Parenting, Technology, and A.I.
One year after its publication on March 26, 2024, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt sparked a global movement addressing the harmful effects of smartphones and social media on children. The book framed the issue as a collective action problem, offering practical solutions that empowered communities to act together. Its success reflects a cultural tipping point, driven by widespread frustration with technology’s impact on youth, and hints at broader prospects for societal renewal amidst rapid technological change. Rather than following their original plan to promote the book and then take a break, the authors witnessed rapid cultural shifts: schools, states, and countries like Australia implemented phone-free policies and raised social media age limits to 16. The book resonated with parents, teachers, and communities exhausted by the post-Covid intensification of screen-time battles, amplifying a collective desire for change.
In a column at The Free Press last month (Jonathan Haidt: Taking Back Childhood from Phones-Finally) Haidt discusses how the movement rests on four norms:
Norm 1: No Smartphones Before High School (or Age 14)
Delay smartphones until high school (age 14), using basic phones instead. This counters kids’ pleas of exclusion-“I’m the only one without one!”-with a clear norm. If a quarter of families commit, no child feels left out. Moms lead via groups like Smartphone Free Childhood, growing from a 2024 post to 300,000 parents by March 2025, amplifying collective resolve.
Norm 2: No Social Media Before 16
Bar social media until 16, a practical global target, given its inappropriate content and data exploitation for kids as young as 13. Bipartisan U.S. lawmakers and Australia’s 2025 law (enforced by companies) back this shift. Surgeon General Murthy pushes tobacco-style warnings. Parents and politicians, seeing the harm firsthand, drive rapid adoption of this protective norm.
Norm 3: Phone-Free Schools
Ban phones in schools from bell to bell, uniting left and right on education’s value. Moms sparked it; governors like Sanders (Arkansas) and Newsom (California, by 2026) scaled it. Countries like Brazil and Denmark followed. Teachers report revived school spirit-“laughter in hallways”-as students escape distraction machines for six hours daily.
Norm 4: More Independence, Free Play, and Responsibility in the Real World
Encourage free play and independence over screen time, reviving pre-1980s childhoods. Progress is slow as anxious parents hesitate: “Who else is doing it?” LetGrow.org’s initiatives, like kids ordering food solo, inspire change. Common in Northern Europe, less so in the U.S., this norm seeks a richer, real-world childhood.
The Ezra Klein Show
In this interview on the Ezra Klein Show, Jonathan Haidt delves into how social media and rapidly advancing A.I. technologies manipulate teenagers’ intense desire for prestige, subverting age-old paths to esteem-like becoming a skilled archer, leader, or craftsman-with instant, superficial validation. He points to Famefy, a troubling app that supplies lonely kids with A.I.-generated followers, showering them with fake praise and hearts to fill the void of real connection, requiring no effort or merit. Haidt warns that A.I.’s evolution, shifting from omniscience to omnipotence, is poised to eliminate friction from human desires, especially in relationships.
He imagines A.I. companions-infinitely responsive and tailored-eclipsing human interactions, a chilling prospect informed by his own isolated childhood. With 2025 as a pivotal year before A.I. becomes deeply woven into existence, Haidt stresses the urgency of protecting children from this seductive, frictionless digital landscape. He advocates fiercely for a childhood grounded in authentic, real-world experiences-full of challenges and consequences-over the hollow omnipotence A.I. promises, fearing the developmental cost of such artificial allure.
I think the most compelling part about the exchange was Klein talking about his challenges growing up and how he’s glad A.I. didn’t exist when he was a kid because of the difficulties he had with friction relationships and being bullied. I recommend the full show, which clocks in a little over an hour. Yes, I listen to a podcast by a liberal because it’s not a liberal podcast. Klein has interesting guests and discussions that make me think. And we could use a lot more thinking before we fire off publicly without doing that first. I have linked to the chapters specifically about relationships and A.I. but make time to watch the whole thing.
Chapter: “Success and Attention”
Is there danger that the way you want us to raise children is actually suffused in nostalgia for an economy, for a politics, that no longer exists? That it’s not being deformed – it’s being adapted?
Right. In theory, yes. There is a danger of that. And history would suggest examples of it. Every generation is wary of the technology that the kids are using.
If it turned out that our kids were flourishing, then I would just be an old man shaking his head at the clouds. But our kids are the least flourishing generation we know of ever – certainly in modern times.
