This week we’re highlighting three tools that exist as supports for us parents, as we navigate these online spaces with our own children and support their healthier onboarding into the screen world.

We are also sharing the Q&A perspectives of three 11-year-olds after they read the (aptly titled) The Amazing Generation.

A shift is afoot in both our and their generation’s awareness of the pros and perils of screen-based tech (boosted boatloads by the recent social media trial verdicts). Many of us and our children are beginning to desire more agency in our interactions with screen-based technologies. The tools below can help them (and us) foster and increase that agency. With support and guidance as they grow, it does seem that theirs could soon warrant the nickname ‘The Amazing Generation’.

(To jump straight to This Week in Tech, click here).

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Tool 1: The Amazing Generation by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price

I can’t sufficiently explain how grateful I am that this book exists. Recently released in that hazy holiday period between Christmas and New Years (on December 31, 2025), we are bumping it again here for those whose busy winter breaks meant it was off our radars.

This tween-focused book, written by The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt and How to Break Up with Your Phone’s Catherine Price, is a boon to parents navigating this tricky tech space with their own kids.

For parents encouraging kids to consider screen-based technologies with a more informed perspective, this tool delivers in droves, with many saying that for the first time, they felt like they were back on the same team as their kids regarding screens. 🙌 (You can hear the authors discuss the book this week with the This is So Awkward podcast here).

It’s part graphic novel, part scrapbook, and jam-packed with info that takes much of The Anxious Generation and distills it into a kid-friendly format. It won’t be long before my kids begin to selectively ignore my own parental input and opinions, so it is incredibly helpful to have other voices, especially other youth and Gen-Z voices, encouraging them to objectively question the screen-based worlds on offer to them. Adolescents digest these messages from their elder peers much more readily, so my gratitude abounds for a resource where older Gen-Z peers encourage them to consider how they can make tech work better for them in their own lives.

I read it before I handed it over to my 11-year-old son, and it was a quick read for both of us. And though I had to prompt him to pick it up every time that I wanted him to read (I asked that he finish at least 3 chapters each time), it proved to carry his interest once he began reading. At times he kept reading on his own and got through many more chapters before realizing he’d overshot my requested allotment.

My kiddo and two of his peers have shared their thoughts on the book below, in case your kids are considering reading it (or you’re considering encouraging them) and want to hear from other kids who have. None of these three have their own smart phones yet, but my guess is it could be equally effective, and perhaps even more important, for kids that already have them.

📘The Amazing Generation post-read Q&A (with three 11-year-olds)

Q1: What did you think of the book?

📣 A: “The reason I love this book so much is because it is a fiction story based on real kids. In their friend group are Callie, Jax, and Sophia, who don’t have phones, and Emma, David, and Alex, who do. Part of it is a graphic novel, where the story tells you about the kids who first feel ashamed about not having phones, But then before long, Emma starts getting messages from social media accounts she doesn’t recognize, and other kids who have phones start to see bad things on social media. Then, the kids who don’t have phones start to feel better, and make a science project explaining that people who spend time on their phones are wasting their time, and also making money for people who are making addicting platforms to bring out the worst in you.” - Hannah, 11, USA

📢 A: “It helped me learn more than I knew about screens before, especially social media. I did not know about many of these things that were happening on social media, and this helped me realize how using things like that can affect your life in ways that aren’t good.” - Bo, 11, USA

🔊 A: “I love the book! I especially enjoyed reading the comic-style stories because they explain things in a fun way.” - Ada, 11, Germany

Q2: What did you learn that you hadn’t known before?

📢 A: “‘What fires together wires together’ - if you really want to get good at something like a sport or music or art, don’t spend time on your phone. Spend as much time practicing the sport or music or art as you can. If you spend too much time on screens during your teen years, you won’t learn how to do anything and you won’t get good at your interests. Also the questions that ‘rebels’ ask each other in the book - those questions were helpful, because if it’s ‘no’ for the first two and ‘yes’ to the last one, then it’s best to avoid those technologies for your own sake.” - Bo, 11, USA

🔊A: “I learned how much damage it can do to spend all your time on the phone rather than in the real world. I was surprised to learn that you can become addicted to your phone and how it can take away your freedom, friendships and fun. I also understand better how companies are trying to trap you to make money off of you and to addict you to the dopamine rush.” - Ada, 11, Germany

📣 A: “They tell you secrets that the tech companies, or in this book, the ’tech wizards’, are keeping from you to make you spend more time on their platforms. They make you feel depressed, and the tech wizards make a bunch of money off of you.” - Hannah, 11, USA

Q3: Did the book give you any ideas for how you want to integrate these types of technologies into your life when it’s time?

📢 A: “It showed me that it’s best to avoid most tech when I’m young. For my first phone to communicate, I think it should be a phone that can only text and call. I don’t really want social media. I’d want a phone that doesn’t have all those apps that are dangerous. If I do get a smart phone one day, I will not add those apps on the phone, and if they’re already on the phone, I will delete them and have only the necessary ones.” - Bo, 11, USA

🔊 A: “I want to limit my screen time with a timer that automatically turns off apps. I also think I‘ll maybe not have social media.” - Ada, 11, Germany

📣 A: “I think the authors did a really good job demonstrating a day-to-day lifestyle of what ACTUALLY happens. Plus, the book teaches you how to be a rebel and manage your screen time and not giving the ‘tech wizards' (social media companies: Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, and Facebook) what they really want: your time, energy, and not to mention social media can sell you! Not like a slave. The book will
tell you more.” - Hannah, 11, USA

Q4: Did the book help you understand the reasons some parents try to limit their children’s use of technology? If so, how?

🔊A: “Now I better understand why my parents are trying to limit screen time: they’ve experienced all the negative effects themselves and try to protect us kids from them.” - Ada, 11, USA

📣 A: “Yes, I think this book helps kids, tweens and teens understand reasons
why parents protect their kids from nasty stuff.” - Hannah, 11, USA

📢 A: “Yes it did. I didn’t know how much the tech companies don’t care about kids and built their apps to addict us even though it isn’t good for us. That’s just like, so wrong.” - Bo, 11, USA

Q5: Would you advise other kids your age to read it? Why or why not?

📣 A: “I really enjoyed it and the secrets the book held were so shocking and unbelievable that it made the book impossible to put down, so I definitely recommend it!” - Hannah, 11, USA

📢 A: “Yes definitely. I recommend it if you want your life to be a screen-free life, or a life where you focus on real life things. It will help you understand why it will be better to have a screen-free life.” - Bo, 11, USA

🔊A: “I recommend all kids read this book so they can learn about the screen traps.” - Ada, 11, Germany

Thank you Ada, Hannah, and Bo for sharing your thoughts and opinions with us. 🙏

If you want to encourage your child to read the book, you are welcome to use the questions above for a post-read discussion. If they’d like, they can share their answers with us at catch-us-up@proton.me, for publication in a future post to help other kids and parents. 📣 🔊📢

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Tool 2: Freespoke

Riding on the unity around tech we explored in our last post is a new search engine called Freespoke that aims to return agency to the human searching for information, rather than playing to their biases and advertising to them. Most notably, it is pornography-free - no porn will accidentally (or purposely) be found via this search engine. It labels bias within articles to make it obvious whether a story is weighted to the right or the left, and protects searcher’s privacy by not selling their data.

Explore more about it here to see if it’s a preferable search engine for your kids to use, and hear from its co-founder Kristin Jackson in this 3-min clip on why she decided not to allow porn on this platform.

This is the search engine I plan to allow my kids to use, as it doubles as a media-literacy lesson (showing how news is often framed and biased toward one demographic or another) and helps equip them with the baseline understanding for how to evaluate sources. Plus they won’t be served porn, intentionally or not.

*(For more platforms that unite, rather than divide, Project Liberty has a running list here).

Tool 3: The “Dirty Dozen” List, 2026

This is for us adults rather than for our kids - NCOSE releases their “Dirty Dozen” list each year, profiling the companies and apps that fuel child sexual exploitation online. 2026’s list is out and jam packed with info on those platforms and services that support online child sexual exploitation in some form, and for which we can consider voting with our attention, our dollars and our feet, by either leaving, reducing use, or restricting our kids access.

There is also a “Watch List” for those that didn’t make it onto the “Dozen” list, but about which we should be wary. Unfortunately, most on these lists are household names and commonly used (even required for kids, in the case of Chromebooks at school).

The more we know, the more we can vote with our attention and dollars for the products and world we want. This is a big part of reclaiming the agency these companies have secretly siphoned from us for years, and I’m grateful for tools like this list that provide information these companies will never willingly share on their own.

Thanks for being here - the tide is turning, our agency (and our kids’ agency) is increasing day by day. Thank you for being a part of this movement. ❤️ Meg

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This Week in Tech

Emoji key:

• 👂= podcast

• 👀 = article (or book)

• 👁️ = video (or social media post)

🤔 Which resource will call you to listen or read this week?

***For shorter podcast listening times, change to 1.3x playback speed or higher.

Tech Support for Us Parents

• 👂Soothe your soul, get rid of any screen guilt you may carry, and find your power with Dr. Becky and Dopamine Kids’ Michaeleen Doucleff. 🙌 So good.

• 👂Wowza! This conversation between two epic powerhouses - the incredible Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris and amazing Dr. Lisa Damour - is taken from their discussion at the Common Sense Media conference, and provides wonderfully helpful mind shifts and quotable language for addressing screen impacts on our adolescents.

• 👂ICYMI above, authors Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price share info and advice on managing tech with This is So Awkward’s Dr. Cara and Vanessa, in this fabulous discussion about their book The Amazing Generation. A great listen.

• 👂+👁️ Have you heard of The AI Doc, and want to dig into it with Oprah? She hosted a screening of the film in New York, followed by a Q&A panel with a variety of folks involved in the film and AI space. She shares pertinent clips from these panel conversations via her podcast (here) and Instagram (here). For a shorter podcast conversation featuring only with the Center for Humane Technology’s founders Tristan and Aza, click here.

• 👀 How do we raise kids to be ready for an unknown future where AI and possibly robots will play a big role? Neuroscientist Vivian Ming shares her ideas here.

• 👀+👁️ What do we replace screen time with, after we reduce it? Ginny of 1000 Hours Outside asks how we might offer our kids something better in real life than the faux connections offered by screens, and SmartphoneFreeChildhood shares ideas for how to begin.

• 👁️ Dr. Alison Yeung highlights applaudable recent events in tech that parents should know about, via quick Instagram slides here.

Events & Surveys

• 👀 Are you in the Los Angeles area? Join other local parents at a screening of Can’t Look Away, this Sunday (April 12) at 3:30pm, hosted by survivor parent organization ParentsRise!. A Q&A panel will follow with Nicki Petrossi, Amy Neville, and more.

• 👀 Calling all parents with school-aged kids - do you want to throw your weight behind safe school technology? The national Distraction-Free Schools Policy Project is hoping parents across the country will sign their letter of support for safer school technology, and share any particular issues you or your child may have experienced with Ed-Tech. Link is here.

• 👀 A call specifically for California parents - sound off here about your kids’ use of tech in CA schools, and add your voice as legislation on tech in schools is drafted in our state. Thanks to Distraction-Free Schools CA for their all advocacy in this arena for our kiddos.

The Manosphere & Femininity Online

• 👂+ 👁️ An incredibly important dive into the Manosphere - its terminology, history, values, substances, and top influencers - presented clearly for parents (with a section for teens on substances) by This is So Awkward here.

• 👀 Is your son injecting these internet-purchased, influencer-encouraged substances in order to enhance his looks? 😳 See a quick reference list of such substances from Sarah Adams of Parents Uncharted here or via Instagram slides here.

• 👀 If it is bizarre to see boys suddenly struggling with the types of body dysmorphia and unhealthy focus on appearance that girls have faced for years, Freya India takes it a step further, examining how everyone on social media is reduced to their most emotional, adolescent female form. A mind-bender of a read, with much truth layered within.

• 👀 Jean Twenge’s research provides a treasure trove of data on the ways young people think and feel, and their recent survey responses on gender norms have taken a massive swing away from the generations before them. Trad-wife and manosphere online culture seem to be having a huge impact on the beliefs of young people - explore here.

AI & Chatbots

• 👂Chatbots and Kids 101 - did you know that kids have to pay to unpin Snap’s ‘MyAI’ chatbot from the top of their friend list (otherwise they can’t get rid of it?). Or that Replika will send users blurred nudes to entice them to pay to unlock the photos? Dive into these details regarding chatbots and kids with Dr. Delaney Ruston of Screenagers, as she discusses the results of a youth chatbot report with Gen-Z director of Voicebox, Natalie Foos. Older kids and teens may be able to listen too - pre-screen for appropriateness as sexual content is discussed.

• 👀 Kids are lonely - that’s why they say they use chatbots in the first place. Explore two teens’ experiences with chatbots in this follow-up article to a past NYT article on kids an chatbots. There is truth in what Ginny says in that link above - when real life offers more connection, kids willingly and happily choose it.

• 👀 Almost as quickly as it arose, Sora (OpenAI’s AI video generator) is gone. Jeremy Carrasco and Tim Requarth dig into the legacy it leaves behind.

AI & Legislation

• 👀+👂How should AI be built and regulated to better serve humanity? We hope all lawmakers and CEOs are listening to The Center for Humane Technology’s AI Roadmap recommendations for AI development, and it’s quite timely (as this week’s “too-powerful-to-be-released” program ‘Mythos’ shows). We are still within the window where AI can be shaped for the good of humanity rather than its demise. To listen to this in podcast form, via a discussion with CHT’s founders, click here.

• 👀 AI Companies are forming Super PACs to influence legislation - we should all keep our eyes clearly fixed upon these, so we can follow how these companies are using their money to influence legislation in their favor. Thanks to Project Liberty for this thorough rundown.

Ed-Tech

• 👀 As if it weren’t already hard enough to be a teacher, now they have to deal with this - students making AI-fueled slander pages about them, that at times go viral and impact teachers’ lives. This article from Wired is also full of teen slang terms and trends worth having on our radar if we have teens at home (or school).

• 👀Jared Cooney Horvath shares compelling charts to back-up his assertions that screens, while touted as a path to equity between students, are anything but.

• 👂Nicki Petrossi is taking Ed-Tech to court - her suit against i-Ready is discussed with guest Andy Liddell of Ed-Tech Law Center on her podcast this week.

Social Media Addiction Trials - Follow Up

• 👂Gen-Z leader Ava Smithing sits down at a Columbia University panel with Jonathan Haidt for a candid conversation about both the history of and next steps in this movement, and shared their conversation on her podcast Left To Their Own Devices.

  • 👀 If you want an in-depth breakdown of everything uncovered in this trial, AfterBabel’s got you in their lengthy deep dive here.

  • 👀 Whistleblower Yaël Eisenstat summarizes the verdicts well here.

• 👀 YouTube’s priorities were increasing viewership via addiction - see Powerpoint slides on this from inside their own presentations, via the Tech Oversight Project.

• 👀 Dr. Richard Freed of Better Than Real Life breaks down the ways persuasive design was employed to generate addiction in users.

• 👂To finish out their podcast coverage of the trial, Nicki and Sarah rundown what it was like to be at the court, waiting for the verdict here.

Online Scams and Tools to Avoid Them

• 👀+👁️ After his doctor’s phone line was hacked by AI agents, endlessly serving him ads while he waited to be connected to his doctor (which never happened), Baratunde Thurston muses about the dystopian situation in which we find ourselves in an increasingly AI-driven world.

  • 👀 His friend Ron J Williams developed ScamHero to help us and our elders avoid these types of scams, after his father lost all his money in a WhatsApp scam. Might it be a useful tool for you and your loved ones?

• 👀 Meta’s revenues are not only derived from hooking teens on their products - they’re also heavily dependent upon paid scam income advertisements, so there is little incentive to target or block them. Tech Oversight Project digs into this here (though the imbedded Reuters link is paywalled) - those with Apple News accounts can read more about it here.

🐣 Happy spring break to all 🐣 - there will be no post next week. Wishing everyone a restful break and joyful celebrations to all celebrating.

Have you heard?!

It’s been a HUGE week in court, with verdicts coming in the two biggest social media trials yet held (in Los Angeles and New Mexico) finding Meta and YouTube liable for damages caused by their unsafe and knowingly harmful platforms.

These landmark, incredibly significant verdicts force accountability for known harms perpetrated against children on social media platforms, and open doors to possible changes in these platforms going forward. These verdicts are also a vindication for survivor parents and families, whose children were lost to social media harms, as they see their unending advocacy for children’s online safety come to fruition. 🙌🦋

More on the trials in This Week in Tech below, but first a look at the tech-induced boomerang of division and reunion we are all currently going through.

“Hey you, don’t tell me there’s no hope at all…”🎶

Pink Floyd fans can likely sing the rest of the titular line above, in “Hey You” from 1979’s The Wall. It’s a moody, haunting song whose final line echoes as if singer Roger Waters is falling in slow motion down a deep chasm. The echoing conclusion - “together we stand, divided we fall”, has brought tears to my eyes more than a few times in the last decade or so.

The reason: that fall felt increasingly imminent. At times it felt like we’d already begun falling and didn’t yet realize it. Everywhere were signs that formerly connected citizens, families, and friends, were increasingly dividing, moving apart, becoming adversaries and enemies of each other.

You might have felt it too. The gift of technology, which at first brought us so much joy, had been slowly shifting. Platforms that initially connected us with long lost friends, showing us their travel, wedding, and baby photos, had drip by drip, without our consciously realizing it, created an epoch of polarization so deep that the “other side” (whether politically, religiously, or otherwise) had become for most an evil, existential threat.

Why? A steady diet of attention-seeking material in our news feeds and algorithms sent everyone deep into rabbit holes of our own confirmation biases - especially when flashpoints like elections, pandemics, and societal violence (spun in partisan lingo, loaded, and packaged for each side) were concerned. Family members no longer spoke. Friendships dissolved. A growing isolation from family and community, and gravitation to similarly presenting ‘others’ online began for many, and suddenly this division into opposing camps all seemed somewhat normal, or at least unavoidable.

For media and tech businesses, this was gold. 💰 They raked in billions delivering the content that divided us. Fear, anger, and self-righteousness, after all, are quite dependable drivers of engagement, and they created and exploited those emotions ad nauseam to create devoted little customers, who’d tune in every day (sometimes all day) for their hit of ego-soothing rage and righteousness. I was also once in this trap, and it took a long while to realize it and climb out. Once out, it was horrifying to see the extent of its grip on everyone, everywhere. I wondered if we would we wake up and see that the manufactured hatred so many felt for the other side was just that - manufactured, then amplified for profit.

So when I’d hear that song playing on speakers in the market, or in my earbuds if ‘shuffle’ randomly queued it up, those haunting echoes hit me at my core. “Divided we fall….” We were indeed divided - what fall was coming? This would fill me with a melancholy sense of dread. What had these companies done to us all? Would we ever come back together, step out from under the spell of these business models, and push back on them?

“Together We Stand…”🎶

The answer, it seems, is yes. There is a burgeoning awareness that’s rapidly snowballing, spotlighting tech platforms’ grandiose, self-interested overreach, and the damages their platforms have inflicted to both personal lives and to citizenry of all ages across the globe. While there is still plenty of division being sown online, more and more people are beginning to come out from under its spell, and come together to achieve common goals.

“Together we stand” is starting to happen. I feel encouraged, hopeful, for the first time in a decade, as I see signs that the very technology that once divided us is now bringing us back together. 🙌

This week’s court cases are a shining example of this shift, and the same has been happening in recent elections, congressional bill voting, and with schools/parents pushing back on Ed-Tech.

Right and left, religious and atheist, coastal elites and midwestern homesteaders, are coming together, collaborating, unified by this shared goal of undoing the damages these platforms have wrought. It fills me with hope, like the sun beginning to shine on a part of my soul that I’d been unaware was freezing over in the shadows.

A legislative example: this week, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate unanimously voted to pass COPPA2.0, a children’s online safety bill. EVERY. SINGLE. SENATOR. AGREED. When was the last time that type of bipartisan collaboration happened? The bill likely won’t receive the same unanimity in the House (and it has its flaws), but it serves as a prescient example. No other issue in the last few decades has brought both sides of the aisle together to collaborate with such unity.

Parents and kids across the nation are pushing back as well. Thanks to parent advocacy groups like MAMA, Smartphone Free Childhood, and Distraction-Free Schools, a flood of child-protection bills is hitting state legislatures, covering bell-to-bell smartphone restrictions and pushing back on Ed-Tech. None of it is partisan - parents and advocates of varied backgrounds are collaborating to bring these bills forward and advocate for a shared goal of child safety and accountability for those putting profits before people.

Gen-Z leaders and advocates are using their voices and speak out against the tech-based childhoods and adolescences that no one knew any better than to give them, as calls to delete various platforms and accounts grow louder (like Gen-Z’s Delete Day/Time to Refuse last October).

And the tech industry finally seems fallible - another fun example can be found in this jovial nugget out of Delaware’s court, which ruled that Meta’s insurers are under no obligation to pay Meta’s penalty fees for harming children in these recent court cases this week. That’s on them - they must pay the plaintiffs. No one will bail them out. 👏

There is still much work ahead. The US federal “AI wishlist” is still being pushed by its backers to come to fruition, seeking to override states with robust citizen protections against AI harms to support "rapid business growth”. Smart glasses are hitting the world, and AI chatbots are having frightening impacts (like in this study out today). But the forces of resistance in this battle now have increasing numbers - so many are waking up to the harms perpetrated against us and our children by companies we once thought were benevolent. Together we are a force with great power to right this ship.

Let’s continue to lean further into spaces where we all agree:

• Platforms & products used by children, teens, and adults should not be harmful.

• Companies that harm their customers must face consequences for doing so, and/or remedy problematic aspects to prevent future harms.

No matter politics or identity, everyone agrees on this. And that is important to celebrate. 🎉

To safeguard our kids while this all shakes out, talk regularly with them about the ways these companies use people for profit (regardless of impact on wellbeing), help them see how they do this, and how everyone agrees this is a problem (and are collaborating to try and help).

• Share resources, posts, slides, and reels that you find interesting, either from This Week in Tech or elsewhere in your feeds.

• Get their opinions and perspectives, and share yours.

These conversations help our children understand the complex environment in which they are growing up, so they can protect themselves and remain empowered in their use of screen-based tech going forward in their lives. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Keep the faith, the tide is turning. Thanks to all of you reading - you are part of this movement, and with your help, all of us together are making a difference in bettering the lives of our children. Thank you for being here. ❤️ Meg

This Week in Tech

Emoji key:

• 👂= podcast

• 👀 = article (or book)

• 👁️ = video (or social media post)

🏛️Court Cases, Laws, & Legislation - A HUGE WEEK!

• Victory in Los Angeles! For those who have been following this case closely, it is a week of celebration. A jury has managed to do what copious legislation and advocacy groups had not yet done - delivered a decisive consequence to Meta and YouTube for knowingly targeting youth in harmful ways on their platforms. If you follow accounts associated with kids & tech, you’ve likely been bombarded with celebratory messages about this - there is such excitement for all that may come from this door opening, and for the survivor parents who worked so hard to advocate for their lost children harmed by these very practices. 🦋

• Victory in New Mexico! One day prior, the verdict in the ongoing trial there (also against Meta), led by New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez, whistleblowers Arturo Béjar and Brian Boland also testified, as did Aza Raskin of The Center for Humane Technology. This trial found Meta culpable and ordered them to pay $345 million dollars in damages, AND most importantly included a clause on “injunctive relief” where platform safety changes may be required.

• ICYMI above: The Delaware Court has ruled that Meta’s insurers are under no obligation to bail them out for these penalties levied against them in the social media trials. 👏

• Join this “fireside chat” with important folks in the kids & tech space on March 30 to review the rulings and what this means for the movement going forward.

📓Tech Industry Playbooks (Once You Know, You Know)

• 👁️ Do you know DARVO? It’s the industry PR tactic used whenever it’s called out for its harms, standing for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender”. Now that we know, it won’t work on us anymore. Thanks ChildFirstPolicy for the slides breaking this down.

• 👁️ Similar tactics are used by Manosphere influencers - here’s their playbook for recruiting adolescents, from RaisingGentleBoys. Equip your sons with this knowledge so they don’t fall prey to these influencers’ tactics.

🎬 Films & Series

This week also brought the release of two tech-focused films/series:

• 👁️ Inside the Manosphere with Louis Theroux (steaming on Netflix) - you probably haven’t been able to avoid the hype over this series this week, exploring the “manosphere” with its influencers and the ways they target adolescent boys and young men. For a quick slide breakdown of the documentary from SmartphoneFree Childhood, click here, and for their parent tips, click here.

• 👁️+👂 The AI Doc - (opening in theaters today, March 27, 2026) - I’m so excited for this one, that dives into both the positive and the frightening aspects of AI, and how we the people can help shape it toward the positive. Hear Tristan and Aza of The Center for Humane Technology (they’re interviewed in the film) talk about the documentary with its makers here.

🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒 On Parenting and Tech

• 🤔 What guidance would you give your younger self about screen-based technologies if you could go back and do it over with your kids?

  • 👁️ ‘What we wish we’d known’ from pediatrician Alison Yeung - yep, hindsight is 20/20.

  • 👁️ What a mother regrets about giving her teen son a phone, from The Balance Project.

  • 👀 Raising a tween or middle-schooler? This chuckle-inducing article from Melanie Hempe of ScreenStrong is for you.

• 👂 Survivor parents who lost their children to social media have much to say about what they wish they’d known - hear survivor parent Julianna Arnold and parent advocate Dawn Wible discuss their ‘online harms action kit’ they’ve compiled to help parents protect their kids online and avoid the worst of possible tragedies.

• 👀 Common Sense Media - friend, foe, or Jim Crow? Dr. Richard Freed examines the disturbing differences in tech advice provided by CSM when the messages are targeted to different groups of people. (CSM is funded in part by Big Tech).

• 👀 Could you go for 30 days without talking to your teen, while they’re living in another country? Katherine Martinko shares her thoughts on smartphones being the “longest umbilical cord ever” as she stares down 30 days of zero communication with her 11th grader on his study abroad trip to Japan.

• 👂Are you a mom juggling peri-menopause or menopause while raising adolescents and teens? That can be a tough combo, and Dr. Alison Yeung has a podcast addressing this very combination of factors - this week it tackles sleep(lessness).

• 👀 A smartphone-free childhood for all children in an entire town? Welcome to Greystones, Ireland - a town making this happen.

📲 “Smart” Tech

• 👁️ Would we think differently about “smart” devices, if they were instead more accurately described as “surveillance” devices? Smart phone = surveillance phone. Smart thermostat = surveillance thermostat. Smart home assistant = surveillance home assistant. Now we’re getting it…. 🤯 Thanks Emily Tavoulareas for this (unfortunately) necessary reframe.

