A Parent's Guide to Hacking the Environment

The power of environmental defaults and how to make them work for you.

Hello, good people! A new year is upon us. You can feel the optimism as we all devise plans to make this the best year yet. Sure, some madness may have snuck in over these past few years. There was that whole Covid thing, after all. But this year, things will be different. 

Except, they might not be. Things will get hectic. The kids will get sick. School districts will insist on nonsensical policies. And you might just fall back into your same old patterns. We like to believe we will make a plan and white-knuckle ourselves through the finish line, but there is a reason that over 80% of New Year's resolutions fail by February. 

Emotions are fickle, willpower is finite, and old habits die hard. It is hard to change, particularly when your desired behaviors conflict with the momentum of your environment.

Environment Shapes Destiny. So, Shape the Environment.

In their book, Nudge, Nobel Prize winning economist, Richard Thaler, and Harvard Law professor, Cass Sunstein, reveal the powerful influence that subtle environmental nudges can have on our behavior. For example, in 2003, economists Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein found that 99.8% of Austrians are blood donors while only 12% of Germans were. Austria and Germany are neighboring countries with very similar cultures. 

Source: dangoldstein.com

What accounted for this almost 88% difference in participation? Simple. In Austria, the default option was for citizens to be organ donors. To avoid being a donor, you had to go out of your way to opt out. By contrast, in Germany you had to actively opt in to become an organ donor. 

Humans almost always choose the default behavior. And, make no mistake, in every potential choice, there is a default option (or a default menu of options) set by the environment. For example, your community environment likely nudges you to drive to work rather than to bike. Your grocery store defaults you to grab name-brand items which pay for prime supermarket real estate. The default setting on your smartphone is to have every notification alert you with a ring, a message banner, and a bright red bubble. 

Source: https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/iphonebasics/messages/1/

Your phone’s default settings nudge you to use it as much as possible. If you want to be less susceptible to phone distraction, the best way is to change the default settings. You could:

1. Go to your phone settings and make recommended changes like eliminating notifications other than phone calls and texts.

2. Go to your phone settings and utlize the “Focus” options.

3. Create new habits that put a barrier between you and your phone at specific times throughout the day. For example, keeping your phone in a desk drawer throughout the work day will make you less likely to reach for it every time you want a distraction.

Setting Your Environment Up For Success

Similarly, last school year, I found myself sitting at my desk far too often. So, this August, I made some fairly drastic changes to my office environment. I moved the large monitor and keyboard up to my standing desk and moved my office chairs outside of the desk area completely so that the default is now to work at my standing station. Since then, there has not been one day where I didn’t stand and work. Without planning on it, this has, also, had the added benefit of prompting me to go sit outside to eat lunch most days.

The Shane Trotter work station (at its least messy)

Default options exist everywhere. They are created by governments, architects, bosses, marketers, technology designers, teachers, parents, and, most fundamentally, by community norms. Perhaps the greatest superpower that parents have in their arsenal is the capacity to shape the environment—to manipulate the environment so that its cues prod their children toward better behavior. We’ve looked at the results of bad cultural norms (bad defaults) many times here at Setting the Bar. When cultural norms are not fruitful, it becomes incumbent on parents to stop, reflect, and create new default options.

When Defaults Are Not Fruitful

For example, here is a picture from the breakfast menu at my child’s elementary school:

Lunch is more of the same. From a health perspective, that’s hardly different from selling cigarettes in the cafeteria. The mere fact that options like these have been the default so long is what keeps most people from fully recognizing just how insane this is. Defaults often offer a degree of social proof that blinds us from seeing clearly. Parents need to be aware of dysfunctional defaults so they can actively insert better ones. 

Here are some of the most important default options that parents can switch up to help their kids thrive:

• Food: Purge the home of junk food. Treats are wonderful, but they are treats. To keep them special, perhaps it should require a trip for you to get to them. 

  • Substitute new items like cashews, almonds, Ezekiel bread or sourdough bread, nut butters, fruit, muffin pan egg bites, etc. 

  • Other purchases like a blender and a good lunch box can open up other options too. 

  • Make it easy to pack lunches. 

• Movement: Create an environment that promotes movement. For example:

  • Invest in bikes, scooters, pull-up bars, nerf guns, and all those things that spark real active joy. 

  • Try to keep screens out of bedrooms and screens off when they aren’t in use. When screens are kept on for background noise, they have a way of pulling us to them. Play background music instead.

  • We are social creatures! Join groups with an active component. Make exercise social. Nothing is more motivating.

  • But movement doesn’t always have to be organized. Make it a default behavior to go on a family walk after dinner. And you can avoid some of the insanity of putting kids in organized sports too early by calling up their friends' parents and meeting at the park. This is much more age-appropriate than organized sports for kids under 7. Even after age 7, it is vital that kids get this free, self-directed play. 

• Shoes: Many of the most popular (default) shoe choices dictated by our culture promote unnatural movement patterns and foot deformities. Most of us have no idea how radically our bodies are changed by the shoes that we decide to wear and the frequency with which we wear shoes. There is no way to avoid having compromised, dysfunctional movement if you spend years walking around in flip flops, slides, crocs, or other shoes with no back. 

“Slides” are the worst. Kids who wear slides tend to turn their feet outward and drag them across the ground. The toes lose flexion because they never bend. The arches collapse. Then we further deform feet by shoving them into shoes that are too narrow and have an elevated heel.

Source: feelgrounds.com

Often the difference is just knowing that some choices come with significant costs while comparable substitutions like Converse and Vans shoes often do not. Even among brands like Nike or Adidas there is considerable variation between how harmful shoes are to your feet, so it is important just to know what to look for. Aim for shoes with a:

• Wider toe box

• Heel that is not elevated (front and back of the shoe sit at the same height)

• Shoe bends easily through the arch

• Smartphones: More than anything, the default norms dictated by technology designers have subverted our lives. For the most part, we’ve all accepted the default settings that they have presented us as normal. A couple thoughts:

  • For teachers, do not allow phones in class. If students have a phone in their pocket, it is a drain on their psyche. Even if they are not looking at it, it might be vibrating incessantly. They could be staring right at you, while feeling the itch to check their phone notifications and plotting how they might sneak a look. And once they have a text conversation in their mind, they’ll be obsessing on potential responses. Remove the itching powder.

    • Utilize a class smartphone holder. 

  • For parents, utilize an app like Bark or Screentime to disable your student’s phone during school hours. These apps are great and they have many options to personalize them to your own parenting style.

  • For more on changing phone defaults and setting and enforcing healthy tech boundaries, check out the associated links. 

A Final Thought

Default norms are often the consequence of new technology. Something as simple as the chair has had dramatic consequences for our lifestyles, our mobility, and collective health. When new technologies come about (and the culture does not adapt well) this often leads to changes in the default norms of a culture.

We live in a time of more rapid and constant technological development than ever before. The trick going forward will be to utilize the benefits of new technologies without taking on the negative consequences. That will require an ability to recognize default patterns and change them to serve you better. This is a vital skill for thriving in the 21st century.

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Thank you for reading and sharing with your kindred spirits! 

If you are interested in more like this, my friend Justin Lind and I have created a free ebook on Making Changes that Stick.

And if you really want a great deep dive into how to set up systems for success, I still think James Clear’s Atomic Habits is the best I’ve read on the subject. The best way for real, lasting success is to dig deeper into the principles behind behavior.

Life is too short to be normal!

Shane