“OR Unplugged” is a coalition created by parents in Portland to support healthy digital environments for children.
The group provides resources to parents and families, like curricula for digital wellness, suggestions for alternative devices to smartphones, and community events with “unplugged” activities.
The group also works as a thread to unite several smaller, local groups of parents across Oregon that are like-minded about creating phone-free environments for their children.
Currently, these groups exist around Central Oregon, Hood River, Ashland, Salem, and the Portland-Metro area.
One of these groups, based in Sherwood, was founded by Daniel Golder, a father who wanted to create a screen-free upbringing for his children. He calls the local group “Analog Alpha” because of the group’s goal of helping Generation Alpha be “adept at technology without being dominated by it.”
Kathy Masarie is the founder of OR Unplugged — she’s a retired pediatrician who pivoted to this advocacy work after two decades in healthcare. We’ll hear from Masarie and Golder about their work.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon Unplugged is a coalition created by parents in Portland to support healthy digital environments for children. The group provides resources to parents and families who want to encourage phone-free or at least screen-limited childhoods, and they’re partnering with like-minded groups all around the state, including in Central Oregon, Hood River, Ashland, Salem. One of these groups is called “Analog Alpha.” It was founded by Daniel Golder, a pastor in Sherwood. He joins us now along with Kathy Masarie. She is a retired pediatrician and one of the co-founders of OR Unplugged. Welcome to you both.
Kathy Masarie: Thank you.
Daniel Golder: Yeah, it’s a pleasure being here.
Miller: Kathy first, what got you into this work?
Masarie: Started early. I fell in love with kids teaching them swimming lessons, and then I became a pediatrician. And as a pediatrician, I was really about prevention, keeping the sparky kid fully alive. And whether it’s vaccines or bike helmets or less screens, which was TV at the time, which was also harmful. It was showing kids obese and diabetic and displacing their lives, even then in the ‘80s.
Miller: So in the ‘80s, you would say turn off – my mom would call it the boob tube – turn off the TV and go outside and play.
Masarie: Exactly.
Miller: Do you think about screens differently now than you did in the 1980s?
Masarie: Yeah, the good old days, right? We’re looking back at the 1990s and 1980s as the good old days and it was hard then. So it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse and worse.
Miller: Obviously technology has changed and we now have the internet, we’ve got social media, we have YouTubers, there’s everything you could sort of imagine is available on a screen. But how do you think about that as an activist and as a former pediatrician?
Masarie: I would say persuasive design is the difference. In the ‘90s, these tech people learned about how to keep people’s eyeballs on the screen by addicting them with their products, and it’s working really well, and it just makes us want to watch more and more.
Miller: Daniel, what about you? How did you get involved in this particular work?
Golder: I love reading, and I thought word was out. I thought everybody knew screens plus childhood equaled bad outcomes. And then I’ve just seen over and over again, parents and young people making harmful choices when it comes to screens. And I thought, what do we need to do to start making a difference in this area? And the answer we came up with is hyperlocalized small groups, we call them chapters, of adults and alphas banding together to make a difference in their local community.
Miller: One of the big challenges I’ve heard is kids saying, “How can you not let me do this thing or be in this particular space? All my friends are there, that’s where socializing happens. If I can’t be on this thing, I won’t be a part of the social world of my peers.” How do you deal with that sort of collective problem?
Golder: No, I think that’s, you’re hitting the nail on the head, especially for young people. The social cost is the greatest cost to consider. And as adults, when we show up and shake our fingers in the faces of teenagers, they go, yeah, buzz off. I’m gonna do the opposite of what you’re saying, especially if there’s a social cost.
Like, for instance, did you know we struggle massively to get adolescents to take their immunosuppressants? It’s a massive struggle. Why? Immunosuppressants make you bloated. And so I don’t want to go to the pool party and wear a bikini because I’m on my immunosuppressants. Even though you’re reading teenagers the riot act, you’re saying, yeah, you’ll get, you’re gonna die, you’re gonna reject this organ and you’re gonna go to the bottom of the donor list, and they still won’t take them. And I don’t think teenagers are going to change anytime soon. So as the grown-ups in the room, we’ve got to think through how we communicate about really important topics with adolescents.
Miller: OK, but to this specific issue, if 10 kids in a group all have access to some particular social network and you’re talking to your kid, one of 10, and saying you’re not gonna have it, how do you do that?
