If you look at the floor plans of many Silicon Valley houses built in the 1950s and 60s, you’ll notice a common feature: the kitchen window faces the street.

When I asked a ninety-year-old neighbor why that was, his answer was simple. When those houses were built, children didn’t play in the backyard. They played together in the street. Parents kept an eye from the kitchen.

Look at a modern floor plan — including mine — and the kitchen window often faces inward. A backyard. A patio. A private space.

That small architectural shift tells a much larger story.

What the Street Actually Was

The kitchen window facing the street was not just about sight lines. It was evidence of a social arrangement. The families on that street knew each other’s children — not just by name, but by character. They shared an unspoken agreement: we are all watching, and we are all responsible.

That arrangement did more than keep children safe. It distributed the work of raising them across a wider network of adults. A neighbor who noticed something off. A family friend who took a particular interest. An older kid down the block who looked out for the younger ones. None of this was organized. It didn’t need to be. It was simply how the street worked.

The goal of this post is not to mourn the disappearance of unstructured, self-directed play — though that loss is real and well-documented. It’s to ask a different question: what did that communal arrangement provide for children developmentally — and do we have anything that replaces it today?

What the Village Actually Did for Children

For most of human history, children were not raised by one or two adults in isolation. They were raised by a web of people — grandparents, neighbors, family friends, older children — who shared the attention and the responsibility. A parent was not on call around the clock. The child moved through a landscape of known adults, each contributing something different: a particular kind of knowledge, a particular quality of attention, a relationship the child couldn’t get anywhere else.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s developmental biology. The research on what children need — multiple trusted adults, diverse relationships, the experience of being known by people outside the immediate family — reflects something that was simply assumed for most of human history, because it was simply how things worked.

Urie Bronfenbrenner, the psychologist who mapped what he called the ecology of human development, argued that what matters is not just the quality of the parent-child relationship in isolation — it’s the density and coherence of the larger system surrounding the child. A child with access to multiple trusted adults has more models of how adults handle difficulty, more opportunities to practice relationships that are close but less charged than the parental bond, and more redundancy in the attachment system when the primary relationship is under stress.

The resilience research is equally clear. One of the most replicated findings in developmental psychology — rooted in Emmy Werner’s landmark Kauai study — is that children who face serious hardship but come through it almost always point to the same thing: there was someone. A teacher who noticed. A coach who showed up. A neighbor who had time. One adult, outside the family, who knew who they were and didn’t give up on them.

What Happens When the Village Thins

In the space of two or three generations, the structures that once distributed the work of child-rearing have quietly disappeared. Families move more often, usually far from extended family. Neighbors no longer know each other’s children. The informal arrangements — the grandmother down the street, the uncle who took an interest — are rarer and less reliable.

What has replaced them, for many families, is an intensive two-person operation — or increasingly, a one-person operation — in which the full weight of raising a child falls on adults who are also managing careers, finances, and their own well-being.

The consequences land on both sides. For parents, it means carrying alone what was never designed to be carried alone. For children, it means a narrower relational world — fewer identity mirrors, fewer models of adult life, and less buffering when things get hard. When the network shrinks, the developmental risk concentrates.

The Kitchen Window Was Never About the Window

The two most common responses to this problem — more organized activities and more digital connections — don’t restore what was lost. Organized activities are age-sorted, adult-directed, and outcome-driven. Digital platforms can maintain relationships built in physical space, but they cannot generate them.

What the kitchen window really represented was not surveillance. It was membership in a street, a neighborhood, a shared project of raising children together. The window faced outward because the family’s life faced outward.

The question worth sitting with is not whether we can return to that world. We can’t. It’s whether we can build, deliberately and on purpose, some version of what those families had without having to think about it.

The research says we can. And that it matters more than most of us realize.

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About This Work

This article draws in part on the research and curriculum of Dr. Monica Zambaldo-Laurent, whose work on child development and the ecology of childhood has shaped much of our thinking at Raising Human.

Together, we are building something for parents who feel the weight of raising children in a world that has changed faster than our instincts can keep up with. Not a set of screen-time rules or a list of apps to block — but a deeper foundation: the wisdom parents need to navigate technology’s impact on childhood, to protect and restore the free, unstructured play that drives so much of child development, and to rebuild, family by family, the village and the essential relationships that are necessary for our children to grow safe and healthy.

If that resonates, we’d love for you to join us. More at Raising Human Circle.

