〰️ 🌷Welcome back from spring break and holiday celebrations, for all who spent the last weeks welcoming springtime in its many forms and customs. 🪻〰️
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).
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. 📣 🔊📢
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
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.
Wow. Impressed as usual! Keep it up.
What an incredible breakdown of everything going on in the tech world! Appreciate it!