Masarie: That’s alpha analog. You got to start early. That is the best. You start with your kid, your awareness of where you want your kid to be. They’re 4 years old, and you want them to have a life that’s different than what they’re seeing in the 12-year-olds and the teenagers. So you start early and create the environment among all of their friends’ parents that this is what we all want. And that makes it so much easier. It is very hard to be the only kid doing something different. But if you’re all doing it, that’s why this grassroots, it’s a fierce movement. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there are moms all over – and dads, mostly moms – just doing everything they can at every level to influence a better outcome for their kids. And they know it involves involving other parents, schools, school districts, legislative action, it involves all that, and it’s very grassroots.
Golder: To answer your question though, I think it really is, it’s about building community and about establishing relationships so that young people don’t feel like it’s a social cost to make the healthy choice when it comes to screens. It shouldn’t be a social cost. It should be the right thing to do. In fact, it should be the rebellious, cool, edgy thing to do because we have trillion dollar companies that are invading bedrooms, and that’s not cool. They’re greedy and they’re creepy, and they should get out of there. And if we can change the narrative for young people where they identify, hey, this is an act of rebellion actually, to not be on the algorithm. I’m an Alpha off the algorithm.
Miller: What’s the actual messaging that you would employ or suggest that parents employ to make not being on screens cool and a kind of a political action that is, I mean, because this is also something that their parents are telling them to do. So already it, it seems like that’s one of the challenges that you’re up against, but you want to have this be countercultural.
Golder: Yeah.
Miller: So what’s the language you would use?
Golder: Well, first of all, I would use very different language when I’m addressing alphas compared to when I’m addressing…
Miller: Oh, when I say alphas…
Golder: Yeah, yeah, Generation Alpha. People argue about generation start years and end years all the time. I’m a millennial. I still don’t know when we start and end. That said, the years we use are 2010 to 2025 or 2026 are the birth years for Generation Alpha.
Miller: So 1-year olds to 16-year-olds or so.
Golder: About, yeah. And so when I’m addressing alphas about this, I think there’s a wonderful book by Doctor David Yeager called “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People,” and he’s done a huge amount of research and thinking about how the adolescent mind works and how motivation works. And frankly, if I’m addressing an alpha about this, the language I’m using is, hey, you’re really competent, you know the problems this is causing in your friends, and don’t you want to do something about it? I mean, the attempted suicide rate, this is 2023 CDC data, the attempted suicide rate for adolescents right now, for teenagers is 9%.
That’s wildly high. And so what part of what a chapter wants to do is to have alphas start clubs at their own middle school, their private school, their high school, whatever it is. To say, hey, do you want to be a part of saving lives at your school? Do you want to be on the front cutting edge of making a difference in this world and teach advocacy? Do a fundraising drive. One of the things the Sherwood chapter is doing is a digital detox drive where we’re gonna pick a day and alphas are gonna go around their neighborhoods and say, hey, on this day, I’m gonna keep my parents off their phones for 4 hours. How much money will you give me per hour? And then raise money to buy a book. Like the amazing generation to have at their school.
Miller: I’m glad you brought up adults and parents on their phones. What role does that play – kids seeing parents doing this – in the work that you’re trying to do?
Masarie: It is pivotal, right, for them to realize their relationships with their phone. I’m just waking up, even, I’m reading dopamine kids. I’m a dopamine addict. I’m a dopamine addict to this work. And I’m putting my life aside and that’s not healthy. And so we have actually a film coming, “Your Attention Please,” to get adults to look at their relationship. What life, what do you want to do with this one wild and precious life? Is this how you want to spend it? It’s very much an intention. You make an intention that you want your life to be spent in a different way than you’re doing right now.
Miller: Before we went live, before the show started, we did something which is relatively common, I would say happens more than half the time in these shows is that your picture was taken in the studio here. I’m not that much on social media myself, my assumption is that pictures like that end up on social media. I think I assume that’s why you all had that picture taken. What’s your own relationship to social media?
Golder: Let me say two things really quick. So I want to address the question you just asked, which is, what is the relationship between a parent’s usage of devices and their kids? Last year in May 2025, there was a meta-analysis done of, I think, 21 studies…
Miller: Not the company Meta. You mean like, sorry, an analysis of existing analysis.