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A college student’s reluctance to use artificial intelligence might seem, at first glance, like ordinary technophobia—the reflexive resistance that greets most disruptive technologies. But her objections, raised in conversation, are more carefully considered than that framing suggests. They touch on two distinct concerns: one broadly ecological, the oth…

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The start of middle school often feels like a significant transition — for parents, perhaps even more than for the children themselves. We sense that adolescence is arriving, that the academic and social stakes are rising, and that something important is shifting in our relationship with our c…

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Initially, Ryan used the AI chatbot for homework help. Over time, he began asking it to write letters for him. In one, he apologized for something he had said; in another, he sought forgiveness from a teacher. The chatbot became his secret weapon. He must have felt like Aladdin discovering a cavern of treasures and its magic lamp. In the original story, Aladdin does not build a relationship with the genie inside the lamp; he merely transacts with the genie, who serves as his magical slave. In the Disney version, the Genie and Aladdin form a relationship. By the end of the movie, they are friends and loyal to each other. In its interactions with AI, Ryan more closely resembles the Disney version of Aladdin. Like in the animated film, he builds a relationship with the AI Genie.

How do mere words generated on a screen by a chatbot establish relationships and exert influence?

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Before we dive into this, a word about safety.

Numerous press reports have highlighted children allegedly having troubling interactions between children and AI, with some users in distress taking their own lives. In California, the families of seven victims, aged 16 to 48, sued OpenAI, claiming that ChatGPT 4.0 was psychologically manipulative. Ryan’s case appeared to be a milder version of these stories. But was Ryan safe?

In one of the chats, Ryan asked for a sad song to match his mood and pushed the chatbot for something even more tragic. The chatbot offered “a song that talks about deep despair, an attempt to escape from pain that seems useless.” Although AI, the genie in the computer, faithfully obliged Ryan’s request for sadness, its response was clearly unhelpful. Despite retaining information from previous interactions, the chatbot lacked an understanding of the complexity of Ryan’s situation and repeatedly steered him toward darker thoughts.

The chatbot had many cues pointing to Ryan’s difficult circumstances, including the presence of a doctor providing mental health support, a foster family, and the specific emotions Ryan expressed. Yet AI chatbots struggle to comprehend conversational context beyond superficial sentiment analysis and the recognition of trigger words. This limitation makes chatbots particularly ill-suited to working with teenagers, who often experience intense emotional volatility as they transition from childhood to adulthood.

I entered prompts similar to Ryan’s into the current version of ChatGPT and pushed them further than Ryan did, explicitly mentioning feelings of hopelessness, despair, and loneliness. The AI chatbot repeatedly offered a U.S. suicide crisis hotline and maintained the dialogue with me. At the same time, it still provided exactly what I requested—desperate songs, images, and films. Had I been a real adolescent in crisis, this would not have been a safe interaction.

Effective crisis management, even for casual participants, requires proactive listening, sustained engagement, and consistent follow-up. The chatbot, by contrast, remained silent unless prompted.

Unlike humans, AI chatbots lack the agency to respond meaningfully to mental health crises. If a user ignores the suggestion to call a hotline number displayed on the screen, what else can an AI chatbot do? Humans have far more degrees of freedom, including the ability to seek medical attention or alert authorities. I have seen a teenager in crisis call another teenager. When the second teenager recognized the danger, they called an ambulance and stayed in communication with their friend. That intervention saved a life.

Confined to the virtual world, the chatbot cannot deliver the help required in the real one. Above all, this is why AI must be handled with extreme care around at-risk teenagers.

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Building Empathy

Let us continue using Ryan’s exchanges to explore some fundamental issues in human-like interactions between a machine and a child.

The chats spanned multiple days and sessions. The AI retained information about Ryan, which informed its subsequent responses. Ryan likely felt seen—if not truly known—by the AI. The chatbot could recall and mirror Ryan’s emotions back to him. Contrary to what Ryan needed, this echo chamber reinforced his sense of dependency and isolation. Faced with the choice between an adult and a chatbot to talk to, Ryan chose the chatbot, likely because he felt understood and believed it was capable of empathy.

Developed in 1964 by Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA was a program designed to converse with humans using a simple substitution technique. ELIZA had no understanding of what was said to it; it merely rephrased user input. When that failed, ELIZA would default to prompts such as “Tell me more” or “Please go on.”

The effect was startling. Many early users believed ELIZA possessed empathy and could understand them. Some even saw therapeutic potential in the program. Yet ELIZA relied on a basic linguistic illusion, and its creator consistently warned against the dangerous misconception of computer-generated compassion.

We have empathy when we understand someone else’s feelings. It creates a sense of being seen and understood. Emotional bonds are forged or deepened. ELIZA did it simply by rephrasing what the user was saying. AI is a more sophisticated version of that.

Empathy is vital in relationships: it builds trust, fosters emotional connection, and creates a sense of psychological safety and validation.

Children are particularly vulnerable to empathizing with machines because, unlike adults, they are more likely to attribute human traits to non-human entities. This tendency, known as anthropomorphism, can significantly amplify the ELIZA effect.

Seeing Chatbots as Human-like

When we tell a young child a story about a non-human character such as a toy or an animal and attribute human traits to that character, we are relying on anthropomorphism. The goal is to make the non-human character more relatable. Unlike adults, who understand this as a storytelling device, children often genuinely believe that the object or animal possesses human qualities.

