Josh Ramsey — Family Digital wellness, Keeping Your Children Safe Online

And it is what's involved in that. Well, you know, we like to have special guests and this evening's special guest is no different. Who is he? He is Josh Ramsey from an organization called beintouch.org.za. Hello, Josh, how are you doing? - Hi, Dave, how are you? Thanks for having me on the show. - I'm great, thank you. Now it's an absolute pleasure. I first came across Josh and his work in another, in a podcast in fact, that I do as well. And when I chatted to him, I think I thought to myself, nope, this needs to go out and this needs to be heard by some more people. So hence me chatting to you at this time. Josh, first, before we dive into beintouch, give us a little bit of your background because you have to say the least an interesting background. - Well, thank you for your interest. I guess it's always hard to know how interesting your own story is 'cause you're immersed in it. But in a nutshell, I was very involved in leadership and I was a very promising young person in school involved in leadership and all the kind of accolades of someone that's gonna go straight to the top of the ladder. And I studied psychology, philosophy and life coaching. But all the while, while developing these aspirational career directions, I had an increasingly compulsive relationship with digital media, starting from pornography, which I was exposed to at about age nine and then leading into gaming, social media and eventually developing into substance misuse as well.

And so while I was on the one hand, very much the picture of success. On the other hand, I was really struggling with anxiety, frustration, depression and this all kind of came to a head in my late twenties, which was quite a while after age nine. And so I realized I had to do something to change my life and I started turning it around and seeking purpose. And now I use my story to help children express their challenges that they're facing. And we do work in terms of digital device management and how we relate to our devices. So everything from cyberbullying to inappropriate content exposure online to managing devices in our homes. That's really the space I play in now. - Fantastic. And you've been very sort of modest about what you've done because you've been a model. You've been a stuntman in one of my favorite TV series, in fact, something called Black Sails. So you were a pirate there, weren't you? - Yeah, I was very much in what they say in front of the lens and in front of the camera in the entertainment engine and that was a part of this growing chasm between my internal reality and the external reality that everyone assumed I was experiencing. You know, I was very much doing everything that everyone kind of has ideas about and how wonderful it may be.

But I just did not really, I wasn't able to continue putting up that facade and my internal landscape was really needing some attention. So yes, I was modeling and acting and traveling the world and having a lot of kind of experiences that seemed like what young people would want, but on the underside of that, really not feeling very content at all. - And this is to do with, for want of a better word, soul and purpose and things like that, which eventually led you to co-founding something called beintouch.org.za. You spoke about it in terms of your digital footprint and things like that, but what exactly, 'cause beintouch is targeted mainly at our youngsters, isn't it? - Yeah, so, you know, it is at the end of the day helping children change their behaviors and relationship to their devices and what they do online, the media that they consume, but our mandate is to educate, connect and protect and we work with teachers in schools, we work with school leaders in terms of how they, how they help their learners relate to device use. And then we work with the children themselves and with families to help them set up their homes in a way that devices don't become the kind of untrained or pairs or child minders that they can so often become in our very full lives.

So we try and help families manage how they relate to media as well. - I'm gonna play, I'm gonna play devil's advocate and ask you the question, which I have no doubt some people are going to ask, and that is, but why? Why is it such a problem? I mean, you know, we're keeping the kids out of everybody's here, they do their own thing. Why is it a problem? - It's a question that we do deal with on a daily basis and it's a very valid one. Unfortunately, there is a lot of ignorance around what children are doing with their devices, where they're doing it, and the impact it's having on them. So one of the ways in which we work to educate parents around this disease that we call not my kid syndrome where parents will believe that it's not my kid that looks at pornography, it's not my kid that cyberbullies anyone, it's not my kid that is in danger of being groomed by an online predator. And so we gather survey data in schools that can help educate parents about the dangers that exist online when your child is given unlimited access to all of the corners of the internet. - Okay, now let's assume that we have children and they just, they're online, whether it be on their phones, on their computers, their tablets, whatever the case may be.

