Press Pause: Finding Balance in a Digital World

Why It’s Time to Press Pause

• Cassie Dietrich • Season 1 • Episode 1

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In the premiere episode of Finding Balance in the Digital World, host Cassie Dietrich, Public Information Officer for Dublin City Schools, sits down with Superintendent Dr. John Marschhausen to explore why the district is launching the Press Pause campaign.

They discuss growing concerns around student screen time, the impact of tech habits on learning and well-being, and the shared responsibility schools and families have in creating healthier digital boundaries. You’ll hear real-life examples, practical tips for parents, and ideas for starting meaningful conversations at home.

Up next: Kevin Patton joins us to talk about how screens affect sleep — and what families can do about it.

This conversation is just one of many. Visit www.dublinschools.net/press-pause to explore tools, resources, and actions you can take today to help your family Press Pause. Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss a conversation.

Cassie:

In a world that never stops scrolling, sometimes the healthiest thing we can do is press pause. Welcome to Finding Balance in the Digital World, the Dublin City School District's Summer 2025 Parent Education podcast series. I'm Cassie Dietrich, public Information Officer for Dublin City Schools and your host for this series. Each week we'll have real conversations with experts in community voices about screen time, tech habits, and how we can help our kids and ourselves take back control in a constantly connected world. Let's press pause. And start the conversation. So today we're kicking off this campaign with Dr. John Marsh Hausen, superintendent of Dublin City Schools, Dr. Marsh Hausen. Before we talk about the why behind this campaign, can you just tell us a little bit about how you're connected to Dublin? Aside from being the superintendent of the school district?

John:

Well, I'm a resident of the school district. I have a wife who has been a teacher here. She'll be starting her 13th year up at Eli Penney. I also have the honor and privilege of serving on the chamber executive board, serving on the visit Dublin executive board, and like no other place I've worked. The threads are all woven together in Dublin and there's a lot of intentionality In how as a community, we work together with all of the different organizations, business, government, faith-based support base, the food pantry. Everybody is working towards a common goal, which really makes our Dublin community elite.

Cassie:

All right, so can you just tell me about the Press Pause campaign, why Dublin City Schools is doing it, and why this has become a focus for us?

John:

I think when I'm asked what's the biggest concern I have. As a superintendent with 20 years experience for the kids in our school district.

Cassie:

Mm-hmm.

John:

I think the biggest concern is cell phones, followed by social media, followed by an almost alternate reality. Of where our students live and think they should be. And then we start putting AI on top of that. And when we look at student's ability to be in the now, student's ability to build real relationships and to, at a personal level. And build trust with the people they should be building trust with press Pause is an opportunity for us to partner with parents as we head into our summer months and then even beyond as we return to school next year, to equip parents with some tools and some resources that we as educators also often need refreshed about and how to keep kids safe. What are appropriate limits on screen time? What age should we start students on social media? How do we monitor their Instagram and their TikTok and all of the different apps that they're on? And ultimately, how do we help? Our young people turn into young adults that are prepared for success in the world that they're gonna step into.

Cassie:

Awesome. I have a 13 and 15-year-old home so this hits home for me very closely. And I find that often people say. It's not in our community or they just try to divert and live in a kind of a state of denial. Can you talk about one or two examples of situations that have actually happened here in Dublin that we've had to deal with related to social media and our students?

John:

Well, I think there are two things that we're most concerned about when we talk with our Dublin police. There are bad actors. Actors out there who are looking to pray and take advantage of young people And we've had young people in our community who have fallen victim to bad actors, adults pretending to be children. Getting information, personal information from 13 year olds and 15 year olds. Because there are people who trained to extract information from them. That puts young people at risk. It puts them in risk of things that we don't want to talk about in Dublin, abduction, sex sextortion, all of these things. Because when kids give up information. That other people shouldn't have. It makes them vulnerable. So number one, are those real life things that are challenges. And then number two are, we've just dealt recently with you can create a fake social media account about someone, make it posted, make it live, and using ai. Make it look like someone saying something they would never say, which puts kids in such a position of vulnerability. And they come under attack by other groups and they didn't do anything. So as parents, we need to be engaged with our children's social media accounts. We need to help monitor. We have to help them know what's real and what's not real. And then we have to take advantage of the real connections we have. Because if something doesn't look right, it's probably not right. And how do we follow up with that?

Cassie:

Yeah. And can you talk about how, maybe decades or generations ago parents would worry about when their kids were at parties or out and about with friends and how they still need to have that same worry, but about who the people are associating with online?

John:

Yeah. I, I'm gonna sound really old now, but there was a time. When students got a lot of freedom when they got their driver's license when they were 16 or 17, and up until that time, mom and dad knew where their kids were because they were talking to other parents, or they were dropping their child at a house or they were in a certain social group. Now, unfortunately it seems like parents are less engaged with where their children are'cause they can track them on a phone app or they can text another parent, or they feel like they know where their kiddo is and sometimes the kids are smarter than parents. There are times that they might not be texting mom. They might be texting another number for a child.'cause it's really easy to get another texting app on your phone that looks like it's someone else and we don't follow up like we used to follow up. We're not dropping a child off and going in and having a. Conversation. We're not calling a home phone on a landline that rings in the kitchen.

Cassie:

Right.

John:

And the other big piece of this from a mental health standpoint is these kids have the phones next to their beds twenty four seven, three sixty five, and they never get to unplug when all we had was a landline. There were a time when mom and dad could pick up and say, Hey, get off the phone.

Cassie:

Right.