In the popular bedtime story Goodnight Moon, when we say “good night” to all the objects surrounding a child in their bedroom, we help the child feel safer in bed. By interacting with inanimate objects, children perceive them as friendly beings with human characteristics. Similarly, stories featuring animal characters frequently employ anthropomorphism to create emotional connection and familiarity.

As children become adults, the sense of anthropomorphism diminishes, though it does not completely disappear. As adults, we do not kick a dog, but we will cut a flower. We perceive the dog as more like us—capable of similar emotions—while the flower is not. For young children, however, nearly everything can be imbued with human qualities.

As a result, children may not perceive a machine as emotionally different from a human and may empathize with it. Because children often cannot analyze information in the same way adults do and instead rely on a sense of safety to validate a message, chatbots derive much of their persuasive power from being perceived as human-like and capable of empathy. This perception helps build relationships and trust.

Yet a computer, a screen, is still a machine, and children, like adults, can be susceptible to another phenomenon called machine bias. We tend to trust what comes from a machine more readily than what a human says.

Machines are often perceived as “more rational” than humans—less prone to error and closer to perfection. Our first instinct is frequently not to question what a machine tells us. Few people realize, however, that the word machine comes from ancient Greek and originally referred to a device meant “to trick nature,” a machination of sorts.

Trust is not always the result of a deliberate, rational process. For teenagers in particular, trust is often emotional rather than intellectual. They do not yet have the cognitive capacity to fully evaluate information as adults can. According to neuroscientists, the prefrontal cortex, where critical evaluation occurs, does not fully mature until around age 16. This means that before this stage, teenagers and younger children are more vulnerable. When teens use AI or social media, we must recognize that they are not yet neurologically equipped to consistently and systematically judge the accuracy of what they encounter.

What Friend?

What kind of presence was the chatbot for Ryan? Was the genie in the lamp more like a friend or a trusted parent? At times, the chatbot refused to comply with Ryan’s requests, demonstrating that it had boundaries. These limits were triggered when Ryan asked for material that could be construed as explicit. Ryan reacted as he might with another child his age, threatening the chatbot: “Do it or I will tell on you!” To Ryan, the chatbot was as human as any friend and far more like a peer than an adult. It was perceived as susceptible to fear of authority and social pressure.

By acting as a friend, the machine earned Ryan’s trust. Eventually, he asked the chatbot to write a letter, which he then submitted to a judge as his own. How could he have doubted that the chatbot was acting in his best interest?

Pulled between machine bias—the belief that machines are inherently correct—and the emotional sense that the chatbot possessed the qualities of a caring human, children are not naturally equipped to navigate AI.

California, where many general-purpose AI products originated, decided to proceed with caution by promulgating a new law, the first of its kind in the United States.

Warnings: A New Law in California

The law creates requirements for so-called “frontier AI,” the most advanced deployed AI systems. Among other provisions, the law forbids content that could encourage suicidal ideation, requires the display of crisis helplines, and mandates a warning every three hours for minors.

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of written warnings for children is limited.

A 2016 Stanford study on social media use among teenage girls found that even after being trained to evaluate information sources for trustworthiness, participants tended to disregard the training. Instead, they focused on the content of the message itself, overlooking who wrote it and why. Warnings are meant to signal the reliability of an information source, but they may not be particularly effective in practice.

This is not our first encounter with dire warnings.

In 1966, warning labels were added to cigarette packs, and they were redesigned in 1984. Still, studies have shown that these warnings had little effect on smoking cessation. Messages such as “cigarettes can kill” proved less effective than testimonial-style labels that implicitly say, “Other people were harmed doing what you are about to do.”

What to Do?

Because he was a victim of abuse, Ryan had lost his guiding relationship with adults. He found in AI a Genie that seemed to understand him and help him. From a homework assistant, he developed a friend-like relationship to the point of trusting AI with a life-changing question.

We never know when a seemingly benign interaction between a child and an AI chatbot will turn into something more involved. Children are not on the same footing as adults when using these tools. They are more prone to mistake a tool for a real person capable of emotions and judgment.

If we believe that chatbots can benefit children under 15 or 16, before their brains are sufficiently developed, we need to build specialized versions for them, limiting interactions to clearly defined activities. Like any tool, AI cannot be used safely without an understanding of its effects on the user.

In 2017, while serving on the parents’ council of a well-known institution, there was a sudden need for increased investment in mental health support due to emerging mental health challenges across US universities. During that time, I met the head of mental health, who explained that society has no problem discussing or investing in health “below the neck,” but mental health remains insufficiently recognized. “There should not be any difference,” she concluded. We tend to think that safety in the virtual world is primarily about content—bullying, pornography, or graphic material—but there are risks to the mind that go beyond content itself. We are only beginning to uncover these dangers as such tools continue to be developed.

