Know the audience 📺
"We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us."
—Psychotherapist Virginia Satir
> 35,000 decisions | you’re a bad parent
My growing interest in psychology and the human mind was inspired in part by graduate school for journalism and media at the University of Texas at Austin.
There, we read one study after another about what really drives audience behaviors when even the audience doesn’t know what it wants. 🎬🍿
- It wasn't long before I realized audience behaviors were nothing more than human behaviors.
And human behaviors are the domain of psychologists, neuroscientists, decision scientists, and behavioral scientists.
We turn to their research, for example, to help us understand a teen girl's relationship with Instagram and her body.
It's extraordinarily difficult for us all not to compare ourselves to everyone else on the internet.
Grownups hate their own bodies, too.
Plus, grownups must live in fear of being called bad parents, which makes them a rich target for advertisers.
There were no parenting influencers or books or YouTube channels for most of human history.
We're born with an intuitive understanding of how to parent.
- Yet we ruthlessly judge ourselves and judge other parents over the "right" and "wrong" smartphone restrictions for kids.
- We’re vulnerable to non-experts and influencers with polished, online personas but few scientific facts.
We measure our performance as parents against the performance of other parents by the number of parenting and Malcolm Gladwell books on our shelves.
An NPR reporter (and mom) in 2014 examined 18 major parenting books before concluding that she would never read any again.
"Really we are just ourselves using our own best instincts to try to keep our children from becoming insufferable jerks."
- next time "We judge each other for not having a Costco card."
- listening Sly & The Family Stone "Family Affair"
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