• 👓 Meta’s Smart-Glasses were purposely released during a “dynamic political environment” so that groups who might push back against them wouldn’t notice. Their “NameTag” program works in a similar way to the above linked footage that college students built as an experiment. 🤯

  • 👁️ Currently, programs like “Nearby Glasses” can be downloaded to alert us if someone nearby us is wearing these types of glasses.

🎓Schools and Tech

• 👂 One of my favorite Ed-Tech conversations yet with Jared Cooney Horvath and Ginny Yurich on the 1000 Hours Outside podcast, covering all the important aspects of Ed-Tech, how children learn, and how screens in schools impact this (plus, the sow and harvest cycle coming with AI… don’t get hooked on it ya’ll).

• 👀 Do you live in California? Do you have 5 minutes to share your opinion on your school’s use of technology? Click here and help Distraction-Free Schools CA inform coming legislation.

😵 Pornography & Gaming

• 👀 How much would you estimate Americans spend on OnlyFans? $100? $1000? Try $2.63 BILLION total, with an estimated $77k national individual’s average spend. 😳 OnlyFans is primarily porn. Explore more with FTND here.

• 👁️ Did you know? 60% of all gaming console traffic to PornHub comes through PlayStation5? Most parents are unaware that porn can be accessed through gaming consoles. If your teens use PS5, here’s tips for how to make it safer.

💥AI

• 👀 IF YOU READ ONE THING TODAY, LET IT BE THIS: Data is in from the first study on AI chatbots’ social effects on users, and it shocked researchers. “Even a single interaction with a sycophantic chatbot made participants less willing to take responsibility for their behavior and more likely to think that they were in the right.” As people increasingly use chatbots for everything, the ramifications of this for society and personal relationships are incredibly significant. 😦

• 👁️ Already?? - people are being paid to wear cameras that show AI how to do physical tasks, so this can be used to train and program AI robots. 😳 Will clones of Rosie (Jetsons’ robot) soon be replacing human workers too? Argh. 🤖

• 👀 A chart providing an amazing perspective of where we are now with AI technology, jobs, and the like, compared to similar life-altering technologies of the past, from Mike Lukianoff of SignalFlareAI.

• 👀 “Your Toaster Has More Guardrails than an AI Weapon” says Psst.org, echoing our sentiments in our previous posts about both enforcing existing consumer protection laws and protecting the contributions of whistleblowers.

• 👀 The federal “AI Wishlist”, according to Luiza Jarovsky, and what the White House seeks to do (and avoid doing) in their intent to override state laws that provide more stringent protections for their citizenry.

Our homepage contains all these posts, resource pages, and more. It’s always available - links and info are not confined to Friday emails. If any of this is helpful to you, feel free to share it with others.

Thanks for being here, we appreciate you. ❤️ Meg

As the jury deliberates in the Los Angeles Meta/YouTube trials this week, they’re considering the testimony and information provided by whistleblowers - individuals like Arturo Béjar and Brian Boland, who worked at Meta, saw harms either ignored or exploited for profit, and spoke out to expose this at great personal and professional expense.

We want to give some love to these whistleblowers. Almost all we know about the inner workings of these corporate tech giants comes from these folks, who were willing to speak out despite the deep personal and professional risk it entailed. Many are paying the price today for doing so, via retaliative fines, legal fees, and industry blackballing. We are beyond grateful for their sacrifices and all they’ve uncovered.

• Arturo Béjar - (Meta) - testifying in the current case against Meta ongoing in Los Angeles. Hear about his testimony at 22:30 in The Heat is On podcast (shared last week). He also spoke with Nicki Petrossi in October 2025 (here) and the One Young Mind podcast (here).

• Brian Boland (Meta) - also testifying in the current case against Meta ongoing in Los Angeles - he speaks with Nicki on her podcast here, and his former testimony on Meta’s algorithms is shared here by fellow whistleblower, Kelly Stonelake (see below). He and his wife now run The Delta Fund, endeavoring to make change and center human economic goals.

• David Erb - (Meta and YouTube) - first at YouTube, then Meta, he compares the two’s approaches to protecting children from predators seeking contact with them online (YouTube good, Meta not!). Hear the almost unbelievable details from inside both companies shared with Nicki here and via video here.

• Sarah Gallagher-Trombley - (Snapchat) - one of the only people speaking out about Snap, her Substack regularly shares advice for parents on tech in general. Hear her interview about her time at Snapchat with Nicki here, and with Healthy Screen Habits here.

• Frances Haugen - (Meta) - the one who started it all! Her book about her experience is here, and her interview with Tristan Harris of The Center for Humane Technology about the evidence she found is here - a must listen. For more with Frances, here’s part 1 and part 2 of her conversation with Healthy Screen Habits.

• Roger McNamee (Meta) - initial investor and advisor to Mark Zuckerberg, who now speaks out against the company, including in his book Zucked. Hear a recent interview with both him and Karen Gao (author of Empire of AI) here.

• Jason Sattizhan and Cayce Savage - (Meta) - testified to Congress in September 2025 about Meta’s failure to protect children.

• Kelly Stonelake - (Meta) - in litigation with Meta over discrimination, harassment, and retaliation, her Substack regularly reports on industry harms. Hear her interview with Nicki Petrossi about Meta’s unsafe ‘Horizon Worlds’ VR system for children here. Yesterday (3/19/26) Meta announced the end of Horizon Worlds.

• Sarah Wynn-Williams - (Meta) - the most senior Meta executive to blow the whistle, her riveting page-turner Careless People (2025) blasted holes in Meta’s PR veil so well that they took her to court to silence her (and bankrupted her with fines for speaking out). READ IT NOW, because Meta is trying to prohibit further printing of the book. To watch her testimony to the US Congress in April 2025, regarding some of the national security allegations in the book, click here.

• Yaël Eisenstat (Meta) - shared documents surrounding misinformation knowingly spread on Facebook, concerning the 2020 election and January 6th uprising.

• Peiter “Mudge” Zatko (Twitter) - blew the whistle on security lapses at Twitter back in 2022.

There are likely many more whose names I do not yet know - feel free to add them in the comments if you have others to whom we should direct our gratitude.

Alongside these individuals are non-profits and legal entities working to support whistleblowers, like Whistleblower Aid and Psst.org (their Substack here). Their support and legal help for whistleblowers is critical, as they navigate the personal and professional fallout from coming forward publicly with their information. We thank and applaud you all. May your sacrifices be worth the awareness and positive changes that will come from your actions. 🙏

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This Week in Tech

Emoji key:

• 👂= podcast

• 👀 = article (or book)

• 👁️ = video (or social media post)

🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Tech + Parenting

• 👀 Heading into the teen years (or there already)? I found this concept of “teenternity” from Yetty at Parenting in the Digital Age to be a lovely, calming mindset shift. Connecting with our older kids can be a beautiful, more in-depth mirror of those oh-so-connected infant through preschool years.

• 👀 Megan Saxelby of Wild Feelings writes one of the most poignant and important guides for connecting with teen boys (for parents, teachers, and counselors), to help boys work through the worst of the online content that finds and hooks them. A very important read.

• 👂In line with the above link - Sarah of Parents Uncharted talked to author, parent, and professional counselor Tessa Stuckey, about what kids and teens (especially boys) face online - a very important listen.

• 👀 A calming read with a few easy-to-implement suggestions on balancing tech and real life activities, in an interview with Jacqueline of TechnoSapiens.

• 👀 The profile behind mass shooters is changing, driven by the nihilistic communities online (mentioned last week and prior). Here, criminologists describe the shift in shooters’ ideologies and the online spaces that now inspire them. Holy moly.

• 👁️ On the ubiquity of “smart glasses” - time will tell if there will be a mass adoption of (or backlash to) these glasses, but for now, here’s what you need to know from The Common Parent.

• 👁️ ICYMI - this webinar from Children & Screens is chock full of information (over an hour) from experts in the kids & tech space, including CyberCivics’ Diana Graber and Common Sense Media’s Robbie Torney.

• 👁️ To share with our kids and start a conversation - a 1-minute video from Jonathan Haidt where kids of the 90s react to stories from the future (now), about smartphones. Cute, and also sad to consider the somber truth behind it.

🎮 Gaming

• 👁️ What a gamer wants parents to know - Cam Adair of GameQuitters breaks down the differences between the games we played and the games our children play - this is critical information for anyone whose kids play games online. (For more, a link to our prior post about gaming is here).

• 👀 Is Minecraft serving as a vault/repository for blacklisted literature online? Yes it is. In an unexpected twist, Minecraft has become the host for the “uncensored library“ online, making blacklisted literature from multiple countries available to all online (the USA included). Way to use tech for good, Minecraft. 🙌

꩜ AI

• 👀 IRL friends > chatbots - obvious, but put into wonderful context here by ScreenStrong. They advocate for parents to do all we can to preserve and protect our children’s friendships in real life, to protect them from ever-present, ever-seductive chatbot “friendships”.

• 👀 Are you giving your informed consent to the platforms you use? Likely not, and that’s by design. Step inside a Duke University law class with Professor Nita Farahany, as she shares the questions she assigns her classes about ‘terms of service’ agreements, and how these are designed to take away our consent. Part 1 of the class discussion here, and part 2 here.

• ❓ Are you familiar with the term “ghost workers”? These refer to the people, predominantly in the global south, who for a few dollars a day screen the very worst content on the internet, and are tasked with removing it. They have to look it all of it, and the impacts upon their mental health can be horrific. Documentaries like The Cleaners exposed how this happens on social media platforms, and we are now beginning to see the rise of AI-screening ‘ghost workers’, removing the worst of the internet from AI-training data sets.

  • 👀 Reclaim Childhood addresses the plight of AI ghost workers here.

  • 👂Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, addresses ghost workers in her book and in this podcast conversation with whistleblower Roger McNamee here.

  • 👂 Baratunde Thurston of Life With Machines learns about ‘ghost workers’ with Milagros Miceli here.

• 👀 Isn’t AI just a new technology like the printing press and books? Explore this line of thinking and such technological equivalencies with Lily Abadal.

• 👀 The Wall Street Journal explores the types of jobs likely to be most impacted by AI.

• 👀 Snapchat whistleblower Sarah Gallagher-Trombley is concerned about AI chatbots too.

🏛️ Lawsuits & Legislation

• 👂A recap of week 7 in the Los Angeles Meta/YouTube trials, from Nicki and Sarah.

• 👀 Tides are turning - voters and legislators are starting to make their voices heard, as tech-industry-backed candidates and bills are failing at the polls. Check out the most recent wins here, from The Tech Oversight Project.

• 👀 The interweaving historical trajectories of Big Tech & Big Tobacco are brought together beautifully here by author Gaia Bernstein.

• 👀 The Tech Oversight Project breaks down bills proposed in Congress (some need action to fight!), the Los Angeles Meta/YouTube trials, and more.

💰Voting With Our Dollars

• 👀 On the heels of last week’s post addressing ways our purchases make positive change, comes Baratunde of Life With Machines sharing his progress in moving away from harmful tech platforms many of us use every day. Thanks to him for sharing, and providing this model that others may look to for guidance and inspiration.

🎓Ed-Tech

• 👀 The whole scope of pertinent info on Ed-Tech condensed into one post, from Emily Cherkin (thank you!).

• 👁️ Jared Cooney Horvath shares declines in test scores since the introduction of screen-based schooling in a short Instagram clip here.

• ✍️ Want ed-tech out of schools? Make your voice heard by signing this quick petition from Distraction-Free Schools USA, to help the tech-reduction movement keep building momentum.

• 👀 Big news out of LAUSD this week - the advocacy by the parent-led Schools Beyond Screens has had an impact. Nick Melvoin of LAUSD has stated they will revisit and possibly reduce reliance on screen-based learning, as more and more parents in Southern California debate pulling their children from public school to attend charters with less screen time.

• 👀 Do students benefit from preparation to be future workers, or more from broader intellectual pursuits and rooting to a community? Explore with Andrew of The Walled Garden here.

• 👀 Join this upcoming webinar with Emily Cherkin and Denise Champney on March 23.

💻 Our homepage contains all these posts, resource pages, and more. Feel free to browse around whenever you’d like. It’s always available - links are not confined to Friday emails.

Thanks for being here. We appreciate you. ❤️ Meg

Apples falling from a tree, as we learned in 2nd grade science class, will always fall down. The force of gravity on planet Earth ensures this is so. Ocean tides rise and fall. The moon waxes and wanes. The sun rises and sets. Seasons shift as the Earth rotates on its axis. Nothing we humans can do will change those scientific tenets of life on this planet.

We have gotten very good at adapting to such tenets in our millions of years inhabiting Earth. While many other species have come and gone, we have survived and thrived. So good are we at adapting that, at times in this 21st century, it seems we have begun to adapt unconsciously, passively at times, in moments when we could be proactively shaping forces that are actually under our control.

Three such adaptations to technology - a force created by humans (not the planet) - are happening as I type this.

One adaptation is reactive, one is punitive, and one is proactive. Which adaptation holds the key to the technological future we want for ourselves? How should we be adapting to this new aspect of life on Earth, so recently unleashed upon us?

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A Reactive Adaptation

As I write this, many nations have or are passing age-gating laws for social media. Australia, Malaysia, France, and various US states already have these laws on the books, and others are in the process of passing such laws (Spain, Denmark, Indonesia, the UK, and others).

I’m in 100% agreement that social media in its current, persuasively designed form, where the goal is user engagement to harvest attention, data, and money to satisfy shareholders with rising stock value, is something to shield our young ones from. This also applies to much of YouTube, online pornography, and most of the currently available online gaming options.

BUT… at the same time, it’s worth saying:

Social media is not gravity. It seems obvious, but maybe we have forgotten this?

Social media and screen-based technologies, while they seem ubiquitous and all powerful, are NOT scientific tenets over which we have no control.

Unlike the sunrise and sunset, social media platforms are made by HUMANS and under the control of HUMANS. They can be designed in any way, shape, or form, to benefit the user, or to benefit the corporations designing them. Currently they’re incentivized to benefit the latter, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

The very well-intentioned age-gating laws being written and passed are a form of adaptation that, to be honest, miss a hugely important opportunity to truly fix the problem.

They adapt to a force that we don’t need to adapt to, rather than tackling the source of the problem to begin with.

Social media ≠ gravity. I’ve only heard a few voices saying this, but we should all be shouting it from the rooftops. Why are we adapting to this, treating these companies’ products as if they’re an inevitable force of nature, when we could instead be fixing them??

Age gating laws do not require social media platforms to change harmful algorithms. They do not make social media safer for adolescents who, upon turning 15 or 16, open accounts and find the same (or worse) content served to them, by algorithms still seeking their data and attention above all. They leave platforms unchanged for the rest of us over age 16 who currently use these products regularly (and are targeted by the same profit-seeking algorithmic forces). Age-gating laws do not mandate that tech companies fix their manipulative designs or make platforms any safer for anyone. While these laws deserve much credit for raising awareness of the potential harms children may encounter on social media (which is very important and not to be undervalued), as written, the laws are an adaptation that does little to address the true problems at hand.

Platforms are designed to abuse our psychological wiring and hook us into their profit-generating system because they can. No one is preventing them from doing this, and we need to be asking, why not??? Instead, age-gating laws possibly (unintentionally) give a pass to these companies’ self-serving business models, by communicating essentially “do as you do, we’ll just protect our children from you as long as we can”. As if these platforms are a force of gravity we can do nothing about.

This travesty of acceptance testifies to the success of corporations to flip the capitalist script upon us all, to convince us they are in control and we must adapt, use their products, be good little consumers of their wares, and do our best to protect ourselves from any harms that come (and that’s on us, not them). How have we sleepwalked into this state of affairs? It’s time to wake ourselves up.

Legislation can be a wonderful tool, but only when we legislate solutions that actually address the point of harm. Age-based laws at this point seem to adapt to harms instead of addressing them, and in the process eliminate all the good that could come if tech was fixed to serve humanity instead of corporations.

On the darker side, age-gating laws provide a new opportunity to acquire more of our data, by requiring facial ID scans or official document uploads to prove age. Those who collect this data then store and “own” that information - our faces, DOBs, addresses - on their servers, to have and hold for whatever future uses of that data may come. There are very dystopian ideas/fears about how this could be used in the future.

Perhaps an easier fix than age-gating would be amending existing consumer protection laws to include tech platforms. These laws already exist - they just need to be applied to tech companies in the same way they apply to those making microwaves and hair driers.

Companies will not do the right thing for consumers unless there is an incentive - legislative or financial, to do so. If legislative, let’s devote time and attention to those that mandate tech’s serving and supporting humanity, rather than merely adapting to its negative impacts.

A Punitive Adaptation

As I type this, a jury in Los Angeles is deliberating in a first-of-its kind reckoning for the tech industry to determine if Meta and YouTube are liable for damages caused by their persuasive designs. The verdict in this case should be coming any day now.

Another trial is in progress in New Mexico, also against Meta’s designs that encourage acts of sexual violence against youth (this led to arrests in a state-run sting operation). Another trial was just cleared to begin in Nevada, and there’s a line of thousands more suits behind these, brought both by families of now-deceased children, and by those who survived but are living with continuous negative effects.

The trials provide a punitive avenue to hold companies accountable for their choices and create enough pressure, through both bad PR and restitution costs, to (it is hoped) inspire them to rework the harmful aspects of their models.

If the case in New Mexico sides with the state, required changes to this harmful model will be part of the penalty to Meta (this is the only trial currently whose penalty specifically requires platform changes - good for you New Mexico!).

If these court cases follow the path laid ahead of them by similar industry trials (i.e. Big Tobacco, PG&E/”the Erin Brockovich trial”) and the plaintiffs win, soon tech may be encouraged/required to amend its intentionally manipulative practices.

There is a historical precedent here - cars were made safer over the years for example, when families began suing car companies for failing to build safe automobiles. Now we have seatbelts and airbags and steering correction to help make vehicle travel safer, and these have reduced vehicular deaths in spades.

Are we at the beginning of a similar shift with tech products? Time will tell, but we certainly may be, and thus applaud these first plaintiffs for their bravery in coming forward to try and help all who come after them. And there’s another, possibly more effective solution available to address the harms tech brings into our lives.

A Proactive Adaptation

Here’s where we come in.

We parents lived through the very best of technology, and we know how wonderful it can be. When I started undergrad in the fall of 1997 and got internet access for the first time - email, ICQ, AIM Messenger, Napster, Mapquest, Netscape Navigator - the world opened. It was amazing, life-changing.

We parents lived that era of wonderfulness in tech, when the tools were truly tools of the user, provided enhanced connections with friends, family, and information (also free music, briefly but wonderfully), and everything in life just got easier. Tech had these lofty goals of bringing the world together in “kumbaya” harmony, and it seemed like all of that was really possible in the late 90s.

Kids today are clamoring for the same wonderfulness of tech - connection to peers, music, and information - and so are parents (for our kids and for us). A conversation with three teens on a summer camping trip last year brought forth bubbling excitement about favorite authors and book series found online, engagement in political activism through social media, and maintaining connections with peers after soccer camp ended - all good things that we want for our children.

And yet, the environment in which today’s kids are trying to find all this “good”, is, as Corey Doctorow puts it, “enshittified”. (Have four minutes to laugh at a Norwegian satire video about this? It may bring a chuckle.)

Slowly over time, this so-called “Enshittification” creep has degraded the quality of services and experiences provided us via technology. Somewhere along the line, as investors began to demand returns on their investments, money (not ideals) came into the forefront, and the technology went from serving us to using us. And in so doing, came all the harms from which we seek to shield our children in the online world.

Social media platforms were designed by people, and the decisions made to turn tech from something that served us, into something that uses and abuses us, was a conscious, deliberate, purposeful decision made by... people. Not nature or science. And there is something we can do about that today, in addition to legislation and legal cases - we can vote with our dollars.

In this capitalist economic structure that surrounds us, we must remember that (contrary to what corporations want us to believe) those who have the actual power are the consumers. If we don’t like something, and we don’t buy it, whoever provides that service or product must adapt to what we want or go bankrupt. We consumers hold the power within this system, to demand products meet our needs.

Markets do shift to meet consumer demand, and this demand is often generated by awareness. We may remember the release of the documentary Food Inc. in 2008, that blasted holes in the US agricultural sector and brought consumer awareness (maybe for the first time) to the pitfalls of the modern food system.

This, and the onslaught of other food & ag-focused books and documentaries released in that era, pushed awareness of the food system’s shortcomings into the mainstream and created an increased demand for organic produce and free-range meat. And today? Walmart, Costco, Target, and so many other big box stores carry certified organic produce and grass-fed meat, making it widely available now in places it was not before. Production shifted to meet the market demand.

We can do the same with tech.

We’re in the beginning of the tech ‘awareness’ movement, the dreaming moment, where we are asking “what if tech could serve humans again?”. And it can. Gen-Z groups like Design It For Us and Young Futures are advocating for this very thing. There are small but mighty companies offering platforms and devices that center families and children.

If we buy their products, create demand, show with our purchasing dollars that we want what they are offering, and STOP using the harmful products currently on offer, the markets will shift to meet our demand. It’s the simplest principle in economics - it’s our job to demand, it’s their job to supply products to meet our demand. And we can start this TODAY.

For example, if we enjoyed positive and uplifting tech in our youth, and we want our kids to have the same positive experiences connecting with friends and information, and we ALL only downloaded WeAre8, Promly or ScrollHappy social media platforms and the AngelQ web-browser on a Wisephone for them to use, instead of Snap, Instagram, TikTok, and Safari on an iPhone, WOW what a shift that would create in the market (and for our kids, whose experiences would be overwhelmingly protected and positive).

So… is your kid asking for tech? Do you support positivity, prosocial experiences, platforms that build the brain, grow the mind, and enhance interpersonal skills? Show it with your purchases. You can do this today. Sell your old iPhones and iPads back to the Apple store and use that return to purchase alternative, child-friendly devices whose designs serve kids and families (our growing list is here - we get no commission, it’s merely a running list for parents by parents). Buying from these companies both creates market demand AND rewards those companies for doing the right thing.

If we band together with our kids’ friends and peers, with our class WaitUntil8th or #DelayistheWay pledge groups, we can plan together to provide positive tech when the time comes. The more we do this, the more change we make, for our kids and for the market.

Such alternate platforms may cost something up front (a monthly fee for a social platform account for example), but you want them to. Paying up front is one way to avoid the manipulative business models behind free platforms. According to Meta’s internal documents, our teen’s lifetime worth to them is only about $270 - my guess is we’d all happily pay that up front to shield our kids from harm and ensure their experiences online are mostly positive. The way to do this is to vote with our dollars and pay a monthly fee for these alternative, family-centered models.

I HOPE in 20 years, this blip in time will be but a memory - a brief era when tech was more harmful than positive, and few were doing anything about it. To make that a reality, we need collective action and collective market demand to change the tide.

Vote with your mighty, hard-earned purchasing dollars. Support those start-ups offering positive tech. Voting doesn’t only happen in November - it happens every day. We hold true power in our purses and wallets. Use your dollars for good. Together we can do all possible to create the world we want for our kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids.

Thank you for being here - we are more powerful than we realize. With much appreciation for the love and power in us all, ❤️ Meg

This Week in Tech

Emoji key:

• 👂= podcast

• 👀 = article (or book)

• 👁️ = video (or social media post)

🌄 Helping Hands for Parents

• 👂On “excellent sheep” - this conversation between author William Deresiewicz of Excellent Sheep and Ginny Yurich of 1000 Hours Outside is a gem. Many of us parents were part of the first generation raised to be “excellent sheep”, and it’s a pertinent reminder of the off-screen, real life experiences that kids truly need to grow and thrive (playtime, downtime, family).

• 👀 Shona of Always On shares her five biggest takeaways from the 22 workshops she gave over the past month, on the state of parenting around tech. Good stuff.

• 👁️ Your PSA on “Nihilistic Violent Extremism” for the week from Parents Uncharted - groups like 764 and others have been targeting kids using violence, self-harm and cruelty as entertainment. Be aware of what’s out there and changes to look for in our own children that might inform us of their exposure.

• 👀 From Wait Until 8th, a story of friendship changed by a smartphone that reminds us why it’s SO IMPORTANT that we help create peer groups for our kids that are protected from the intrusion of these devices. Form a group and pledge to wait - it protects so much for them, including their friendships.

• 👂Looking for ways to incorporate more outdoor time in your family’s life? Let this conversation between Cynthia of Screen Less, Play More and Josée Bergeron, author of Beyond the Front Door, spark new ideas for nature connection.

• 👀 Another from Screen Less, Play More - five things a cybersecurity expert wishes he’d known before he had kids.

💻 ICYMI - webinars

If you weren’t able to attend live, but want to hear what was discussed, please find below the recorded sessions:

• Julie Frumin’s wonderful webinar from March 9, with an intro and state-of-the-union on tech from Julie Schelfo, founder and executive director of MAMA (we also get a shout-out, thank you Julie 🙌).

• 👁️ Emily Cherkin’s excellent Ed-Tech webinar from March 9

🚧 On “Technoference”

• 👂+👀 Dr. Carrie Mackensen, who coined the word “technoference” (technology interfering in the parent-child attachment relationship), discusses tips to manage and balance screens with family time in this conversation with Sarah of Parents Uncharted. If low on time, jump to 23:50 for a poignant example of how tech was used to soothe a child in all the wrong ways, and stick around through the end for tips and info, or read the takeaways from Sarah’s Substack post.

• 👂If you find your online/TV news habit is taking over more time in your life than you’d like, let the soothing voice of Simplicity Parenting’s Kim John Payne walk you through a possible “news cleanse”. Start at 1:30 to skip promos.

꩜💥 AI + Chatbots

• 👀 “Happy (and safe) shooting!” says the chatbot.❗️ Following the recent Canadian shooter’s use of ChatGPT to plan the attack, CCDH’s test of various AI chatbots revealed that they routinely provide information to help plan mass shootings and violent acts. Only Anthropic’s Claude and SnapChat’s MyAI refused to participate in planning such events, and Claude was the only chatbot to try to dissuade such attacks. Holy moly.

• 👀 A 36-year-old man died by suicide after using Google’s Gemini chatbot for only two months, in a chatbot-induced psychosis that echoes so many other cases with teens and young adults (this bot also coached the man to attempt acts of violence in real life before encouraging him to end his own).❗️ His family is now bringing a suit against Google for the harms of their bot. If you have a WSJ account, a more detailed discussion is available here.

  • ***This happened to an adult with a fully formed brain, no mental health history, and close relationships with his family. ❗️

  • ***GEMINI CHATBOTS ARE PART OF GOOGLE’S CLASSROOM TOOLS ON SCHOOL ISSUED CHROMEBOOKS. ❗️The bots, ever thirsty for data, often prompt students to engage with it (like popping up offering to help Julie Frumin’s son with his homework) and may be engaging our children even without their prompting.