Chapter: “AI and Parenting”
I was a very lonely kid. I did not have many friends. What if I had a lot of A.I. friends and that began to pattern my expectations of other human beings? And then when other people did not fulfill those expectations that was a frustration to me? And it made my A.I. community that much more alluring?
This scares the hell out of me. I’m not saying that on a 20-year time frame we won’t adapt. But on a 5- or 10-year time frame, we don’t even know how to think about it.
The way we adapt is by preventing kids from having these friendships.
I’ll draw on a really insightful analysis from a Christian writer, Andy Crouch. I did a session with him at N.Y.U. We had a conversation mostly on Chapter 8 of “The Anxious Generation,” which was about spirituality.
And Crouch said something so powerful that I always bring up, because it’s so helpful. He said: What is magic? Magic is an instant, effortless effect on the world.
You know: Snap your finger, something appears. It’s always been the human dream. And technology is essentially magic. Technology allows us to do things. You want a car to come pick you up, press a button – hey, here’s this car. So the technology is magic.
And he says: Now let’s look at how children are formed. How do you get an adult?
And again, he’s coming from a Christian perspective, so they care a lot about the moral formation, the religious formation of their children.
He says: The three areas of formation for children are home, school and church – or any religious organization. Those are the three areas. And all three of those areas are now colonized by tech.
Even in church. I’m hearing from pastors who say they ask kids to pull out their Bible. And kids will pull out their phone. They look at the pastor, but then they go on and do something else.
So I think we have to stop. This is not even about the content. We have to stop saying: Oh, we just need better content moderation. No, we don’t. We need to realize kids have to go through a childhood in the real world with other kids within a moral universe where they experience the consequences of their own actions. And they have to learn how to deal with real people who are frustrating.
And if we give them A.I. companions that they can order around, that will always flatter them, we are creating people who no one will want to employ or marry. So we’ve got to stop.
Chapter: “Flourishing”
I’m teaching these kids. If you want to send me someone who’s going to do well at N.Y.U. Stern, don’t send me someone who has mastered Instagram. Send me someone who is home-schooled and never had any of this garbage. They’re able to pay attention. They’re able to read a book.
Our brains are large language models, in a sense. Don’t send me kids whose L.L.M.s were filled in by TikTok. Send me a kid whose L.L.M. was figured within a stable moral community. And that kid is going to be adapted for the future, because he didn’t have the current technology when he was growing up.
The current technology is a giant obstacle to human development. So if you want to prepare your kid for the future, think very carefully about the technology you immerse them in.
Ezra Klein Show Transcript in the N.Y. Times
Exactly. And this is why I’m so passionate about how we have to move quickly this year, 2025. This is really our last year before A.I. really has a big impact on life.
I disagree with Haidt about this being our last year. Skynet is already here. It’s been here. For decades. Let me jerk wheel for a minute to make this argument. I’ve been in information security for my entire career. When I decided after several years in the working world to go back to school, I chose an MBA program in Information Assurance at the University of Dallas over going to law school, principally because though I love the law, I didn’t want to practice law, I wanted to do security. I viewed the law degree as a pathway to credentialism — a path that many security people with alphabet soups after their names also fall victim to.
I told you that story to tell you this story.
Information Assurance has been rebranded as Cybersecurity. Philosophically I have my differences with it, but Cybersecurity is a much more accessible concept to people than Information Assurance, which is esoteric to most people. It’s why my company focuses on concepts of assurance, while my not-for-profit organization uses the Cybersecurity language. Cybersecurity is instantly accessible to parents, STEM kids, and the public at large, while the consultancy practice is focused on training business leaders to view security challenges as a business risk and make decisions based on demonstrating assurance, which is a Standard of Due Care.
Steering the car back onto the road, every generation has parenting pitfalls, childhood challenges, and teenage trauma that are made more complex by technology but that exist within a realm parental assurance. Raising children is the ultimate Standard of Due Care test for parents. We can neglect it and things may workout. We can get everything right by the book and end up with a colossal disaster. Everything in between rests on doing the best we can to uphold that parental Standard of Due Care because the balance of the ledger ends up there much more than it does on the false hope of “maybe it will be fine”. The former is where we want to be, the latter is where it’s easy to fall into the trap of responding to problems rather than providing guidance along the way. Believe me. I know.
Brent Bozell is an American conservative activist and writer who founded the Media Research Center to combat liberal media bias and has authored several books on the topic. To paraphrase a quote from him from a quarter century ago, he said, “Raising children is a tough job, and the left’s cultural agenda makes it even harder by pushing values that undermine traditional parenting.” Traditional parenting is not confined to conservative parents. Struggling against those kinds of undermining values is far beyond our politics and the letters after our names. It’s not tribal, it’s universal — meaning everyone can understand it because we’ve all faced it either as parents or in our own childhoods across the generations.
Let’s quickly bounce through the last century and examine the intrusion of the outside influences into what was once a smaller realm of parenting largely tied to community and creaturehood. Think about Haidt referencing his discussion with the writer Andy Crouch about parenting and spirituality and how the intrusion of technology has the parenthood problem by several orders of magnitude.
- Cartoons: “Steamboat Willie” came out in 1928.
- Movies: From silent films to “talkies” where the image went from the immediacy of theater to a window into an imaginary fantasy world.
- Television: TV brought the window into our homes.
- Rock and roll rebellion: From James Dean (a true rock and roller to be sure) to Elvis to Dylan to The Beatles. In just a couple of decades we had Tipper Gore putting warning stickers on the records.
- Mass marketing: Dime store novels to newspapers to magazines to television to the internet.
- Food marketing: “A part of this nutritious breakfast” is a perfect catchphrase for this concept.
- Video games: Did anyone think Pong was a problem?
- Cable television: Storer Cable, Garland Texas. Cable blurred the self limiting daily television schedule.
- Cross promotions: The back of the cereal box is a good example of this.
- Movies made to push merch: From the success of Star Wars toys we got Return of the Jedi with muppets and teddy bears getting in the way of a good story. Then the year following came Gremlins, the meanest movie ever made which was a hatefest built around selling Gizmo toys.
- The internet: Took the fantasy window from the family room and den TV to a computer hidden away in a nook or office room and then into kids bedrooms. The limiting aspect of a television broadcast schedule was itself eliminated at last.
Look at the scary elements of the Internet that come into the home by wire or air: chat rooms, social media, and now A.I. But there have always been the offline threats, even from the mind. Daydreaming, Toxic friendships, Bullying isn’t just a physical threat, it’s the fear that it instills in the mind of a child.
I’m GenXer and we are wired a little differently. We didn’t come of age with the Internet as Millennials did. We grew up with all the things above that preceded it. Many of us were latchkeys and there were wild streaks that manifested with that. We were locked out on Saturdays and during the summer. We went to church on Sunday. We rode our bikes and explored the neighborhood.
The wild streak manifested itself in various ways. Baseballs into windows and sheetrock, knives and couches, matches and household accelerants, and hammers and hearths. In some ways we were literal “hackers” before the term became defined as it has. I chose my career bath largely due to the movie WarGames.
All of these technological terrors are ultimately tools.
From Shane (1953):
A gun is a tool, Marion. No better and no worse than any other tool – an axe, a shovel, or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.
As a three decade information security professional and a three time dad concurrently for most of that time, let me say this about that, borrowing from Gary Cooper in Shane.
“A.I. is a tool, Marion. No better and no worse than any other tool – an Internet connection, cable television, or anything. A,I. is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.”
Epilogue
Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says
Ashley Belanger of Ars Technica breaks down a Pew Research Center survey highlights a significant divide between AI experts and the U.S. public on artificial intelligence’s future. Surveying 1,013 experts and 5,410 representative Americans, it found experts far more optimistic: 56% predict a positive impact on the U.S. over the next 20 years, versus 17% of the public. Additionally, 76% of experts expect personal benefits from AI, compared to only 24% of the public, with nearly half of Americans anticipating harm.
Public sentiment leans toward concern-51% are more worried than excited about AI’s rise-driven by fears of deepfakes, job displacement, and bias. Awareness of AI’s potential has grown over four years of Pew surveys, yet skepticism persists. Both groups distrust government regulation, desiring more control and doubting industry responsibility. Experts believe Americans use AI daily, often unknowingly, while the public remains wary, underscoring a need for inclusive dialogue as AI evolves. The survey results dovetail neatly into the popularity of John Haidt’s book and the movement it helped to generate and focus on technology resources for parents.
I’ll close with the Babylon Bee, which always seems to have a pitch perfect post on any topic.
‘AI Is Totally Safe And Development Should Continue Rapidly,’ Says Totally Genuine, 100% Human Scientist https://t.co/maRBoqryhT pic.twitter.com/vXvh7G6qsc
– The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 5, 2025