Are you saying that there is a large amount of our children that are getting into these, well, frankly, areas that aren't suitable for children and they're opening themselves up to all sorts of things. What do the numbers say? - So in a nutshell, yes, kind of an anecdotal story is that I used to start my school talks. I've been doing this for a number of years now. And before we have the data, I used to try and shock the kids by saying I've been exposed to pornography at age nine. And the survey data that we're not collecting is revealing that as much as 20% of the children I speak to started viewing pornography or saw pornography for the first time below age 10, so age nine and lower. So we've seen a drastic increase in the exposure of children to adult content pornography, but also adult themes, the violence in over 18 films, even the violence that's generally accepted in games these days, and the ways in which children are seeking to manage their internal emotional states with digital media and then, you know, that then lies the kind of reward circuitry for what can later become addiction, which is what happened in my life, you know, managing internal emotional states without dealing with the issues, but rather just distracting yourself with this media.

So the statistics that we use, our own ones that we collect ourselves are generally what we focus on, where you've got statistics like 80% of children having access to their devices late at night in their rooms and 56% of cyber bullying happening late at night. But in the schools that we work in, we routinely see 40 to 50% of children saying that they have been cyber bullied online. We see statistics like 20 to 30% of them saying that they've received a nude picture from someone their age. So there's a lot of ways in which our adolescents, our young people are facing a brand new coming of age, you know, where it's not about holding hands behind the swings when you're 12 or 13 or stealing a first kiss at 14, 15. It's more asking a child to send a nude picture of themselves to another child in the school. And we're seeing that even from age 11, 12, 13. So it is an unnamed, challenge that our children are facing and we're trying to give a voice to that and get parents back involved in monitoring this aspect of parenting which they don't have experience of. - Sorry, I'm sitting here and I'm both shocked and a little sort of amused at myself because if I think back, and this does take me back quite a few years, I think in my days it was still standard.

So I think it was standard five. - I'm part of that cohort as well. - Standard five and I got trapped in the science classroom by a girl at break time. And she decided she wanted to kiss me and stuck her tongue in my mouth. And I was horrified and I ran out of the classroom. And that was kind of, that was where we were in terms of the level of innocence and child-like behavior. With you saying these things happening these days, I'm just sitting here and I'm thinking that is so, so scary. So we're heading into this child protection week, isn't it? - Yeah, the child protection week is kicking off on the 29th of May through to the 5th of June. - Okay, so we're right there and that's one of the reasons I wanted to have a chat to you about this. Now, aside from all of the obvious things, I mean, it's what it's doing to our children, the possibility of grooming, which is something I also only became aware of a little while ago when I interviewed a gentleman by the name of Dion Wiggerts and he's got a book called "My Only Story". And in that book, he relates his hunt for a pedophile and how it actually, the grooming happened to him. And that wasn't even necessarily online stuff, but I can imagine it is just such a deep, dark morass out there, this interwebs of ours, that it's gotta be scary.

So aside from those scary things though, this can also impact, and this I've seen in my own experience, this can impact our youngsters in terms of their emotional growth and emotional intelligence. So does your research support that? - Yeah, absolutely. If we look at the biological drives that exist in the adolescent period, basically what happens is that the brain lowers its baseline of dopamine. Now, dopamine is a kind of a reward hormone. It does a lot of things, but it can be broadly understand as a reward hormone, as a motivational hormone. And so what happens in the teenage brain is that the average level of dopamine or the baseline is reduced and that drives discomfort in the teenager. And we all know teenagers get bored and they wanna go do stuff and they wanna go climb a tree or kick a can, whatever the case is. And so that discomfort pushes them out into the world to take risks, to try and tell jokes in front of their friends, to try and master a kick flip, to try and climb a tree, to do a speech in front of their school, whatever the challenge is. And then they use their will to overcome the resistance that they may feel the nervousness, the fear of embarrassment, the beating heart and the flushed cheeks.

