Can we protect childhood?

The social media generation already taught us what happens when we wait to find out.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

A toddler on his father’s shoulders in a hotel lobby. There was an iPad propped behind the father’s head. The child was watching it. The dad probably didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. He was just carrying his kid through a lobby.

A friend described this to me. She was in Mexico on a family trip, and everywhere she looked, kids at dinner tables, kids at the pool, kids in the lobby, all watching screens. I told her I had a moment like that too, at an all-inclusive the year before. A gorgeous outdoor restaurant, a three-year-old with a tablet propped at her place setting. It never crossed my mind to do that with mine. But it’s just normal now, and most of us have barely noticed.

And then I took my daughter to the library this weekend.

There was a boy at one of the computers, maybe ten or eleven. He wasn’t watching a tutorial or doing anything for school. He was just a kid on a screen, watching another kid do something vaguely weird in a fake hospital bed. Then Minecraft. My daughter walked up behind him and stood there completely still. She said, “I want to watch that.” I said, “No, we don’t come to the library to watch TV.” She came with me.

But on the walk over to the farmers market after, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I brought her there to get books, to be somewhere that felt like the 90s for an hour. A screen almost won in thirty seconds. It’s not that she’s addicted to screens. It’s simply that the pull was that strong. She’s four.

Screen problems are, in some ways, the old problem. The new one is harder to see. And I keep wondering: can we actually protect childhood this time? But first, you have to see what’s already happening.

We were never built for this.

I work in AI tools all day, every day. Which is exactly why something Jonathan Haidt said in a recent TED talk has been on my mind so much lately.

Haidt is the social psychologist behind The Anxious Generation, and one thing he said just clicked for me right away: humans aren’t just social like dogs or chimpanzees. We are ULTRASOCIAL, like bees and ants. Our bonding is physical and it requires bodies. Sharing meals, moving through space together, laughing together, touch. Millions of years of evolution have wired us this way. That shared, in-person, physical experience is how the connection actually happens, how it gets built into us.

I see it every single weekend with my own kids. When we spend a day with friends, actually in the same room, the laughter is different. The body language is different. The whole energy is different. And the feeling at the end of that day, compared to the feeling when you turn off the TV and everyone just kind of drifts, there is no comparison. You can see it in them. We are just so much happier when we are with people we love in real life.

And now we are building technology designed to replicate exactly that responsiveness without any of the real wiring underneath it. AI is always available. It never gets tired. It always has time for you. It sounds like what we all wish we had more of. Except it doesn’t need anything back from us. And chatbots are now being built directly into stuffed animals and toys, marketed as a companion always in the room. A friend who never has to go home. It’s worth naming what that actually is: an attempt to give kids the feeling of connection without another human being involved. For creatures built the way we are, that is not the same thing.

Human connection is who we are. It’s not optional.

Here’s where AI is already sneaking in without us knowing

This is where the story gets harder to watch.

A therapist recently ran a session with a man and his “female partner.” The partner was an AI companion. A real session, happening right now in real time. A human being who brought an algorithm to couples counseling.

I recently caught up with a friend who has been paying very close attention to all of this, reading everything she can on what screens and AI are doing to kids’ development specifically. She told me about a girl who came home and said she used AI to brainstorm ideas for a sleepover party. That meant deferring to an algorithm for the one thing kids have been doing for themselves forever: deciding what to do on a Saturday night at a sleepover. The wrestling, the creative back and forth of actually figuring something out together, that IS the thing that builds creative thinking and judgement. And it just didn’t happen, it was mentally offloaded to AI.

She also told me about a kid who, instead of riffing with his friends to come up with a funny class song, asked ChatGPT to write it. Then everyone sang the AI’s song. I thought back to color war. The class trip bus. We’d just make something up. We’d try things out, something would come out of it, and it was ours. Now they don’t have to do that.

She called it exactly what it is: Innocent ways of stealing the kids’ creativity.

The evidence got there before we did.

We already have data on what happens when we don’t get ahead of this.

Sweden was the first country in the world to go all-in on digitizing schools, tablets at every desk, devices in nursery classrooms. After years of declining test scores, they reversed course in 2023. The Karolinska Institute issued a finding worth paying close attention to: “Clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning.” They went back to textbooks. They went back to handwriting.

A friend posted something on LinkedIn recently about returning to handwriting that made me stop scrolling. It was talking about the almost rite of passage of having to write a ten-page essay by hand, the physical pain of it, the crossing-out and rewriting and getting the outline right. One of the most progressive countries in the world just said we’re going back to that. My friend who I interviewed for this edition kept coming back to this same point. The importance of wrestling with a writing outline, making edits, physically putting words on paper. That process matters in ways we’re only now starting to understand.