John:

And you had time to be away from the stress. Your brain had a chance to decompress of everything that happened during the day. Now it's all the time, and we need to create that opportunity for downtime.

Cassie:

I agree. So some parents might think this is a school problem, not something that starts at home. But why is it important that our families are part of the solution?

John:

Well, we have the privilege and responsibility of having students with us for about seven and a half hours a day. By the time they get to us and get back home the rest of the time they're in the house and we have too many kids. Who retreat to a place in their home where they're out of sight, so then they might be out of mind and they're staring at their device, they're communicating with. We're not even quite sure who we're using filters on the pictures. We post of ourselves to create alternate realities and we can't do it all alone. And anything that we do in school needs to be reinforced at home and vice versa. And so this press pause campaign, one of our ultimate goals is for it to be a conversation starter. You and I, Cassie, have been in meetings together where adults have said, but my kids said everybody gets Instagram at 13 these are leaders in our community in some cases who are saying. John, when should kids get Instagram? My hope is at neighborhood barbecues this summer and at soccer camps and wherever our parents are together, we can start some conversations we're not saying we have. The hard, fast rules, but as a community, as communities of parents, can you be together? And can we set some norms? And you've got your key communicators, we've got our groups. That we're open to this conversation, but we need to engage in the conversation.

Cassie:

We called it finding balance, right? Because we know that people are still gonna use the devices.

John:

Yes. But

Cassie:

we want them to find the right balance so that kids aren't on it all the time, or even parents aren't on it all the time.

John:

You and I are very mindful, we're probably not taking a phone away from a sixth grader who already has a phone.

Cassie:

Right,

John:

but can we help mom and dad put some parent controls on that phone that may have limits to how much it can be used during the day? Can we help mom and dad do some small things? Like where are all your devices charged in your home? And I can't tell you how many times I hear students say, yeah, but my phone's my alarm clock. Yes, we live in Dublin, Ohio for 10 99. You can get on Amazon and get a battery powered alarm clock.

Cassie:

I didn't know they.

John:

You can do'em and like they're travel little battery powered ones. You can buy an alarm clock if that's what you need in your room to get up in the morning. Right. I think the experts we talk to and some of the expert messages. That will be part of our press pause series. Kids shouldn't be having their cell phone in their room while they're trying to sleep. There are too many alerts, bings, pings, bongs, whatever the sounds are that kids need to be safely unplugged and in a place that mom and dad can pay attention.

Cassie:

Yeah.

John:

So we want these to be conversation starters, and that's

Cassie:

a great segue because tomorrow we have Mr. Kevin Patton coming to talk about sleep and screen time. So yeah,

John:

it's huge.

Cassie:

what's one message you think the board and yourself would like for families to kind of get out of this press pause campaign? Just one. The biggest takeaway,

John:

This may not be the biggest, but this is. One of the things that I really believe mom and dad's own the phones mom and dad's. Even if their kid's 18, if they purchased the phone, if they're paying for the plan, you have a right to see what's on your child's phone all the time. So I think it's critical that when we look at phones and devices, parents have access. They set those access codes so they can't be taken away by the child. And that mom and dad, if you haven't started, I think they should check phones on a daily basis. Look at the text threads. Look at the social media threads, because our children need guidance from us as adults and as the mom and the dad, as grandma and grandpa, as the. Parents and the caregivers, we wanna help you set the norms in your family to keep each child safe and that's a family decision at home, but we want to be able to be part of that conversation. I think it starts with mom and dad need to have access.

Cassie:

Yeah. And I think in many cases what we hear is when we do have issues with phones. That trickle into the schools. When we contact parents, they don't necessarily know that this is what their kid's doing online.

John:

Correct.

Cassie:

they're caught off guard

John:

and our fear is always when it's the police getting into the phones, when it's looking at things. And we have parents who say, my kid would never, and that's a dangerous statement'cause the best kids make mistakes. When we look at what happens with young people, we wanna teach our kids to be resilient. We know children make mistakes all the time. They're kids. We just don't want those mistakes to be life altering. Right. And as the adults and as a school district. Partnering with parents, if we can help avoid life altering mistakes, that's ultimately what we want to be able to do.

Cassie:

I agree a hundred percent.

John:

Mrs. Diana Rigby, who's our board president, when I met with Mrs. Rigby earlier in the year and said, as board president, what's kind of your focus this year? And this is a passion for her. And when people wonder like, what does the board do? The board through conversations a lot of times helps with this kind of vision and direction. And it's so timely and so important, as we look at the role of cell phones in our schools and with this generation of young people, we're proud and take the responsibility to be partners in keeping our young people in Dublin safe.

Cassie:

Well thank you for joining us. Thank you for helping us launch this campaign. Everybody can visit our website to view episodes, see resources. We have lots of research there, tips and tricks. For example, at the next episode we'll be talking to Kevin Patton, as I said about sleep and screen time. We are going to give parents the tools they need to be able to set, focus mode or sleep mode on their child's cell phone, links to, centralized. Charging stations that you can purchase and put in your home so that all the phones are charged in the same place every night and your kid does not have access to them.

John:

They even tuck away the wire so they don't have to look. Yeah, like a tangled web. Yeah. They look really nice on your counter or wherever they are, if they've gotten better.

Cassie:

If you're ready to shop on Amazon, we're gonna have the link. all right. Well, remember a little pause goes a long way. We'll see you next time.

John:

Thanks, Cassie.

People on this episode

Contributor

Cassie Dietrich

Host
Contributor

Dr. John Marschhausen

Guest