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.
• Austria and Indonesia have since announced similar bans.
• 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.
• 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. For child number two, he did the opposite. No public announcements, no face-feeding the algorithms. Eventually he went back and deleted much of the digital trail he'd built for child number one.

His wife, a paediatric nurse, was seeing the consequences in real time: 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'd expect. MIT Technology Review 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 them altogether. Even Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and Instagram, doesn't 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. A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $942 million over child safety failures in August 2026, and European regulators are threatening billion-dollar fines over infinite scroll and autoplay design that keeps young users stuck.

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 have opened up genuine freedoms: new friendships, the ability to roam the city more independently, a foot in the digital world alongside the physical one.

The honest tension here is that there's no hiding from technology, and pretending otherwise doesn't prepare kids for the world they'll actually inhabit. AI, software that can write, create images and answer questions, now runs through education, entertainment and work. Children who never encounter it at home will still encounter it everywhere else.

Gradual, supervised exposure combined with real conversations about what these tools do and how they can mislead seems the more useful path. That judgement call, made fresh for each kid at each age, is the actual job.

Common questions

At what age should kids get a smartphone?

The current research and many school policies point toward delaying unsupervised smartphone use until mid-adolescence, and introducing simpler devices, such as supervised tablets or basic phones, before then. There's no number that fits every child.

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, 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.