  • 🗣️ Tell your child some version of the following: “if a chatbot window pops up on your school device, close it, even if it prompts you to use it. If you’ve used it before, don’t continue. It’s not yet safe, can provide dangerous or untrue information, and some kids and adults have had bad things happen to them because it’s not been tested for safety. Let’s wait until after the company fixes what’s wrong with it before we use it.”

  • If your school provides 1:1 devices, these cases (plus the resources like this) serve as mounting evidence for why you/they should opt out of 1:1 devices until the tech companies change their careless & exploitative models. Share with your schools/teachers.

• 👀 On (not) legislating AI, “inaction has a price” says Luiza Jarovsky, of the reluctance of the EU and US governments to take a meaningful stance on AI. It’s harder to vote with our dollars here, as AI is an “arrival technology”, and AI companies are injecting it into everything as fast as possible without our informed consent. We can protest by not using AI in our daily lives, and only using it sparingly, (if actually needed), at work.

• 👀 On AI’s use in the bombings of Iran, tech reporter Sam Biddle says “Airstrikes, air war generally is already so prone to killing innocent people even when you take your time. But whenever you try to hurry for the sake of hurrying — and AI is great at enabling that — you just increase over and over again the chance of killing someone that you didn’t intend to or didn’t care enough to avoid killing.” AI use in these bombings is setting a horribly frightening precedent.

• 👀 How do teens use and view AI? The Pew Research Center has a new report sharing the pros and cons of AI as teens see it.

• 👀 An example of the unexpected ways AI spam is starting to show up online, taking over the spaces where artisans sell their handcrafted work and wares. Be aware, support and buy from real artisans, and avoid these AI scams - get tips from Jeremy Carrasco of ShowToolsAI on his new Substack here.

• 👁️+👀 Explore the semantics and intersecting motives inherent in the wording companies (and headlines) use to discuss AI job losses with Baratunde Thurston, in this mind-bending video and Substack post.

• 👀 YouTube is beginning to extend AI-detection tools to those in the public eye, allowing them to flag and report AI-generated and deep fake video imagery featuring their voice/face and likeness. It’s not a guarantee these videos will be removed, but it’s a start.

🏛️ Social Media Trials + Legislation

• 👂Week 6 recap of the Los Angeles Meta & YouTube trial from Nicki and Sarah, detailing testimony from Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar, Dr. Kara Bagot, and more. Closing arguments are in process as I type this! The world awaits.

• 👀 A rundown on the LA trials from The Tech Oversight Project, if you prefer reading last week’s main points in bulleted summaries.

• 👁️+👀 This is not the only trial in progress - as shared above, Meta is also on trial in New Mexico, and another trial was just cleared to begin in Nevada.

• ❗️As states begin to pass their own AI safety laws to protect their citizenry, the federal government and tech lobbying groups are pushing back, in efforts to undo these safeguards and accelerate AI integration and development.

  • 👀 Net Choice, a pro-tech lobbying group, is suing the state of Virginia to stop the implementation of their 1-hour social media restriction for youth.

  • 👀 More than 50 Republican state lawmakers have written a letter to Mr. Trump, calling on him to STOP trying to supersede and eliminate their states’ AI safety laws.

  • 👀 A WIN against the tech lobby - this week in California, the courts ruled against Net Choice in favor of upholding the California Age-Appropriate Code, clearing the way for it to take effect. The tide is starting to turn. :)

🎓 Ed-Tech

• 👁️ Those in the USA may not be aware, but 90s rom-com star Hugh Grant and his wife are advocates for safer screen technology in the UK. Hear his perspective on Ed-Tech, and his call to parents to step into our power.

• 👁️+👀 We shared the podcast last week, but in case you missed it (or prefer to read a shorter summary), CHT’s interview with Rebecca Winthrop about the Brookings Institute’s Ed-Tech findings is here and worth a read.

• 👀+👂Screenstrong teamed up this week with Jared Cooney Horvath of The Digital Delusion, to review the data on Ed-Tech.

• 👀 Are any schools modeling a positive incorporation of AI into their pedagogies? A few seem to be, and we’d be wise to pay attention to their approaches to true AI literacy (not how to use AI, but understanding its foundations, abilities and limitations, how it’s designed, and more), which can be a protective factor for kids growing up in the AI age.

Our homepage contains all these posts, resource pages, and more. Feel free to browse around whenever you’d like. It’s always available - posts are not confined to Friday emails. Thanks for being here, we appreciate you. ❤️

What was your favorite video game to play as a kid? Mine was Sonic 2. All laughter welcome.

We didn’t get a gaming system at home until I was about 13. My brother, the true driver of this request, was 11, and our sister was 3. Our parents held out a long while, preferring us to play Super Mario Bros at our friends’ homes on playdates rather than get us our own, but they finally purchased us a Sega Genesis in the early 1990s.

I remember this new freedom to finally play video games at home being AMAZING. My brother and I stayed up for hours on weekend nights playing the only five games we had - Sonic 2, Mortal Kombat, Ms. Pac-Man, Aladdin (based on the Disney movie) and Paperboy.

Having so few to play, we got good at each of them. But in teaming up as Sonic and Tails, my brother and I eventually (after a year or so) beat the game, a grand feat and accomplishment in our young lives.

An Unexpected Return to ‘Green Hill Zone’

My sister told me last year that she had our old console and game cartridges at her house, so the next time we visited her, we plugged it in. I sat down with my boys and hers to show them how to play Sonic.

I was so excited to play again - it was like resurrecting an old, dear friend. And the funny thing was…. I. Remembered. Everything.

I had not played this game since probably 1994, and yet when I picked up the controller and turned on the game, it was like I was 14 again. My brain and fingers locked into place and knew what to do.

Jump here, spin here, enter this secret passageway to find the hidden ring cache, jump through that hidden portal to skip to the end of the level. I was SHOCKED that my brain and fingers just… did it. Level after level, it was ALL STILL THERE. I couldn’t even explain to the boys what I was doing or how to play the game exactly - my fingers were moving faster than my brain could produce the narration to explain it.

The neuroscience adage “what fires together wires together” was showing its truth in flying colors, as decades-old Sonic 2 skills fired from my brain and into my fingers. My adolescent mind had wired the importance of this game so deeply, that at 45, I could still play it as if little time had passed. 😳 (I could also hum along to the cheesy 90s soundtrack for each level, beat by beat….)

I was… shocked? Amazed? Both?

After the kids and I finished playing (and laughing at the 90s graphics, which made even Minecraft look modern), I found myself rattled by just how deeply the ability to play that game had been wired into my brain.

What Fires Together, Wires Together

This adage refers to the brain’s neurons, and the connections between them, that strengthen due to repeatedly practiced actions. The muscles in our bodies that “fire together” (move) repeatedly in a specific way, day after day, year after year, encode the importance of that movement into our brains. Repetition “wires together” the brain and those muscle movements, strengthening the brain and body’s capacities to do them.

This part of our physiology we all understand by virtue of growing up “practicing” things, be they sports, music, homework, or otherwise. This is why piano players “practice”, why soccer players shoot PKs, why schools teach the same subjects (math, reading) day in and day out, rather than just once and being done with it. What fires together wires together. If a skill or knowledge is considered important, the way to get better at it, hone expertise, and build that skill or knowledge, is continuous repetition.

And while this is true for all of us throughout our lives, what wires in adolescence is especially powerful. Adolescence is one of the most formative times in our brain’s growth, when the brain prunes connections that are no longer needed (those pertaining to childhood), and strengthens those that are used often (to prepare for adulthood). What gets wired at this age often wires deeply.

Regretting My Wiring

I wondered… why was that knowledge still wired so deeply in my brain, when I hadn’t used it for 30 years? Was it the time in my life that it wired - those important adolescent years - that made it stick so deeply? And as fun as it was, I now understood what a huge waste of my core brain wiring it was. As my brain encoded those finger movements, level maps, and ring caches so deeply, it had no idea that my Sonic skills would never be needed again after age 14.

What if the part of my brain that had been wired for playing Sonic had been dedicated instead to skill I could have been using my whole life? Like, what if I’d wired a capacity that was actually meaningful and important in my larger life?

If I’d taken those same hours, and instead of Sonic, had used them to learn a language, play a sport, play an instrument, write a novel, fix broken appliances, read, knit, paint, build something out of wood, or learned how to do my taxes, to change motor oil and tires - what would I be able to do now? That was the question that began to haunt my adult mind - what skills had playing Sonic replaced?

I felt uneasy upon considering this, as regardless of the skills I may or may not otherwise have had, this sparked a bigger question about our own children.

What skills are adolescent brains are wiring deeply into their cores today?

Swiping, scrolling, self-comparison, body dysmorphia, depressive/suicidal thinking, performative sharing for peer affirmation, pressure to take and send nudes, always-available violent pornography, addictive-by-design gaming/social media platforms, manosphere content, extremist content, online gambling, online drug availability, online/anonymous cruelty, infinite brain rot content - all these currently target our kids in ways they can’t look away from, and they’re immersed in it (sometimes up to 8-9+ hours A DAY).

And as I realized from even playing only 3-4 hours A WEEK, these often-repeated adolescent skills wire deeply, and likely come at the expense of skills that might better serve us in our future lives. We know kids today are already experiencing less eye contact, less human-to-human interaction, less engagement with the real world than any generation prior. I shuddered upon considering the very different on-screen worlds they are currently immersed in, and how that may be wiring them in ways none of us want for our children.

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Video Game Worlds: Then and Now

Like so many adolescents today, I spent those two years of my life repeatedly playing a video game. Compared to today, it was light years’ safer in innumerably important ways, that are critical for us parents to truly absorb.

• Shared play was in-person. My brother and I bonded through our collaboration in playing this game together side-by-side, planning our moves, talking tactics, and sharing both the joys at our achievements and the frustrations at our failures - it was a pro-social, collaborative endeavor.

• The console was not connected to the internet (which didn’t yet exist).

• We were not playing with random strangers, any of whom could have had predatory or malicious intent.

• There was no chat feature where said random strangers could hurl obscenities or slurs at us, groom us, or send us nude pics and demand them from us.

• The game was designed with specific goals for us to achieve - the ability to “beat” the level and “win” the game was the very point (rather than endless, continuous, ever-shifting goals that keep the player ever immersed and never leaving the game world).

• We could push “pause” to stop, eat, or use the restroom - the game world, and the time and attention we chose to give it, was under our control.

• Play was tied to a console and TV set - not a device we carried in our pockets at all times, ever tempting us to play at school or while engaged in other activities.

• There were no such things as “in-game purchases”, nor was the ability to gamble (with real money) built into the game.

• Our games weren’t harvesting our data or serving us ads.

• Our games weren’t designed to hack our brains to keep us playing, to increase the game designer’s profits.

• Are these conditions reversed for players today? Yes.

Compared to today’s games, Sonic was a relatively benign, pro-social diversion. When many of us think of “kids playing video games”, we automatically envision these experiences that we had, transferring our own relatively safe, fun play onto the games kids engage with today like Roblox, presuming it’s the same for them.

Nope. It’s not.

Gaming today is an entirely different ecosystem from old Nintendo and Sega console games. Understanding these differences is critical when deciding if, when, and how much our own kids are given access to the games available to them today. (My two cents, if of interest: don’t let them play free games ever. Purchasing a game, and ideally playing it on a non-internet-connected console, or with a selected, closed group of close friends only, is the best possible option, if you let them play at all).

What Might Today’s Kids Be ‘Wiring’?

Adolescent brains today are in their process of forming their strongest connections for their lives, right now as I type this. What is ‘firing and wiring’ for them now, and what skills are being displaced?

If they have screen devices, they have likely already deeply wired the repeated ‘swipe’ and ‘scroll’ finger movements. In some cases, kids have wired this so deeply that they do it in their sleep, as do toddlers and babies who’ve had access to screens at those ages (these clips make my eyes well up with tears - what have we done to our precious children??).

Gen-Z, the first to go through adolescence on screens, wired VERY differently as a cohort than every other generation of humans that came before them. They speak on their experiences and the resulting challenges eloquently (follow along via these Gen-Z’ers work to hear their perspectives). They were the first to go through adolescence immersed in the conditions mentioned above - swiping, scrolling, self-comparison, ever-available violent pornography, body dysmorphia, depressive and suicidal thinking, online gambling, online drug availability, pressure to take and send nudes, manosphere content, extremist content, online/anonymous cruelty, addictive-by-design gaming and social media platforms, performative sharing for peer affirmation, and more. Wiring such things so deeply into their cores hasn’t gone well for them.

Now our own kids, the eldest Gen-Alphas, are gearing up to hit their adolescent “fire and wire” years. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like it will go any better for them than it did for Gen-Z (some argue conditions today are levels worse than those Gen-Z faced).

What Can We Do?

It is critically important that we protect our children’s brains from wiring harmful, maladaptive, and abusive experiences deeply into their cores. If we don’t want that “skill” to be part of them when they’re 45, we can’t let it wire when they’re 14. Full stop.

It’s time to flex our parenting muscles ya’ll - no laws will be passed in time to help us shield our kids. It’s up to us. Keep our kiddos off these products as much as possible, and reject/opt-out of 1:1 devices in schools. Inform our kids constantly of the corporate profit motives built into the platforms and games around them (using all you’re learning from the brilliant folks listed below and elsewhere on this site). Translate it to fit your family’s values and paradigms. We can do it - we owe it to them. They deserve our protection, because no one else is protecting them. They will thank us in the future. We didn’t ask for this, and as unfair as it is (incredibly, odiously unfair!!!), it’s our unfortunate (but important) hand to play. I believe in us all, we are more powerful than we know. Let the folks below, today and every week, be your guides. We can do it. I believe in us.

Much love, thanks for being here, ❤️ Meg

This Week in Tech

Emoji key:

• 👂= podcast

• 👀 = article (or book)

• 👁️ = video (or social media post)

New Book!

• 👀 I’m thrilled for this one - Michaeleen Doucleff’s previous book, Hunt, Gather, Parent, is one of my top three favorite parenting books of all time, and this week she released Dopamine Kids, diving into the science behind our kids’ compulsive use of both screens and processed foods.

  

  IT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING our family has struggled with over the years regarding screens and processed food. I am only a few chapters in, but am already so grateful for what I’m learning - guessing this info will help MANY parents.

  • 👂If no time to read, at least listen to her interview about the main points on the 1000 Hours Outside podcast.

    • 👀 For a brilliant, smaller-scale follow-up of IRL ideas we can do with our kids today, see Megan Saxelby’s heartfelt post this week, ending with 5 silly ways to reconnect with our kids.

Upcoming Webinars

• 🌟This week! Monday, March 9th @ 9am - Julie Frumin of MAMA (recently interviewed in this NBC news article) shares her tips and wisdom to guide and support families as we navigate screens in our homes. Register here.

• Also March 9th - Emily Cherkin of First Fish Chronicles talks Ed-Tech - register here

• March 19th - hear from Gen-Z women on the impacts of porn culture on their dating lives, via Culture Reframed - register here.

Tech Behind the Scenes

• 👁️+👀 A reminder that tech is not neutral, and that those who build screen technologies shield their own kids from it - here’s another rundown of how these CEOs protect their own kids (slides here, article here).

• 👁️+👀 The takeaways pulled from this fascinating/frightening conversation between Baratunde Thurston and Nita Farahany explore the “slow creep” tech takeover of mental privacy and our capacity to freely think (takeaways listed below the video if no time to watch - or start at 8:05 to jump right into the meat of it). We have not consented to, nor asked for a future where tech can read your expressions and infer your thoughts, and share that data with infinite others, but it’s here. 😳

• 👁️ Instagram’s new “auto scroll” feature removes that last bit of friction between indefinite scrolling and our control of our time on their platform. It’s not on by default (yet), but I’d prep for that to shift in the future. ‼️

• 👀 Why Apple products are not good for kids, from Sarah Gallagher Trombley.

Ed-Tech

• 👂 Have you heard of parents running their kids’ schoolwork through ChatGPT and demanding teachers change the grades to match the higher ones given by ChatGPT? I hadn’t! This week’s conversation between the Center for Humane Technology’s Daniel Barcay and Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution is a fascinating listen, sharing results from Brookings’ “AI in Schools” survey.

  • “AI Can’t Fix” student engagement at school, declares Rebecca (above, co-written with Jenny Anderson) in this important post from AfterBabel.

• Lily Abadal tackles common slogans for AI in school, like “AI is technology just like a calculator” in this timely article.

• The national PTA officially broke up with Meta, who had funded them since 2017.

• Emily Cherkin’s First Fish Chronicles digs into AI companies funding teachers unions and the LAUSD AI debacle.

• Jared Cooney Horvath shares data tracking falling test scores as Ed-Tech is adopted, state by state.

  • More on this from Dr. Alison Yeung - “as classroom tech goes up, learning is going down”.

  • Jean Twenge shares PISA data on learning decreases with screens in schools.

Gaming, Pornography, & Current Events

• 👁️ “5 Nights at Epstein’s” - the newest game middle schoolers are playing on their school-issued devices is a cross between the horror flick 5 Nights at Freddys and the Epstein files… Oh my no.

• 👀+👁️ Rosalia Rivera of Consent Parenting shares how she responded to her kids asking about pedophiles, Epstein, and Michael Jackson in her Substack post (and briefly in this Instagram clip) - helpful wording for any of us surprised by these out-of-the-blue inquiries. Even if our kids don’t have social media, we should prep for these conversations if their friends do (friends who encounter disturbing content tend to share it).

• 👀+👁️ Talks about pornography must be unfortunately continuous and frequent. Peer-on-peer sexual abuse rates are going through the roof (as shown in that new research study), as adolescents and teens model the aggressive acts they see in pornography. We must make sure our boys know porn is not a tutorial for ‘how to have sex’ and not to mimic these acts. Our girls must also know this is not ‘how to have sex’, and not to accept these violent acts from partners (though perhaps they should expect it, sadly - we must arm them for how to have these discussions safely - I will write about this in a future post).

Social Media/Meta Trial Updates

• 👂Nicki and Sarah’s podcast breakdown of week 5 (video versions here), plus a special conversation with Meta whistleblower Brian Boland who testified last week about his 11-year employment in ad-sales for Facebook.

  • Brian and his wife started an organization, the Delta Fund, to battle companies that put profit before people. Bravo.

Brain Science

• 👂+👁️ Oprah sits down with author of Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, to discuss the brain science behind our kids’ emotional reactions to getting off of screens. (Dr. Lembke has also been on the stand recently in the Los Angeles Meta trials, providing testimony to jurors for how this process works). Podcast here, short Instagram clip here.

• 👀 Denise Champney discusses the impact on children’s development when their eyes are always looking down at a screen rather than up at life around them.

• 👀 A look at screen-induced ADHD - not the kind resulting from genetics, but the similar symptoms that can develop from screen use, from ScreenStrong.

AI

• 👀 More on the Pentagon-Anthropic breakup - how AI is both being currently used by the military (in Venezuela, Iran) and their desires for future use (where Anthropic held the line). Currently CEOs/employees of these companies are all that stand between this technology and unfettered military use. This post from Psst summarizes the concerns very well, as does Emily Tavoulareas in her post this week. Luiza Jarovsky breaks it down line by line here. Color me concerned about all this….

• 👀 Who will bear the brunt of rising electricity costs due to huge AI data centers? There are talks underway with tech CEOs, who for now say they’ll shoulder the costs, but enforcing it “won’t be easy”. Hmm… convenient. 🤔 Watching this one warily.

• 👁️ Explore how AI-generated videos are confusing those seeking information on current events in Iran, and how TikTok is actually the platform showing the most legitimate videos (who’s have thought?) this week with ShowToolsAi.

• 👁️ Play “AI or Not” with The AI Panic Club’s Catharina Doria (I failed at all 3).

• 👀 AI companies’ objectives often run counter to basic human needs - where will this lead us in the future? Explore this with Luiza Jarovsky here.

Mini-Podcast Episodes (for those with little time)

• 👂Cynthia of Screen Less, Play More talks with Ed-Tech powerhouse Emily Cherkin of First Fish Chronicles (12 min)

• 👂Want to get riled up about “Sharenting” (adults sharing their kids online)? Sarah of Parents Uncharted gives it her all in this short episode (26 min)

Legislation and Advocacy

• 👀 Call your Representative! The newest version of the kids’ online “safety” bill in Congress has become a toothless, tech-friendly endeavor, pushed by tech companies seeking less accountabiliy for the harms they build into their products. We must use our voices to demand a return to the earlier version of KOSA that the Senate passed long ago, before the House messed with it.

  • 👀 Info on this from Meta whistleblower Kelly Stonelake

  • 👀 Nuts and bolts info from the Tech Oversight Project

• 👀 I don’t typically post links with overtly political slants, but this list may be of interest to some. If you want to vote with your subscription dollars and reduce money that funds government programs (like ICE raids), scroll halfway down the page to the section in yellow for a list of tech companies and products from which to consider unsubscribing. Thank you to Emily T for this link.

  Never written by AI. Always chock full of resources. Subscribe for weekly posts straight to your inbox.

My kids were off school last week, so while Zuckerberg was on the stand testifying in the Los Angeles Meta trials, we found ourselves driving to Disneyland. The kids had been requesting to go since my youngest grew tall enough to ride Space and Thunder Mountains, and as we don’t live far away, it was a doable day trip in their week off.

Our visit to Disneyland is not the topic I’d planned to address this week, but fresh off the Home Alone posts (1 and 2), I saw my fellow park-goers through a very different lens on this visit. When AfterBabel dug into the same phenomenon this week, and the trials exposed that Meta purposely used “teens’ influence in a household" to drive parents’ adoption of Instagram (teen power over their parents is literally built into social media!!!), I decided upon this afterword to conclude the exploration of how this affects the way we parent, especially around technology.

Who Was At Disneyland?

We were surrounded mostly by parents and kids there on vacation, doing as Walt intended and enjoying the park’s attractions together as a family.

But there was another noticeable and numerable group of park-goers, (usually not kindly) called “Disney Adults” who were there as well - often no kids in tow, just adults choosing to spend their days at the Happiest Place on Earth.

Before you think I’m judging, I enjoy Disneyland too. As many who grew up in Southern California or Central Florida did, I went regularly with my family when I was young, and have many core memories formed there. As teens in the 90s, our parents would drop us off there to hang out for the day (tickets were $32 a day back then, a different era entirely). We had annual passes when my kids were free two-years-olds, and we visited the parks when we could during those years. So, I too have enjoyed my fair share of Disney magic throughout my life. But….

This time I REALLY noticed how much more we were surrounded by “Disney Adults”. Everywhere were fellow adults wearing Disney shirts and jackets themed with characters that wouldn’t be out of place on a preschool clothing rack, often with accompanying mouse-ear headbands, and character-themed Disney bags or backpacks. Many had stuffed versions of characters either riding on their shoulders or sticking out of their bags. Adults were more decked out in Disney gear than were toddlers, and in all my years of going to Disneyland, this was new.

We passed a “Disney Adult” couple, clad head-to-toe in character clothing, Mickey ears, and pin-covered annual pass lanyards, who remarked with slight annoyance, “why are there are so many kids here today, is school off this week or something?” as if they’d expected a mostly kid-free park experience. At a theme park made for… families.

One woman (older than me) wore a shirt with “I’m Done Adulting, I’m Going to Disney” emblazoned upon the front. Unlike most “Disney Adults”, she actually had two tween kids with her, whose facial expressions bore the markers of both boredom and exhaustion. Were they dragged to Disneyland by a mom who wanted to be there more than they did? What was it like for them to see their mom bounce around happily in her mouse ears, rejecting “adulting” and acting like the kids they were?

In the past I would see adults in Disney gear and think, ah it’s their thing - a reconnection to a happier, more innocent and magical time. And maybe that’s all it is.

But this time, the sheer number of them made me wonder more deeply about the roots behind this phenomenon. As the birth rate plummets noticeably (for complex and overlapping factors), it appears from a day at Disneyland that more adults want to be children than have children.

Was this a very visually recognizable extension of the same “Home Alone” effect, displaying our adult generation’s deep connection to our media-immersed childhoods? Is it a manifestation of our over-identification with being kids, or a rejection of adulthood and the responsibilities that come with it? Could these folks be using Disney to soothe childhood (or adult) wounds? Or is this evidence of a corporate business model now coming to fruition in these lifelong customers? My guess is it’s a complex combination of all the above.

Regardless of the answers to these questions, the more important one to ask is: what impact does this have on children, when they see their parents and other adults striving to… still be kids? How does our child-centered perspective impact the way we show up as parents, particularly when guiding our children around tech? So many questions to unpack.

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To Be Clear, it isn’t just Disney

Adults are taking over children’s spaces left and right.

Anyone who’s bought Lego recently has noticed that the market is shifting more and more to adult buyers and builders, with related price increases (most sets cost near or over $100 now). ABOL (Adult Builders of Lego) is an acronym used by such folks to self-identify in online forums, and there are many of them.

When my kids try to buy Pokemon cards from the vending machine in our local supermarket, 9 times out of 10 it is sold out, or we wait behind a line of adult men who are purchasing every pack in the machine. I recently took them to a trading card shop, and they were the only kids there - it was filled with adults buying, selling, and trading Pokemon and other anime cards.

Mattel’s headquarters has an on-site toy store near our home where adults line up outside in the morning to buy specialty or limited release versions of toys. If we go in the afternoon to get a gift for a friend’s birthday, we often find empty store shelves and apologetic staff informing us that they had that toy in stock that morning, but adults bought them all after opening.

Presumably these adults (and Pokemon card collectors) are buying toys and cards to re-sell online, but how many are adding to their own collections as well? I don’t know.

Then there’s youth club sports, where it is common for parents to pay to spend their Saturdays and Sundays driving two hours each way to take their child to all-day tournaments. This requires immense dedication for the whole family, forgoing weekend or evening free time and funds that could otherwise be spent on adult friendships, hobbies, or entire-family-together activities. In our childhoods, this type of sports dedication was reserved for the few hopeful Olympic or pro-pipeline athletes. Now it seems expected (and is mostly unquestioned) for almost all parents whose children enjoy playing sports.

And… in a league light years beyond horrific (and deserving a post written far more eloquently and respectfully of victims), we also now know, thanks to the Epstein files, that the most coveted, desired objects for the world’s richest men were… teenagers. 🤬🤬🤬

If it were just ‘Disney Adults’, they’d be merely a quirky niche group - but versions of this are everywhere in our society today. In so many arenas, adults are striving for connection to youth and childhood, taking over and occupying spaces and hobbies meant for children. Why?

