Get ready to end the struggle and find the balance in your tech-driven family life! Digital Daze is every parent’s essential guide to creating a productive relationship with screen time and stronger family bonds. We welcome Martial Peter, founder of Neuro-Synchronology™—a pioneer in harmonizing the conscious and subconscious mind—to discuss his vital new book. Martial explains that technology isn’t the problem, but rather the bad use of it, and shares practical, bite-sized strategies on how to create “tech-free zones” like the dining table, how to detox your own phone addiction to model the right behavior, and how to replace screen time with engaging, fun activities. Plus, learn about his essential “get out of jail free card” concept for building a safe zone and a foundation of trust with your children to navigate the dangers of the digital world.
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Digital Daze: Parenting Strategies For Healthy Technology Use And Stronger Family Bonds
“Origin Of Digital Daze Journey”
I’m excited about 2026 coming up. We are kicking off our BA Mag Training series with Lin Yuan-Su, who is a seven-figure mindset coach. She’s going to be giving us a talk on mindset secrets for authors who want to lead. You can register for that at BAMagTraining.com. It’ll be on January 9th, 2026. I’m super excited, because what better way to kick off the year than having your goals ready and being inspired to step into those goals? Get yourself signed up for it at BAMagTraining.com.
Our guest is one of our authors. His name is Martial Peter. He’s the Founder of Neuro-Synchronology, a pioneer in the discipline that harmonizes the conscious and subconscious. As a parent and thought leader who has raised children both before and during the digital era, Martial brings deep insight and compassion to the modern challenges of parenting in a tech-driven world.
If you guys haven’t bought his book, Digital Daze, you need to. It’s every parent’s guide to the balance between allowing your children to consume some screen time, but to consume it in a very productive way. We’re going to talk about that because I know it is so easy to get hooked on social media, video games, and all these different things that take us away from the beauty of the real world and real relationships. Standby for my interview with Martial.
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Martial, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I appreciate being on.
I’m very excited about your book. There are a lot of parents out there who need this book. Tell me a little bit about what inspired you to write Digital Daze, and what’s the main message that you hope to share with parents?
The start of Digital Daze is a bit weird. It was a client’s daughter in the UK having trouble with her kids and technology. She asked me if I could help out. I sat down one evening and wrote down a three-page strategy on how she can help her kids using neuro-synch. When I sent that over as an email, I got an email back, probably about a week and a half later, going, “This is fantastic. I’ve shared it with all my friends at school and other parents. They loved it. You’ve got to do something about it. You’ve got to share the message.” That started me off.
Shortly after that, I decided to make it into a book because I’ve had 2 kids prior to the whole technology era and 2 kids post-technology era. If you look at the kids and how they develop, it’s chalk and cheese. What anything means to them in the parent-child relationship has changed a lot. You go out to shops and restaurants and see people out there sitting there with their phones in their hands rather than communicating and connecting with each other. That goes especially with kids because they’re using technology, as in iPads or phones, as an electronic babysitter, even at restaurants and at home.
The whole book is about strategies for how to reconnect your kids to the family and how to re-engage them in activities outside of technology. I don’t think technology is a bad thing as such. Technology is a useful tool. The main idea is how you reconnect your children to your family and bring it back to the core values that we used to have when you and I were kids.
Technology isn’t the problem — it’s a tool — but the real focus is learning how to reconnect our children to family and return to the core values we once held. Share on XWhen we would go to restaurants when the kids were younger, and I still have to do it when they’re older, unfortunately, I would have them put their phones away. Since I’m a writer, we would look around the room, and I would make them tell stories about people at the tables next to us. It was a way to get their attention. You mentioned neurosych, which is neuro-synchronology. What is it, and how did it influence your approach to all of this?
Neuro-syncchronology is the synchronization of the conscious and the subconscious mind. It sounds pretty simple. We, as human beings, are pretty much driven by a subconscious mind. About 80% to 85% of us are driven by a subconscious mind, and about 15% by a conscious mind. Quite often, have you ever thought, “I need to do something, but I’ll go make a cup of coffee first.” In psychology, you call it procrastination, but it’s your subconscious mind achieving a different goal than what your conscious mind wants.
What neuro-synchronology is how you can get your conscious and subconscious mind to go after the same thing or the same goal. If you want to make a sales call or have a chat with somebody that you feel like, “I’m not ready to do that,” and your subconscious mind goes, “Let’s go to safety. Let’s go and make that cup of coffee,” or, “Let’s go and distract ourselves with a TV show,” or, “Let’s doom scroll,” what neuro-synchronology is about is connecting that back and making your subconscious and conscious head in the same direction.
That’s so interesting. I can always tell when I’m procrastinating because my house is spotless. I know I’m procrastinating, but I do it anyway.
You do everything but what you have to do, right?
Exactly. The other thing is when I have a problem, or I’ve never done something, I will go for a walk because it’ll help me clear my head and get back into it. I don’t consider that as procrastination as much as I need to get out in the fresh air and get some creative juices going on how I’m going to approach this.
At times, we call that changing your state of mind. You’re changing your location or changing your environment to change your state of mind. Your subconscious association with going for a walk and fresh air is like a rejuvenation for yourself. What happens is that when we do that, the environment influences us. We have an association with the environment, so it influences how we feel. We come back and go, “I’m fresh. I’m ready to do that.” When you get into it, it’s cool because you understand why we do what we do on a regular basis.
That is cool. In your opinion, what is the most urgent issue that we face with children and technology?
The most urgent issue is our perception towards it. Let me explain that. As parents or as grandparents, we have this perception that they shouldn’t be doing it at all, or we should cut it off. If you look at cutting it off, technology is kids’ connection to the world. It’s their entire connection. What we used to do is cycle over to a neighbor’s house and do that, but kids nowadays do it through technology.
“Learning To Use Innovations Safely”
The effective use of technology, to me, is the most important paradigm that has to come out of this. Technology on its own is not bad. It’s the bad use of technology. Let me give you a different example. Hopefully, the audience will get an idea of this. When cars first came out, we did not have traffic lights, roundabouts, or speed limits, so there were a lot more crashes, accidents, and damage.
Imagine if governments go, “Cars are bad for us. Automobiles are bad for us. We have to ban automobiles because they’re killing people.” We didn’t do that. What we did was we trained people to use cars effectively. We put traffic lights in. We put roundabouts in. We put speed limits. We then put the police into policing people who are using the vehicles properly. It’s the same thing with technology. The biggest paradigm I love for people to get on board with is that technology is not bad. Bad use of technology is bad. Effective use of technology is super powerful.
It’s about putting guidelines, boundaries, and things in place. When you say it’s good, every child uses it. They have to learn it to be productive in the world. You can’t say, “We’re not going to do any of it.”
“Teaching Kids Tech For Future”
I was at a workshop up on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. I was talking to people there, and there was one parent who said, “I’m not letting my kids have phones or technology until they’re fifteen.” I was so worried about that. I got entrepreneurial friends, and one of the questions during interviews is, “What games did you play on computers as a kid and as a teenager?”
If they didn’t come up with the right games, they didn’t get the job. Technology is interwoven into our lives so much that if you are not tech savvy, your future is at risk at getting great jobs or progressing. AI is coming into it as well, so we have to get ahead of the curve. We have to educate our kids to use technology effectively rather than going, “It’s a bad thing.”
Technology is now so integral to our lives that if you are not tech savvy, your future is at risk. Share on XRemember, when we grew up and then went to job interviews, it was, “Do you know Word? Do you know Excel?” That was it. DOS was a thing.
It was DO. I remember my first computer. I still have it. It’s a Macintosh SE. You had to put a disc in before you could start it up because the DOS program ran from the external floppy disc. I remember listening to an article about how we’ve got more power in our hands than what put the first man on the moon. The technology in our phones is so far more advanced. It’s the effective use of that.
The other part of the book is also about how you re-engage your kids. We say, “Don’t do that, but what are we replacing it with?” Kids are taking out about 270 kilobytes of information per second. If you look at some children, they’re watching TV, and they have their phones in their hands at the same time. They’re looking for more and more info and input, like in the old Johnny 5 movie, to keep them entertained. How do we re-engage them outside of that?
I love the fact that you talked about taking your kids to a restaurant and getting them to make up stories of what people are talking about. I do that with my kids, or used to when they were younger. I would take them out on the road, and we’d make examples of things going on. One year, I remember vividly. It was Christmas. We heard some bells, so we started making up stories that Santa was doing a trial run. He was practicing his trial run and practicing his route before he came out on Christmas Eve to deliver the presents. That conversation expanded. My kids were going crazy with the imagination of what they were talking about and creating. That gives them the same amount of kilobytes per second, but it’s more embedded and more internal. That connection starts working again.
I’m going to let you guys know how old I am here. Back in the ‘80s, when I worked at Chiat Day, we had the Apple account. I used to go through airports with what they called a portable Mac, which was about 2 feet high and 1 foot across in a big styrofoam container. I used to carry that through airports. You look at what it is now, where I can do all of that pretty much on my phone or with a laptop. We’ve come a very long way. The book also describes creating tech-free zones. Tell us some of those practical tips. How do you do that? Getting the phone out of your child’s hand is almost impossible. “Pry it from my cold, dead hand,” is what Charlton Heston said.
It’s a balance. When we talk about tech-free zones, I talk about areas. For example, our dining table is a tech-free zone. I used to make the lounge a tech-free zone, too, but it was pretty hard because if the TV wasn’t on and the kids wanted to do something, making the lounge a tech-free zone didn’t quite work out. The dining table, when we eat, is a tech-free zone.
It’s interesting. I had a friend of mine who was in real estate. He used to sit at the same spot every time at his house when he was dining. I’m talking about the subconscious part of the game. When he quit his job in a bigger company and started working from home, he said, “I can’t get motivated at home.” I said, “Where do you work?” He says, “I work at the table.” I said, “Is that the spot you sit when you eat your breakfast, lunch, and dinner?” He says, “Yeah. I only sit in the same spot.”
I said, “Your neuro association with that spot is basically, ‘This is my comfy spot. This is where I eat, relax, and have conversations.’ Your brain is not going to get motivated in that spot. Change where you sit to a different part of the table and see how you go.” The next day, he calls me and goes, “It worked. I sat at a different part of the table, and that was my work zone. I had my work zone and my personal zone.”
When we make our dining table a tech-free zone, that is our connection zone. When we explain it, we have to do it slowly. You can’t go, “Give me the phone.” First, we get them to put the phone upside down, and then say, “Do you mind doing me a favor? Can we leave the phone over there because it is distracting our conversation?” You take it in stages. We tell our young kids they can’t do something, and the first thing they want to do is rebel.
That’s what I was thinking. Massive rebellion. The screaming begins.
“Engaging Kids Beyond Screens”
When we do it in bite-sized chunks or smaller pieces, first, we say, “Can you put the phone down for a couple of minutes while we have this chat?” Then, it goes to, “Turn the phone upside down while we have this chat.” Then, it goes to taking the phone and putting it on the sidebar when we have the chat. This becomes our tech-free zone.
One of the things I love doing after dinner is playing games. We play Connect Four or Hangman. We had a friend come over for dinner once. She goes, “You got a whiteboard?” I said, “Yeah.” We brought out the whiteboard, and then, post-dinner, we played hangman. The kids loved it. How do we entertain their little minds away from technology? That’s the question. The question is not taking it away from them. What are we replacing it with? Are we replacing it with loving conversations, talking about values, and talking about beliefs, or are we replacing it with nothing and saying they can’t have it?
