1KHO 882: Helping Parents Navigate Digital Landscapes | Leslie Tyler, Pinwheel

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome, welcome, welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And I am honored to have today the Chief Marketing Officer and Director of Parent Education for the company Pinwheel. This is a company that is helping to balance out screen time in real life, which is the same mission that we have. And just helping parents in this. This is a brand new field. And people always say, oh, you know, it's a brand new field. It's the same, you know, people have always had problems. It's been hard to raise kids, but this truly is a very new thing to navigate. Leslie Tyler, welcome to you.

**Leslie Tyler** (1:35)
Thank you so much, Ginny. I'm so excited to be here. And yes, as you said, we're very aligned on the 1000 Hours Outside mission. And, you know, put down, it's odd, a phone company saying put down your phone and go do something else.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:48)
Well, we had had a while ago, you know, this is, I think these are fantastic products. We had had someone once reach out and they were like, can you help us to advertise this? And I don't even know if you use the term dumb phone. People like use different terms for that, but they were like, you know, it's a first phone, right? So our oldest, you're going to try out this first phone. And they want us to help, you know, let people know about this product. And he just didn't use it.
Oh, yeah. Right, which is good. That's actually what you want, right? Like it's just sitting on the counter because it's not addictive. And so then I was like, well, this is actually kind of a hard thing to advertise because it's, it's being used for the minimal things, like a phone used to be used. And I know you sell a landline phone, which is so wonderful. Old school because that worked. So give us a little bit though of your backstory in terms of ending up at Pinwheel. I know you're also a partner with Boston Children's Hospital Digital Wellness Lab. So what's your kind of trajectory there?

**Leslie Tyler** (2:45)
Yeah. So I've been at Pinwheel about four years now. The company is about five years old. And prior to Pinwheel, I have led marketing at a lot of mission-driven companies. My last company was in educational technology. So we sold a software product to schools and districts, and K-12 schools and districts. And it was acquired by Guild Guardian, which is a filtering and monitoring software that schools buy to prevent YouTube in school and things like that. So that's my background. And at Pinwheel, one of the things that I do is create help for parents to navigate digital landscape. And it's hard, like you said, it's not quite the same.
My kids are a bit older, and I wish that we had had devices like this. But we didn't know even just 10 years ago, we didn't know about the harms of social media, and we didn't know about the addictiveness of phones. And now we do. And so there's a lot of fear and uncertainty, and I had somebody tell me yesterday who is a very smart and accomplished dad. And he said, you know, parents know best, except for I don't know.
It's true.

**Ginny Yurich** (4:03)