And then there’s what we already know about social media. The generation before us gave their kids smartphones young, not because they were bad parents, but because the research wasn’t there yet and the companies moved faster than anyone understood. Now we have the data. We see the outcomes. We see the kids who grew up on those platforms and we know exactly what we would have done differently.

We watched it happen with social media. We’re not doing that again.

AI is not going away. I use it every single day for work and I genuinely believe in what it can do for adults who use it with intention. But kids aren’t developmentally ready for this. They have no baseline to question what they’re being told. They don’t understand that it might not be healthy to constantly be turning to a chatbot for answers. They don’t know what’s being taken from them, the ability to critically think, build judgement and taste.

I’ll be honest about my own experience. Some days when I’ve leaned on AI too much, I feel a little off, like I skipped a step I should have taken. And I’m an adult who knows how to catch that, who can cross-reference what I’m reading and push back on what doesn’t feel right. What happens when a kid who has no baseline to question any of this gets the same access? They can type “explain this to me like I’m three years old” and get any complex idea broken down in seconds. They can skip the part where they don’t know something yet. They can skip the part where they sit with being wrong. And that sitting, the discomfort and confusion of not knowing yet, is exactly what builds the capacity to actually think.

You are not the only one who feels this way

I thought for a while I might be overcorrecting. Being the alarmist mom.

Then a friend stopped me at the park last weekend, kids running around between us, and just said it flat out: “I’m honestly just scared.” No context needed. I knew exactly what she meant. Another friend told me at dinner the night before that she’s worried about what all of this is going to do to her kids. And another friend, one I’ve talked about before, has been quietly grappling with what it even means to sit with an idea anymore, to actually think something through from scratch without immediately handing it off.

Every single person I’ve talked to about this lately has said some version of the same thing. Scared. Not sure what to do. Trying not to be the alarmist mom while also knowing in their gut that something real is happening.

The friend I interviewed for this edition has been doing the actual slow work of building norms in her community. Not petitions. Parent having conversations. Small, livable agreements people can actually hold. What I learned from her is that if you go too “all in”, you can turn people off completely. You have to meet people where they are. She’s right. And she said finding even a few other parents asking the same questions changed everything.

More parents than you think are already scared and haven’t said it out loud yet. And that’s exactly what I felt when I spoke with her. I finally felt like I’m not crazy, and there are people actually doing something about this that I can learn from. I hope we do the same thing in our community.

---

If this resonated, share it with a parent who needs to hear this. More parents than you think are feeling this exact thing.

What I’m actually doing about it

Not a complete system. Just where I’m starting.

First: I’m noticing. One place in our day where AI or a screen fills a gap that used to require someone to figure something out. The boredom gap. The “I don’t know what to do” moment. I’m not fixing everything at once. I’m just seeing it. That first move matters more than you’d think.

Second: I’m finding my people. One other parent who’s asking the same questions. Not a committee. One conversation. If you’re reading this, you already know someone who would want to read it too.

Third: I picked up The Anxious Generation. If any of what you’ve read here resonated, start there. It’s not a doom spiral. It’s a diagnosis, and more importantly a case that the tide is already turning. Parents and teachers and entire countries are pushing back, and it is working.

One more thing: I’m putting together a separate email specifically about how to talk to your kids’ school about AI. There are real questions worth asking, and you’re more powerful asking them with one other parent than alone. That’s coming soon, and it’s more practical than it sounds.

You are not overreacting. You are paying attention. Those are not the same thing.

Here’s what I want to leave you with: this is already working. In schools where phones have been removed, teachers report the same thing over and over, they hear laughter in the hallways again. Real laughter, between actual kids. Haidt says parents are mobilizing faster than he expected. Countries are reversing course. Parents are finding each other, setting norms, having the hard conversations. The movement is real and it is growing.

AI is coming for a lot of things. It should not come for childhood without a fight. Not because technology is bad. Because the brain being built during those years is irreplaceable, and we know too much now to hand it over without being clear-eyed about what we’re doing.

Can we protect childhood? Yes. But only if we stop waiting for someone else to start.

This week’s dinner-table question: “Is there something you’ve asked your phone or a computer to answer that you think you could have figured out yourself? Was it easier that way, or did something get lost?”

Ask it to your kids. Ask it to yourself too.

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle