Raised on AI

When my oldest child was born, I immediately set up Gmail and Twitter accounts in her name. I broadly announced her birth online and proceeded to plaster her photo across all sorts of platforms. In short, I began creating her digital footprint long before she could stand on her own two feet.

Fast-forward a couple of years to when my second kid came, and I had essentially the opposite reaction. I wanted to make sure I preserved her privacy. I didn’t want her birthday to be a matter of public record or her face to feed the algorithms. In time, I would go back and scrub much of the early footprint I had created for my first child as well.

What happened? I watched the promise of the early internet give way to the reality of its potential for abuse. I myself was already fully in the throes of smartphone and social media obsession. My wife, a pediatric nurse, grew increasingly alarmed at the number of children admitted to her hospital struggling with the effects of things like body dysmorphia or cyberbullying as a result of interactions on social media. We became those parents. The ones whose kids carry flip phones and aren’t on TikTok.

We are not alone in this. A surprising—maybe troubling—number of people I know who work at big tech companies also keep their kids at arm’s distance from technology. They lock down their phones, if they have phones at all, and keep them off social media. Hell, even Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t publicly post his children’s faces on Facebook or Instagram.

If the desire to limit kids’ use of technology was once a subcurrent, it has become a raging flood. Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling 2024 book The Anxious Generation helped propel the issue into the mainstream (despite criticisms of his conclusions from some developmental psychologists). Last year, Australia became the first country to enact a social media ban for children under 16. Other nations, from Austria to Indonesia, have followed suit, announcing similar bans. The US Supreme Court recently upheld an age verification law in Texas, which acts as a de facto ban, and several states have flirted with their own measures. School districts all over the country are banning educational devices like iPads and Chromebooks in favor of actual books. Kids themselves seem to be embracing this tech skepticism too: The hottest gadget among the Gen Alpha set is a vintage Sony Walkman.

We have to prepare our children to live in the actual world we have actually created, not the one we wish we had.

Yet there is no hiding from technology. It permeates nearly everything, everywhere. And so we have to prepare our children to live in the actual world we have actually created, not the one we wish we had. How can we help kids survive and thrive in what we have wrought?