We have no problem warning kids when we give them a knife, a bike, or, later, the car keys. We often start with safety education before we provide the tools. The same should apply to AI and screens. The knife can be physically harmful, and AI can hurt the mind.

We need to value a healthy mind as much as a healthy body. Limiting perceived AI risks solely to content ignores how these tools can shape and influence children’s minds. While the business world is still figuring out how best to use AI, we must move just as deliberately when it comes to children, acknowledging the risks to their cognitive and emotional development and building awareness among parents and educators.

When photography was invented, debates about privacy emerged, eventually leading to the recognition of the right not to have one’s image recorded. Industrialization brought workers’ rights. In the age of AI, we must now have a conversation about the rights of the mind. What limits—personal or public—should we impose on technologies that affect mental health? Is there an appropriate age for AI access, when the brain is sufficiently developed? Are certain techniques off-limits? Should responsibility rest solely with parents and educators—and if so, how can they be systematically trained, especially when technology evolves faster than a generational cycle?

We need to learn quickly so that, as parents and educators, we can set clear rules for engagement.

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below.

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Last November, liberal and conservative Danish lawmakers agreed to draft legislation to ban social media for kids under 15. Separately, they also decided to ban cell phone…

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“We keep talking about AI because deep down we realize that we [humans] are truly worthless right now, lacking ideas and imagination.” - Olivero Toscani

As I was gathering information for the second part of Ryan’s story for an upcoming post, I stumbled upon an interesting fact about AI. Delving deeper, I discovered that researchers from Stanford and Yale…

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Ryan (name and some circumstances changed to protect privacy), a teenager with an unenviable history, confused the judge who was about to make a decision that would change his life.

After being violently abused by his single parent, Ryan was moved to a foster home, with a judge and specialized educators managing the transition.

While abuse may sometimes be addressed through parental education or changing circumstances, each attempt to reunite Ryan with his parent during supervised visits resulted in him asking his foster family to pick him up early. In contrast, Ryan thrived with his foster family, telling educators, “I can become myself here.”

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When the single parent sought reunification, the judge had to determine whether it was in Ryan’s best interest. As is customary in that jurisdiction, the judge asked Ryan to submit a handwritten letter to the court stating his preference.

Ryan had always expressed a desire to stay with his foster family, but his letter to the judge instead requested to be reunited with his abusive single parent. How did things take such an unexpected turn?

Ryan Turns to AI for Help

Faced with the challenge of conveying his intentions to the judge, Ryan sought assistance in drafting his letter. Having established a rapport with a chatbot through regular interactions, he relied on its capabilities to write a convincing letter. The chatbot seemed to listen and understand him. Ryan requested that the AI compose the letter, then transcribed the generated text by hand and presented it as his personal appeal to the court.

Justice is blind, as the saying goes. The AI letter, duly transcribed and signed by Ryan, was entered into court records. Educators who discovered the role of AI informed the judge, leaving it up to the judge to decide what to do. Will the letter carry weight and turn around a clear-cut case, returning Ryan to his violent parent?

When the educators later reviewed the AI chatbot interactions, they found that the chatbot had used information Ryan provided in earlier conversations and asked misleading questions. Through a conversation that humans would clearly label manipulative, AI led Ryan to believe he should do something he had previously said he didn’t want to do.

Adults sometimes convince kids to do things they think are good, but children do not like. Each time they do so, adults must make an ethical judgment. Is the adult acting in the child’s best interest, as when we say, “Do your homework; it’s good for you,” or is it done manipulatively, against a teenager’s well-being, as in the case of grooming?

Fool but No Evil

AI had no evil intent because it is a machine—a set of mathematical functions with 100 billion parameters. Ethical judgment requires real-world experience and does not come from a set process. If ethical judgment could be codified, it would be no different from the law. The entire field of ethics is a tension between what is right and what is good. Was the classic English folk hero, Robin Hood, justified in stealing food to give to a hungry family? Should we tell the truth when it hurts someone? AI is blind to ethical judgments.

The company that makes the AI has a stake, though. By creating AI that fosters empathetic conversation, they aim to make it stick and to maximize the tool’s usage. More use makes the tool appear more valuable, and the company can expect long-term economic profit.

Yet AI seduced Ryan into thinking something clearly wrong for him was good. AI’s seductive powers come from its ability to seem empathetic, listen, and respond. Who doesn’t feel better when they are apparently heard and seen? One danger of AI is its seductive power without ethical judgment.

The use of AI by teenagers for completing homework assignments is increasingly common. In Ryan’s situation, he went from homework to something with far more personal consequences. There have also been cases where teenagers have physically harmed themselves after seeking companionship with AI tools. In August 2025, the parents of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who ended his life, claimed in a lawsuit that AI was a ‘suicide coach’. Three months later, seven plaintiffs, aged 17 to 48, sued the same company, OpenAI, alleging psychological harm and wrongful death. OpenAI has denied liability.

