was really fun. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: And I’ve got some great ideas up my sleeve for my three-year-old granddaughter. 

Bri DeRosa: Excellent. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Thank you for that. And your other insights and playfulness. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, and we will, uh, we will put links in the show notes to, of course, Common Sense Media and a lot of the toolkits and things that Betsy has brought up, and to our dinner and a movie recommendations, but we just wish everybody the happiest of New Years and a great start to 2026. 

We’ll see you next time on the Family Dinner Project Podcast.