Golder: Thank you, correct, yeah, yeah, yeah. An academic journal article, let’s say that, that looked at 21 other studies to analyze what is the impact on children of parents using technology. And of course they’re very academic and kind about it, but my translation is it’s pretty devastating, we probably need to do more research. But it’s really really impactful and challenging, and I’m so sorry I’ve forgotten the second thing that you just asked me.
Miller: Well, it’s, it’s more my what’s your own relationship to social media, or screens more broadly?
Golder: Yeah, I in front of me have four screens: my computer, my iPad, my phone, and my Apple Watch.
Miller: That may be a record…
Golder: Thank you.
Miller: …on this show.
Golder: Being analog doesn’t mean anti-technology. It means removing technology’s place as tyrannical over us and putting it back in the place of a tool. Like if I have a nail and I pick up a hammer and I hammer the nail. Then I set the hammer down. The hammer doesn’t float around all day hitting me in the side of the head, saying, pick me up, pick me up, pick me up. It’s not healthy and it’s not right.
Miller: It also wasn’t designed by very smart people that the hammer, to come up with all kinds of problems for it to solve and be the perfect tool for almost anything you can imagine.
Golder: I think of social media like tailpipes. Like I deal with tailpipes. I endure them because they provide transportation, reliability, economy, they’re great.
Miller: For you tailpipe is an internal combustion engine or vehicle.
Golder: Yeah, exactly. But what I don’t do is I don’t sit and suck on a tailpipe’s exhaust for five hours a day. So social media has its uses. I posted, I didn’t know when we were gonna be on. I took a picture, I posted, I said, “Hey, this could be on here.” I post maybe five times a year, something like that, and I use it primarily for keeping up with friends and family, because so far I haven’t seen anyone change their political opinion based on my wicked comment.
Miller: I’m curious, Kathy, what you see as the class dimensions in this conversation.
Masarie: Inequity, is that what you mean?
Miller: Well, what I mean is, for example, we got a comment from Beth Parsons, who said in response to our question on Facebook, whether smartphone access should be limited for kids. She said yes, for at least three years so their brains can develop normally, then restricted a lot. She says too many people are using them as babysitters, and that’s going to really backfire on the parents and the whole society. One of the things that I’m zeroing in here is that a tablet, if you already own it, is in a sense a kind of free babysitter for parents who are working two jobs or who are struggling, and it’s a very easy thing to have their kids look at a screen, especially if they can’t afford some other person to watch them at that time. So I’m curious how you think broadly about class in this conversation.
Masarie: Well, I think people that have the lower means you have, the more enticing it is to use the screen because you literally are trying to get food on the table and you just can’t. And so what happens with these poor kids is that they are actually on the phone two hours more per day than the average kid, which is already 7.5 hours a day.
Miller: It’s the opposite of the way we used to talk about the digital divide.
Masarie: People still believe this myth that it reduces inequity and it actually increases it. It’s worse. It makes it worse. And there’s lots of research behind that that we can share. So what we want is to pass laws that affect all kids, not just our kids, and then it evens the playing field. But in answer to that, I had a babysitting co-op. I don’t think I’d go out for $100 for the babysitter for four hours. And I have more money. I don’t even think I’d want to spend it that way. But babysitting co-ops are free. You just get together with two or three other families and you keep track of how many half hours you use with each other and it’s just, we don’t think of community like we used to. I relied on that in the ‘90s.
Golder: I think you’re hitting the nail on the head though, is that it really is, I mean, it’s one thing to come in all high and mighty and say, hey, an iPad is literally destroying the white brain matter in your child’s brain. Don’t use it with your 3-year-old. But I’m saying that as someone who works a job, just one, and has time for reading and pleasure, like leisure time on the weekends, right, so we do have to be really thoughtful with our language about this. And one of the things is, I really appreciate, Kathy is a superstar and the work she’s doing with school boards and legislation is incredible, and I think we need more of that work happening.
One of the things that we’re trying to do at a really small scale is change a narrative in a community, where the community comes together and says, hey, yeah, I understand. Oh, you don’t want to have your kid on your iPad, but you’re struggling with childcare. I get that. Maybe I can come alongside you and watch your kid for two hours once a week or something like that because we need each other and we’re far too isolated.