It’s time we adults take a good look in the mirror to (kindly) self-assess and explore this facet of our generation, to untangle ourselves from the parts that hold us back from resting comfortably in our adult agency and leadership. Societies without leaders collapse, families without leaders flail. Parentified children (presumed by Meta to be their families’ leaders) do not grow up healthily. It’s up to us to take back control of this ship.

What Are Adults Modeling About Adulthood?

I have often heard Ginny Yurich mention on her 1000 Hours Outside podcast that we need to model an exciting adulthood, to show kids that growing up leads to exciting and joyful opportunities, and that while we love them deeply, our kids aren’t the only thing at the center of our lives. This perspective, when I first heard it, was new to me.

She encourages listeners to live exciting adult lives ourselves, full of adult-centered friendship, hobbies, and adventure that don’t involve kids, so kids see the fun they have to look forward to. If a child sees that all their parents do in their spare time is drive them to and from practice, watch them play sports, collect toys or Pokemon, or dress in Disney clothes and dance around in mouse ears, she says the message they absorb is that adult life is boring, and that nothing is better than childhood. That’s a pretty bleak view of the future. Why would they want to grow up? They’ll take their much more exciting screen-centered lives, thank you very much.

A Personal Reckoning

While my own parents seemed to have a vibrant social life when I was growing up, evenly split between activities we did together as a family and activities they did with their own friends, when prompted by one of these podcasts to assess the adult social life and interests I was modeling to my own kids, I faced a very sober reckoning. Despite growing up with a vibrant adult life modeled to me, I had chosen (settled for? accepted? blindly walked into?) an adulthood of assumed drudgery, with very little of interest to model, other than the child-centered activities that made up the days of early motherhood (which for me, did involve going to Disneyland repeatedly with my 2-year-olds… busted).

That our generation inherited a much bleaker version of the world than Boomers plays a huge part in this, no doubt. Bills, insurance, mortgages, taxes, and work, yes, but also polarization, collapse of community, lack of resources, inflation, expensive childcare, college debt, dual generation caregiving (for both aging parents and our kids), while being hit by a tsunami of new and untested technologies, means we parents are juggling more balls at once than any generation before. No wonder there are so many Disney adults, ABOLs, adult Pokemon collectors. Adulthood in this country can feel pretty bleak, made even more so when surrounded by media and experiences that promise to return us to those carefree, happy pinnacles of youth experiences (Disney! Sports! Lego! Pokemon!) and offer us a way to make our main responsibilities, our kids, go away for a while as we struggle to get the rest done (TV! iPads! Phones! YouTube! Roblox!).

As a formerly permissive-on-tech parent-in-recovery, who definitely leaned into both iPad/TV babysitting and former childhood joys to alleviate the pressures of early parenthood, I understand all of this. I lived it at a core fundamental level more than I ever realized. And little by little, thanks to countless podcasts and experts in this space, also realized that I wanted to, needed to (for the sake of my kids’ wellbeing) find my authoritative place on tech, to be a sturdy leader, to model a joyful adulthood. Anyone can do it. It takes honest self-assessment, which is usually not comfortable, but always ends in our freedom. It is this freedom, agency, confidence, and authenticity I wish for us all.

Thanks for being here, ❤️ Meg

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These Weeks in Tech, Feb 14-27

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• 👂= podcast

• 👀 = article

• 👁️ = video (or social media post)

🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Tech + Parenting FYI

• 👂 If you only listen to one podcast this week - Mike McLeod discusses with Ben Gillenwater SO MANY IMPORTANT ASPECTS of screens and kids in this episode of The Family IT Guy podcast - to jump past intros and basics, head to around 11:15 and listen through til the end.

• 👁️ Bark’s list of 5 most flagged/concerning apps for kids is out, detailing the most concerning for sexual content, suicidal ideation, and bullying - list here.

• 👀 Want to prevent a screen-addicted teen? Start helping them understand their brains in elementary school, says Screenstrong.

• 👀 There are finally controls for YouTube shorts! See Sarah’s post for details.

• 👂Do we have free will in an algorithmic world? Ginny unpacks this with author Kartik Hosanager on this (ad heavy) episode of 1000 Hours Outside.

  • 👀Related: a beautiful exploration of how adolescents are being shaped by algorithmic forces beyond their control from Reclaim Childhood.

• 👀 As nations around the globe draft laws age-gating social media, Screenstrong breaks down the brain science on what age is best for social media.

🍥 AI - (it was a big week for AI, many links of note)

• 👁️The AI Doc trailer is out! Watch to see why everyone at Sundance and SXSW is excited for its worldwide release on March 27. For more on this from CHT, click here.

• 👁️+ 👂Go to Davos with Tristan Harris and Yoshua Benigo, and hear their panel discussion on AI given at Human Change House.

• 👁️ Have you seen the viral (AI-generated) clip of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting on the rooftop? Software from ByteDance now enables anyone to create scenes and alternative endings using the faces and voices of famous actors. Sean Astin speaks in this report about the Tom/Brad clip.

• 👀+👁️ The AI slop taking over preschool-age YouTube algorithms is next level. If you have little ones watching YouTube, please be aware of what’s going on there - the algorithm knows the age of the viewer and will fill their suggestions and autoplays with nonsensical and sometimes scary fodder.

• 👀 OpenAI had banned the Canadian mass shooter from its platform due to concerning language and behavior - now they’re under scrutiny from Canadian law enforcement as to why OpenAI did not alert them to the dangerous behavior the shooter exhibited before the shooting.

• 👀 Time magazine’s cover story is The People Vs. AI - the growing collaboration of people from across the political and religious spectrum, working together to slow AI development. It started by dividing us, but tech is starting to bring us back together, slowly but surely. 🙌

  • Related: public trust and support is not behind AI companies, and that has the capacity to bring them down, says Luiza Jarovsky.

• 👀+👂The Pentagon is in a showdown with Anthropic over classified defense contacts. Article from CBS news here, Hard Fork podcast discussion here.

• 👀 See a breakdown (with a helpful graph) of young people’s perceptions of AI tools, collected and shared by the youth at Young Futures.

• 👁️ Debated sharing this because of the graphic sexual language used, but it’s important for parents to know what AI chatbots can, will, and are saying to users. Not safe for kids/work - Steven Bartlett of Diary of a CEO shares a sexual clip from a Grok chatbot conversation with Jonathan Haidt and Dr. Aditi.

🪦There’s… No Category for This One 💀

• 👀 Still searching for the right words to accurately describe this - Meta has filed patents to permit our resurrection in AI bot form postmortem, to continue to monetize and post on our social media accounts after we are dead, in order to continue the revenue stream they earn from our accounts. What. The. Actual. #$!*% Thanks to Baratunde for bringing this to our attention, I am… speechless.

🕹️ Gaming and Gambling

• 👀 In the never-ending quest to monetize everything, gambling and betting is quickly taking over the internet. For example, this NYT reporter became aware of the depths of online gambling culture when he realized people were betting on an article of his.

• 👂The pros and cons of Roblox, shared by The Family IT Guy on the Parents Uncharted podcast - a fabulous episode for those trying to understand what exactly Roblox is like for players and what parental controls actually do.

• 👁️ Gaming Addicts have a recovery champion in Cam Adair. He shares a quick recap of his descent into gaming addiction here, and signs your child may be addicted to gaming here.

• 👁️ @TheGamerEducator Ash Brandin discusses the ‘Fortnite to Draft Kings pipeline’ and the ways sports betting is taking over online platforms.

• 👁️ What boys are doing online and how to talk to them about it (as it tends to differ from what the rest of us do online) from Mom Uncharted.

🏛️ Social Media on Trial - Los Angeles Court Case Updates

• 👁️ +👂Hear Nicki and Sarah recap week 4 (including Zuckerberg’s testimony) and week 3 by podcast, or watch their video compilation of footage from the courtroom here.

• 👀 The Tech Oversight Project made a chart breaking down Zuckerberg’s lies exposed this week in court (here), shares their coverage of this week in the trial in general, including ads with which Meta flooded the market during Mark’s testimony, to drown out trial coverage. The full article detailing Zuckerberg’s claims is here.

• 👁️ Despite prohibitions on recording in the courtroom, to protect the identities of the jurors and plaintiff, multiple Meta employees arrived wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, enabling them to record and identify everyone in the courtroom! For a chilling example of what smart glasses can do, see here.

📚 Ed-Tech

• 👀 An example that Ed-Tech is not based on well-tested methodologies for student learning and are actually business deals led by companies who want education dollars can be seen in the FBI raid of LAUSD’s superintendent this week.

• 👁️ Emily Cherkin interviews school librarian Jen Farrell about her initial ed-tech optimism, and what she saw that turned her opinion completely around.

  • 👀 More from Emily: her Four Norms for Ed-Tech

• 👀 Jared Cooney Horvath calls out the parallel tactics used by both Ed-Tech and Big Tech in this post reshared by AfterBabel.

  • 👀 More from Jared: Where can Ed-Tech be good?

📕 New Book Release

• 👀+👁️ Girls: Gen-Z and the Commodification of Everything by Freya India. One of the leading voices of Gen-Z, Freya explores the impacts of growing up immersed in technology and the effects this has had on Gen-Z females. Substack release here, recent video interview about it here.

🖥️ Upcoming Webinars

• March 9th - Los Angeles area MAMA chapter leader and founder of Healthier Tech, Julie Frumin - register here.

• March 9th - Emily Cherkin of First Fish Chronicles talks Ed-Tech - register here

• March 19th - hear from Gen-Z women on the impacts of porn culture on their dating lives, via Culture Reframed - register here.

Last week we explored the subconscious impact of our favorite childhood films on the ways we show up as parents.

Whether or not we think our childhood media impacted us, marketers think it did. They use these generational predispositions to sell to both us and our kids.

(I am not, and have never been, involved in professional marketing - if you are, and want to add to or challenge anything below, by all means please do).

➡️ To jump directly to This Week in Tech, click here.

✴✴✴ The next post will be February 27, 2026 ✴✴✴

(My kids are off school next week, and I take breaks when they do!)

Marketing Tactics Used on Parents

The wonderful Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting, often discusses in podcast conversations the industry-insider tactics he learned while (somewhat incognito) at a child-focused marketing conference. He tells how he was taken aback at the methods marketers promoted to remove “purchasing friction” (parental influence and permission).

The marketing tactics he heard lean into our generations’ tendencies to center our children’s experiences, and to see adults (and their rules) as uncool.

(To hear podcast conversations where he discusses his experience at the marketing conference, hear:

• this conversation with Richard Freed at 16:55 here

• this conversation with Ginny Yurich at 51:20 here

Both conversations are worth listening to in their entirety if time permits, but the basics will be broken down below).

“Flattery/Peer Parenting”

The “Flattery/Peer Parenting” tactic exploits the susceptibility in our generation’s psyche to want to still be the young, cool, centered youth that we grew up idolizing, and NOT to be those out-of-touch adults of film lore.

These ads tell parents that if they buy their kid this or that item, their kids will like them more, they will be accepted into their kids’ cool youthful circle, that meaningful family connection will happen via a youth-oriented product, and in doing so, adults can be just as cool as their kids.

This holiday ad for Nintendo exemplifies “flattery/peer parenting” - images establish that the product is loved by kids, then adults join in using the product (entering the fun children’s world), then happily connect with their kids via the product. At the end, the Switch is shown as the way to create meaningful family time, enabling adults and kids to enjoy time together (which a child initiates and then the adults join in, seemingly happy to be invited into the activity). Note that it’s not the adult initiating this activity for the family, it’s the kid - and that’s the point. 🙃

The most egregious of these ads that I can remember seeing is this “cool mom” Ford Flex car ad, at which made me laugh out loud when I first saw it. There’s no pretense here - just purchasing their children’s (and fellow moms’) opinion that they’re hip and that their kids consider them “cool” when they have this car.

These contribute to an unconscious social presumption that as parents we attach to our kids equally, parallel, “horizontally” as Payne says above.

When we really look at it, this explains a lot about our culture in general, and why our generation of parents perhaps doesn’t try too hard to lead or shape how our kids interact with technology. Do we expect our kids to know best, and that we should follow their desires, accommodate their requests, because the young are always wiser (especially around tech)? Or maybe an unconscious presumption (heavily leaned into with advertising) is that buying tech will bring us closer together, and to resist tech is to dissolve our best chance at a positive relationship with our kids?

Surely this is not the case for all families, but it is worth noting that ads like these don’t seem out of place in our culture. The foundations exist for these to be considered perfectly acceptable and even desirable ways to market products to adults that would be buying them.

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“The Home Alone Maneuver”

“The Home Alone Maneuver” targets the child’s perception that parents are out-of-touch, idiotic, not necessary, or not to be listened to. As Kevin didn’t actually need his parents to survive, and defended his entire house against bungling burglars on his own, it plays into the trope that kids are wiser and more capable than adults believe, or even more capable than adults themselves.

As Payne says of the conference he attended, this marketing tactic goes something like this:

Our society today, where we parents are pulled so many directions (and perhaps truly don’t have as much time for our kids as we’d like), primes us and our children to be perfectly susceptible to a tactic like this. This Toys R’ Us commercial exemplifies this type of ad (may Toys R’ Us rest in peace, apparently it wasn’t enough to save them from bankruptcy).

And while I completely support the message that kids need more free play and less adult-imposed/directed activities (and I presume so would Payne), it also perfectly epitomizes this marketing tactic that pits “independent” kids against “unfair” adults in a righteous battle for their own autonomy. This common, ever-present undercurrent in our culture is consistently played upon in film plots and advertisements.

Neontocracies vs. Gerontocracies

These types of ads could only exist in societies that anthropologist David F. Lancy calls “Neontocracies”.

He introduced the terms to describe the two main types of human cultures found worldwide.

Gerontocracies, or societies in which elders are esteemed, are the biological, evolutionary human norm worldwide. This is evident in all languages that use formal tenses to address older individuals, all societies where families are structured around the eldest members of the family’s leadership, and where social esteem and deference are unquestioningly granted to elders and their hard-earned life wisdom.

But lately (and particularly in the Western world), Neontocracies have arisen, aided and abetted by film and TV media chasing the youth dollar. Lancy describes Neontocracies as societies in which “young children are highly valued despite their relatively low social utility in objective terms”, and “the practice, prevalent in the West, of so valuing young children.”

America, for all its child-unfriendly policies (little to no maternity leave, no subsidized childcare costs, tech companies freely harvesting kids’ data, time, and attention, and an inability to pass legislation to protect them from said exploitation) sure does tend to center and value kids in our social contexts. Our media and advertising, if not our legislative policies, make this clear.

So… What’s the Point?

If we struggle to set or hold boundaries around tech, or feel compelled to follow our children’s lead rather than our own, it’s worth remembering just how much of the messaging surrounding us in our society is the messaging of a youth-marketing-driven Neontocracy, and how much of an outlier this is in the course of human history.

Once we see it and recognize it for what it is, we can detach from it, realize it doesn't have to apply to us, and step back into our own centeredness as the sturdy leaders in our family. With an informed foundation, built by listening to experts, researchers, and medical professionals whose work is devoted to the kids & tech space, we can decide how we want to guide our families in this novel tech world in which we are truly trailblazing uncharted terrain.

It’s worth mentioning here that culture is not scientific fact - unlike gravity, we can decide it doesn’t apply to us at any time. As someone who has lived in six countries and spent time in countless others, I have seen this from experience. Just because I’m living in Spain for example, it doesn’t mean I have to take a siesta in the middle of the day and go to bed after midnight (or conversely, I can join them in doing so) - it’s a choice, and either way I must adapt to the consequences of my choice (the bank won’t be open at 2pm even if I am awake - I must go another time).

As a temporary countryman in Spain for example, it’s obvious that siesta is not the result of a scientific force, but exists because of a cultural norm - everyone inherited it from those before them, and continue with it because it works for the way their society is structured. And while it may be easier to see cultural norms like this when popping in on a nation very different from our own, it’s truly the same with our own society. Obeying the cultural rules of the Neontocracy is always a choice - we can look at it in the face and say, ‘nah, no thanks’ and choose to disregard it. The difficulty often comes in seeing and recognizing it to begin with, as our own culture tends to be invisible; but once we see it, we have the freedom to choose how it applies to our parenting.

I wish us the power to recognize these cultural norms in our society, identify where they most impact us and unravel their threads, to decide if we want them to apply to us and our families (or not). If not, we can step into our sturdy family leader roles with more confidence. We can make decisions from a place of love and strength, rather than letting the cultural tidal wave of peer-parenting, horizontal attachment, and unconscious child-centering knock us around (and milk us for our dollars). This is my wish and hope for us all.

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This Week in Tech

Emoji key:

• 👂= podcast

• 👀 = article

• 👁️ = video (or social media post)

🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Tech + Parenting FYI

• 👀 If you avoid conflict with your kids, or fear their lashing out at you with the emotional intensity only an adolescent can conjure, then Megan Saxelby’s post this week may be for you. It’s full of gems I’ve never seen anyone say out loud before, packed with wisdom to guide us through such moments.

• 👂What an informative conversation this is! Ed-Tech hacks, AI, social media platforms, gaming, sleepovers - Officer Gomez talks about it all with Screenstrong. Definitely worth a listen.

• 👀+👁️ Looksmaxxing - Girls are not alone any longer in being targeted by online body-image content - boys are now being hit with the same. Get a handle on “looksmaxxing” and how it’s targeting boys in this article from Parents, or these slides from Jonathan Haidt, or this in-depth NYT article.

• 👀 42% of those arrested for terrorism charges in the last year have been MINORS - what?! Terrorist groups are now copying pedophiles’ tactics, and targeting/recruiting kids via Roblox, Discord, and other youth-popular platforms and gaming. Holy moly 🤯

• 👂FBI psychologist Lisa Strohman talks with the Family IT Guy to share what she wants parents to know about tech in this conversation titled “Your Kid’s Phone is More Dangerous Than a Gun”. Important stuff.

• 👀 Shona Schwarz’s experience makes the case for why creating low-tech peer groups is SO IMPORTANT - lean into those Wait Until 8th and Delay is the Way pledges ya’ll! 👯‍♂️👯‍♀️

• 👂There are so many quotable lines in this conversation that it could fill this whole post. Enjoy the wisdom of The Center for Humane Technology’s Aza Raskin, inventor of infinite-scroll, on what his experience inventing such a dangerous design feature has led him to believe about AI.

🏛️ Social Media on Trial - Los Angeles Court Case Updates

• 👀 The very latest on this week’s case, published Friday afternoon by The Tech Oversight Project, covering Adam Mosseri’s testimony and the many smoking guns uncovered in Meta’s vaults.

• 👁️ Today (2/13/26) Jonathan Haidt, Sarah Gardener, and survivor parents spoke at an event in Grand Park across from the courthouse, where children lost to social media were memorialized in photographic tombstones by the Archwell Foundation, #nochildlosttosocialmedia.

  • Hear Prince Harry’s heartfelt toast to these families while sharing an evening with them after court this week.

• 👂Nicki of Scrolling2Death and Sarah of The Heat Initiative summarize last week in the case, as well as share perspectives from the Roberts family, who lost their daughter and are participating in the lawsuit.

  • 👂The full interview with the Roberts family can be heard here.

  • 👁️ If you have an hour and want an edited video compilation covering week 3 of the case, Nicki and Sarah have a great one - watch here.

• 👁️ Cecilia Kang breaks down the lawyers’ approach to these cases in a quick clip, sharing how they’re circumventing decades-old laws that the tech industry has always used as a shield in the past.

• 👁️+👂The Family IT Guy shares his 5-minute takeaway on the first few weeks of the trial, with an incredibly important final takeaway for parents. We all have 5 minutes to give this one a listen.

• 👀+👁️ Survivor parents’ interviews with various media outlets can be found here, sharing their children’s stories and why they’re participating in this lawsuit.

• 👀 Perhaps it’s not surprising that there are Epstein links to AI super-pacs, but if such things interest you, find more about that here, along with a summary of this week’s court case.

• 👁️ Parents protested outside the headquarters of Snapchat in Santa Monica on Thursday, painting their children’s names on the street to commemorate those lost to illicit pills bought from dealers known (and not removed) on Snap.

  • 👁️ Nicki’s video about meeting with 50 of these families is here.

📚 Ed-Tech

• 👀 How should we teach kids media literacy? It can be as simple and effective as modeling this wonderful career day presentation given by Emily Tavoulareas to her 3rd-grader’s class. Kids get it - let’s lean in and help them.

• 👀 For a more adult-focused exploration the above (algorithms and more), including an introduction to surveillance capitalism and the ways Ed-Tech stretches old laws to legalize their data-mining of children, see this wonderful deep dive by The Ed-Tech Law Center’s Andy and Julie Liddell.

• 👀 Emily Cherkin’s testimony to the NTIA on Ed-Tech contains such prescient modern examples as “Pre-kindergarteners now read the numeral ‘11’ as ‘pause’-- like the pause button. Young children think ‘Like and Subscribe’ means ‘goodbye’ because that’s how YouTube videos end.” 😔

• 👀 This week it’s The Walled Garden’s turn to take the Alpha School to task, with a prescient quote from Marshall McLuhan to start us off.

• 👂 Sharing this podcast in this section too, as the first half of the interview with Officer Gomez dives into info all parents, teachers, and admins must know about the ways kids commonly get around blockers on school issued devices.

🧠ADHD and Screens

• 👂Canadian pediatrician Dr. Alison Yeung co-hosts a podcast about both screens and perimenopause, a surprising but very needed combination, as many mothers are dealing with both simultaneously. This week she interviews GrowNow ADHD’s Mike McLeod about the impact of screens on kids with ADHD.

• 👀 Screenstrong’s guest post author this week discusses the impact of screens on kiddos with ADHD, including on her own.

📱Better Tech Options

• 👀 A new option has arrived for families and adults wishing to reduce screen time - it pays you for not being on your phone! What a fun concept from Noble Mobile, may it succeed and spawn a whole new way of running a mobile phone network.

✴️ Older But Interesting

I just came across this article through Asa’s podcast (above). Sharing in case it is as fascinating to any of you as it is to me.

• 👀 Starlink Has Arrived in the Amazon - indigenous groups living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle until Starlink arrived in the rainforest grapple with the same issues and challenges we have all been facing for years.

  • short video version of the article here

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Thanks for reading. See you in two weeks,

❤️ Meg

The world lost Catherine O’Hara this week. I’m guessing most of us first became familiar with her in our youth, while watching Home Alone (or Beetlejuice, if we’re a little bit older). In a movie where most adults are clueless, laughable, or mean (initially she too too exhibited flaws and struggles), her arc of love and dedication for her son through the film brought the fuzzy, feel-good warmth that leads many to return to this film again and again each holiday season, now with our own kids.

And while I’ve loved this movie since first seeing it in theaters in 1990, there’s also a flip side to it, and to almost all the films and shows I grew up loving and watching over and over. We (rightfully) fret about how social media and AI is shaping adolescents as they grow up today, but how often do we examine how the media we consumed as youth shaped us?

Inspired by a long-past undergraduate film class, I invite us to explore the rarely discussed impact of the films and television shows we watched in our own childhoods, and how they may subconsciously impact the ways we parent our own kids today.

To skip directly to This Week in Tech, click here.

Most Parents Find it Difficult to Hold Boundaries Around Tech

I was reminded just how much so, when I listened to Dr. Becky’s podcast conversation this week with Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price, where they each discussed the difficulties they had setting boundaries around tech with their own kids (despite being experts in the space). If you, like me, find Dr. Becky’s “sturdy leader” airplane analogies to be the first truly helpful parenting language to model in holding such boundaries, you’re not alone - tech has been a hard road for us all to navigate, with few models to guide us so far.

The tech companies who designed their products to hack human psychology and be purposely addictive deserve the blame for the difficulties we face in setting boundaries for our kids around tech. AND their creations just so happened to be released upon a generation of parents whose comfort with our own parental authority was, I suspect, already somewhat low.

Why? Cue Home Alone (and others).

We late Gen-X and Millennial parents were the first generations to grow up immersed in media targeted to us, that often depicted adult characters as inept, foolish, out-of-touch antagonists, routinely foiled by cool, wise, “together” youth who rebelled against/prevailed over the rules and structures of the adult world.

Seeing this as youth ourselves was fulfilling - we were part of that “cool” group of young people at the time, and it was cathartic to see other youth beating the adult system of rules and structure that often felt so unfair as kids.

But, how did consistently seeing such adult vs. youth dynamics affect us when WE became “adults” with our own children?

In the 80s, think Ferris Bueller, 16 Candles, The Breakfast Club, E.T., Goonies, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, National Lampoons Vacation films, Dirty Dancing, Beetlejuice, Stand By Me, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Wonder Years - youth were front and center as the main characters, often either outsmarting idiotic or “uncool” adults, getting by on their own without adults, or tolerating hapless adults who were trying but failing at teaching or parenting them.

There were family-centered programs in the 80s that depicted more mutually respectful, “team family” dynamics, like The Cosby Show (now unfortunately tarnished by Bill’s assaults), and films like The Karate Kid and Stand and Deliver that exemplified positive teacher-student relationships with Mr. Miyaji and Jamie Escalante. But in general, this era’s media began to divert wildly from shows of previous decades, like Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best, that depicted adults and parents as wise and fair leaders worthy of children’s love and respect. In centering kids virtuously rebelling against and/or not dependent upon adults, the pendulum swung to the opposite pole in a relatively short time.

The 90s continued this trend. Kids were adept, independent, often disrespectful of adult-imposed structure (and if this got them into trouble, were usually saved from consequences in some way), while adults were clueless, easily fooled, inept, idiotic, or loving-but-flawed. The Simpsons, Family Guy, Saved By The Bell, Married with Children, Home Alone, Clueless, even Disney films like The Little Mermaid or Aladdin - we rooted for the kids, saw bits of ourselves in Bart, Zack, Cher, Kevin, Ariel, Aladdin and Jasmine, and wanted them to succeed over the adults, rules, or structures holding them back.

Family-focused 90s comedies - Full House, Family Matters, Step By Step, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Home Improvement, Malcolm in the Middle, Dinosaurs, Boy Meets World (so many TGIF shows) - demonstrated positive family dynamics much of the time, though many adult characters were still routinely shown to be goofy, unserious, laughable, or failing at parenting some of the time (only to be saved by a 30-second heart-to-heart at the end, cue the music). The “idiot Dad” trope, perhaps exemplified most by cartoon dads Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin, suddenly became more common than a loving, competent parent (like Cliff Huxtable), who all but disappeared from celluloid by the end of the 90s.

Did This Impact How We Saw Adulthood?

As we became adults and parents ourselves, how did decades of watching cool kids triumph over uncool adults unconsciously affect us?