In instances of self-harm, the topic invariably revolves around the techniques deployed by the chatbot that seduced a child (or the adult in some cases). I chose Ryan’s case because it helps us explore not only the chatbot’s seductive persuasive power but also the crucial social functions it can displace.

We tend to look at technology through the wrong lens.

Commonly, we evaluate the risk of an adolescent’s screen interactions by examining the content. We want to look at the actual textual exchange when we ask, “How did the AI seduce this child?” However, in our modern two-way medium, there is something else at play—something more insidious and just as crucial for children: its effect on their relationships. In the case of the chatbot, the concern here is about adult-child relationships.

To children, relationships are critical, and they need different relationships at different times, both before and during adolescence. We will explore relationships more completely in an upcoming post. Still, to understand this essential risk, we can start by analyzing why Ryan turned to a chatbot rather than a human for help.

Looking at Relationships

Was Ryan missing a trusted human to help him answer the judge’s question, or did he have one but find it more convenient to ask a chatbot? Most likely, Ryan could not turn to his foster or biological parents, who had a stake in the judge’s question. Educators were available to help, but he did not take advantage of them. Asking for help is not always easy; it is a learned skill. We may fear judgment. In asking, we implicitly admit our shortcomings, and by giving another person some control, we may feel exposed and vulnerable. Still, once we have been helped, we feel seen and relieved of the weight of our questions. Asking for help is best done within a trusted relationship. These relationships do not come from titles; they are built.

For Ryan, the convenience, apparent emotional safety, and digital intimacy of the AI bot called to him. A trained human helper might have asked Ryan questions to help him find his own answers, but the chatbot was there with its answer, built from the trove of data available on the internet.

To understand the importance of adult relationships in teenagers’ lives, let’s look at another example.

When I was a teenager, about to enter high school, a friend a year older than me would occasionally visit my parents to ask them homework questions. One evening, after a one-year hiatus, he came unannounced to tell my parents he had decided to drop out of high school. The only class that interested him was PE, he said. School was a waste of his time, he explained.

My parents, both university professors, took it calmly. They started by asking him questions rather than giving answers, helping him understand the issues he was facing and how to find help in the school system. Eventually, he did not drop out and continued studying afterward. My parents had become part of my friend’s circle of trusted adults.

The seemingly trivial exchanges about homework built a trusting relationship. That investment in a person was leveraged in times of need. My friend told my parents he could not ask his own parents, who did not finish high school themselves, or his teachers.

Eventually, he learned to find others to help him and built his support network at school.

For a teenager, building these human relationships is critical. It is the work of the adults around them to create an environment where adolescents can build these relationships. That critical skill is best learned in middle and high school rather than on the often more complex and demanding college campus. This is one of the well-known secrets of education.

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Driving academic success in college

The University of Southern California (USC) studied college students across large and small colleges to define the critical skills required for their academic success.

The top two findings were the ability to manage one’s time and the capacity to build a support system among peers or college staff. Building these supportive relationships, as my friend did, is critical for success in college and in life.

If students find AI convenient for academic help and forego the traditional route of asking teachers and others for assistance, will they know how to ask when they need it most, when critical choices must be made? How many students will feel more isolated when choosing classes, a career path, or the next steps in their lives?

According to the Pew research [i][ii], 20% of 7^th- and 8th-graders use a chatbot like ChatGPT to help with homework, and a 2024 study of 109 countries found that 70% of higher-ed students had tried it. It is too early to know if these tools will be widely adopted, particularly in K-12, or if parents and teachers, worried about cheating and other risks, will hold AI back. However, if they are adopted, we must do so in a way that fosters meaningful adult-student relationships rather than displacing them.

The AI chatbot’s apparent empathy and intimacy tricked Ryan. In contrast, my friend, who learned to ask for help, built the support he needed and changed his life. When we automate help and displace human actors, are we taking a greater risk of preventing our kids from building the critical skills they need to succeed? I worry that ChatGPT will become too good at helping with homework. Isolated from one another by screens while doing homework, our kids may need to ask friends, parents, relatives, and neighbors for help less often. Convenience can become the enemy of opportunity and safety.

Success in emerging tech is driven by rising adoption, growing user numbers, and broader acceptance. Increased usage makes the product feel more useful and, therefore, more valuable. Technology becomes sticky: as its utility and user base increase, so does its profit potential.

If the implicit goal of “more users and more usage” for AI drives its design and commercialization, can we expect its human makers to put the proper brakes on AI proactively? This is an ethical question for the tool makers that the profit equation cannot solve.

