Raised on AI

The writer starts with a familiar bit of internet optimism gone sour: first child, every account and photo posted; second child, a much harder line on privacy. After watching social media’s damage pile up, the family shifted from oversharing to keeping kids off TikTok, away from public posts, and more guarded about what technology gets into their lives.

That instinct is no longer fringe. People inside big tech are reportedly keeping their own children at arm’s length from phones and social apps, and even Mark Zuckerberg does not publicly post his children’s faces on Facebook or Instagram. What used to sound like parental paranoia now looks more like a mainstream reaction to a system everyone has seen up close.

The policy response is moving fast too. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation helped push the issue into the center of the conversation, despite criticism from some developmental psychologists. Australia became the first country to ban social media for children under 16, and places from Austria to Indonesia have followed with similar moves. In the US, the Supreme Court recently upheld Texas’s age-verification law, and several states have considered their own versions. Schools, meanwhile, are ditching iPads and Chromebooks in some places and bringing back actual books.

And the kids are not exactly begging for more screen time. The writer points to a surprising sign of the moment: among Gen Alpha, a vintage Sony Walkman is apparently hot stuff. For a piece about AI, that’s the real tension here. The world keeps getting more digital, yet more parents are trying to slow-roll their children into it, one locked-down phone at a time.

The sensible take is the one too many Silicon Valley parents arrived at late: handing kids the full internet was always a reckless experiment. The funny part is that the people who built the thing now trust it least at home, which is probably the most honest product review Big Tech will ever get.