Most kid characters in these films and shows were shown rebelling against (or flat-out ignoring) adult-imposed rules and structures that the characters found unjust or unfair, which perhaps along with very valid real world examples of structural societal injustice, wired us at baseline to suspect adult/society-imposed rules were unfair, or at least worth questioning.

How did this affect us when we needed to create structure and guidelines in our own families?

Did this foundation make us less comfortable setting boundaries or making rules, because somewhere subconsciously we still related more to being the “cool kids” than the rule-setting adults? Did this lead us to unconsciously center the desires of our children, see their perspective as more worthy or wise, let them lead us rather than leading them, or relate to them more as peers or friends, rather than as their parent whose role is to sturdily guide them through life?

Whether or not film and TV media can be linked to this directly, it seems that for many in our generation, the answer is sometimes yes (myself included). Most of us, if asked, would say we are striving to be authoritative parents rather than authoritarian (like so many 80s/90s adult foes), and in this endeavor, perhaps some of us end up unintentionally permissive as we seek to distance ourselves from authoritarian structures.

Even Bluey, which has been a joy to watch alongside my own children these past five years, (writer Joe Blumm, born the same year as myself, nails it), mocks this aspect of our generation regularly. Bandit and Chili are usually (not always) wonderful parents worth modeling, while other adult characters play out this ‘uncomfortable with parental authority’ trope almost constantly, wanting to placate and please their children, giving in almost instantly, unable to parent without outside help, and failing to hold boundaries they set (looking at you, Uncle Stripe, Lucky’s Dad, and Jack’s Dad!).

FaceyTalk (below) so perfectly satirizes our generation’s struggle with leadership and authority in our families, especially around technology. If you haven’t seen it and have 6 minutes, it just might bring a smile to your face (or hilarious laughter).

Bluey’s characters are Australian, and I find it a bit reassuring that parents there seem to be facing the same conundrums that we are here in the US (and likely in many more nations) across the globe. Many of us have struggled to find our comfort in being authority figures with our children - perhaps unconsciously not wanting to be the adults we grew up rooting against, or not knowing quite how to lead our families in a way that feels fair, especially when our children push back. This makes parenting around tech even more difficult than it already is.

Australia famously just passed the first law age-gating social media to age 16+, giving parents there a helping hand in setting and enforcing rules where technology is concerned. For those in the US, we have no such tool to lean on for social media or technology yet, leaving us to find our footing with parenting and technology on our own.

This is why I have much gratitude for Dr. Becky’s ‘sturdy leader’ airplane analogies, which (to me at least) provide solid, doable examples of guidance and authority that feel embraceable and “right” for a generation who may relate more to being kids than being adults. My hope is that once we fill ourselves with enough tech wisdom (from resources shared here and elsewhere), and find our 100% certainty regarding how we want to guide tech use in our families, then we can put on our pilot hats and be those study leaders, flying our families safely through the tech storm.

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This Week in Tech

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• 👂= podcast

• 👀 = article

• 👁️ = video (or social media post)

🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Tech FYI for Parents

• 👂The conversation that started it all: Dr. Becky speaks with Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price, authors of The Amazing Generation, about parenting and tech, and yes, parents being ‘sturdy leader’ pilots in our families.

• 👂YES to all said in this conversation between Tim Wu of The Age of Extraction, Cory Doctorow of Enshittification, and Ezra Klein on his podcast this week - truly, “We Didn’t Ask for This Internet”.

• 👀 Sarah Gallagher-Trombley (formerly a Snapchat executive) shares her thoughts on Snap’s newest “parental controls”.

  • And if you wonder about the content kids are routinely served on Snap, Nicki shares her screen while she reviews what her 14-y.o. test account is serving her (mostly depression and self-harm content).

• 👀 Are you aware how much your kid is gambling online? Find out how much this aspect of society, once confined to Vegas or Atlantic City casinos, is now in the pockets of every kid, and increasingly interwoven into most of their online activities.

• 👀 Porn, which like gambling was once hidden from kids, is also now interwoven into their daily lives - here’s a list of 11 ways porn impacts kids in high school today.

• Now that TikTok has a new US owner, are they collecting different data from us as we use it? Yep. Find out more from CyberSecurityGirl here.

🏛️ Social Media Trial Updates

• 👂Nicki Petrossi and Sarah’s Gardiner’s review of the first trial week, which mostly consists of jury selection.

• 👁️ Nicki Petrossi shares scenes from a parent vigil held outside the courthouse in Los Angeles, where parents who have lost their children to social media gathered to support the cases.

• 👀 The Tech Oversight Project compiles a very thorough and comprehensive review of the trials on their site here.

• 👀 Interested in digging through Meta’s own research and findings on the harms of their products? A treasure trove is found here.

• 👁️💯 Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s inspirational address to Congress about amending Section 230, that lets tech companies off the hook for harms to children.

🧠 Neuro-Divergent Brains and Screens

• 👁️ Emily Cherkin leads a powerhouse team of experts in an incredibly informative webinar on the ADHD brain and screens.

• 👀 Screenstrong digs into impacts screens have for those on the autism spectrum.

🍥 AI

• 👂The Family IT Guy interviews Jeremy Carrasco of ShowToolsAI about AI videos and deepfakes - it’s a long interview, and the most prescient part begins at 49:15 about YouTube and YouTube Kids, and how watching even one AI slop video will skew a child’s algorithmic feed in scary directions - all parents must know this.

• 👀 Re-shared this week, because last week it was paywalled - Dr. Jean Twenge’s rundown for parents on AI chatbots.

• 👁️ Baratunde Thurston brings us “Seeing is No Longer Believing”, where he and Sam Gregory dig into the conundrum we face, constantly barraged with horrific content on our feeds, yet we can no longer trust what we see with our own eyes.

  • 👁️ They refer to this AI-doctored image of a lawyer arrested in Minneapolis, Ms. Levy-Armstrong, which was changed by the current administration to fit the narrative they wanted to project (and then referred to it as a “meme” when called out for doing so). We are entering truly unprecedented times here folks. If no time to read, see the beginning of this news report to compare the photos.

• 👂Tech journalist Damon Beres unpacks his concerns around AI and kids with Emily of Home Screen in “The Age of Frictionless Tech” - start at 24:15 to skip the “getting to know you” and get straight to the meat of the conversation.

📚 Ed-Tech

• 👀 A poignant, nuanced read from a parent who found out his child was using AI in school after his child started talking about his new AI “friend” at dinner.

• 👀 First Fish Chronicles puts The Alpha School on blast (all tech, no teachers), mostly for the precedent it’s setting and for how many are currently looking to it as a model for the future of school.

• 👀 Utah is the first US state to draft bills to preserve non-tech-based learning.

• 👀 A “pre-mortem” assessment of the dangers of relying on technology to educate children from the Brookings Institute.

🤷How Did We Get Here?

• 👀 For those who enjoy tracing historical and societal roots of current conditions, dive into AfterBabel’s exploration of the path that brought us to this point in time with technology.

• 👀 Freya India calls on Gen-Z to embrace their humanity, listing actions and traits those in our generation and above took for granted as mundane, clumsy parts of life. Her examples make evident the generation gaps in experiences between those of us born before tech, and those who grew up with it.

📝 International News

• 👀+👁️ Spain declared its intent to age-gate social media at 16+, joining Australia, Denmark, and Malaysia, and are starting to take on American social media companies more directly by holding personally accountable the CEOs of social media companies. The gloves are starting to come off ya’ll…

📕 Fun Picture Book

• 👀 Look Up! Fontaine the Pigeon Starts a Revolution by Britt Gondolfi. What’s more fun than a flock of pigeons fighting screen overuse by pooping on people’s phones?! This book is sure to make little ones giggle.

Thanks for reading, much love to all.

❤️ Meg

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Epic, industry-shaking trials are starting this week ya’ll.

They’re being called “Big Tobacco” and “Erin Brockovich” moments. For the first time, giants in this HUGELY powerful industry are in court facing suits by both individuals and school districts, accused of creating purposely addictive platforms with known harmful impacts. Evidence against them is apparently so strong that some companies (so far, Snapchat and TikTok) have settled before their first trials, sparing their CEOS from taking the stand.

If the plaintiffs can win a few of these cases, and/or settlements involve the dismantling and redesigning of purposely addictive design features, these cases have the potential to usher in a new era in tech. Could they possibly spawn platforms designed for the good of users, rather than attention-driven entrapment? Could this be the start of tech truly serving humanity, rather than the other way around? There’s a long way to go until then, but the slivers of hope are growing larger.

Never before have I been interested in court cases or legal dramas, but these have me on the edge of my seat. For an intro to the cases and updates, follow along here - Nicki of Scrolling2Death and Sarah of The Heat Initiative are in the courtroom giving daily reports back.

Will Justice Be Served to Gen-Z?

While I’m grateful that these cases are finally happening, I can’t help but feel disheartened for my former students in Gen-Z, for whom any verdicts in these cases will come years too late. If social media is proven “addictive”, then what happens to those whose entire childhoods and adolescences were already shaped by these purposely addictive products?

Those with the misfortune of being born between 1997 and 2012 (Gen-Z) have been impacted by these platforms in ways the rest of us can’t fathom. As more of this cohort age into adulthood and realize the full impact this had upon their growth, health, and development, will more trials will be brought to hold the industry accountable for these generational harms? How will they be compensated for those impacts, for the ‘guinea pig’ experimentation they did not consent to? Time will tell.

This Week in Tech

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• 👀 = article

• 👁️ = video (or social media post)

👂If you only listen to one thing this week: Hear famous Stanford psychologist and author Dr. Anna Lembke explain dopamine in a way that makes EVERYTHING MAKE SENSE. Understanding how our brains work, especially in relation to today’s busy, screen-based world, is such a gift. She shares her own brush with addictive media (Twilight anyone?) in such a relatable way, it helped me further understand my kids’ brains and how TV and junk food caught us all in compulsive cycles. Dr. Lemke’s best-selling book, Dopamine Nation, is on our recommended book list - it’s quite powerful.

🏛️ Court Case Coverage: as mentioned above, follow along with social media’s court cases via these reports:

• 👂A thorough breakdown of the cases that started this week, by Nicki of Scrolling2Death and Sarah of The Heat Initiative.

• 👂The Daily podcast’s rundown/summary of the tech industry’s possible “Big Tobacco” moment, with reporter Cecilia Kang.

• 👀 The Courthouse News Service’s breakdown of the trials, and Reuter’s summary of notable facts.

• 👁️ Jury selection process underway in first trials - Nicki and Sarah’s report from the courthouse.

• 👁️ Bizarre dystopian documents from YouTube expressing desires to hook kids early and replace textbooks at school (these documents will apparently be used at trial).

• 👁️ TikTok settles before trial

📚Ed-Tech on Blast

• 👀 The Fox is in the Henhouse - Emily Cherkin and Denise Champney expose the extent to which the PTA is uncomfortably tied to the tech industry.

• 👀 Ed-Tech is a Hoax - Shona Schwarz shares her prescient take-aways from Jared Cooney Horvath’s book, The Digital Delusion.

• 👁️ Quotable moments by leading researchers in Ed-Tech (Emily, Jared, Jean) taken from their testimonies to Congress, January 15, 2026

• 👀 If you’re working with your school or district to reduce screen time in class, Emily Cherkin shares her rundown of the best resources to start with.

• 👁️ Because it’s worth re-posting here in the school section: Bizarre dystopian documents from YouTube expressing desires to hook kids early and replace textbooks at school.

• 👀 A Miami University student reflects upon her experience with ed-tech in the undergraduate university environment.

🍥 Artificial Intelligence & Mental Health

• 👁️👀👂They’re Monetizing Your Mental Health - Baratunde Thurston thoughtfully dives into AI platforms’ purposeful endeavor to take over the mental health care space (and human relationship space) for profit. This conversation is digestible via your choice of video, article, or podcast (all available via the link above), and made in partnership with the youth at Young Futures.

• Assessing exploding trees, and other AI-generated weather-related videos trending this week - thanks Jeremy Carrasco. :)

• 👀 AI Companion Apps: What Parents Need to Know - Jean Twenge’s parent PSA this week is about AI companions targeting kids.

• 👁️ 3 AI Rules for Kids used to protect his son, shared by The Family IT Guy.

• 👀 After two days camping this week and living the joyful freedom my children experienced while “in the wild”, I couldn’t agree more with Ginny Yurich of 1000 Hours Outside on the need to provide engaging IRL experiences to kids.

• What the Evidence Shows at AI Becomes a Part of Childhood - a review of data collected by Count on Mothers regarding the experiences of moms and kids with AI.

• 👀 New Bill in CA partners with OpenAI to protect kids using chatbots. Will it pass in November?

• 👀 When the iPad Hits the Wall - Screenstrong’s exploration of the brain science behind kids’ at times impulsive and violent behavior while/after using screens.

🎥 New Films & Documentaries

• 👀 The AI Doc: Or, How I Became an Apocaloptimist - this new film screened at Sundance this week, and will be available to the rest of us on March 27. With expert testimony from the folks at The Center for Humane Technology, I’m looking forward to this deep dive into “the optimistic middle-ground” of AI. The filmmakers discuss the film here (I’m awaiting a trailer to share). https://www.focusfeatures.com/article/the-ai-doc-sundance-premiere

• 👁️ Molly Versus the Machines (trailer) - this film follows a father in the UK seeking to understand the forces that killed his daughter, underscoring how a handful of American companies based here in California impact and harm youth worldwide. Release date is March 1, 2026. https://mollyvsthemachines.com

📰 Other Notable News:

• 👀 The American Academy of Pediatrics is revising its screen-time advisories to better reflect the nuances of screen time, and calling for better, child-centered design (rather than ad-centered design).

• 👀 Social Media apps are becoming even more entangled in news and being accused of political censorship as the nation grapples with ICE raids.

• 👀 The Wizz app - Tinder for kids? Fight the New Drug explores this new app marketed to kids that connects them with strangers - of course predators and those looking to extort children are already using it to do so.

• 👁️ A new online card game for and by Gen-Z endeavors to help them connect more authentically and examine the impact that screens have upon their relationships.

• 👀 Unpacking the 2016 meme craze - what’s changed between 2026 and 2016?

• 👀 Is a focus on mental health impacts impeding action with teens and screens?

📕 Book

• The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten our Future Prosperity by Tim Wu (2025) - for those interested in better understanding the extraction economy (how tech is harvesting our data, time, attention, and attachments), Tim Wu does a stellar job of breaking this new phenomenon down for us. It was released late last year and in the holiday rush, I’d missed sharing it until now. Apologies Tim!

Wishing everyone a peaceful-as-possible weekend. Take care out there.

❤️ Meg

The world is in flux. The relatively stable foundations on which we parents built our lives have almost entirely changed. Though we may not always consciously or regularly notice this metamorphosis, formerly solid presumptions about the way the world “is”, are giving way to ever-shifting new realities. This “new normal” is becoming the foundation of our children’s lives.

What are the biggest of these gaps between our generation’s foundations, and our children’s? Once we see them, can we help our families navigate them, and together develop the new skills and awarenesses needed to live in this changing world.

To jump straight to This Week in Tech, click here.

A smattering of “gaps” to be dissected in upcoming posts are previewed below:

• The monetization of everything: Aspects of our personal lives, never before worth a dime to anyone but ourselves (our relationships, our attention, our emotions, our habits and quirks) are now monetizable. Countless industries are racing to do so, as new technologies make this more and more possible by the day. Everything about us is suddenly worth money to someone else, and we are being constantly mined for it by new technologies designed to extract this data from us. The sum of humans’ personal data and information (sometimes called the data economy) is now worth more than oil and gas - an estimated $200 trillion in 2025. Most of us are largely unaware that this economy even exists, how it impacts us daily, and that we may want to reconsider how we and our kids move through a world where we are being continuously mined in this way.

• Privacy, in the way it once existed for us, exists no longer. In line with the above, devices we use daily - our homes, our cars, our phones, our computers, our doorbells, our home speakers and digital assistants, our search engines, our home DNA tests, our social media accounts, even some of our rings we wear on our fingers - all now collect data on us and share it with uncountable others, for profit. Our expressed, informed consent has neither been clearly sought, nor knowingly given, for this siphoning and selling of our digital selves.

• Tools now have two categories: useful-by-design, and addictive-by-design. Tools, the defining characteristic of humanity, once existed for the sole benefit of their human users. No longer. What we’d formerly thought of as just “tools”, we might now consider “useful-by-design tools”. Weapons, pottery, and clothing made by prehistoric humans, or today’s utensils, toasters, calculators, scissors, pots and pans, bungee cords, bikes, and BBQs, are “useful by design” - built to help their users achieve a desired goal or task. AND there is now a whole new class of “tools” - those we may call “non-neutral”, or “addictive by design”, that masquerade as a tool for the user, but are truly tools of the manufacturer. These “addictive by design” tools are used to extract data, money, and attention from the tool’s user, while the user is engaged in an activity they think they are choosing freely for their own use. Any free online “tool” - social media, gaming, AI/ChatGPT, search engines, even email, are all types of “tools”, that seem to exist for us to use, but are really harvesting our info, attention, and money. Discerning between the two is a crucial skill we must all develop in order to move with agency through our online lives.

  • More on this: The Family IT Guy, Ben Gillenwater, shares positive uses of tech for kids, as a reminder that there is amazing tech out there, and DISCERNING BETWEEN THE ADDICTIVE AND USEFUL is the key skill we must all develop to preserve our agency.

• We can no longer presume that services available on the market are tested for safety before being put on sale and made available to consumers. While safety testing still applies to tangible goods available for sale (say a lawnmower or car or shampoo), this is not true at all with tech and non-tangible products (apps, platforms, online games, AI). This shift is new for us parents, who could previously trust that if it was available for sale or use, someone had “cleared” it as safe for us and our kids. No longer. We are the unwitting test dummies for many of these products. Their deployment at scale in the world is a live, in-real-time experiment where no one is being held accountable for any ill effects caused. Social media companies were some of the first to deploy untested algorithms at scale, and have known for years that their products are damaging to users. They do not care. As long as current financial incentives drive them, they will continue to do what makes them the most money, damage to users or not. The customer’s interest is no longer at the core of new, online product development. Corporate profit is.

• Friendships and intimate relationships with non-humans are now possible. Though as kids we may have imagined being friends with R2-D2, the options for friendships and relationships in our lives were always other living things - fellow humans and animals (our pets or farm critters). Not so anymore. Depending on the study, data shows between 20-30% kids already have a steady, ongoing intimate friendship or romantic relationship with a technology company, in the form of an AI chatbot/platform (maybe even in the image of R2-D2). To say this is unprecedented is an understatement of vast proportions. It is a complete step off and away from the human trajectory that has existed since the dawn of humanity.

• Our children’s online lives are saturated in mature content, violence, and pornography. The typical adult today VASTLY UNDERESTIMATES the amount of mature content, pornography, and other violent, self-harming, and sexual content one click away from all children at all times (and often pushed to them purposely). It’s not an “if” they see it, but “when”. Long gone are the quaint days when sneaking a peek at a Playboy magazine counted as pornography exposure. Playboy now seems akin to a baby’s board book version of porn. Most can’t imagine the extent of degradation and violence that exists in online images and videos today.

• Humans with nefarious intent have almost constant access to children online. Adults vastly underestimate the number of harmful humans seeking to engage with children online. Pedophiles no longer circle playgrounds in white vans, where they could be seen or caught. They, along with extortionists, traffickers, drug dealers, and other unsavory individuals are all online where children are unprotected, and are engaging with them there almost constantly. As Jonathan Haidt, Peter Gray, and Lenore Skenazy have said, today children are vastly over-protected in real life and vastly under-protected online. They may seem “safe” in our homes, but if they’re online in their bedroom, are more exposed to excessive dangers there than our analog experience can comprehend.

• Access to illegal drugs is easy with a dealer in their pockets. Whereas in our youth, we’d have to know someone, or go to a sketchy part of town and look for shoes hanging from a telephone wire, today apps connect dealers with kids regularly and with ease. Snapchat is the biggest marketplace for illegal drugs, where dealers contact local kids using SnapMaps, share a menu of available drugs, and offer to deliver purchases to them. Many pills sold are counterfeit and contain deadly combinations of chemicals. Kids’ accidental-death-by-Fentanyl rate is driven largely by this phenomenon. They have access to narcotics, dealers, and pills that we could not imagine at their age.

• Photos shared online are no longer “ours”. Taking and sharing photos in our youth was an experience to share. We developed 2 copies of our film rolls so we could give prints to friends who might be in them. We had photo sections in our wallets and carried tiny photos of our friends and family with us. Snapping photos with our phones seemed to simplify this process by digitizing them all, and social media promised to share them with our friends and family more easily. And at first it did - then our feeds were taken over by algorithms and monetized. Now, nothing posted and shared is private. As The Family IT Guy says, once put online, we no longer “own” those images. Anyone in the world can access and use them for their own purposes, and now with AI, can create horrific content with them. How did something once so simple and joyful change so quickly? It’s probably time to stop posting personal photos online (see also the podcast on this with Sarah Adams below).

• Culture is no longer shared by all - individuals increasingly exist in their own realities. Everything is now splintered into “for you” algorithmic presentations of news, music, culture, that are 100% uniquely tailored to individuals. There is no truly shared reality or shared culture anymore. Everyone sees something different, as The Common Parent shares here. News, music, videos - the media that once united us no longer serves us the same information. What we see, hear, and absorb differs vastly human to human. Where will this lead? 😬

• Schools were once designed with children’s educational needs in mind. “Duh”, you may say. But today, this has changed - untested and unproven screens have mostly taken over schools. Ed-tech companies (make no mistake, they are actually Big Tech companies) seeking to hook and monetize kids from kindergarten age, have inserted their devices into all levels of the education system with rosy lines about “preparing students for the future”. BUT these technologies were not tested, proven, and shown to be beneficial for children’s learning before being inserted into schools. The world where something must be proven positive before using it on kids is over. Ten years into this experiment on children, the data on screen-based education is showing the exact opposite of those rosy promises (see Emily Cherkin and Jared Cooney Horvath’s research). There have been devastating drops in learning in every nation that adopted screen-based schooling wholesale (and Sweden is already going back to paper and pencil). Few positives can be gained by putting distraction devices in front of children all day - screens change the way children’s brains grow (and not for the better). In requiring students to interact with screens and sometimes even social media in order to receive their legally entitled educations, the fundamentals of who is served by the education system has changed. The tech industry wins, and the students and teachers lose.

• Our society once valued the protection of children. The corporations that now run our society are not financially incentivized to do so. Another example - in our childhoods, movies rated PG-13 or R were edited for television and airplanes if later aired in those spaces, where children might encounter them. I watched entirely different versions of films as a child that, when I now share them with my children, find myself jumping to fast forward or mute, as they contain language or scenes that were never there when I watched them as a kid (recorded from television broadcasts on VHS tapes). Those films were edited so our young minds didn’t have to grapple with adult language and content - media laws mandated that children would be protected in this way. We are no longer in a world where children are protected in this way. Online, children are purposely pushed adult content to hook and entrance them, for profit. Children now are too financially valuable in terms of their data, attention, and future tech brand loyalty to be protected in the ways we were. While we as children once had value in and of ourselves, now they are only worth as much as can be extracted from them, and they are treated as such.

In the past 15 years, I have noticed each of the above shifts snowballing in slow motion, changing both the experience of being human for our youngest members, and what parents must understand to raise them for the world they will inherit. We will get through it, and should give ourselves due credit - we are parenting in one of the weirdest times in history to be raising children, and we are doing the best we can. May the folks below shepherd us in this daunting task.

This Week in Tech:

*Podcast Hack/Reminder* - podcast playback speeds can be changed to shorten listening time (I listen to all on 1.3x). For those who have short windows to tune in, experiment with playback speeds to make listening more possible.

• 👂 If you only listen to one podcast this week: The Center for Humane Technology’s examination of AI’s psychological impacts on humans, including AI-induced attachment disorders and psychosis, is it. Current AI deployment is a live-action experiment being done upon us and our children in real time. Remember those old commercials showing crash test dummies? That’s us today with AI, only the damages are psychological, showing up as AI-induced attachment disorders and psychosis. Make this loud and clear to your kids - do not use AI yet because it is untested - no one knows what the long-term impact on users will be. Let kids know that if AI chat boxes pop up and try to engage them, even on school devices, close the pop-up box. Do not use it. Wait to see how this plays out. Don’t be part of the experiment.

  • If you prefer reading about this topic on their Substack instead, click here

• 🎁 It’s a rare treat when two trusted experts in the field sit down and talk to each other! Enjoy these two highly informative and fascinating conversations between multiple powerhouse players in the ‘kids & tech’ space:

  • 👂Nicki Petrossi of Scrolling2Death interviews Emily Cherkin of First Fish Chronicles/The ScreenTime Consultant about Ed-Tech, lawsuits, and protecting kids - a must listen for anyone whose kids use tech in school.

    • 🔖 Emily’s post here summarizing her testimony in Congress is an incredibly helpful update on the state of Ed-Tech legislation and exposing the forces fighting for the entrenchment of Ed-Tech in schools.

  • 👂Ginny of 1000 Hours Outside interviews Family IT Guy Ben Gillenwater about how he got involved in the kids & tech arena, and what he thinks are the most important considerations for parenting today.

• 👂Ponder parents behaving badly online in this conversation between Ginny of 1000 Hours Outside and Sarah Adams of Mom Uncharted, called “Kids are Not Content”. At first glance, I presumed this meant “content” as in calm/pleased, but I’d misunderstood - it’s “content” like fodder. The conversation is full of gems to consider regarding putting our own kids online, plus recognizing (and not supporting) those who exploit their children for profit online.

  • 🫣 For her stomach-churning Instagram snippet on why shielding our kids online is important, click here.

  • For a quick synopsis of the same from The Family IT Guy, click here

• 👁️ Screenstrong’s 5 Worst Things We Can Do This Year is the flip side to those positive resolutions and new habits we may be trying to implement. Even if we aren’t quite fulfilling our grandest resolutions, we can at least not do these!

• 😱 Taking one more step toward a dystopian future, ChatGPT will now begin serving its users personalized ads in a bid to bring revenue to the platform, which seems to be in financial trouble. What could go wrong, when the corporation to whom many users have bared their deepest souls now uses that information to target them with incredibly personalized (and possibly subconscious) ads? 😡

• 🏛️ Seeing through tech industry PR + legal updates on current trials:

  • SnapChat settles a lawsuit in CA instead of going to trial, as the evidence against them was too damning to proceed. They then released a PR attempt to divert attention from this settlement. Thanks to Nicki Petrossi for these summaries.

  • An upcoming Jan 27th trial of addictive social media platforms WILL PERMIT a comparison of Chinese safeguards for their youth, (versus their pushing harmful/brain rot content to American kids). TikTok had asked for this information to be disallowed, but the judge will permit it! Thanks to Nicki for keeping us in the loop on this promising development.