And then the byproduct of that are the skills that they develop. So those will be social, emotional skills, they'll be motor sensory skills, all the skills that you'll need to become a kind of a fully functional adults or at least the point that you can leave home at 18. So indeed, what we're seeing is that children are spending less time fumbling through the conversations that you have as a teenager. And we actually have quite a lot of evidence, some anecdotal from the teenagers themselves saying that they start relationships online and they can't actually translate into in-person conversations because the whole relationship is being built via text, where they're texting one another and they're using emojis to express emotions. And when it comes down to it, they don't have the kind of social, emotional learning skills to develop those relationships further. So it is concerning. And with the increase of the distance in our society now with COVID, it really is something that we need to be thinking about with our children. And this is one way in which parents can take a more active role in really spending more time with their kids in unstructured, conversational, interactional, non-screen based kind of communication moments, which I know is a challenge given all the pressures that we all face in.

- Absolutely, we're gonna dive more into this and find out what you as a parent can do. And also in terms of schools, how you can get involved, all of that and more. My special guest is Josh Ramsey. We'll be back in just a bit. And we're back with my guest, Josh Ramsey, co-founder of beintouch.org.za. You were just talking about these emotional things just before the break, Josh, and what happens. I've got a 22 year old in the house and when it comes to them finding something funny, instead of laughing, like I was taught to do, we get lol. And I'm like, oh no. But that's just a bit of an aside. So you mentioned that these kids are online and late at night. And if you're anything like me, I mean, by nine o'clock after the kind of day that I had, by nine o'clock, I'm out like a lot. I'm done, game over, thank you for playing. And this is when a lot of this stuff happens, as you say. Now, parents obviously have a responsibility to monitor what their children are doing and to take care of their emotional wellbeing as well. But, and I'm not a biological parent, so maybe I don't have the experience. But just to me, you try and tell a teenager or a tween to put down their cell phone or that they can't use their cell phone or whatever, that's World War III.

- Yeah, it is. And it is something that we have to understand why the kids are so drawn into the devices. So on the one hand, there's the pull factors of, it gives them access to a social group, which teenagers are very involved in setting up their social status because they want to be accepted by the groups that they're part of. So it's a great vessel for doing that. It gives a really strong perception of control. You can watch your followers go up, you can watch your video postings go up. It's nicely analytical in the way that you can track your progress. So it does tick a lot of the boxes that the teens are looking to fool. I mean, it's a different part of the conversation, but there's also what's called persuasive technology that's built into the device, how it looks, how it vibrates, the sounds it makes, even the tone of the sounds that trigger certain responses in teenagers. So there's a massive fence to get over in terms of the resistance to this. But what we try and educate parents about is that if your children don't understand the why behind your concern, they're really gonna struggle to bind to the how of how they're supposed to change their behavior. So at the end of the day, we talk to parents about the digitally resilient child.

And this is a child that is able to engage positively with devices because they have had these four pillars built underneath them. And so as each parent uses, sets their home up differently, we try and help them to understand that they can use their child's devices to teach them these four pillars. And the four pillars are understanding consequences. So if your child does break an agreement on how they're supposed to use their device, that you've co-created with them, it's your job as the parents to make sure that that consequence is carried through. So you can help them to understand consequences, to delay gratification. This is something that we all deal with, myself included, to get the work done before the play is played. The third one is then to help them with a growth mindset. So to help them not be so obsessed with getting five A's at the end of the year, but rather get used to studying five hours a day. It's kind of helping them build habits that lead to change, as opposed to chasing the change on the horizon. And then the fourth being, so we've covered understand consequences, delay gratification, growth mindset. And I'm gonna scramble to my notes to see my fourth one, apologies.

- So this is the thing that happens, particularly when you're doing live stuff, it kind of goes all out the window, the best laid plans. Don't worry about it, I do it often. - Yeah, so when we can help parents to understand that they can use devices to motivate their children into positive habits, then it becomes something that is useful, as opposed to something that needs to be completely shunned. So there's an appropriate use of technology, and that's really what we are advising parents to do with their children, to help them understand the opportunities available, as opposed to just losing them into this bottomless pit of the things that they're trying to help them to understand. - Because I think this is important. And if you are listening, between Josh and I, we are by no means saying that social media and technology is a bad thing. It's about the responsible usage of it. And for you as a parent to be aware of what could happen. I mean, we've had some shocking stories here in South Africa. There was one just recently where a young lady committed suicide after being bullied and cyber bullying and all sorts of things like that. Josh, when we come back, I wanna just chat a little bit, if we can, about the parents' role and where do we start?