That’s a very good point. I’m going to hit all the parents here. I notice when I am out that the parents are as bad as the kids with the phone, but they’re telling their kids to put their phones away. Talk a little bit about how you have to model the behavior you’d like to see.
“Parents As Role Models”
For our children, their greatest role model is us as parents. Monkey see, monkey do. Kids see, kids do. When a parent is sitting at a dinner table, and I hear this all the time, “I’m just doing emails. I have to do this for work.” In Australia, we have a saying, “Is it worth a sheep station?” Are you talking about sheep stations? If you don’t send that email in the next three seconds, are you going to lose a sheep station? Are you going to lose $1 million? Can you create an environment where you go, “For the next 30 minutes, I’m going to put my priorities, love, and focus towards my children.” That is a conscious thing that we have to do.
Our children's greatest role model is us parents. Monkey see, monkey do. Share on XThe crazy part about it is that we have to detox ourselves. We have to detox ourselves from the addiction that we have. We justify our addiction by saying we have work to do. Nobody works 12, 14, or 16 hours a day. I’ve got five companies. I don’t work that many hours, I’m sorry. You have to be able to prioritize. I’m not being mean to the parents. Please take this the right way. You’ve trained yourself that your phone’s more important than your kids.
I remember going to someplace with my mother, and I left my phone at home. I was agitated. I felt like I was naked without my telephone. We were way out in the country, and my mother was like, “You wouldn’t have gotten reception here, anyway. Quit complaining.” We do get addicted to our own phones. I described that I was completely overwhelmed, not having my phone. What advice would you have for those parents who are not only overwhelmed by themselves putting down the phone, but getting the kids to do it, too? It can be overwhelming when you get that pushback from everybody about it.
The biggest part is to take it in small steps at a time. A total ban, in my opinion, doesn’t work. Take it step by step. Go, “Let’s practice putting the phone down for five minutes.” It’s like going to the gym. When you go to the gym, can you bench press 50 kilos straight away? You can’t. You’ve got to build that muscle up. The brain is a muscle. You have to build that muscle up in little steps.
It can be like, “For the next five minutes, we’re not going to look at our phone. We’re going to look at each other’s eyes, engage, tell stories, and have fun.” Then, it’s like, “Five minutes is up. Everybody, get your quick hit.” You can expand that to 10 minutes and then expand that to 30 minutes. It’s about creating those habits.
The most important part about this is replacing the habits with something fun. The kids go, “I put the phone down, but we’re not talking. I’m bored.” The second part, and I did this with my son who is a teenager, was that I spoke about my intent of why I am concerned, what I’m looking for my son to achieve in the future, and how this affects them in the future.
“Intent Behind Discipline Matters”
Tell them the intent, like, “I love you. This is why I would like you to put that down,” or, “I would like you to do this because this is how it’s going to affect you in the future.” It’s important that our kids understand what our intent is behind what we’re saying. Are we saying that to discipline them? If they get the impression that we are saying it to discipline them, it’s like, “Who cares?”
You’re nagging, then.
It’s like, “I’m doing this out of love for you. I want to give you a better future.” You’re going to have to repeat that at least 6 to 8 times before it sinks in. It doesn’t sink in. It’s the same thing with us. We hear a bit of information, and it takes us six times before our brain registers and creates neural pathways, where it creates a solid memory. The important part is replacing the habit with something that’s fun. I’m not saying have a food fight, but that’s not a bad thing to do either.
As long as you’re not the one who has to clean it up.
Sometimes, that’s the price we’re paying. Remember, we spoke about before when you said about going for a walk. When you go for a walk, it changes your entire mental state. In houses, the mental state of the table is still technology-based. To break that state or to make it into a fun state, you might have to have a couple of food fights to break the environment and say, “This is a place of fun.”