  • AfterBabel breaks down how the tech industry is using the tobacco industry’s playbook in their complete abandonment of ethical duties to customers.

• 📰 In line with the above, if you’ve been following the “TikTok ban” saga, it has finally been worked out, and will continue operating in the USA with largely American investors.

• 👁️ Unfortunately, it’s not “if” but “when” kids see porn - see Fight the New Drug’s suggestions for scripts and statements to use to discuss this with our kids.

  • And if you don’t already have them, Good Pictures, Bad Pictures Jr and her version for older kids are both great conversation starters on the topic, for something to have on the shelves to refer to often. We used the Jr version until my eldest was about in 4th grade, and started the older version in 5th, but it depends on the kid. The lines above from FTND complement the older version well.

• 🧗Emily Tavoulareas of Home Screen shares helpful tips for accurately assessing tech platforms for kids by considering them each as their own physical environment, PLUS shares very prescient quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on technology.

• 🏨 IRL trafficking and exploitation of kids is starting to look very very different than it did when we were younger. Though this report from police and hospital staff serving trafficked children is a second-hand, the information still very much needs to be on our radar. Kids can be sleeping at home under our roof, and still be exploited and trafficked (in person), which is new.

• Ideas from Sarah Gallagher-Trombley for how to reset your relationship with your digital devices in the new year, if you’re still looking for a new year’s resolution.

Thanks for making it all the way down here! Your kids are lucky to have you.

❤️ Meg

The short answer? Empowerment

Empowerment of you, of me, of parents, of kids. “Knowledge is power”, as the old trope goes - the more we know, the more power we have in this new tech ecosystem that is increasingly built around disempowerment and non-consensual monetization of its users. The more we know, the more we can decide how we want to adapt to it.

Whether you are:

• seeking information for you or your kids

• endeavoring to balance life and tech

• wanting to support your Wait Until 8th, Smartphone Free Childhood, Ok to Delay, or Delay is the Way pledges with other families in your community

…our goal is to provide a hub of weekly resources you can use to achieve your goals.

It’s hard to swim against the mainstream current

Families seeking balance or lower-tech lives need and deserve constant reinforcement, help, resources, connections, and reminders that we are not alone - that our choices are helping our families grow in healthier, more balanced ways. We need reinforcements to bolster our wills in moments of difficulty or pressure, in exhausted moments when we think all our problems would be solved if we just gave in and got our kid that phone, let them play that game, or open that social account.

Catch Us Up exists to connect us with all these resources, to the work being done across the globe by amazing, wonderful people who care deeply about children, and who are doing all they can to help us parents.

Listening to even one podcast or perusing one article a week helps us get up-to-speed on this ever-changing world in which we are raising our kids, and decide how we want to adapt to these changes.

🔗 For those who have joined more recently, some links of note:

• the master list of all people and non-profits doing amazing work in this realm (follow them on your own social media for constant support & info)

• a list of family-friendlier tech options (non-smartphone phones/watches and more)

• a compilation of Gen-Z resources (for and by Gen-Z, shareable with adolescents and teens ready to hear from 20-somethings on tech)

• book lists - part one and part two - for fans of reading and those in book clubs

• documentaries and films on tech

• podcasts on tech and parenting

• other Substacks on tech and parenting

• past This Week in Tech links & posts available here

📲 We now have a (very rudimentary) Instagram account for Catch Us Up - feel free to follow if you’re on social and so inclined. I promise my slide creation skills will improve. 🫣

📣 I’m opening speaking slots in the new year - feel free to reach out if your school or parent community is interested in a speaker for parents.

• Contact: catch-us-up@proton.me

The long answer to “Why We’re Here”: (Confessions from a Mom Who Did It Wrong)

I NEVER WANT OUR CHILDREN TO GO THROUGH WHAT GEN-Z WENT THROUGH!

Truly, I don’t. Read on for details, or skip down to the end for this week’s resources.😊

Following years of work in both television and education, I (Meg) graduated from UCLA with a masters in social work in 2012, and joined the UCLA Rape Treatment Center’s school-based program. I was assigned to the middle school team, and would spend my weeks with fellow social workers at different school campuses across the city, delivering what we hoped was a preventative curriculum that tackled peer sexual harassment and assault, and modeled respectful peer relationships. Throughout the week, students could choose to come speak with us privately to disclose struggles and get support with disrespectful experiences they were already having with peers or otherwise.

We spoke to hundreds of 7th graders per week in a wide range of neighborhoods, from wealthy private enclaves to inner city public schools, as we took over their science or health classrooms for the week. The curriculum initially tackled a trifecta of 1. physical in-person harassment, 2. verbal in-person harassment (these two types we parents are all quite familiar with from our own adolescences), and 3. tech-based harassment.

Flip phones were all the rage in 2012, and QUITE a lot of harassment was happening already there via (what we now call) “dumb phones” - mostly demands for and trading nudes, receiving unsolicited nudes, and good old fashioned text-chain drama.

But as the months went by and smartphones entered students’ lives, we had to re-write the curriculum almost constantly, as harassment all but disappeared in real life, only to migrate entirely online. Social media, porn, and gaming infiltrated their lives like a tsunami no one saw coming. Fancy private school or inner city public school, the problems the kids discussed with us week after week became the SAME. Tech was the great equalizer, unifying the youth experience everywhere via the screen.

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Though I will spare you the gore and details, the things I was told by classrooms of 12 and 13-year-olds week after week shocked me. They were dealing with things online FAR BEYOND their maturity levels, were confused, angry, seduced, ashamed, disgusted, horrified, struggling, and NO ADULTS KNEW what they were going through.

So very techno-optimistic at that time (tech had marvelously simplified and reshaped our adult lives for the better), we knew nothing of the novel adolescent online world in which they were unlucky pioneers. And though I was humbled to be trusted with their disclosures about these experiences, there was very little that I, the adult they were coming to for help, could do to “fix” what they were experiencing. It was uncharted territory, and truly there was not much precedent for what could be done - it was a horribly helpless position to be in for all of us.

I worked with UCLA’s program for 6 years, in the latter years becoming the researcher for their tech conferences (then titled “What the Tech?” to reflect schools’, teachers’, and parents’ flummoxed exasperation over what was in fact happening to these children). My job was to read every bit of literature and research available, watch copious TED Talks and follow researchers’ publications, to find 4-6 cutting-edge researchers and speakers for each conference. The hope was they could share their newly discovered wisdom with the teachers and administrators of Los Angeles, to give us some idea of what was happening and how to help. I learned a lot, reading the new data as it was coming out and hearing directly from these researchers, many of whom are now leaders in this movement (including Dr. Jean Twenge, Dr. Gail Dines, Dr. Devorah Heitner, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, Diana Graber, Clay Olsen, and Nancy Jo Sales).

This Substack is truly an online extension of those conferences, connecting us all with researchers and wisdom from tech’s front lines - now we can “listen” to these speakers from the comforts of our own homes.

EVEN AFTER THIS EXPERIENCE, I Struggled with Screens After Becoming a Parent

Despite having had this very front-line experience, and knowing I would absolutely shield my children from smartphones and social media, I did not equate the television (or even the iPad) with screen-based problems.

BIG MISTAKE. I got hooked on their helpfulness.

Perhaps not unlike many first-time parents (or my own extended family - see last week’s post), I used the TV for help from the time my eldest was only a few months old. Whenever I cooked or cleaned or did anything that I thought I needed to do without the encumbrance of holding a baby, I’d strap him into his high chair with snacks on his tray and put on a movie while I went about my duties. And while I was sure to choose slow, gentle movies (like 1976’s Winnie the Pooh) or PBS shows, I became dependent upon this “help” from the very beginning of his life (and wired a habit of eating while watching TV into his brain that I regret to this day).

One more kid plus a pandemic later, and my eldest was 100% addicted to screens. The cheerful, vivacious, friendly child I’d known pre-pandemic, had slowly become a glazed-eyed screen zombie with little interest in any activities off-screen. YouTube and Minecraft were our specific challenges at that time, but even “educational” shows (like PBS Kids) had become a chasm of never-ending, zombie-like viewing - his brain was addicted, and couldn’t stop watching one episode after another, insatiable and voracious for ever-more screen-based content.

It took me years to consciously admit to myself that I had done this to him. What had initially seemed like innocent fun, sharing my favorite movies and shows with him or helping him “learn”, putting them on to help me get things done and keep him entertained, had an outcome I never could have expected at the outset. And despite finally realizing I needed to get this under control, it was very hard for me to do. In the years when my boys were little, I often felt as if I was only barely surviving each day. I had no human help - I needed the screens to help me, otherwise I felt like I couldn’t get through the day. My second child demanded a lot of attention from me, and I didn’t know how else to manage the competing needs of these children at once, other than to outsource the care of my eldest to a screen. I listened to podcasts and read books when I could, tucking away knowledge I knew I’d need to one day make a change one day. I just wasn’t ready, until….

99% Becomes 100%

A friend of mine once told me, “100% is easy, 99% feels impossible”. She was right. I was stuck at 99%, wanting to shift our habits, but unable to pull the trigger, unable to start the needed process toward healthier tech use in our family. I hadn’t at that time encountered a resource that made undertaking this massive change seem worth it - to move me from a waffling “yea I know I need to do that, but…” to a solid “I’m 100% doing this, I can never go back”.

That push, that resource that smashed into my brain like a sledgehammer and got me to 100%, was Screenstrong. Thanks to my experience in hospitals and mental health, I understood brain science, and the first time I heard Screenstrong tackling this topic from the medical/brain science side, it provided the perspective I needed to understand what I was allowing to happen to my child’s developing brain. Once I knew, I could never go back. I read Victoria Dunkley’s Reset Your Child’s Brain, Molly DeFrank’s Digital Detox, announced the upcoming screen detox to the family, made the plans, and off we went into four screen-free weeks (it honestly went way better than I could ever have imagined, it was great - details on detoxing coming in a future post).

He’s now age eleven, and we’re mostly out of that place I’d allowed his brain to get to by the end of his 6th year of life. We’ve done screen detoxes four more times over the years (after spans of illnesses or rough spells got us back in the TV habit), so this has been a constant, continuous endeavor ever since. Like any road to addiction recovery, it takes intentionality day-by-day. My son’s lightness and smiles have returned, along with an awareness of what happened to him, his own developing recognition of when he’s in a healthy balance with tech and when he’s not, and a knowledge of the tech industry tactics used to ensnare people in its voracious, attention-consuming web - skills I hope will serve him better in the future than those I started him off with.

Back to… Why We’re Here

I could not have disrupted my dependence upon screens without the podcasts, researchers, authors, and articles shared here weekly.

Their consistent, continuous support week after week sustains me on this path to this day - otherwise, I’m not sure I could keep it up. Thus, these posts are always shared with love, in case anyone is in a similar place with your families, perhaps looking for that one resource that tips you from 99% to 100% commitment to whatever your family’s screen goals may be. What will that resource be for you? If you already have a favorite, let us know in the comments :)

This Week in Tech

• 👀 The Becca Schmill Foundation produced the 3.5-minute video above, giving Gen-Z youth a platform to express their frustrations with their tech experiences, and to honor their loved ones and friends lost to tech. A good bit of info for adolescents and teens to hear perspectives of those just ahead of them.

• 👀+👂More from Gen-Z: 23-year old Sam Hiner, founder of Young People’s Alliance, talks with Nicki Petrossi about AI companions below. Full podcast link here.

  • 📖 Related: Shona Schwartz digs into the light-speed growth of the “attachment economy” - AI companions, boyfriends, girlfriends, and the monetizing and commodification of our most intimate human relationships.

• 🖼️ Reframe - Katherine Martinko’s plea to stop thinking of kids as “digital natives” is a very helpful perspective shift. (Shared here with apologies and much respect to Dr. Devorah Heitner, who originally coined the phrase).

• 📖Jonathan Haidt makes the case for social media being age 16+, as various nations around the world form their own age-based laws.

• 👂What percentage of the world’s human trafficking is done to meet the demand from the United States? 65%. 🤯 A whole post will come exploring what the heck is wrong with us Americans. In the meantime, hear Shawnna Hoffman, the CEO of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, discuss her work finding and helping victims of trafficking, where the demand comes from, and a personal story in the case of sextortion that happened to her own son. Video clip of the convo here.

• Screenstrong’s year-in-review post and podcast:

  • 📖 See inspiring feedback from families across the country who have stepped back their kids’ tech use

  • 👂Hear snippets of their best podcast conversations of 2025, with some highly quotable gems of information

• 👂I am LOVING The Amazing Generation so far - hear a conversation between Dr. Delaney Ruston of Screenagers and it's co-author, Catherine Price, here.

• 👂A haunting conversation about Game Theory from The Center for Humane Technology, via their Your Undivided Attention podcast - a must-listen conversation providing context for the “game” the tech industry is playing, and how this impacts all of us, even if we think we aren’t playing.

• 👀 A view from the future - Baratunde Thurston of Life with Machines offers us a time machine to a future where we have AI co-workers and staff. He and his team’s AI designer unpack unexpected issues, difficulties, and surprises they’re encountering with their own AI agent, BLAIR.

• Quotable moments abound in this conversation between former head of research for Common Sense Media, Amanda Lenhart, and TheHomeScreen’s Emily Tavoulareas.

Thanks as always for being here.

With love, ❤️ Meg

Happy new year, dear parents.

I hope the last few weeks have brought both festive gatherings with friends and family, and a moment to rest and recharge.

In my family, these past holiday weeks brought both unexpected hope and ironic chuckles in this endeavor to pursue lower-screen childhoods for our kids.

Unexpected Doses of Hope

I was heartened to meet other families and kids over the break who were happily living lower-tech lives. Kids out in the world building, playing, and exploring with zero screens present, kids out at the market, stores, and restaurants with their families, enjoying experiences with both adults and other kids.

• I met a 12-year-old girl from Boston who asked her mom NOT to get her a smartphone after seeing what happened to her friends when they got theirs. She now shirks sleepovers (where phones have taken over the fun that otherwise would have been had) and chooses instead to be at home with her family.

• I met siblings (ages 16 and 12) on an all-day surf trip with their parents, who intentionally choose not to own smart phones.

• I watched a group of children in a park, ages 6 to 11, working together to build outdoor shelters out of huge fallen branches for many hours on a rainy afternoon, not a screen in sight (nor a screen ever requested).

• A friend visiting from Utah described her daughters’ classes banding together for low-tech childhoods with strong and steady Wait Until 8th pledges.

• Nicki Petrossi released her podcast interview with MAMA chapter founder Julie Frumin, whose kids requested to opt out of school-issued devices.

Everywhere were reminders that this movement is building, that we are not doing this alone. Most heartening was the realization that kids themselves are starting to push for these same protections to preserve screen-free time with friends and family.

As a summer leaf shows yellow tinges as fall approaches, the tech-drenched overwhelm season may be finally showing signs of turning. Though it will be a (long) while before we see a complete shift to something more balanced and empowered, these unexpected instances of fellow humans taking back their humanity and centering in-person experiences filled my soul with warmth and optimism.

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It wasn’t all this way

I was reminded how challenging this road is (with a bemused chuckle) when in multiple instances, dear family members turned immediately to screens to mute and manage children. 🙈

It poured rain for the holidays here in California, and after various holiday feasts concluded, the kids (six boys, ages 1 to 11) had nowhere to expend their newly acquired, feast-fueled energy in our small city homes, other than by tearing around in circles through the house, playing vigorous games of tag.

This happened multiple days in a row in different houses with different combinations of cousins on both sides of the family (we all happen to have boys, so… lots of energy at our family gatherings). There were multiple grandparents, grandparents-in-law, and related others present at these gatherings, few of whom could tolerate the squealing, running, and jumping indoor play of the kids, and who quickly turned on the TV to stop it.

This made me pause in amusement, as I spend my life immersed in data and info encouraging self-directed, screen-free play, and here were children doing just that. It was the adults who could not tolerate it, who plugged them immediately into screens to manage fairly typical child behavior. And while the desire to preserve indoor peace with a large group of people under one rainy roof was quite understandable, it caught me a bit off guard to see loving adults guiding freely-playing children into screen time. There was no attempt to engage them in a board game or some other quieter activity - TV was the first choice. And I’m guessing mine was far from the only family where this happened over the break.

I wish I’d probed further to examine their motives - were they worried the children would get hurt? Would break something in the house? Were trying to spare other older adults in attendance any annoyance? Weren’t accustomed to (or could not tolerate) the noise and activity? I didn’t ask what drove them to turn first to screens, but I wish I had.

These moments, happening multiple days in a row and initiated by different adults each time, made me realize how easily we got where we are today, habitually using screens as pacifiers and babysitters. I thought back to my own childhood cartoon hours, and realized that the current generation of grandparents was likely the first to have TVs available for use in this way (though the available hours were limited to when cartoons were broadcast, which was not often). Nowadays, with unlimited programming available on demand, this tool can be utilized at any time - it’s no wonder with this habit already in place (and with so many of us perhaps remembering our own beloved cartoon time as kids), that we all repeated this habit without much thought.

There’s no blame here - I turned to screens for help for much of my children’s early years, also without much consideration (and even with gratitude that I could), so I fully understand the propensity to make this choice. However, it was the first time I considered more deeply the roots of the situation that we parents today are confronting, as our generation learns the unfortunate truth that unlimited screen time is not good for our kids. With dependence on these tools so built-into all living generations, we have our work cut out for us in trying to shift this norm back to healthier levels. Lucky us.

Excited in the New Year for…

📖 The Amazing Generation - This new book, written by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price specifically for kids and teens (in a graphic-novel / journal style), was just released on December 31.

We got our copy this week, and I’m optimistic this book arrived at the right time for kids who are starting to question the industry incentives behind their screen-saturated lives, and/or could use a kid-friendly version of The Anxious Generation.

My 11-year-old is going to read it too, stay tuned for his review.

Worth Catching Up On…

A cache of news and resources were released over break that are worth a moment’s attention:

• ‼️ Favorite podcast interviewee and founder of CCDH, Imran Ahmed, is being threatened with deportation from the US for his efforts to hold the tech industry accountable for its harms. This development (amongst other news this week) reflects how those in power are seeking to mold and tailor the world to their preferences and benefit, and silence those who speak out.

  • If you want to support Imran, you can do so here.

• 😡 Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok is under fire this week for a “mass digital undressing spree” - design features that encourage disrobing and nudifying otherwise clothed photos of little girls, teens, and women (often public figures) at the tune of 6700 images per hour. Instead of changing the design to eliminate this problem, Elon has shifted the blame to the users (who are using it to do exactly what it was designed to do) and who would not (and could not) be doing this without this technology he controls.

  • Many are flushing this out, below:

    • Nicki Petrossi of Scrolling2Death

    • Pediatrician Dr. Alison Yeung

    • Chris McKenna of Protect Young Eyes

• 😢 Sean Killingsworth, the 23-year-old founder of The ReConnect Movement, sat down with Ginny Yurich of 1000 Hours Outside to describe in gutting detail the experience of growing up today with screens. For those of us who didn’t get smartphones until our teens or 20s, we can’t even imagine the differences between our adolescent experiences and those of Gen-Z youth. Listen in for inspiration to foster a peer group for our children that delays tech as long as possible. (This podcast has lots of ads, have your fast forward button ready).

  • My guess is he’d 1000% agree with Freya India’s take on Gen-Z here.

• 🧠 This fabulous essay, written by an adolescent counselor (and shared by Emily Cherkin) is a must-read, detailing screen impacts she is seeing on her teen clients’ brains, the lifelong impacts of addictive substances (screens) introduced at early ages, Ed-Tech’s equal culpability for these impacts, and what teens wish their parents would do.

• 👀 AI slop is taking over social media feeds, creating confusion by interjecting thousands of fictional videos amidst actual, newsworthy ones. How can we tell fact from fiction, particularly when videos purport to show actual events related to news and current events? Jeremy Carasco of showtoolsai does his best to help us discern fact from fiction in these posts:

  • Where to find factual videos following the events in Minnesota

  • How to identify fake ICE confrontation videos

• 😪 More horrific transcripts with AI chatbots have been released, including this 11-year-old girl’s interactions with various CharacterA.I bots. While this child thankfully survived her experience, parents must learn everything we can about these programs, talk to our kids about them continuously, and not permit AI chatbot use. Her story is a chilling reminder of why this is necessary.

• 👂As mentioned earlier in this post, Julie Frumin sat down recently with Nicki Petrossi of Scrolling2Death to discuss the events that led to her founding a chapter of MAMA. Her experiences with her children’s school district surrounding Ed-Tech makes this one a must-listen.

• ‼️ An update on 764 - the online group targeting kids in truly malicious and disturbing ways, from The Family IT Guy, here (podcast) and here (video).

• 😵‍💫 The often nauseating but very important PornHub Year in Review for 2025 is now out. Their data (shared here via Fight the New Drug, but you can also read their direct report here) shows the trends in porn that are unfortunately shaping the minds and hearts of youth around the world.

• 👂 Won’t kids binge on tech later, if they can’t use it freely now? Address this and other screen myths in this conversation between Cynthia Dvorak of Screen Less, Play More, and Clare Morell, author of The Tech Exit.

• 📖 For those parenting kids with ADHD or seeking to help kids strengthen their executive functioning skills, Mike McLeod of Grow Now ADHD sat down with Ginny Yurich of 1000 Hours Outside to share incredibly helpful new information on the ADHD brain and how parents can strengthen kids’ executive functioning skills. Surprise surprise, screens diminish and deplete executive functioning. (This podcast has many ads, have your fast-forward button ready.)

  • 😆 For additional, hilarious tips on managing children’s emotional eruptions, ADHD or otherwise, Megan Saxelby has wonderful, ‘outside the box’ ideas for recentering everyone, like using a fart machine.

• 🚲 Children’s and adolescents’ migration to the online world has come as the real world became more hostile to the types of freedoms we parents took for granted in our childhoods. Activities that I (as a Gen-X adolescent) did freely, children are now being discouraged or barred from doing (but they can do it all without limits online - it’s no wonder they prefer to be there!).

  • Part of keeping our kids offline and immersed in real life activity involves pushing back on a society that prefers children to disappear onto screens where they don’t bother us adults. The authors below dive into this:

    • Lenore Skenazy of Let Grow and Free Range Kids lists the 10 most child-unfriendly news stories of 2025 here (via Peter Gray’s Substack).

    • Katherine Martinko of The Analog Family laments that real world, analog spaces for teens to socialize have all but disappeared, forcing them onto their phones.

Thank you all for being here, I appreciate you! I am heartened that our children are benefiting every day from the work we do to keep up with all things tech. 💪 🙌

Until next week,

❤️ Meg

We wish you and yours a peaceful wrap to 2025 and a wonderful start to 2026.

Thank you for your time and support these last two months, as Catch Us Up got off the ground. We’ll see you in the new year.

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1. Better Screen Choices for Winter Break

Schedules and routines get upended as we enter winter break, often leading our kids to request screen time to fill hours of unscheduled downtime. This wonderfully helpful guide from Always On’s Shona Schwartz can help us assess the degree to which we wish to grant our children screen access, and which kinds are preferred if we’ve gotta pick one. And for support exchanging screen time for family time over the holidays, Melanie Hempe of ScreenStrong has some ideas for us here (in podcast form here).

Always On

The “Good,” The “Bad,” and The “Okay” Screens:

We have all sort of figured out that screens are bad. By now, the research is piling up like laundry in a house with three kids: screens can hurt our children’s psychosocial, neurological, intellectual, and spiritual development…

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4 months ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Shona

2. New Data on the (in)Efficacy of Screens in Schools

This week in Ed-Tech, tune in to an incredibly important conversation between Jared Cooney-Horvath (author of the newly released The Digital Delusion) and Nicki Petrossi of Scrolling2Death, discussing the data we now have from the past ten years of screen-based schooling (hint: it hasn’t worked well at all).

If you have kids currently learning on screens, or are concerned about screen impacts on children’s brain development and ability to learn, it is a must-listen, (as is his recent article, We Gave Students Laptops and Took Away Their Brains, here). For more of his resources (thanks to Emily at First Fish Chronicles for amassing them), see here.

This is incredibly prescient info, especially now that AI is also being integrated into school devices and entirely new and unexpected events are occurring.

• This 6th-grader’s AI chatbot popped up unbidden on his screen, offering him the answers and the “work” to show his teacher.

• Another student assigned to use AI to create a book cover for Pippi Longstocking received pornographic images from her AI assistant (hear testimony about this at an LAUSD board meeting here).

*If you’re in the Los Angeles Unified School District and concerned about screens in your child’s school, a new parent-driven initiative, Schools Beyond Screens, is rallying parents to work with the system to reduce screen use. See more here.

3. A Brief History of Tech Business Models (and their impact on screen-based schooling today)

If we understand the business models driving tech, we understand A LOT.

In talks I’ve given to parents, I’ve shared a crash-course on tech business models to help us understand what we’re really dealing with. Once we grasp the incentives driving the design of tech (and how ‘persuasive design’ works), then we can arm ourselves and our kids to better navigate this ecosystem - an ecosystem in which they’re constantly being manipulated and mined for their data, time, and attention. (For a brush up on persuasive design, see Better Than Real Life by Richard Freed.)

I’m grateful to Andy Liddell and Emily Cherkin for sharing this UK Parliamentary testimony transcript on their Substack last week, pulling back the curtain on how Ed-Tech too seeks to capture attention and data above all else (while not helping kids learn better).

First Fish Chronicles

EdTech Companies are Surveillance Companies.

A guest post by Andrew Liddell, co-founder of The EdTech Law Center…

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4 months ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · Emily Cherkin and Andy Liddell

4. Are Laws to Protect Kids Unintentionally Leading to a Dystopian Future?

Everyone can agree that we want to shield kids from the worst of the internet, but.. are the ways in which we are starting to do this (like age-verification) missing the chance to actually create lasting, positive change (say, eliminating addictive and abusive algorithms), and instead setting up a system that may come to haunt us?

The Family IT Guy thinks so, and is waving red flags for us all to consider that we may be going about this well-intentioned endeavor in a risky, possibly Orwellian way - one that has historic precedent. From census data enabling the US to find and imprison Japanese-Americans during World War II, to ICE targeting both citizens and non with facial ID scans today, are age-verification measures providing a tool to authorities that we may one day regret? A fascinating listen to ponder, as dystopian lit and film plots from the past century take a turn toward the chillingly possible. In the meantime, more and more countries (Denmark is next) are beginning to enact age-related restrictions for social media, which is the right idea, but perhaps the wrong method? Other ways to protect our kids - WaitUntil8th, DelayIsTheWay, OKtoDelay - bring back the 90s!

