The Dragon Behind the Glass

I’m the youngest of six.

For most of my life, that meant something structural. There was always someone older in the room. Older when I was in high school. Older when I left for college. Older when I got married. Older when I signed a mortgage and started raising kids. For a long time, “older” felt like a category I wasn’t in.

Then the distance collapsed. We were all married. We all had responsibilities. We were all tired in similar ways. Two siblings passed. My parents are gone. There are no grandparents left. I still have two older brothers, but something has shifted. I see aging now. I hear it in conversations about recovery times and memory and pace. The insulation is thinner. They were always older. Until they weren’t. Or maybe more accurately — until it no longer protected me.

I grew up with a sense that the world could fracture. The Holocaust wasn’t distant history. The Cold War wasn’t metaphor. There was always an undercurrent of instability — something large and dangerous just out of view. Technology moved slower then. Imagination came in cartridges and pixelated worlds. I grew up in the era of Miyamoto, when wonder fit inside a plastic console. I built my career in the era of Jobs, when design reshaped how we held technology and how we held ourselves.

Now I’m raising a son and a daughter in the era of Altman, where machines generate language and prediction in real time and the future feels compressed. The world has accelerated. History feels less theoretical. The noise is constant. The boogeyman never left. It just changed names.

As a kid, I played Dungeons & Dragons in basements with my siblings and friends. Dragons were adversaries then — creatures you confronted with dice and imagination. Fear was part of the story, but it was contained. You rolled for it. You defeated it. You packed up the board and went home. My son now watches Stranger Things, a stylized echo of what my childhood might have looked like from the outside. We still play D&D. The dice are still there. The imagination still works. But something has shifted.

We have a bearded dragon now. I’m building its new enclosure carefully — heat gradients, lighting, substrate, space. Too cold and it shuts down. Too hot and it suffers. Too little structure and it’s vulnerable. Too much and it’s stressed. It struck me recently that the dragon hasn’t disappeared from my life. It’s just changed roles.I used to imagine dragons. Now I steward one.

The fear that used to live under my bed doesn’t live there anymore. It lives in the questions I have about the world my kids will inherit. It lives in late-night thoughts about acceleration and instability and what scale means now. I don’t lose sleep because I’m panicked. I lose sleep because I’m aware. The difference at this stage of life is this: I am no longer the child imagining the future. I am the adult responsible for standing inside it. And that requires something different than bravado. It requires steadiness. It requires conserving energy for what matters. It requires modeling play not as escape, but as resilience. I still build Lego. I still run. I still sketch and design and experiment. Play hasn’t left me. It has become deliberate. It is how I refuse to harden.

There’s a strange full circle in all of this. The youngest sibling who once felt insulated. The kid who rolled dice against imaginary monsters.The adult who watched technology and history compress decades into years. And this week, I turn fifty. The reveal isn’t the number. It’s the position. Fifty is when you realize you don’t fight the dragon anymore. You tend the fire. You regulate the heat. You build the enclosure. You own the fear instead of pretending it’s gone. The dragon didn’t disappear. It grew up with me.

And now I’m responsible for how it breathes.

During my time as Lead Creative and Regional Training Facilitator at Apple, I spent far more time thinking about behavior than hardware. We weren’t just asking what the technology could do. We were asking what people actually did once the screen lit up. One distinction kept surfacing in those conversations: consuming versus creating.

Years later—as a dad and as an art teacher—I find myself returning to that same distinction constantly. Parents ask me a version of the same question: “How much screen time is okay?” But I’ve come to believe that’s the wrong question. The better question is: What mode is my child in right now? Because not all screen time is equal. The action matters more than the device.

Over time, I’ve come to see four clear modes:

1. Passive Consumption

2. Active Consumption

3. Interactive Engagement

4. Creative Production

When you recognize these modes, the conversation shifts—from counting minutes to cultivating intention. 

Passive Consumption: The Low-Load Mode

This is what most people mean when they worry about “screen time.”

• Infinite scroll

• Short-form videos

• Algorithm-fed clips

• Auto-play content

This mode is engineered for minimal cognitive load. The brain doesn’t have to track a story, solve a problem, or hold information in working memory. The system does that for you. In education, we talk often about executive function—the mental skills that allow a child to focus, initiate tasks, regulate attention, and persist through difficulty. Certain activities strengthen those muscles. Others bypass them. Passive consumption requires very little executive function. There’s no planning. No sustained focus. No meaningful decision-making beyond “next.” It isn’t evil. But it’s not neutral. The issue isn’t screens. It’s unintentional use.

Active Consumption: The Narrative Mode

Now compare that to sitting through a full-length film—or even a complete episode with a beginning, middle, and end. In this mode, the viewer must:

• Track characters

• Follow structure

• Hold details in working memory

• Process emotion

• Anticipate outcomes

The cognitive load is higher. The brain has to stay with the story. Not every movie is exceptional. That’s not the point. Structure alone changes the experience. A contained narrative demands attention in a way fragmented clips do not. So when someone says, “Shorter is better,” I gently challenge that assumption. Thirty minutes of algorithmic fragments is not automatically better than two hours of coherent storytelling. The difference isn’t duration. It’s mental engagement.

Interactive Engagement: The Productive Struggle Mode

When someone plays a well-designed game, something fundamentally different is happening.

• Both hands are active.

• Decisions matter.

• Failure is immediate.

• Adjustment is required.

In education, we call this productive struggle—wrestling with a problem long enough for learning to occur. A good game requires executive function:

• Planning

• Strategy

• Cognitive flexibility

• Emotional regulation after failure

It also builds agency. The player’s choices shape the outcome. That doesn’t mean unlimited gaming is wise. But it does mean we should stop flattening all screen use into one category. Watching something happen and making something happen are neurologically different experiences.

Creative Production: The Agency Mode

This is the mode I care about most as an educator.

Creative production looks like:

• Drawing digitally

• Editing video

• Recording music

• Coding

• Writing and revising

• Designing something original

In my classroom at S.A.R. Academy, when students enter what I think of as studio mode, something shifts. Attention sharpens. Decisions slow down. Revision becomes part of the process. They’re not reacting. They’re building. This is deep work—sustained focus on a cognitively demanding task. It requires planning, iteration, and ownership. It strengthens executive function instead of outsourcing it.

Creative production builds agency. The child is not passively consuming someone else’s output. They are shaping something of their own.

As someone who designs games and builds physical projects, I know how demanding that process is. Creation requires persistence. It requires sustained attention. It requires responsibility. This is intentional technology use. And it’s powerful.

A Better Framework for Parents

Instead of asking, “How much screen time?” Try asking, “Which mode?”

• Passive Consumption → limit

• Active Consumption → curate

• Interactive Engagement → guide

• Creative Production → encourage

Some modes drain attention. Some train it. Some build agency. The goal isn’t elimination. It’s discernment.

What I’ve Learned

kids don’t need less technology. They need better relationships with it. They need adults who understand the difference between:

• Scrolling and focusing.

• Watching and building.

• Low cognitive load and productive struggle.

• Algorithmic drift and intentional creation.

When we stop treating all screen time as the same, we stop fighting the wrong battle. We stop policing minutes. We start cultivating habits.

And the question shifts from:

“How long were you on your device?” to “What were you doing on it?”

That’s the question that actually changes something.