There’s going to be cleanup and all of that, and I apologize for that. What it does mentally is it creates that the table is a place of fun. We’re like, “Our dining table is a place of fun.” That’s the subconscious part of it. Two months or three months later, the kids would go, “Can we have another food fight?” As a parent, it’s your duty to have that food fight to create that fun environment and show the kids that we can have fun. Make paper planes and throw them around. Be creative. Bet the kids to be creative.
We play Cards Against Humanity. I’m not sure how healthy that is, figuring out which one of us is the most demented.
We can go back to whatever we call it here. Uno.
That’s no fun.
A lot of stuff is cool. You, as a parent, should start thinking, “I need to be creative to make things fun.” My son loves to cook. That’s part of our connection before we come to the table. When he serves up food, it looks amazing. He has to present it fantastically well. Every now and then, I’ll put something a little bit out of line. I hope he doesn’t read this because I don’t want him to pick up on my trick.
Dad’s playing games with him.
Every now and then, I’ll take a couple of spaghetti lines and put them a little bit out of line. He’ll go, “What happened there?” I’m breaking his state. I’m changing the way he looks at it. We have fun at the table. If we make that a serious place of doom and gloom, as the news always is, you can’t expect kids to give up the technology.
That makes sense. Last question. Online is a pretty dangerous place for kids. We had a discussion about something called roadblocks. How do you make sure that your kids are viewing things that are healthy? There’s so much bullying out there. It’s not healthy. There’s porn addiction and things like that.
If we remove technology for a sec, because I love psychology with kids and all that, the first part of that is teaching them the right values. It is teaching them what is good, what is bad, what is good for them for their future, and what is going to influence them in a bad way. We do that with food. It’s interesting. My son went to me and said, “Dad, I want to have a cleansing-out month next month of eating healthy food.” I’m like, “Okay, cool.”
In December?
I know. He’s fifteen. I’m like, “Can we do it before Christmas? Christmas is going to be fun.” Teenagers and young kids are already thinking that way. All we have to do is neuro associate that with the bad parts of technology. If we guide them and say, “In doing this, this is how it’s going to affect you. In doing that, this is how it’s going to affect you. Which would you like?” That’s part one.
“Building Trust With Kids”
Part two is to get engaged in the stuff that they’re doing. Stand behind them and say, “Can I play with you? Can I join you? Can I see what you’re doing?” That’s cool. Rather than judge it, encourage it. You might not like it, but if you encourage it, they will bring you into their world. If you judge their world, they will take you out of their world. They’ll block you from their world. You want to be in their world. When you encourage them, they bring you into their world.
You might not like it, but if you encourage it, they will bring you into their world. If you judge the world, they will take you out of their world. Share on XThe second, to me, is one of the most important things. It’s not just about technology bullying or cyberbullying. It’s also any form of bullying. Your kids need to know irrevocably that you have their back. One of the ways to achieve that is I tell my kids that they have a get out of jail free card. They get two a year. This get out of jail free card, they can use any time. No matter what they’ve done wrong, no questions asked, I will get them out of it.
My kids have hardly ever used it, but they have this get out of jail free card. When they royally screw up something, 1) They know that Dad’s not going to punish them, and 2) They know that Dad’s a safe zone. To follow that up to the next step, what I tell them is, “If I’m the first to find out something that goes wrong, I can do something about it. If I’m the 2nd or 3rd person to find out that something’s gone wrong, that ship has already sailed. I can’t protect you that easily.”
That’s interesting.
My son’s a teenager. I keep repeating to him, “If I’m the first to find out, I’ve got your back. The job of a parent is to protect you. You will get into trouble for doing something silly, but that’s secondary. Let’s take care of the problem first. If I’m the first to find out, I will protect you. I love you. I will protect you.” They need to know that. It’s then like, “Secondly, you get punishment through time.” If they don’t know that they have a safe zone to come to with their parents, unfortunately, they go to other kids. The advice that they get from the other kids is to panic, run, and do all the stuff that they shouldn’t be doing.