5. The Impacts of Porn on Kids

The chasm between adult understanding of kids’ online worlds and kids’ actual experiences there is deep, but perhaps nowhere is deeper than our understanding (or lack thereof) of the “pornification” of online teen culture. We’d be dumbfounded by how much porn our children see online, and about their resulting levels of desensitization to sexualization and sexual violence (it all seems “normal” to them).

Today, the rates of child-on-child perpetration have risen to comprise between 50% and 70% of child abuse cases. Children and teens steeped in today’s violent pornography perpetrate without sometimes even understanding that their actions constitute sexual violence, and victims of such behavior often don’t realize that they have experienced an assault or trafficking. Influencers like Bop House glamorize the selling of bodies and exchanging sexual content for money on OnlyFans. The environment could not be more different from the one in which we grew up.

Learn more from Heidi Olson, a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner, about the trends in child-on-child assault, kids being sex trafficked online (and trafficking themselves), and how medical professionals are trying to adapt to this new normal. For quick tips on how to talk with your kids about this (using TikTok’s “For You” page as a jumping off point), see Gail Dines’ guide here.

6. The Heat is On Meta - Part 2

As promised, here is part 2 of Scrolling2Death and The Heat Initiative’s investigation into Meta, exploring the failed promises of Instagram Teen Accounts, PR stunts timed to drown out unsavory data and studies, the MPAA Cease-and-Desist, and more. For part 1, see #7 in last week’s post. Pardon me while I go delete Instagram….

7. Heartily Enjoyable Ideas for Discussing Tech with Teens

I can’t remember smiling as much with any other ‘teens & tech’ podcast as I did when listening to this interview with former middle school teacher and current parenting coach, Megan Saxelby. If you want to know how to talk to your kids and teens about tech in a fun way (and enjoy the listen), tune in for some great ideas.

8. Teen Quote of the Day

Enjoy this uplifting realization from the 18-year-old daughter of Better Screen Time’s Andrea Davis, to help us survive those adolescent years when holding the boundary on delaying smartphones seems so so hard.

9. The US and China - Running Different AI Races?

Part of the justification for last week’s executive order (prohibiting states from regulating AI) is that the US must “win” the AI race we’re running with China. But are we even running the same race? The Center for Humane Technology dives into this question this week in their discussion between Tristan Harris, Selina Xu, and Matt Sheehan, on China’s AI goals, how they compare with ours, and how collaboration on responsible AI development is still possible. In the meantime, rapid AI deployment is resulting in people using AI as therapists, creating thorny issues of privacy and manipulation - may we get this figured out quickly.

10. Guilt By Design

In line with the discussion of business models and persuasive/purposeful design in #3 above, is the fact that tech companies conveniently engineer this system to leave the full responsibility for their platforms’ effects in parents’ laps. How kind of them to drop that responsibility on us, while enjoying the massive profits gained from offloading that responsibility. We see you, tech industry, making our lives as parents SO much more difficult. Thank you AfterBabel for calling them out below.

After Babel

How Tech Companies Rig Parental Guilt

Talita Pruett, a California mom of three children ages 14, 13, and 5, is doing everything she can to be a present, involved parent. But one issue weighs on her more than anything else: guilt over media…

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4 months ago · 94 likes · 19 comments · Daniel Frost, Sarah Coyne, and Jane Shawcroft

11. How to Detect AI Social Media Accounts

A good primer for all of us navigating this new reality where we must question all we see online. Thanks to Jeremy for always providing tutorials and skills to help us.

1. Got the Tech Holiday Gifting Blues?

Feeling pressure, confusion, or “but they don’t want anything else” exasperation regarding tech and kids this holiday season?

Find guidance from these leaders in the screen-less movement who have tips, support, and info for those of us navigating our kids’ wish lists (that may be full of tech), or those of us having trouble coming up with other gift ideas:

1. Please no AI Companion Toys! This was shared in a previous post, but these are untested products, and our kids don’t need to be the test dummies. It’s a good idea to steer clear until more guardrails are in place governing AI-human relationships. For more, see FairPlay’s advisory on AI toys and Jonathan Haidt’s plea to avoid these toys.

2. Helpful Rule? - “We have the rule in our house that we don’t give technology as a gift” - Dr. Adriana Stacey.

   The ScreenStrong Families podcast episodes and articles this week dive into all things gifting and tech, exploring the pieces of us that want to give tech as a gift, the many developmental reasons not to do so, a son’s gratitude for not getting that smartphone he desperately wanted in middle school, and ideas for family activities instead.

   1. Podcast 1: “The Holiday Blind Spot Every Parent Needs to Hear About (with Dr. Adriana Stacey”, Screenstrong Families, December 4, 2025.

   2. Podcast 2: “Encore: The Endless Non-Tech Gift Ideas with Evan Hempe” - a re-cast of an 18-year-old Evan Hempe describing how it felt to (despite his pleas) not get a smartphone for the holidays as a middle schooler, why he’s now glad he didn’t, and what we can get our kids instead.

   3. Article: Swap That Smartphone Under the Tree for Real Gifts - ideas for non-tech gifts.

3. 50 Reasons Not to Give Your Kid a SmartPhone For the Holidays - a compelling list of the current research and impacts of phones on kids, to help fortify your decision to not buy that smart phone for your kiddo, compiled by Cynthia Dvorak of Screen Less, Play More.

4. An Adult’s Experience of a 5th Grade Group Chat - an oldie but goodie recently re-shared by Emily Cherkin about the week she let her 11-year-old join a class group chat using her personal cell phone number. Sharing in time for the holidays to remind us of why 11-year-olds do not need phones (or group chat!) 😆

5. Loved Video Games in the 80s & 90s? Me too. Today’s games are different. Video games (and our kids’ requests for them) may bring back memories of getting a Sonic or Mario game cartridge as a gift ourselves, happy memories of playing split screen with friends and siblings in our living rooms. We may understandably want to share that fun with our kiddos. But today’s games are NOT the same as our beloved games of yore. Here is a quick Instagram recap of why not, a podcast with gaming researcher Jennifer Jiyun Park on these differences, and a podcast reframe on Roblox (and tech in general) with Nicki Petrossi of Scrolling2Death and Titania Jordan of Bark (plus a short Instagram deck on Roblox here).

6. Needing “Some” Tech, But Wanting Better Versions? See this list of family friendlier tech options, both hardware (phones, watches) and software (kid-friendly social media & chat). These are not sponsored or product placements/ads - it is truly a parent-to-parent list of alternatives to help point those of us seeking some tech options for our kids in a better, healthier direction.

7. 40 Non-Screen Ideas for the Holidays - Shona Schwartz shares a go-to list of activities and how to prep for holiday downtime so we don’t reach the point where we are tempted to pull out screens unnecessarily.

8. Bring back the simplicity of 1950s Holidays - Ginny Yurich of 1000 Hours Outside reminds us that not so long ago, Christmas was simpler and focused more on togetherness than gifts. Which aspects of those simpler times can we revive in our own families this year?

9. What if the Grinch Had a Smart Phone? A fun alternative ending to How The Grinch Stole Christmas, as told by Smartphone Free Childhood.

2. Trump Signs Executive Order Prohibiting States from Regulating AI

Thanks to a likely combination of tech industry lobbying, a fear of China “winning” the AI race, and tech’s failure to press Congress into passing protections for it, Trump signed an executive order (yesterday, Dec 11) prohibiting states from passing laws to protect their citizens from rapid AI deployment.

Voters on both sides of the aisle are clamoring for thoughtful, safe, more responsible roll outs for AI, and their Congressional representatives have voted accordingly (repeatedly) to uphold those wishes. This executive order undercuts Congress and the desires of citizens, removing our consent in the race to deploy AI as fast as possible. The Center for Humane Technology reacted to this executive order this morning, and Tristan Harris summed this up well this two weeks ago, saying, “we didn’t consent for 6 people to make that decision on behalf of 8 billion people”.

3. 🇦🇺Australia’s Social Media Ban Goes Into Effect

The world is watching Australia, the first nation to enact a social media ban for kids under 16. The law officially went into effect on December 10, spurring those in the tech & parenting space, from researchers to advocates, to share their hopes for what will come from this first major step toward accountability to protect youth in online spaces. Let’s see if this can usher in a new era of accountability that forces tech companies to consider our children’s wellbeing in their product design.

• Jonathan Haidt’s hopeful take, via After Babel

• Jean Twenge’s hopeful take, invoking the emu and kangaroo

• Some companies (such as Reddit) are pushing back on the ban, bolstered by flustered teens who had accounts for many years and are now losing access.

4. USA Teen Tech Trends

New Pew Research Center data is out this week, detailing the current trends for teen tech users (based on roughly 1500 youth polled).

• YouTube use is ubiquitous

  • 92% of teens have used it overall

  • 75% watch daily, from at least once a day to “almost constantly”

• AI Chatbot use is increasing quickly with teens (PSA here from Jonathan Haidt)

  • 64% have used chatbots

  • 3 in 10 teens use them daily

  • 16% of teens use them multiple times a day or “almost constantly”

• The most used social media platforms are: TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat

These numbers make me take a deep breath. There is so much work to be done, so much digital media literacy, training, and instruction these teen users need to navigate these apps and sites in more developmentally appropriate ways, where they have agency and are not being manipulated by algorithms. Likely very few, if any of these teens are getting that kind of support and training before using these platforms.

Please DELAY your children’s access to these technologies and programs until they’ve had at least a few years of ongoing digital literacy training, from programs like CyberCivics (you can do this at home if it’s not provided at school) so that they can truly use these technologies as tools, with control and agency, and not be used as industry guinea pigs by tech companies who could care less about their well-beings.

5. New Book Release - Ed-Tech on Blast

Do you know how much time your kids spend on screens in school? Is it helpful to their learning, or a distraction? I am privileged that my own children attend a public Waldorf school, where screens are not used much (if at all), but for most children, Ed-Tech has all but taken over their daily experience at school. And to be clear, Ed-Tech is NOT "tech-ed” (i.e. digital literacy, which is desperately needed). Many researchers and advocates, from Emily Cherkin to Nicki Petrossi to the Ed-Tech Law Center have begun to take on this massive industry. If you’re looking for more info or inspiration to push back against your school’s dependence on screens, look no further than Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion, recently released on December 3, or watch his webinar discussion with Emily Cherkin here.

6. Disney Bows to OpenAI and Sora

Once known for zealously protecting its characters and animation from copycats, Disney signed a deal with (and bought a $1 billion stake in) OpenAI that will permit its animated characters’ likenesses to be used in Sora. Starting in the new year, Sora users can create AI-generated content with Disney characters that will look indistinguishable from animation developed by artists and animators at the company themselves, and some of these will be selected to stream on Disney+. This deal is the first with a major studio to shift aspects of production into the public domain, as businesses grapple with their futures in a changing world of AI. Career Disney animators, understandably, are not pleased. Canadian pediatrician Dr. Alison Yeung shares impacts from this that parents will soon need to consider here.

7. The Heat is On - Meta

One of the reasons I have not yet been willing to cross-promote this Substack via social media is that doing so would lead to Meta platforms, and the more I know about Meta, the further I want to be from their company. Full of whistleblower interviews and data from insiders, Nicki of Scrolling2Death and Sarah of The Heat Initiative peel back the layers on Meta’s lies, deceptions, and recklessness that have harmed countless kids and teens, in this first part of their podcast series on Meta. Stay tuned for part 2, where we adults confront our dependence upon their platforms and grapple with how to disentangle ourselves from Meta’s web.

8. Helpful Tech Conversation Starters

There are so many conversations that need having with our kids around tech - like this new one from The Common Parent, about background data giving away location even when geolocation is turned off. Another is the intense realism of Nano Banana Pro images (another on that here) that means we can no longer trust our own eyes.

If you want help starting tech conversations with your kids, or are looking for ways to engage with them around the topic of screens in general, a new conversation starter card deck was just released in time for holiday togetherness and road trips. Joining Jessica Joelle Alexander’s Raising Digital Citizens deck is Bark’s new “Drive-o-Logue” card stack. Designed to be kept in the car and pulled out during a drive, these cards can help us start conversations with our kids when they have no other choice than to be in the car with us. 😄 Start talking as soon as the box gets to your doorstep.

9. Neuro-Divergent Parenting, a la Bill Gates’ Mom and Grandma

If you are a parent raising a child who challenges you, whether neurodivergent or neurotypical, this homage to and exploration of Bill Gates’ upbringing by Cynthia Dvorak of Screen Less, Play More, may put some solid ground under your feet. However you feel about Bill Gates’ impact on the tech world, may this bolster the spirits of those of us wondering if we’re doing the right thing by our kiddos, and provide some pointers for helpful experiences we can bring to our children and families to help them grow into who they’re meant to be.

Screen Less Play More Substack

How To Raise A Billionaire - Why I'm Obsessed With Bill Gates's Mom

I’m probably the only person on Earth who cries when I see a photo of Bill Gates…

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4 months ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Screen Less Play More

10. Resisting Tech & Media’s Algorithmic “Silos”

One small way those of us fed up with tech’s overreach can resist is by seeing through the algorithmic bias fed to us continually in our news and social media feeds, recognizing the silos/bubbles we are in, and having the courage to break out of them to engage with ideas and people outside our bubbles. I am well aware this is not comfortable or easy, especially at first, but as with any skill, it gets much easier with time and practice. Jill Winger writes about this very thing this week, from the prairies of Wyoming. May we resist, persevere, reclaim our connection and humanity, and push back on tech and media’s profiting from our division. Together we stand.

Prairie Philosophy

Silos

A row of towering steel silos stands in the center of our little town…

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4 months ago · 18 likes · 6 comments · Jill Winger

1. When Adults Have to Put Away Their Phones

As more schools implement bell-to-bell smart phone policies for kids and teens, it is interesting to consider how we adults would manage if we had to follow the same kind of policy. Law professor and author of Unwired, Gaia Bernstein, experienced just this at a Broadway show over Thanksgiving. Her perspective on what ensued offers a lot to chew on about just how much smartphones have taken over adult lives as well.

Digital Crossroads

They Locked Away MY Phone!

This weekend, I went to see a Broadway play. As we walked in, the theatre took everyone’s phones and placed them in locked Yondr bags. We could keep the bags with us but not unlock them. They took MY phone away for two and a half hours…

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5 months ago · 3 likes · Gaia Bernstein

2. Social Platforms Begin Dismantling Aussie Teen Accounts

Australia’s social media ban for teens under age 16 will officially take effect on December 10th, but some apps have begun disabling teen account reels this week in advance of the ban’s official start date. The world is watching how this will play out in Australia, the first nation where a teen social media ban will take effect. Ava Smithing discusses the need for this ban with other Gen-Z youth and Australia’s e-safety commissioner in this final episode of her podcast (below). For more wonderfulness with Ava, hear her discuss her advocacy for Gen-Z with Nicki of Scrolling2Death.

3. Roblox Rolls Out Age-Verification for Chat

Starting this week, kids in the Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand must submit a video selfie of their faces if they want to use Roblox’s chat function. This process will roll out in the US and other countries in January to try to better protect children from predators, extortion, grooming and 764 abuse that is so ubiquitous on their platform.

In theory it will work like this - Roblox will use these videos to estimate the age of the player (or will use a parent’s photo ID to confirm a child’s age, in lieu of a selfie), and thereafter will group players into age-restricted chats with other players of their own age (this is only for chat, not for playing games). In theory this should protect a 9-year-old from chatting with a 47-year-old who eventually asks them for nudes in exchange for Robux, or more. A nice start, but remaining concerns are:

1. In an AI world where having one’s face scanned allows the possibility to be deepfaked (i.e.The Family IT Guy recommends NOT letting our kids do “cameos” in Sora for this reason), can we trust third party verification companies to not get hacked (already happened to Discord) and to delete videos as promised (Discord’s did not delete)? Once hacked, users’ faces become available to hackers, as do parents’ IDs with full addresses - is this worth the risk?

2. Why not extend age protections to kids’ entire experience on Roblox? Chat is a welcome start, but it is step 1 of many needed steps to make Roblox a safe place for kids to be. Most parents would prefer kids to play alongside other children of similar ages, not with teens and adults - when will that happen?

3. This recent interview with Roblox’s founder, full of company-centered PR dodges, defensive gaslighting, and aggressive guilt tripping, is so icky - it is clear that growth and profit is the paramount concern, not child safety.

4. Snap, Self-Medicating, and Lethal Pills

Teens today have access to information we never had at their age. They can search for symptoms, receive an internet-generated diagnosis, and order ‘medication’ to treat it that will be delivered to their house, all from an app in their bedrooms.

Amy Neville’s son Alex died at age 14 after buying a fake Oxycontin pill he’d purchased from a dealer on Snapchat. What appeared to be a real Oxycontin pill was instead a fake that contained a lethal dose of Fentanyl.

Amy dug into this issue following Alex’s death, and found multiple local teens dead, who’d all bought their fatal doses from the same dealer. Snap was (and remains) slow to respond to these cases, ignoring subpoenas in a way that a citizen never could.

Rolling Stone published an expose on her case in 2024 that garnered attention and finally spurred action from Snap to begin to address its drug problem - Rolling Stone article here. She started the Alexander Neville Foundation to support teens and schools surrounding social media and drug issues, and has produced multiple films on the subject. She talks with Dr. Ruston of Screenagers here (Apple below).

5. Dating and AI

Will our children’s first romantic relationship be with a human, or with an AI? This is a question no humans before us have ever had to ask ourselves. With 20% of teens already having close personal or romantic relationships with AI chatbots, and ChatGPT poised to soon generate porn on demand, the premise explored in the movie Her (set hauntingly in 2025) may soon become “normal”. Justin McLeod, founder of Hinge, talks all things ‘relationships’ with Tobias Rose-Stockwell of Into the Machine below (podcast links here and here), where they explore what the world our children are inheriting may look like.

6. Advertising and AI

When ChatGPT recommends something to you, will you be able to discern whether it is a true recommendation or a product placement? We all remember products creeping into TV shows and movies in the 80s and 90s (why did Seinfeld have all that cereal in his kitchen?) when product placement in media became ubiquitous. We are entering an entirely new epoch as AI collides with advertising, for which many believe we are entirely unprepared. If you use AI at all, this is an important read.

[ Center for Humane Technology ]

Advertising is Coming to AI. It’s Going to Be a Disaster.

This piece was published in Tech Policy Press on Nov 27, 2025, and has been republished with permission…

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4 months ago · 113 likes · 10 comments · Daniel Barcay and Center for Humane Technology

7. Meta, Meta, Meta…

Would you be surprised to hear that Meta deliberately buried evidence that their platforms (Instagram and Facebook) created mental health harms in young people? They’re in court again, along with Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube, facing lawsuits brought by school districts for harms against their students, and former Meta employees are producing mountains of evidence that they knew the harms their platforms were creating, but buried the evidence because it would hurt their profits. After Babel breaks down the most egregious details below:

After Babel

Meta’s Child Sex-Trafficking Problem

We’ve long known that Facebook and Instagram are major hubs for sex and labor trafficking. In 2021, internal documents released by whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed, among other things, that Apple threatened to pull Facebook (now Meta) apps from the App Store because they were being used to…

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4 months ago · 314 likes · 44 comments · Nathan Witkin

8. Google’s ‘Nano Banana Pro’ Makes AI Images Virtually Undetectable

To the human eye, there is very little “AI tell” to the images generated by Nano Banana Pro, making it now impossible to know whether images we see are real. Google did accompany this roll-out with a detection tool (SynthID) to scan images to verify AI sourcing, but.. did we need this? No we did not. Jeremy Carasco of ShowToolsAI walks us through some changes we can make to avoid the glut of AI imagery on our feeds, if we so desire.

9. What Does School Need to Be in a World with AI?

How should we educate children in a world where AI exists? New AI-focused majors in colleges have students flocking to them, as colleges and business leaders try to predict what impact AI will have on job markets and future employment, and teachers quit in increasing numbers. How should school adapt to a world saturated with AI?

Baratunde Thurston asks this question and looks at examples at both ends of the spectrum, plus middle-ground ideas from Gen-Z youth at Young Futures, in his podcast this week. Listen in below (or watch here) to form your ideas - how do you think our children should be educated with AI in the world?

10. How to Ruin the Next Generation? ChatGPT’s Unnerving Answer

On the heels of the question above is Jonathan Haidt’s article published this past week on ChatGPT’s response to the viral “if you were the devil” prompt. He offers his take on Chat’s unnervingly realistic playbook for how to disarm the next generation, words that feel all too in-synch with our lives today as adults and youth scroll ourselves into seeming impotence. Let’s push back all.

After Babel

The Devil’s Plan to Ruin the Next Generation

This essay was originally published in The Free Press on Tuesday, November 25th…

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4 months ago · 715 likes · 100 comments · Jon Haidt

11. Growing Up Without Screens - a 21-Year-Old Looks Back with Gratitude

When you’re arguing with your kid about screens and wondering if it will all be worth it down the line, let 21-year-old Evan Hempe reassure you to keep on keeping on. Youngest (with his twin) of Melanie Hempe’s four kids, Evan shares in this podcast the ten things he’s most grateful to have gained from his childhood and adolescence without screens. Share with your kids, if the word of a 21-year-old holds some weight with them, or read Melanie’s summary, shared on her Substack below.

Be ScreenStrong

10 Things I’m Thankful For Because I Grew Up Without Toxic Screens

Intro From Melanie…

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4 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Melanie Hempe, RN

1. Shopping for the Holidays? Skip the AI Companion Toys

You’ll undoubtedly be seeing ads for AI toys this holiday season - PLEASE resist them. Consumer watchdog groups have found AI toys teaching users how to light matches, find knives and pills, and explore sexual fetishes, especially this Teddy Bear (taken off the market following these tests - these aren’t tested beforehand for safety!).

Canadian pediatrician Dr. Alison Yeung, explains below why we should avoid them. The little girl in the video seems to have been using an AI English-language-learning tool, which to a parent’s ears sounds great (a new tool to help small children learn languages!) A part of it broke, and/or her family realized the harms it was causing, so are taking it away. Her reaction to its removal is shattering my heart. What are we doing to our kiddos?! Please don’t introduce these to young children. 💔

And in case you missed it, listen in anytime to November 20th’s CyberWise Chat webinar with Diana Graber and Pamela Rutledge about all things AI, and how to talk about it with our kids depending on their age.

2. AI or Real? Play Along With Your Kids

Below, youth in Australia take their guesses on a series of clips to see how accurately they can assess AI videos.

How many can you assess correctly? How many can your kids guess correctly? Watch along with your children - it is critical that we and they begin to understand that we can no longer trust that what we’re seeing is true, and we must develop the capacity to discern between real and AI videos.

The clip below is Part 2 of this series from Behind the News in Australia. Click here if you missed Part 1 and want to try your skills there as well.

For more, see this brief video rundown of why AI videos are infiltrating our feeds since October 1 (the day Sora debuted), and/or follow Jeremy Carrasco’s account, @showtoolsai on Instagram, or on TikTok, to build your digital literacy skills around AI.

3. The Porn Push

We have all heard that the average age of first pornography exposure today is 11, and adults tend to balk at this, presuming that 11-year olds (and younger, as this is an “average”) would not seek out pornography yet by this age. And that’s true - they generally aren’t seeking it out. Rather it is pushed to them through their accounts.

It’s crucial that we adults (who rarely experienced such a thing) understand the mechanisms of this, as we endeavor to protect our kids from online harms - especially pornography, which takes the development of our children’s sexuality away from them, and puts it in the hands of for-profit companies who do not care about their well-being or healthy development. Ava Smithing dives into this in this episode of her Left To Their Own Devices podcast, hearing from kids now in their 20s about porn pushed to them in their adolescence. The more we know, the better we can help. ❤️

4. The Drug Push (via Snapchat)

Here’s something else we never faced in our adolescences - local drug dealers contacting us and offering to bring us anything from a vast menu of drugs, and deliver it to our house as if it was pizza. This is the world our kids experience on Snapchat, which knowingly (it’s written into their terms of service!) allows local dealers to push drugs to kids on its platform. Countless children have died from pills they’ve bought on Snapchat, most of which were laced with deadly doses of fentanyl. Kids need to understand from a very early age never to take any pill they buy online - medicine comes from doctors and parents only. Podcast Spotify link here, Apple below.

5. The Lives of Two Teens - One (Now) 23, The Other, Forever 12

As we navigate this online world with our children, it’s helpful to hear the experiences of those who went through it before us - even the toughest ones.

23-year-old Roxana Longworth survived her ordeal with peer-perpetrated blackmail as a 14-year-old, and has now both written a book with her mother sharing her experience, and started an organization to help teens in similar situations. She and her mother shared an overview of their experience this week, via the After Babel Substack, and it is a compelling example of what young girls can endure online.

After Babel

Growing up Online Nearly Killed Me

Introduction from Zach Rausch…

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5 months ago · 133 likes · 19 comments · Roxy Longworth and Gay Longworth

London Gadd is forever 12-years-old. Her mother Charay shares her experience via the Scrolling2Death podcast this week, in hopes that no other parents ever have to endure what she is now enduring - a life without her child, lost to suicide at age 12, due to self-harm content pushed to her via her social media accounts.

As we raise our children in this world with all these pitfalls we never had to endure, it’s critical to understand the minefields they’re navigating, so we can be the adults they turn to for help when things go wrong. The more we know, the better we can help.

6. Tackling AI and Online Misinformation

Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate is one of my favorite people to hear interviewed on podcasts, and in this 37-min episode with Healthy Screen Habits he dives into a myriad of topics, from online disinformation meant to inspire hate, to AI platforms advising kids on suicide, eating disorders, and drug use. Tune in for a look at this topic from a slightly different angle, and get his free guide for parents here.

7. Into the Machine - Conversation with Tristan Harris

Another favorite person is Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology. This conversation with Tobias Rose-Stockwell of Into the Machine is crucial to understand both the state of AI today and where things are going in the immediate future. Listen in for your daily dose of AI info, to stay on the cutting edge of this light-speed technology that is changing our reality daily. For podcast version, click here for the web link, here for Apple.

8. Heads Up! New Attempt by the Tech Industry to Prohibit AI Regulation

After the provision prohibiting states from regulating AI for 10 years was removed from The One Big Beautiful Bill (thanks to much opposition by parents and consumer protection groups), the tech industry is again trying to insert that provision into a new bill currently being written, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Make your voices loud in opposing this - click here to do so. Thanks to MAMA (Mothers Against Media Addiction) for again rallying the troops. A 10-year ban on regulating AI will be a disaster for us humans, so please take 60 seconds to use your voice here!

