Growing Up Alongside AI: What Parents Are Getting Right (and Wrong)

Key points

• Australia became the first country to ban social media for children under 16 in 2024, with Austria and Indonesia announcing similar rules.
• The US Supreme Court recently upheld a Texas age-verification law that effectively bars minors from certain social platforms.
• Jonathan Haidt's 2024 book The Anxious Generation pushed the risks of youth social media use into mainstream debate.
• School districts across the US are replacing tablets and Chromebooks with printed books.
• The most popular gadget among Generation Alpha, children born from 2010 onward, is reportedly a vintage Sony Walkman.

When his first child arrived, the writer did what most new parents did in the early social-media era: created Gmail and Twitter accounts in the baby's name, announced the birth loudly online, and posted photos everywhere. When his second child came along a couple of years later, he did the opposite. No public announcements, no face-feeding the algorithms. Eventually he went back and deleted much of the digital trail he had built for child number one.

What changed? He watched the early promise of the internet curdle.

His wife, a paediatric nurse, was seeing it in real time at the hospital: a rising number of children admitted while struggling with body dysmorphia, a condition where someone becomes obsessed with a perceived flaw in their appearance, and cyberbullying tied directly to social media use. The family became, by their own description, those parents. Flip phones. No TikTok.

Are tech insiders doing the same thing?

Yes, and in bigger numbers than you might expect. MIT Technology Review, which first covered this story, notes that many people who work at major technology companies quietly keep their own children away from the same products they build. Some lock down phones entirely. Some skip phones altogether. Even Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and Instagram, does not publicly post his children's faces on either platform.

This is no longer a fringe position.

Haidt's The Anxious Generation, published in 2024, brought the research into living rooms and school board meetings everywhere, though some developmental psychologists have disputed parts of his conclusions. Governments have started passing laws.

What does this mean for parents right now?

No single rule fits every child or every family. The writer himself has softened his own approach over time. His older daughter started high school and graduated from a flip phone to an iPhone. His younger child now wears an Apple Watch. Both devices, he says, have opened up genuine freedoms: new friendships, the ability to roam the city more independently, a foot in the digital world as well as the physical one.

The honest tension here is that there is no hiding from technology, and pretending otherwise does not prepare kids for the world they will actually inhabit. AI, artificial intelligence software that can write, create images, answer questions and soon carry out tasks on its own, now runs through education, entertainment and work. Children who never encounter it at home will still encounter it everywhere else.

The smarter move seems to be gradual, supervised exposure combined with real conversations about what these tools do and how they can mislead.

Common questions

At what age should kids get a smartphone?

There is no universal answer, but the current research and many school policies suggest delaying unsupervised smartphone use until at least mid-adolescence, around 14 to 16, and introducing basic devices like supervised tablets or simple phones before then.

Is it too late if my child is already on social media?

No. Reducing screen time at any age carries benefits. Starting family conversations about algorithmic feeds, which are automatic systems that decide what content your child sees based on what keeps them scrolling longest, is a practical first step regardless of how long the accounts have been active.