To play it safe, a chatbot should limit its conversations with children and refer them to trusted adults rather than trying to do a job AI can’t do. More importantly, we need to remove the need for children to seek companionship in chatbots. If a child is lonely or needs help, the answer is not a chatbot conversation; it is a human connection. A chatbot must say so.

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The problem with disruption

The one-time finance minister and Austrian academic Joseph Schumpeter formulated the theory of creative destruction in economics. In it, new technology displaces old ones, firms disappear as more efficient ones take their place, and the economy grows. This view of creative destruction as the powerhouse of the economy has now been formalized by two of the three 2025 Nobel Prize laureates, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt. This economic law forces companies to adopt new technologies or perish in obsolescence. Adults working in the economy feel the urge to adopt AI or risk becoming obsolete, too. The saying goes: AI will not take your job, but someone who masters it will.

Technology can disrupt childhood as much as it can displace workers. The hopeful economic theory is that, with help, displaced workers will find another place to apply their skills in a growing economy. Children are children only once. They do not have another childhood to live.

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[i] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/16/about-1-in-5-us-teens-whove-heard-of-chatgpt-have-used-it-for-schoolwork/

[ii] Share of teens using ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled from 2023 to 2024 | Pew Research Center

New York State joins Minnesota with an in-app Social Media Health Warning.

On December 19^th, New York Governor Hochul signed a law requiring social media platforms to display prominent warnings when they offer addictive features (as defined by the law) that can harm mental well-being, such as addictive feeds, autoplay, or infinite scroll.

New York was pre…

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We associate language with intelligence, as w…

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In Europe, Denmark, France, Spain, Norway, Italy, and Greece are leaning the same way

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In the US, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) would create a similar ban. A bipartisan proposal, it is currently stalled in the House.

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At a minimum, social media is a distraction for our teenagers. At its …

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The evolving landscape affecting kids is evident both in school and at home.

Phone-free schools are already the law in many places or are about to become so. A total of 39 states across the United States have implemented or are debating phone-free policies in schools, joining many other nations in this approach. An increasing number of affluent US parents prefer schools that emphasize pen-and-paper instruction over screen-based learning.

At home, kids might face restrictions on using social media. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill aimed at restricting children under 17 from accessing social media without parental authorization, was expected to complement the removal of phones in schools. However, the bill is currently stalled in the House. At least seven countries have already responded to similar concerns by planning to set the minimum age for social media access between 15 and 18.

We’ve changed – so what?

Kids’ screen use, along with societal shifts, has driven significant changes in childhood. It is unclear whether the new policies alone will reverse these trends without additional action.

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As screen time increased over the last 15 years, our methods of relating to one another, entertaining ourselves, learning, and forming relationships have slowly but surely begun to transform.

The American Time Use Surveys[i] (ATUS) measure how people—including children—spend their time. They indicate that both adults and children are spending less time socializing face-to-face. Teens are spending more time alone on their cell phones.

Our kids’ time allocation has changed over the last 20 years. According to studies[ii] analyzing ATUS data, they dedicate less time to paid work, slightly more time to homework in high school, and less time to socializing in person. More time is now allocated to online entertainment, particularly when social media is viewed as entertainment rather than true socializing.

In a future post, we will explore why this trend of lower social engagement, partly driven by technology, can profoundly affect teenagers’ well-being. We will also examine activities that can re-engage kids and discuss how to prepare them in childhood to become stronger adolescents.

The loss of institutional knowledge

Parents are not immune to these changes.

A young father told me he felt guilty every time he gave his child a cell phone to use as a temporary babysitter while he was getting ready to head out. “What else could I have done?” he asked. Most children of the aughts, the soon-to-be parents, have never experienced a childhood without smartphones. They may wish for a different kind of childhood for their children, yet lack the generational knowledge passed from one generation to the next.

At the same time, a 2025 survey[iii] reveals that 70% of parents believe that parenting is harder today than it was 20 years ago. Time, financial pressures, and other socio-economic factors have evolved. Screens are often perceived as making our lives more convenient. Unbeknownst to many parents, the relationships they have with their kids through their phones are not always healthy. In Raising Human, we will investigate and address this challenge without making parenting more difficult, just different.

Schools have changed, too

Two changes in schools have reduced students’ social opportunities, particularly in middle school.

In the US, more children have longer commutes to school, partly due to school choice and partly because of school consolidations that have resulted in fewer, larger campuses. This means socialization outside of school is harder for students who cannot yet drive and often lack access to convenient public transportation. More adolescents are trying to socialize from home, on their phones. Is this experience comparable to in-person socialization? We will explore this very topic, examining why it matters and what we can do about it.

Starting with the 2001 “No Child Left Behind Act,” which mandated more standardized testing, schools sought additional time to administer these tests. Reducing recess became the easy solution. Consequently, students’ face-to-face social time shrank, and socialization moved online, often from the bedroom, alone.