And then I wanna get onto another project that you guys are involved in. So we'll talk about that and more when we come back. This is what's involved. Great to have you along with us. And we're back with my special guest. It's Josh Ramsey from Be In Touch. And Josh, okay, so now somebody's listening and suddenly they're going, well, okay, this might actually not be the bed of roses. I thought it was. I had no idea my children were up and awake and online at all sorts of strange hours of the morning. You don't want to turn into the thought police as a parent because I think that's got its own challenges. But where do we start? What do we do? - So I'm gonna tie it back into the fourth pillar that we didn't quite get to in the last segment. And the fourth pillar, the reason I think we missed it was that we'd kind of been touching on it before in terms of why children like devices so much, but it is their perception of control. And this is also a great thing for parents to understand as I frame up how you can talk to your children about devices is that children love devices because they have a perception of control. They can control maybe the game that they're playing and the advancement of the character or how their status is changed or how they are perceived online.

So when we talk to our children about devices, we have to give them a perception of control. It can't simply be an authoritarian mandate, as you say, thought police that comes in and slaps down this rule. There has to be a relationship going on with your child. And the best way that we position to cross this, what we call the digital divide between parents and children is to ask better questions of your children. So your child gets into the car after school or maybe they get out of their room 'cause they just finished their Zoom maths class. And instead of saying, how was that? Or how was school? Which is a yes, no, fine, good, bad kind of one word answer. We can ask them more open-ended questions like, what's the most interesting thing that you and your friends are learning about these days? Or what's the craziest thing your friends have done lately? Or another one, which is great about giving them this perception of control is, can you teach me about how you use this device or how you use this social media platform? Another great one is, how much time would you like to spend on this platform, game or console, whatever the case is? So we need to start building that bridge and helping them understand that they can also be a part of setting the rules in the home space.

Definitely, we go with some simple ideas for parents to understand that devices are loaned and not owned. So unless your child has bought that device with money that they've earned, not money that you've given them, money that they've earned, you own that device and it comes with certain agreements that you need to get your child to consciously buy into when they use that device. Another simple one is time or space limitation. So you can say, no devices in the bedroom or no devices in the bathroom, no devices after 9 p.m. Those are quite clear lines in the sand. And really that late night device use is really where the most damage is gonna happen to your child. So the stimulation is gonna impact their sleep. So they're not gonna be sleeping enough. And for teens, they actually need to sleep up to 10 hours a day. I know we might get disgruntled when they don't get out of bed early, but they actually need more sleep because their brains are developing so much. So setting limitations in terms of not having those devices in the bedroom and not believing that temptation because they don't actually have the skillset yet to control their use. They're still developing that part of their brain.

So those are some ideas. - Okay, that's a very, very good starting point. Now, in terms of being in touch, the organization that you're a co-founder of, where do you guys fit in? Because we did mention schools. Is this something, a program that you offer? - Yes, so we work, generally we go through schools to parents. We have a lot of resources that are available for free for parents on our website and they can access that directly. We also run free webinars into kind of more specific little niche bits of information like what is Snapchat? How do I change settings on a PlayStation 5? Those kind of more specific things that we never have time for in a workshop or a radio interview. But then we also work with schools. So I come in and do my talk about my life and the lessons that I've learned and how I would do things differently if I was the children's age. And then we go straight from there into collecting the survey data in the school environment, which we then share back to the parents to activate their digital parenting role. We share back to the children so that they understand that they're not the only ones suffering and that they can rally together and change how they work with their devices as a group.

And then we share that with school decision makers so that they can change policies, procedures, they can inform their wellness staff on areas that they need to be focusing on. And then from there, we take it forward with whether they need additional workshops or emotional intelligence training, skill development training. But it all starts with the talk and the survey. We've got to know what's going on in your school. And that really gets around the kind of illusion that you can just get a one-size-fits-all solution for every school everywhere, which I just don't think hits the mark with kids. They can't just sit down and watch five videos about something and then you can assume that they've learned what they need to know. So we really try and help schools get a bespoke solution to their particular need. - Right, now, is this now targeted at all schools and is there a cost involved? How would the school, let's assume we've got teachers or concerned parents listening, maybe a principal or two, and they thinking, okay, maybe we need to get Josh in and have a chat to us so we can get a better idea of what's happening under our noses. How do we do that and what's the cost? Is there a cost?