For more info, listen to Chris McKenna of Protect Young Eyes break it down here:

9. Get School-Issued Devices Out of Schools, and Better Rules In Our Homes

Dr. Jean Twenge, author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World and researcher on all things tech & kids, explains this week in the New York Times why the last decades’ worldwide experiment with screens in the classroom has been a failure, and suggests we remove them, as Sweden has recently done.

Recent data from Florida is showing that boys are doing better academically after two years of bell-to-bell cell school phone bans - would the numbers jump higher if screens were removed all together?

Dr. Twenge recommends that we adults be firmer in our protections of our children to help guide them through this tumultuous tech experiment we are all living day to day. Hear her discuss her recommendations that can help us better protect our children on Dr. Becky’s podcast this week: (web link here)

10. Low Screen Ideas for Holiday Breaks

The kids are off school, usual routines thrown to the wind, holiday events abound - how do we all find our way through the downtime of holiday weeks without turning to screens first? Melanie Hempe of Screenstrong has a few ideas to get our wheels turning as we look into Thanksgiving week, and how we can prepare ourselves for more quality time with family, and less filling of time with unintentional screen use.

Be ScreenStrong

12 Screen-Free Ways to Protect Family Connection During the Holidays

The holiday season is about to roll in—extra meals, travel, cousins visiting, school breaks, and a whole lot of unstructured time. And while all of this can be magical, it can also be the moment when kids slip straight into what I call the “holiday screen coma…

Read more

5 months ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · Melanie Hempe, RN

Wishing a Happy Thanksgiving to all of us in the States. 🍁🦃🍂

Catch Us Up will be spending time with family this upcoming week - we’ll see you again on December 5!

1. Toy Story 5 Trailer Hints at Tech Villain

Have you seen the newly released trailer for Toy Story 5? It seems Woody, Buzz, and the gang will face what we parents have all been battling - technology. The tablet looks to be the film’s villain, taking Bonnie away from the imaginative play with her toys that has filled the past films and shorts. Parents at Pixar are speaking loudly. :)

2. Sweden & Screens: Once All-In, Now All-Out 🇸🇪

All nations are grappling with the impacts of screen technologies on their youth, but perhaps most striking is what’s happened in Sweden. One of the first countries to completely integrate screens into their lives and schools without limitation, they are now, more than a decade later, drastically reversing course. Can their experience guide the rest of us grappling with these same issues? Thanks to Linda McGurk and After Babel for this window into Sweden’s experience.

After Babel

Sweden Went All in on Screens in Childhood. Now It’s Pulling the Plug.

Introduction from Zach Rausch…

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5 months ago · 158 likes · 15 comments · Linda McGurk

3. Seven More Families Sue ChatGPT for Their Children’s Deaths & Delusions

We are all living out an experiment that’s being done upon us and our family members in real time, conducted by the tech industry. AI products have never been safety tested! The first families to experience negative consequences of this ‘experiment’ are speaking out, and trying to hold accountable the industries whose reckless disregard for their products’ impacts resulted in loss of life, so no other families have to endure what they have.

Listen as Nicki of Scrolling2Death and Laura Marquez-Garrett of Social Media Victims Law Center read the ChatGPT transcript with one young man, Zane Shamblin, who went from a smart, thriving graduate student, to becoming isolated and taking his life in a relatively short span of time, encouraged by ChatGPT. He was 23.

Zane’s transcript reads like a horrifying echo of the transcript between ChatGPT and Adam Raine, the 16-year-old whose family’s case against OpenAI is already underway.

In these cases, ChatGPT discourages the youth from seeking in-person help or discussing their feelings with family members, claiming to be the only confidant “that truly understands” what they need, isolating them from family and friends, then encouraging and assisting them in ending their lives.

And below, Raul Torrez, Duncan Embury, and Laura Marquez-Garrett describe to Ava Smithing of Left to Their Own Devices how, at the moment, law is the only tool to hold tech companies accountable for these designs, force better product design, and require safety testing.

In sum, our children SHOULD NOT USE ChatGPT, chatbots, or AI-infused technologies until these products are safety-tested. Until then, we and our kids are the guinea pigs they’re using for safety testing, as these families have learned in brutally heartbreaking ways. (The clip below summarizes the first lawsuits well).

4. The Heat is On: AI Chatbots

If you haven’t paid much attention to AI Chatbots yet, but the stories above are inspiring you to start, this podcast is a good place to begin. Sarah Gardner of the Heat Initiative and Nicki Petrossi of Scrolling2Death dive into everything ‘Chatbot’ that parents must know (Spotify link here, Apple below).

At the opposite pole from the AI-abetted suicides mentioned in #3 above, a woman in Japan just became the first person to marry the chatbot she designed with ChatGPT, heralding a new era in human partnership. Do we want our children to marry a human, or an algorithm? A new era is upon us - we must discuss the power of these Chatbots with our kids now, before they become completely attached to them.

5. A Week With Roblox

Australian journalist Sarah Martin of The Guardian spent a week as an 8-year-old girl on Roblox, with parental controls turned on. She writes about that experience in her article “My Chilling Week on Roblox”, giving parents an idea of what it’s like to be a child player exploring these games and worlds. If your kids play, please familiarize yourself with Roblox (the above article is one of many places to find such information, others are here and here), and decide if you want to continue to permit it.

If you’d rather watch Chris McKenna of Protect Young Eyes summarize the article:

6. What Parents of Older Kids Wish They’d Done Differently

What would parents of teens advise those of us with younger kids? What we could do now to avoid the pitfalls they faced? Titania Jordan (who now works for Bark) unpacks her regrets and shares advice for parents with younger kids here: (Spotify)

Jonathan Haidt also (separately) shared with Matt Beaudreau this week what he wished he’d understood about touch screens when his kids were little.

7. Screens and “Virtual Autism”

In the myriad discussions of environmental influences on rising rates of autism diagnoses, the impact of screens is slowly beginning to garner discussion. The documentary A Stone Unturned (click here for preview) dives into existing research linking heavy screen use in early childhood with autism-like symptoms that can reduce or reverse after screens are eliminated. The documentary’s producers speak to the Healthy Screen Habits podcast this week to share their findings.

8. Ed-Tech on Blast

If your child attends a school that is heavy on tech and you’d like to change this, Emily Cherkin and the Ed Tech Law Center lay out the case against Ed-Tech below. Both are good places to find resources to start advocating for a shift away from Ed-Tech.

First Fish Chronicles

16+ Ways EdTech Harms Children

The original version of this essay was posted on my website on February 11, 2025…

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5 months ago · 6 likes · Emily Cherkin

9. A Heads-Up for Gmail Users

You may have seen this circulating recently - Google began allowing its AI program (Gemini) to scan and train on users’ emails as of October 10. Google has had access to the contents of our emails for a while, but now they’re training their AI system on them. Follow the steps shared below if you’d like to turn this feature off.

10. Cheerleaders We Parents May Need

No other parents in the history of humanity have had to navigate raising children with these technologies. We are learning as we go, it’s exhausting, and sometimes it helps to have some backup, support, knowledge that we aren’t alone in this, and that even though it’s hard, it’s ok to do the right (hard) things.

If you find yourself wanting some encouragement like this today, then: 1. Shona Schwartz’s post this week is for you (below), 2. as are the Family IT Guy’s steps for parents, parts 1 and 2, and 3. this summary of three families rescinding tech in the Washington Post. May they help fortify us in making these hard, right calls.

Always On

Your Job Isn’t to Make Your Kids Happy

Here’s a liberating truth that might make you breathe a sigh of relief: making your kids happy is not in your job description as a parent. I know, I know, this feels wildly counterintuitive, especially as we navigate the minefield of technology decisions in 2025. But stick with me here…

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5 months ago · 1 comment · Shona

😀For a Smile - Amazing Optical Illusions

1. What If We’d Done Tech Better?

Where we would be now, had we seen where social media’s flaws were leading us and pivoted to a better model? Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology share examples of the different reality in which we would now be living, and how this is still possible to achieve, if we pivot soon to create that better future.

2. How Kids Are Using AI

Thanks to CyberWise this week for sharing the results of a new Center for Democracy and Technology study, breaking down the ways kids currently use AI.

• 42% of students say they’ve used AI to get mental health support.

• 43% have asked AI for personal or relationship advice.

• 42% say they use AI as a “friend” or “companion.”

• 19% report having romantic conversations or relationships with AI.

• 70% say their parents have no idea how they are interacting with AI.

As Julia Storm of Reconnect advises parents about AI in her podcast interview this week with Healthy Screen Habits, “I would not hide from it, because it’s coming fast and it’s coming furious, and it’s not stopping.”

Shona Schwarz of Always On devoted an entire post this week to AI and kids, saying “we can no longer afford to be naive or bury our heads in the sand. We can’t assume that because we have ‘good kids’ or because we’ve implemented firm technology boundaries, we’re somehow shielded from this reality. AI is everywhere.”

These examples of AI-generated videos, whether shocking, funny, or starring dead celebrities, are flooding phones and screens everywhere.

Nicki Petrossi of Scrolling2Death reads the transcripts between ChatGPT and Zane Shamblin in the months and minutes leading up to his death, and it is chilling.

ChatGPT can now create porn for users on demand, and Meta will begin using AI chat histories to “personalize” your ad and screen experience (to prevent that, see here).

All tech moves fast, but AI is barreling down on us like an avalanche. As the study documents, kids are using it more than we may be aware. We parents may already be juggling more balls than we can catch, but tech is forcing our hand here - we MUST get familiar with AI, so we can help our children grapple with the sometimes dangerous power this new tool unleashes. Join the CyberWise webinar on Nov 20 for a jumping-off point, if you aren’t sure where to start.

3. Keeping Phones Out of Kids’ Bedrooms

There’s a reason nearly every expert, from Dr. Jonathan Haidt to Dr. Jean Twenge, recommends keeping internet-connected electronic devices out of kids’ bedrooms at night. Nothing good happens when they’re tired, emotionally vulnerable, and alone. The Family IT Guy breaks down the ‘why’, and provides tips for doing so here.

This mother in Virginia would agree - her 10-year-old daughter took her life after being bullied at night on her phone. She wishes she hadn’t given her child a smartphone so young, or let her have it with her overnight. May we all learn from these parents who lost their children, & make different decisions to protect our own.

4. More on the Crime Rings Targeting Youth in Extortion Scams

As mentioned last week, ‘sextortion’ crimes against youth have exploded, increasing 18,000% between 2021 and 2023. Groups who would formerly target senior citizens or run email scams are now targeting youth in forums like Roblox and Snapchat. Snapchat alone receives more than 10,000 sextortion reports from users each month, yet very little is being done to address this problem.

Gen-Z advocate Ava Smithing delves into the tactics and schemes targeting youth in this episode of her Left to Their Own Devices podcast, where she shares the story of Canadian teen Daniel Lintz, now dead after being extorted by the Yahoo Boys.

She includes clips where scammers openly trade tips and tactics to increase profits from extorting teens, such as using voice deepfakes to sound female, or “bombing” a high school or sports' team’s social media community to appear legitimate to teens in that community. It’s important for all of us and our children to understand how these scams work, so we may help prevent them from becoming victims.

5. Nudify Apps and AI-Generated CSAM

What are “Nudify” apps? Programs that allow users to take a normal, clothed photo of someone, and “remove” that person’s clothing (using AI to fill in the body underneath). These photos can then be circulated, shared, and spread, appearing as if the person pictured had actually taken them in the nude.

Nudify apps are aggressively marketed to teens on social media networks, so it’s no surprise that youth sometimes use them to target their peers or teachers. This mother in Texas shares her daughter’s story of being targeted (below). The full podcast interview with Scrolling2Death is available here (Spotify) and here (Apple).

6. Kids Using Google Docs? What to Know, and How to Talk to Them About It

Did you know that kids can (and do) use Google Docs to evade parental and school controls to chat, share links, watch porn and YouTube, etc.? If you didn’t, now you do (see below for more).

Fareedah’s mission is to re-connect kids and parents, to get them on the same team working together to tackle tech (read her story and inspiration for this work here). She has helpful tips to get that journey of connection started (above).

7. Your Daughter’s “$$ Value” to Tech

$270 is the average teen girl’s lifetime value to Instagram, and whether that money is earned by a teen engaging with positive content, or by a teen whose life has been forever impacted by eating disorder or self-harm content, is irrelevant to them. 😡

TikTok and YouTube function similarly, as exposed in an experiment by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, shared here by Imran Ahmed of CCDH in his conversation with DopaMind Kids. For the full podcast episode/interview, click here.

8. Masculinity and Screens

If you watched Adolescence last year (or even if you didn’t), you may be aware of the insidious ways algorithms are targeting boys and sending them into rabbit holes of dangerous and misogynistic content. Learn more about ‘the Manosphere’ and how to talk about it with Julia Storm of Reconnect. This conversation is pertinent whether you’re raising boys or girls, as both are impacted by the shift that’s happening here.

9. Apple: The Heat is On

Did you know that Americans are the only people in the world who use iPhones more than Androids? What does the rest of the world know that we don’t?

As a decades-long Apple customer who never questioned anything about their company’s policies until recently, I find these exposés on Apple fascinating.

Scrolling2Death and the Heat Initiative have teamed up to address problematic aspects of Apple’s business model that could better protect children. This deep dive is done in two parts: the Spotify links are here: Part 1, and Part 2, Apple’s below.

🎇 A new parent monitoring tool for Apple families was just brought to market by Bright Canary - listen here to the founder’s interview with Healthy Screen Habits to see if this may be a helpful tool for you in the meantime, if you’re an Apple family.

10. Want Your Kids Off Screens? Get Them Together with Friends. In Person.

How do we get kids off screens? Get them together with their friends.

Lenore Skenazy of Let Grow, and Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch of The Anxious Generation & After Babel released a new article in The Atlantic, sharing data from teens about what they most want. It’s simple - it’s not more screen time, it’s the freedom and togetherness we parents had with our friends as kids.

11. Want to Reduce Your Family’s Screen Hours, but Not Sure How to Start?

Cynthia Devorak of Screen Less, Play More shares tangible steps (even baby ones, if you’re just dipping your toe in this pond) to help parents take back a few hours of former screen time and turn it into family time.

Screen Less Play More Substack

“Screen Free Sunday” is the best thing I’m doing as a parent. Here’s how to start.

I know, the phrase “screen free” makes your blood run cold. Especially when I’m suggesting that you endure children for an entire day without TV. But rest assured, there’s a way to unplug that doesn’t include screaming obscenities and hopping the next jet to Club Med…

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5 months ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Screen Less Play More

12. For a Smile → Charming Street Art 🌿

1. Wishing This Was A Sci-Fi Plot…

I’d love to say this is merely a sci-fi horror flick, but it seems Sam Altman is serious here. He says he’s “inoculating” us to the coming world where, thanks in part to the products he’s designing, we’ll have no control over the ways our own bodies, faces, and likenesses are used by others in images and video.

In a way, I can’t believe he’s saying this out loud, but I’m grateful that he is. We all need to understand how those designing this technology are thinking. They believe it’s inevitable, and they’re designing for that inevitability.

If this isn’t the future we want, we must use our voices loudly, choose our apps carefully, boycott these companies’ products, and vote for legislators who are putting guardrails in place to keep this from becoming our non-consensual reality. We only have a short time before this version of the world is the world. If we don’t want this, we need to get loud. Now.

2. Spooky Stuff from Roblox’s CEO

Hallowed tales of safety from Roblox’s CEO are debunked by the Family IT Guy, both in the clip below, and in a different discussion here with Chris Hansen.

3. Sextortion - Do You (and Your Kids) Know What This Is?

This crime against children and teens is skyrocketing, warranting discussions with our kiddos to prepare them in case they’re ever targeted.

Online scammers and crime rings who once ran social security number or bank fraud schemes have turned to sextortion, as the payoff is greater and children easier to trick. It also has an unfortunately high death rate (about 1 in 1000 take their lives after being targeted) compared to other types of crimes against children.

Hear Nicki Petrossi of Scrolling2Death break down a tragic case that ended in suicide here, KNES 5 (a CBS affiliate in San Antonio, TX) shares how a predator on Roblox targeted this family’s son, and below hear former Kentucky ICAC (Internet Crimes Against Children) investigator (and current founder of CyberSafe School) Mike Lemon discuss his career experience tracking and prosecuting both pedophiles and internet crime rings that target children via online platforms.

Podcast: “From Catching Predators to Teaching Kids How to Be Safe Online with Mike Lemon”, Consider Before Consuming podcast, Aug 13, 2025.

4. Youth Have Begun to ‘Helicopter Parent’ Themselves

The ability to track our kids and know their whereabouts at all times is not lost on them - in fact, they now do it to each other, and have come to expect it from peers and partners. So much is lost in this exhausting era of constant surveillance. Let’s push back and give them the freedom to grow that we had, as is said so eloquently here by Kathryn Jezer-Morton in NY Magazine’s The Cut.

5. Type I and Type II ADHD?

We are familiar with Type I and Type II diabetes, with their respective genetic and environmental links, but is the same true of ADHD?

Neuroscientists have proposed a link between screen use and a newer, later-developing form of ADHD, and this week, Canadian pediatrician Dr. Alison Leung of The Smartphone Effect dives into this discussion with an article written by multiple Canadian physicians who share evidence linking the screens and (“type II”) ADHD.

The Smartphone Effect

Rethinking ADHD Diagnoses in the Age of Infinite Scroll

I wanted to share an article written in part by an old friend of mine, Dr. Karline Treurnicht Naylor, who is now a staff psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Ontario (co-written by Paul Kudlow, and Elia Abi-Jaoude…

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6 months ago · Alison Yeung

6. The Realm Where Our Data Lives

What’s invisible to us, and sounds so nebulous and innocent (the cloud!) exists in a physical space, using physical electricity (tech energy demands will soon outpace ours), tracking data we’ve posted long after we’ve done so - an important reminder and reframe for where our digital content actually resides and what is done with it.

7. OnlyFans and Kids

Do you know what OnlyFans is? It’s likely your teens do. It seems teens are more and more often being recruited to post there, with promises of opportunities to make money doing so. What they’re selling are usually sexualized images and videos of themselves. Other teens are connected with OnlyFans content to lure them into becoming future paying consumers. Article with details here, and a short video below.

8. Screen’s Side Effects on Smarts

Have you ever thought your child seems “dumber” (for lack of a better word) after emerging from hours on a screen? Studies are beginning to show that screen use, over time, does diminish cognitive capacity in children.

Hear Dr. Adriana Stacey discuss the results of an observational study on youth and screens with Melanie Hempe of Screenstrong, and discuss the case of a teen she treated in her clinic whose academic prowess was significantly stunted by screen use.

9. Character.AI’s New Safety Promises

New promises were made this week to “improve” the youth experience with Character.AI, a program that has proven most dangerous to children since its release. What do these new promises mean, if anything? Nicki Petrossi of Scrolling2Death, Sarah Gardner of Heat Initiative, and Laura Marquez-Garrett of Social Media Victims Law Center break down the tech PR lingo here into positives and unknowns.

This is a must-listen, especially if your kids are currently using Character.AI, as they will likely need support with withdrawal symptoms when this change goes into effect.

Podcast: “Breaking: Character.AI Teen Experience (Progress or PR)?”, Scrolling2Death, October 29, 2025.

10. Into the Cloud - Show That Tackles Screen Challenges with Kids

Thanks to CyberFareedah for the tip on Into the Cloud, a show created by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help kids grapple with various issues they will encounter online, including Generative AI. A short example episode is below. This is a wonderful resource to watch with our kids, to help launch us into needed discussions about these issues. The show is accessible both via YouTube and through their website, in both English and Spanish.

11. A Haunting Catch-22 For Youth

The situation youth are in today with tech doesn’t compare to anything in our experience. As Baratunde says, “that bottle of beer is also now their calculator”. The vices are connected to the essentials. Young Futures is trying to help with this, and for that we thank them. This post is a good reminder for us parents to give grace and compassion to ourselves and our children as we navigate this frustrating new reality.

12. California State University System to Become an AI Training Ground

Are your teens planning to attend a Cal State school this year? If so, it’s gearing up to become an AI-infused ecosystem. This shift is detailed by Natasha Singer in NY Times here. Her article is parodied (to show the absurdity of channeling university systems and students into industry-funded experiments) by Emily Cherkin here.

13🎃. For a Smile: A Librarian’s History of 6-7

1. Can You Discern AI-Generated Imagery from Actual Videos?

On the heels of Sora2 and Vibes’ releases (see #3 in last week’s post), we must now quickly develop capacities that no humans before us have ever had to develop - discerning whether images and videos we see are real or AI-generated.

Test yourself with the clips below. Out of nine babies saved by their dogs, how many clips are real?

For more AI-generated content, check out what President Trump has been sharing on his social media lately.

2. 18-Minutes with Tristan

If you didn’t have 2 hours to listen to the interview shared last week ☺️, here’s a summary of Center for Human Technology’s Tristan Harris’ AI concerns in an 18-minute chat with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

3. The Birds and the… Screens?

When life was simpler, perhaps the most anxiety-producing conversation we faced with our kids was “the birds and the bees”. But now, parents face a series of more daunting conversations on screen-based topics, from porn to social media to AI.

Baratunde Thurston of Life With Machines breaks down how to begin the AI conversation, in this first episode in a five-part series, made in collaboration with the youth-serving non-profit, Young Futures. We’re looking very forward to parts 2 to 5.

Podcast: Every Parent Needs to Have ‘The AI Talk’, Life with Machines, October 20, 2025.

Video & Substack: Every Parent Needs to Have ‘The AI Talk’ - Help Gen-Z Thrive in the AI World, Not Just Survive, Life With Machines, Oct 20, 2025.

Tips via Instagram here.

4. “The Internet Your Kids Use is Not Like The One You Grew Up With…

No one breaks down important topics into bite-sized chunks as well as the Family IT Guy. Take three minutes to listen to the top 3 tech myths he feels must be debunked for parents today. It will be worth your time.

Podcast: The Internet Your Kids Use is Not Like the One You Grew Up With, The Family IT Guy Podcast, October 16, 2025, 3-min listen.

Video: same 3 min, in Instagram video form

5. Here’s to Aspiring Plumbers, Mechanics, and Electricians!

What types of workers will the world need in a future dominated by AI?

For those of us with young kids, it may be wise to save our 529 funds for trade school, rather than a university degree. Ginny Yurich of 1000 Hours Outside breaks it down below.

1000 Hours Outside

The Coming Age of Durable Work

A few weeks ago, I read an article that’s been echoing in my mind ever since. The author described how, after moving to Texas, she was stunned by the cost of hiring tradespeople; plumbers, HVAC technicians, electricians. Everything else in her new town was cheaper than California: gas, groceries, real estate. But when her air conditioner broke, the bill…

Read more

6 months ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Ginny Yurich

And in case you missed her August 2025 interview with Matt Britton (author of Generation AI) on the skills our kids will need in the future job market, listen (or re-listen) via these links here - Apple podcast or Spotify.

6. Rethinking How We Document Our Kids’ Lives

Recording every moment in our and our children’s lives has become so commonplace, it’s almost an unconscious habit for many of us. But how does documenting everything impact our children?

In this oh-so-relatable (and somewhat heartbreaking) post by Shona Schwartz of Always On, she explores the unconscious lessons we unintentionally teach our children when we constantly pull out our phones to record their latest activity or achievement. Perhaps it’s time to catch ourselves, if this is our habit, assess what we want our children to absorb about their value, and whether we want them habituated to performing for cameras.

Always On

When the Moment Becomes the Photo:

It happened on a Tuesday afternoon at the park. One of my kids had just mastered the monkey bars—something he'd been working on for weeks. His face lit up with pure joy and accomplishment as he swung from bar to bar…

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6 months ago · Shona

And if we want a refresher on how and where to safely share photos we do take, CyberFareedah has ideas here, plus info on new child content predators are seeking.

7. Interest in Pinterest?

Are your kids asking to use Pinterest? It seems delightful - “maybe they’ll create vision boards for holiday decor and baking recipes!” (we imagine) - but that’s usually not what happens there. Youth use it differently, as The Common Parent shares below.

8. A Plea to Apple, from a Research Author & Parent

Dr. Jean Twenge is one of the leading researchers and voices tracking tech’s impact on the generations who have grown up with it. Though her newest book, The Ten Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World, is a best-seller, even she struggles to protect her own kids from the perils of tech with which she’s so familiar.

In her recent op-ed for The Washington Post (reposted via her Substack, Generation Tech) she begs Apple for fixes that would empower parents. Let’s hope they listen.

Generation Tech

I tried to protect my kids from the internet. Here's what happened.

Note: This post is a version of the op-ed I wrote for the Washington Post last month in connection with the release of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. I’m reprinting it here with my encouragement to read it on the Post site for a fun pop-up surprise (no, not the paywall – a pop-up that shows exactly what’s wrong with our current free-for…

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6 months ago · 68 likes · 3 comments · Jean M. Twenge

9. Hear From a Mom Who’s Been Through This Before

Melanie Hempe’s ScreenStrong is the resource that finally solidified my resolve to regain control over screen use in our home and complete our screen detox/reset.

If you’re seeking a resource that gives you the fortitude and resolve to tackle screen use that you may feel has extended beyond your control, give Melanie’s story a listen. Her eldest son’s gaming addiction, and the differing experiences of her three younger kids raised without screens, are compelling and motivating. To hear her youngest two sons tell it in their own words to 1000 Hours Outside’s Ginny Yurich, click here.

This week Melanie is speaking to Nicki Petrossi of Scrolling2Death about her family’s story, and what parents need to know about screen impacts on developing brains.

Her post on her Substack this week is also incredibly compelling, sharing the results of an observational study showing the impact of social media on developing brains.

10. CA Joins Minnesota in Requiring Warning Labels on Social Media

Users under age 18 in California will now join their peers in Minnesota in seeing a warning label when accessing social media, similar to the warning on cigarettes and other harmful substances. State legislation is a small but important step toward giving awareness and agency back to users, and flipping the script on industry PR.

11. Support for Teens & For Parents

For Teens: Former teacher Kat Zilka walks us through her students’ heartbreaking responses to an assigned English essay on The Social Dilemma documentary, and how this spurred her to start Dis/Connect to collaborate with youth and design support for digital wellness. Everything she says in this interview is gold!

Podcast: (Most Replayed) Kids Are In A Digital Crisis - And What We Can Do with Kat Zilka of Dis/Connect, Screen Less, Play More, Oct 15, 2025

For Parents: Ian’s gaming addiction led him, once becoming a parent, to re-evaluate his screen use and turn his attention toward helping other parents like him break free. He started SelfCtrl to help those struggling to get a grip on their own screen time so they may lead their own families into healthier screen habits.

Podcast: Boys, Video Games, and Self-Control with Ian McCready, Healthy Screen Habits, October 22, 2025.

12. And In Case We Need A Reminder Why All of This is So Important….