Masarie: Or let’s go play club at the after school. It’s free.
Golder: Wonderful idea. Wonderful.
Miller: Oregon schools are now cell phone free, but Chromebooks and tablets are often major parts of kids’, including elementary school kids’, experiences now. How do you feel about that?
Masarie: We just hosted Jared Cooney Horvath, who wrote a book called “The Digital Delusion” last month, and he is the one that knows the science of learning. He gave us the best talk that we recorded about this is how kids learn. And this is how technology products for the last 50 years of research do not work. Kids learn from live teachers who have empathy, connection, can turn, can see the expression on the kid’s face when they’re struggling. That’s how kids learn. Actually, they’ve shown that kids learn better by putting an air conditioner in their room than they do with ed tech products. They perform better. Air conditioning performs better. That’s how bad it is.
Miller: We see better outcomes.
Masarie: Better outcomes. Yeah, so it’s pretty clear, but it’s not the narrative that big tech is sharing with us. So it’s part of the work to change the myths that are being promoted by big tech, that you have to have ed tech to serve you. It’s like you have to have keys to the car when you’re five because you need to learn to drive. We need to learn to think before we learn how to use technology products.
Miller: That’s often another argument that I’ve seen in favor of kids having some version of maybe significant access to technology is that it’s inevitable that this is the air that they’re going to be breathing. The world they’re going to be living in is a highly technological world, and so they’ve got to know how all these things work. What’s your response to that?
Golder: I mean, here’s the thing. The iPhone, the smartphone, is the most intuitive device ever invented. It’s wild. We don’t need to train people how to use the most intuitive device of all time. We need to train people in an analog way. And they can transfer their skills to a digital. So an example that Dr. Horvath used in his talk is going from, I learned how to drive on a stick, OK? You put me in an automatic, it’s easy. I can transfer that learning. But if you learn to drive on an automatic and try to transfer to a stick, it doesn’t transfer. So you have to learn…
Miller: All the driving aspects transfer, but you have to learn a new way to change gears. I take your point.
Golder: Yeah, yeah, exactly, is that it’s not a one for one, and we’re finding the same thing is true with classrooms. If kids are learning on a screen, they can transfer and reproduce their learning on another screen. It’s a lot harder to do analog.
Miller: We got a comment on Facebook from Troy Johnson. He said this: “The age verification process should be on social media or any other potentially harmful platform. Recent laws mandating that devices require age verification before you can even use them are really bad and should scare everyone.” I bring this up because there have been various efforts in recent years to require age verification of specific apps or full operating systems. But there are also plenty of concerns about both the effectiveness of these kinds of tools or the intrusiveness of them. Do you think that there are policy fixes for what you’re talking about? Or are we really in the end in the realm of household or family-based solutions?
Masarie: That cannot work.
Miller: It can’t?
Masarie: It cannot work. We have to force the technology companies to not just say they’re doing something to make us feel better. They actually have to do it.
Miller: What do they have to do?
Masarie: They have to put guardrails in the inside of their products so that a kid underage cannot get on it. And we will learn as we go what works and doesn’t work, but the demand of it and no leeway on that, you cannot put this on the parents’ back, and you cannot put it on the kid’s back.
They’re telling kids at school, don’t look at that AI, don’t cheat on AI. We’re putting the burden on a kid to not go look at something that gives them an easy answer. That is an impossible ask for a kid. We have to put the guardrails on, and that’s what we can do with the legislation.
Golder: I think legislation could help. I’m really interested in changing the entire public narrative and heartbeat approach to this because we’re humans. Humans are resilient, incredible, wonderful, creative creatures, and I mean, big tobacco seemed like this monolith that would never come down. And look where we are. So, I have a lot of hope for the future, and I think there’s a lot of parents out there that love their kids, want to do their best. And alphas are wicked smart. They’re gonna make some good choices.
Masarie: We have a 10-year-old that picked up “The Amazing Generation” from his grandma’s table, read half of it one day, half of it the next. He’s proselytizing the message to everybody, I’m not gonna be manipulated by these people.
Miller: Daniel Golder and Kathy Masarie, thanks very much.
Masarie: Thank you.
Golder: Thank you.
Miller: Kathy Masarie is a founder of OR Unplugged. Daniel Golder is the founder of Analog Alpha.
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