- Yeah, so currently, unfortunately, there is a cost. We've always built our business around the idea that we want to be making our money in spaces away from charging parents and schools. But unfortunately, that model is not yet in full play. There is an exciting opportunity at the moment with our Share to Protect campaign, which is an opportunity for schools to actually take part in an online child protection campaign. And by taking part, they can actually raise funds for their school, which then could be used to employ us and to come in and do these talks and surveys. But if they are interested, they can just contact us, info@beintouched.org.za, and we try our best to work with whatever budgets that schools have available. And with all the remote and in-person opportunities of delivering these learning outcomes, we can generally find a way to make it work for a school. But I think it'll be an exciting opportunity to talk a little bit about Share to Protect and how that could be used as a way to raise funds that could then be reinvested in terms of the student wellness or any other space that schools are needing funding at the moment. - Okay, fantastic. I tell you what, let's have a bit of a break.

And then when we come back, we can discuss in more detail as we wrap up what Share to Protect is all about. This is what's involved, my guest is Josh Ramsey from beintouched.org.za. And we're back with Josh. Okay, so Share to Protect, this sounds, 'cause you've sent me some info on it, it sounds like a fantastic concept. I can see there's gonna be one or two things where people are immediately gonna go, ah, and hopefully you're gonna cover all of that with us. So start at the beginning, what is Share to Protect? - So the context of Share to Protect is that we've been speaking for 30 minutes now or 20, 30 minutes about what parents can do, what we can do on an individual level, what is our personal responsibility. But we also need systemic solutions to the challenges that our children are facing online. And one of the big areas that needs to be addressed is what's called age-gating. So age-gating is when you tick that box to say that you're over 16 or 18 or you put in your date of birth to get access to something, whether it's buying an adult product, doesn't have to be kind of adult pornographic content, it could be a cigarette or it could be alcohol online. And that process is flawed, obviously it's flawed.

You know, you can simply put in false information or you can click on something and a child can then get access to either an adult chat room where they shouldn't be or adults could get access to children's spaces online. You know, these adult products could be bought or traded. And so we need a better solution then, that's exactly what Shared to Protect is about. We are training an age estimation tool that would then be able to be plugged into that age-gating process. And once this is completed, what it'll look like is that you'll have an opportunity to do a facial scan and then the AI will detect the age of the person in the photo. So it's nothing to do with facial recognition. There's no, it's completely anonymous. And once the system is trained, all the photos will be deleted as soon as they are taken. And so this will be a great way to protect children online, to make sure that children of the right age group are interacting in the line, that children are not interacting with adults in inappropriate areas, and that children are not exposed to adult content online. So the Shared to Protect campaign is a drive to gather 50,000 consented photos of children head and shoulders between the ages of five to 13.

So when we have that data set of, you know, here's a child between the age of five to 13, here is their year and month of birth. With those 50,000 images, we'll be able to train this age estimation technology. And then once it's trained, it can be deployed globally, but also within the South African context with South African NGOs, it can make use of it for the particular tools that they might want to make use of. So that's in essence the campaign. And what we're doing is we're calling on schools to register with us, and we then send them a unique website URL, and they can share that URL, that website link with the school community, with the parent community. The parents then handle the consent, whether or not they want to take part. They upload a facial scan of their child right there through the website. And that website is tracked and 20 rand is donated for the time that it takes these parents to be a part of this child protection initiative. And so the schools can earn up to 20,000 rand for taking part and sharing that link out to their parent body and motivating that the parents do it. So it's a wonderful opportunity for schools to raise funds in our post COVID and ongoing COVID reality.