It’s stuff some teenagers do. It’s full of bad ideas.
“Parenting as a Safe Zone”
That’s the biggest thing. They need to know that the parent is a safe zone. Cyberbullying affects kids because they don’t have a safe zone at home to go to. If a kid comes home and says to their mother or their father, “Dad, I accidentally sent this picture away,” or, “I did this,” or, “I did that,” the parents’ first reaction is, “Why did you do that? Are you stupid?” When you go after them that way, it’s not a safe zone.
If you can stop yourself and say, “What has happened? How do I fix this? Let’s worry about the spilling of the milk later. How do I protect my kid first?” If that’s your priority, it changes the way you relate to your kids, and it changes the way kids relate to you. I’m not saying we’re all perfect at it. I’m not perfect at it because you want to react, right?
That’s right.
We’re human. It’s remembering that and making that a habit.
That’s great. In DigitalDaze.com.au, you have a quiz. You are also starting workshops for parents so that they can learn a little bit more and do some exercises on that. Tell us a little bit about that quiz. That’s at DigitalDaze.com.au. Tell us what they’re going to find out from that.
There are about twelve questions that you answer. Once you go through the questions, it asks you questions about your kids’ behavior. Based on that, you get a two-page report saying what level of addiction they have to technology and what the short-term and long-term consequences of that are. Education is power, but effective use of education is powerful. The whole idea of that quiz is for you to get an understanding of where your kid is on the spectrum of addiction and a couple of steps on what you can do about it.
Part two of your question, which is the workshop, I keep it as an open forum workshop where we talk about the actual problems that people are going through inside their house with technology and children. The whole idea is to equip parents with strategies that they can go and implement straight away. I’m digressing, but I’ll bring it back to you. I remember Tony Robbins saying he read a few thousand books. A friend of mine said, “I’m going to be like Tony Robbins,” and he read 750 books or something in a year. I read about maybe 50 or less. One of the things was that every book I read, I couldn’t finish because I’d started applying what I learned straight away. Whereas my friend read the books and thought they would apply themselves. There’s a massive difference.
You’re executing what you’ve learned.
“Breaking Emotional States”
Even Stephen Covey, in his book, talks about teaching what you learned so that it embeds into your mind. It’s the same thing. Strategies are strategies. They’re useless until they’re effectively used. In the workshops, we practice that. I encourage parents to say, “How does the conversation go?” They’ll tell me, “I tried to take technology away, and this is what happened.” I say, “The next time that happens, here’s something you can do.”
I talk a lot about breaking the emotional state that the kid is in. Once you break that, you can put them into a different state. That could be anything from, “Did you hear the dog barking?” or the food fight. There are little strategies you can do. Sometimes, if the boardroom that I’m in, everybody is getting agitated, I break their state by spilling water.
I bump a glass. The glass falls down, and the water goes everywhere. Everybody gets shocked. Everybody gets into the mentality of, “Let’s help clean it up.” Suddenly, they’ve gone from an angry state to, “Let’s help clean it up.” When we restart the conversation, everybody’s like, “We are in a helping state of mind.” It’s different. It’s important that those strategies get implemented. That’s what the workshop is about.
That’s fantastic. Digital Daze came out on December 8th, 2025. For all you parents out there, we have it for $0.99 in the month of December because the new year is a great time to break habits and start putting new ones together. Go over and check it out. You can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and any place you want it. That’s for the eBook. It’s going to be $0.99. Martial, thank you for being on the show. People are going to get a lot out of this.
Thank you. I appreciate what you’ve done. I look forward to catching up again soon. I truly appreciate being on your show. Thank you.
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About Martial Peter
Martial A Peter is the founder of Neuro-Synchronology™, a pioneer in the discipline that harmonizes the conscious and subconscious mind. As a parent and thought leader who has raised children both before and during the digital era, Martial brings deep insight and compassion to the modern challenges of parenting in a tech-driven world.
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