Screen/Life Balance and How to Break Up With Your Phone
Week of July 27, 2024
Join Catherine Price, TED speaker, and author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, for two workshops dedicated to helping families create healthier relationships with technology — both during family week and back at home. The first workshop is geared toward helping people create better screen/life balance for themselves; the second is oriented more toward families. The two workshops can be taken independently, though they’re also designed to complement each other.
How to Break Up With Your Phone*
In this workshop, Catherine Price, TED speaker, and author of How to Break Up With Your Phone will reveal the ways in which our phones and apps are designed to be hard to put down and the effects that constant connectivity is having on our relationships, memories, attention spans, creativity and productivity. Catherine will help you identify your personal goals, lay the foundations for new habits, and make changes to your settings and routines that will help you establish better boundaries with technology and create a relationship with your phone that feels good. She’ll also provide some practical tips for how to spend your week at the Ranch bonding with your family, not your phone. This workshop is appropriate for adults and teens (13 and up). It’s geared primarily toward helping people improve their *own* relationships with their phones and devices. *Don’t worry: no phones will be harmed during this workshop!
How to Create Screen/Life Balance as a Family
Is screen time a source of conflict in your family? Do you want to create healthier habits but don’t know how? In this workshop, which is designed for families to do together, Catherine Price, TED speaker, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, and core member of Jon Haidt’s The Anxious Generation team, will lead families through conversations and exercises designed to help them achieve better screen/life balance as a family. Catherine will reveal the ways in which our phones and apps are designed to be hard to put down and invite families to explore some of the effects that technology and devices are having on their relationships (and attention spans, creativity, memories, and productivity). This workshop will include guided conversations, discussions, practical suggestions, and hands-on activities, all designed to help families use Family Week to lay the foundations for new habits that they can take home with them. Be sure to bring your phones! This workshop is designed for adults and children ages 10 and up (regardless of whether they have phones), though younger children are also welcome. It’s geared toward helping people create healthier relationships with technology as a *family.*
Catherine Price is a health and science journalist, speaker,and the author of books, including How to Break Up With Your Phone and The Power of Fun. Her work on fun and screen/life balance has been featured in media outlets around the world, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, the BBC, CNN, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, and The Today Show, among many others, and she has led talks and workshops for events including TED, SXSW, the Aspen Ideas Festival, Leadercast, and Oprah Winfrey’s “The Life You Want” series.
Catherine writes the Substack newsletter, “How to Feel Alive,” and her TED talk on fun has been viewed more than 5 million times. Her recent talk, ”Kids, Smartphones, and Social Media: The Risks and the Solutions,” has been described by Jonathan Haidt (the bestselling author of The Anxious Generation) as “the talk every parent should watch,” and has led to a collaboration between Catherine and Jon’s team, in which they’re working together to roll back the phone-based childhood.
Through her writing, talks, and courses, Catherine aims to provide evidence-backed resources to help people of all ages scroll less and live more.