And then for those funds to be available to reinvest in student digital safety, or any other ways in which schools would look to use those funds. - Okay, I'm gonna address the elephant in the room here because I know people are gonna be going, okay, but Josh is not talking about all of these things that can happen online and the sharing of nude photos, which by the way, just it horrifies me that people are doing that at that age, okay? And that it could be your kids. So how do we know that David hasn't just picked Josh Ramsey out of the ether somewhere and maybe it's a bit dodgy. So what sort of, who supports you guys and who endorses what you're doing? - So the company that drives the technology behind what we're doing, Yoti, they have covered pretty much every regulatory body and certification that is around. And they really are paving the way on ethical technology use. Locally, we're endorsed by Media Monitoring Africa. These are the guys that are very involved in making sure that the media that we see in South Africa is ethically based and is of an acceptable quality. We're endorsed by FEDSIS, which is a national governance body assistance organization and their Center for Technology, which is our primary partner in driving this out to schools.

So the checks and balances are in place. And what's important for parents to understand is that your child is sharing images of themselves online anyway, that every time you post, even if it's the child or the parent posting online about what you're up to on Facebook, for example, there are countless information and data points that are being collected each time that post goes out. And what we're saying is that we need to take charge of our data and the way that it is used online. And this is a great way to set up a way of controlling where our children can go and what data will be collected on them because they won't get access to places that are trying to entice them there so that they can collect data on them. And that's exactly what a lot of these big social media platforms are doing is that if they can get a child on early, they've got an additional data point that they can then use to market back to that child as they get older. So it is a little bit of an incongruence because at the one stage we're saying, don't post photos of your children online. But this really is a sterile photo, head and shoulders. The parents will have to give consent to the photo and have themselves scanned in to prove that they're over 21.

And they can provide an email address of that like and they will only be emailed at once. And that'll be to give them their reference number for their child's photo. And if they change their mind at any point and ask for their child's photo to be deleted, they can do that. Again, no names, no IP tracking, no location tracking. There's no way in which that photo will ever be able to be associated to your child's identity. - I'm feeling better about that. And just as you're talking to me, I'm thinking, this is going to be incredibly helpful because you're right. And I mean, I never thought about like buying cigarettes and alcohol and stuff like that online. From a youngster's point of view, we used to just, if we wanted to try and get into a bottle store, we either had to find an older kid, which was very difficult or pretend we were old, older than we were. And then invariably we'd get into trouble for it. So, this way it does make a whole lot of stuff a whole lot easier. So, Josh, if somebody is now listening to this and they want to get involved, maybe they want to get their school involved, maybe they just want to reach out to you guys and go, listen, help. We think we have a problem in terms of how our social media and our access and everything is set up at home and we worried about our kids.

Where's the single best place to go for that? And how do we find out more about the other program that you're involved with? - I would say anything to do with home problems that you may be facing if you're a parent out there or if you're a school that's interested in us coming to work with you in your digital wellness, that'll be our website. We've got our contact displayed all over the place there and lots of free resources. I would say that's www.beintoch.org.za, beintouched.org.za. And then for the Share to Protect campaign, it's best to go and check out the website there. Share to Protect. So, share, number two, protect.yoti, Y-O-T-I.com. But if you just Google Share to Protect, you'll hit straight into the YOTI page. So, share to protect at yoti.yoti.com. - Share to Protect, it's the number two, share to protect.yoti.com. If people sort of want to get involved with the project and they're going, "Okay, is there a contact for you to facilitate how we join up with YOTI or not?" - So, absolutely. All you need to do is you need to email your school name in the subject line of an email to sharetoprotect@yoti.com. So, that's sharetoprotect@yoti.com with your school name in the subject and the name and contact number of the person who is registering and they need to be a staff member in the body of the email.

And that'll put you straight into the system and we will contact you with the next steps. - Wonderful stuff. Brings us to the end of this particular chat. Josh, thank you. As I said, going into Child Protection Week, it is vital that knowledge is power and that we inform and educate ourselves and our children on the dangers. I mean, we're in this fourth industrial revolution and technology is here to stay, but it's all about responsible use thereof. So, thank you so much for joining us. - Absolutely. Thank you so much and I look forward to coming back on when you next need some advice. - Wonderful stuff. There we go. That said, Josh Ramsey, my special guest, beintouch.org.za is where you can go to find out some more information about Josh and the team and what they do. Wraps it up for this episode of "What's Involved" to each and every one of you out there. Take care, look after yourselves and thank you for listening.