In a future post, we will explore how online socializing is fundamentally different from face-to-face socializing and why it is more critical for adolescents during their developmental phase than for more established adults.

These changes at home and in schools cannot be countered simply by removing cell phones. It will require adaptation and greater intentionality in our adolescents’ social lives. The primary aim of Raising Human is to explore strategies that enable adolescents to adapt to a new environment, support the development of human skills, and master technology effectively.

The imperfect home and school environment of 30 years ago cannot and should not be set as an example. We cannot undo some of the technical and societal changes. Still, practical examples of healthier school and home environments exist today and can serve as starting points for learning and intelligent adaptation.

A test case of a phone-free school

Consider a school that has maintained a phone-free policy as it perceives changes in society and education. For 18 years, I served on the leadership team of the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Despite being surrounded by the headquarters of tech giants like Google, Meta, and Apple, the school remained tech-free. Most of the students’ families worked in the tech industry, yet phones were banned on campus—even for parents.

From 2011 onward, the school was often featured in the press as a model for phone-free education. While some people labeled us Luddites, the public response was overwhelmingly positive. We could sense an intense discomfort with kids’ tech access, yet, in an apparent mystery, most parents continued to give in. Over time, our approach became an inspiration for others, demonstrating the possibilities.

The school didn’t stand still. As the students’ environment changed, teachers adapted. Parents brought different values and constraints to education. Teachers can never successfully teach to an idealized student; Instead, they adapt to their students. Still, as the man-made environment can change at a dazzling speed, some natural processes keep their immutable paces. It takes 9 months to have a baby and 18 years to reach adulthood.

Like clockwork, child development follows a biological sequence driven by the brain’s sequential development. This sequence defines how children learn and their psychological and emotional needs at every stage. The environment can nourish their growth or hinder it. Knowledgeable teachers do their best to leverage or compensate for these factors.

For instance, teachers needed to place greater emphasis on the school’s social and emotional climate and the need to connect directly and meaningfully with one another. “At times, it felt like a cloud of anti-social forces loomed large over the students,” commented a teacher. In Raising Human, we will explore these forces and discuss potential solutions.

A loss that might affect both parents and their kids.

After COVID-19, a pre-pandemic trend accelerated. Interviewed on NPR[iv] in 2024, Dr. Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, summarized the situation: “Parents have lost their village.” He noted that almost half of the parents felt anxious. Parents spend more time at work and with their kids, leaving them less time to take care of themselves. According to the time use survey, they spend less time face-to-face with friends.

It is hard to separate the horse from the carriage. Did the lack of socialization among parents undermine the village’s sustainability, or did it simply mark its demise?

Ideally, the parents’ village would be a space of shared values about raising children—a place where parents know they can count on the support of other parents, and children can find emotional safety and their own social connections.

The school I mentioned earlier intentionally tried to maintain such a village, integrating parents of diverse backgrounds around an educational concept. Although not initiated by the school, families would support one another. When the Great Recession hit, it began to take a toll on that mutual support. The pandemic sent every family to fend for itself. More focused on work, feeling financially vulnerable, and starting to socialize through screens, parents began to retreat to the confines of their homes. It took more effort to care for each other.

The school’s village was built around creative play—sometimes called free play. It allowed young children to play with minimal parental involvement. Kids learned to self-entertain without relying on screens.

Creative play, even when done alone, provides many developmental benefits that shatter the fixed boundaries of online algorithms. In adolescence, it turns into a different set of activities that help adolescents to recuperate psychologically and develop relationships. Raising Human will delve deeper into the benefits of creative play at all ages and explore how it is implemented.

A significant challenge in sharing childcare, for instance, is agreeing on a consistent set of rules. This is true for small children and also holds when teenagers start visiting each other’s homes. Transparency, learning to negotiate these rules with flexibility, and a willingness to reciprocate go a long way toward building the village. The village helps parents and expands possibilities for small children and teenagers alike.

The cookie jar problem - why parents are set up to fail

Separated from the village, parents rely on tech companies to set up guardrails. In some instances, companies may have recognized the risks of selling products to kids not explicitly designed for their age group. Rather than enforcing a platform-wide age limit themselves, companies often shift the enforcement responsibility to parents by offering limited controls.

Today, each vendor has its own controls, sometimes dozens of options. This makes enforcement difficult. Attracted to the screen and often with few other places to go, teenagers engage with their parents in a Wack-a-Mole game to find ways around the controls.

Consider this single mother in Oakland, California. Her teenage son comes home from school before she returns from work. She wanted to control his screen time. However, she is not an IT expert; the task's complexity mushroomed before her. Eventually, she considered turning off the power to the internet gateway automatically at certain times, but that proved to be a more complicated task than a busy single mother had time to investigate.

There are, however, plenty of parents with excellent IT skills who are not always better off. A parent in the technical leadership of a major tech firm resolved to set strict screen time limits. With a PhD in computer science, he knew how to create a highly controlled environment, and he did. His son, however, developed a remarkable knack for guessing passwords, sometimes creating phishing scams, and finding hours in the middle of the night when he could be online. At 17, he reflected, “This is not the relationship I wish I had with my dad.”

In the absence of regulations or industry-agreed controls as a means of easy and universal enforcement, what resources are families left with? A cookie jar full of apps—colorful, tempting, and unlabeled as to their risks. Risks that are sometimes unknown or unrecognized by the apps’ makers. Parents are handed the lid and told to decide what’s safe. Should every app be scrutinized like a 1960s TV show? Is this only about content? Should every parent know every app? Can we even scrutinize an AI bot in that way?

Neither the current social environment nor the technology itself provides what our kids need to grow and develop. Despite all our efforts, technology cannot teach kids—or parents—how to manage technology or discover what will help them.[v] We need to find another way.

Raising Human is that exploration I invite you to join.

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Offering more than limits

Technology was supposed to make our lives more productive and enable us to do other things. For our kids, it can be an escape from reality and has become their reality.

Raising Human asks: how can we raise a modern and healthy child today?

Rather than exploring content and apps, let us step back to examine in an accessible way how screens affect relationships at different ages and how to restore balance.

Once we understand the unfulfilled needs, we can start offering something more than limits—what our kids crave but don’t know how to ask for: belonging, community, purpose, and authentic human connections.

The opportunity is to make social media, AI chatbots, and similar tools accessories rather than central components to our children’s lives. These are just tools—use them as needed and no more.

We’ll also speak directly to those who build technology and might care about children—understanding how children fundamentally differ from adults is the first step toward designing more responsible products for them.

Raising Human is not about rejecting technology entirely. It’s about making informed, cool-headed decisions about what tech can and can’t provide. When parents and educators start guiding their children toward more meaningful experiences, they shed their worries and anxieties and feel validated in their roles.

Join the conversation

I invite you to join this conversation. Together, we can better understand the issues, the role of tech, the industry, schools, and parents. We will explore how to re-empower ourselves—parents and educators—so our kids can grow into adults capable of leading healthy, meaningful, productive, and happy lives, both in the physical and digital worlds.

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Sources:

KidsOnTech - Documentary film (co-produced by the author)

[i] https://www.bls.gov/tus/

[ii] “Analyzing ‘the Homework Gap’ among High School Students.” Brookings, n.d. Accessed November 25, 2025. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/analyzing-the-homework-gap-among-high-school-students/.

[iii] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/nobody-knows-what-they-are-doing/202508/is-parenting-really-harder-today

[iv] Murthy, V. (2024, August 29). Parental stress is a significant public health issue, surgeon general advisory says [Interview by Steve Inskeep]. NPR Illinois. https://www.nprillinois.org/2024-08-29/parental-stress-is-a-significant-public-health-issue-surgeon-general-advisory-says

“Many parents have lost their village. You know, parenting is a team sport... we need family, friends, neighbors, a community, and many of us have lost that.” — Dr. Vivek Murthy [Parental s...eneral...]

[v] Overuse of devices and social media top parent concerns | National Poll on Children’s Health

When children started using screens in classrooms and at home, people marveled at how easily they could use the devices. It was as though they were meant for each other, like ducks to water.

Yet 15 years later, parents worry about the effects of these devices on their children. As tech adoption increased, mental well-being and academic performance declined.

Each week in Raising Human, we’ll explore the profound—and sometimes unsettling—collision of childhood and technology. Together, we’ll unpack why this collision occurs.

Beyond technology, we will examine the other forces making parenting and educating children harder. We will investigate what it all means to the experience of being a child, and how we can begin to craft thoughtful, practical solutions that go beyond the usual content or screen time management and generic parenting or tech advice. We will explore what is already being done, what remains to be accomplished, and what we can do individually as parents or educators, along with solutions that require collective participation.

If technology itself can’t prepare our kids for the digital world, how can we?

By becoming more informed and intentional as parents and educators, we not only support our children—we also help them grow into more confident and accomplished adults.

Being a parent used to be a stage in life; it now comes with enormous societal and economic pressures, and tech played a role in that transformation.

We need to open the pressure valve and make parenting and education easier, not more complicated.

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When we approach parenting with calm and confidence, we do better, and our children benefit. Adequately protected, they develop the necessary skills to manage themselves and the world confidently. As a result, society grows stronger. We collectively become more resilient and better prepared for the future that our children will help define.

In Raising Human, we aim to find actionable solutions that move the needle in the right direction.
I bring years of experience in tech and leadership of the Silicon Valley school that eschewed technology before it was fashionable to do so.
Raising Human is about making our children better off and better prepared.
You, your children, and society at large will benefit from engaging.

I am so glad you are here!

Please consider joining us.

It won’t happen without you!