So You’ve Decided to Save Your Kids from Tech

In Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story “The Veldt,” two children grow more attached to their Happylife Home, a fully automated nursery that responds to their desires, than to their own parents. When the parents try to shut it down, the children violently revolt. For Hannah Zeavin, a history professor at UC Berkeley who opens her book Mother Media with this story, the tale captures a recurring cultural anxiety: that technologies meant to support caregiving might end up replacing the caregiver altogether.

Zeavin’s sweeping intellectual history shows how motherhood in America has always been mediated — by baby care manuals, radio shows, TV experts, and now digital tools. Concerns about “bad” mothers, over- or under-reliance on expert advice, or the loss of embodied maternal presence have surfaced with each of these. But while Zeavin resists the idea that today’s digital tools are unprecedented, her work helps us understand how today’s controversy over them connects to a long history of parenting fears.

Another book, The Tech Exit by tech policy expert Clare Morell of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, brings today’s controversies into sharp relief, offering a call to reclaim the moral and institutional authority of the family from the grip of Silicon Valley. She warns that Big Tech platforms are not neutral tools but active agents in reshaping childhood, undermining parents, and monetizing the denigration of family practices. From AI companions to personalized feeds that expose children to pornography and addictive content, Morell argues that today’s digital infrastructure is designed to fragment families, not support them. The Tech Exit urges parents to do just as its title says.

Taken together, Zeavin and Morell offer two essential perspectives — historical depth and political urgency — for understanding the digital restructuring of the family and pushing back with more than just willpower.

Digital platforms now mediate nearly every aspect of family life. Shared calendars coordinate schedules; location tracking apps monitor children’s movements; group chats substitute for dinner table conversations; apps manage chores, carpool logistics, and extracurriculars. Social media curates family memory and identity in public. The rhythms of domestic life, once governed by conversation, tradition, and presence, are increasingly routed through notifications, dashboards, and algorithmic prompts.

As Hannah Zeavin reminds us, this is not the first time caregiving has been reshaped by technology. In Mother Media, she shows that American motherhood has long been entwined with technologies — objects and media that claimed to supplement, improve, or even replace motherly care. In the early twentieth century, the figure of the “scientific mother” emerged: a caregiver expected to follow expert guidance, deliver care on a schedule, and measure outcomes with precision. She was surrounded by tools that embodied the expertise, from bottles marked by the ounce and feeding charts timed to the minute to parenting manuals and advice columns. Later, in the postwar period, this model gave way to Dr. Spock, who urged mothers to “trust yourself” even as he authored hundreds of pages of parenting instruction. The rise of attachment parenting idealized continuous, intuitive connection between mother and child, yet this “natural” approach was still shaped by media and tools: baby-carrying slings, co-sleeping guides, talk shows, and, later, online communities. Zeavin shows that even practices marketed as intimate or instinctual were often scaffolded by external systems of expertise.

Common technologies like pacifiers, cribs, timers, television, and computers were not just conveniences. Zeavin shows that they functioned as material extensions of expert systems, and each embodied the assumptions and anxieties of its cultural moment. For instance, Zenith Radio Corporation commissioned its “Radio Nurse,” the first baby monitor, after Charles Lindbergh’s twenty-month-old baby was kidnapped in his sleep in 1932. The baby monitor extended maternal vigilance through circuitry, while reinforcing ideals of constant, invisible attentiveness. The binky soothed not just the baby but the mother trying to meet prescribed sleep-training goals. The playpen offered containment in line with developmental safety norms. Parents (and people who talk about parenting) have long feared that caregiving, when routed through technology, risks becoming cold, distant, and diminished.

These technologies have provoked at once demand and unease. At the time that Sesame Street first aired, in 1969, concerns about children’s exposure to violent material on television had already prompted one U.S. senator to call upon the surgeon general to investigate TV as a public health crisis. Yet Sesame Street aimed to leverage TV’s perceived problems to do good, and it was “astoundingly well-researched,” writes Zeavin. As some experts became comfortable with the idea of introducing “good” TV into daily domestic life, a powerful wave of media theorists, following Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, mounted a more complete condemnation. By the 1980s, Postman argued that television was destroying childhood as a distinct life stage because, unlike print media, which required gradual learning and slowly-gained skills to access adult information, television instantly exposed children to the same content as adults without any developmental barriers.

Today’s social grappling over mediated care is not new. Digital media, Zeavin’s book shows, are the latest inheritors of this tradition.

Although Mother Media does not venture beyond the 1980s, today’s platforms are arguably somewhat distinct from earlier technologies of familial mediation. Five features distinguish today’s online platforms: peer production, datafication, digitalization, personalization, and commodification.

Peer production is the reality that a significant amount of the content that children engage with online is produced by other children, making it distinct from both books and television. Platforms capture that engagement — with peer-produced content, with peers, and with other content and other people — as valuable data.

Datafication transforms everyday family life into streams of quantifiable information. Apps and devices log sleep, feeding, screen use, and location, turning children’s development into metrics for monitoring and comparison. Zeavin argues convincingly that datafication began long before platforms, but it happened at a smaller scale and with different motives.

Digitalization means that family care becomes customizable and programmable. Platforms can be responsive to the child within the logic of the software. Sleep-training apps send algorithmic nudges, educational platforms gamify learning with points and badges, and smart-home assistants offer behavioral prompts or rewards.

Childrearing experts of the past could only have dreamed of such sophisticated behavioral modification. Unlike the mass media of earlier eras such as radio, parenting manuals, or educational television, today’s platforms are hyper-personalized. They deliver content and interventions that are dynamically tailored to each user’s behavior, preferences, and emotional profile. YouTube and TikTok feeds deliver micro-targeted parenting tips and child entertainment to elicit engagement or address inferred emotional states.

Commodification follows closely behind, as these tools operate within a larger marketplace. Platforms monetize attention, routines, and relationships — offering tiered features, promoting sponsored content, and selling behavioral data to third parties.

While earlier technologies like binkies, cribs, or television were embedded with expert concepts and guidance, today’s platforms reshape family life to fit commercial and computational ends.

Clare Morell’s The Tech Exit joins Zeavin’s long line of parenting literature warning of the latest forms of mediation. While Zeavin invites us to notice how caregiving has always been shaped by expert systems and tools, Morell calls for a reassertion of the family’s sovereignty over childrearing against Silicon Valley platforms that bypass, override, or erode parental authority.

Morell documents how Big Tech platforms systematically route around parental authority. She details stories where young children downloaded apps like TikTok without parental consent and were then served dangerous content like the blackout challenge, in some cases resulting in death. She describes the rise of sextortion, a practice targeting mainly teenage boys that involves someone, usually a stranger pretending to be a peer, threatening to distribute private and sensitive material if they don’t provide images of a sexual nature, sexual favors, or money. She notes the rise of suicide associated with social media. The average age of pornography exposure is 12. Pornography is easy enough to access on purpose, but more than half of kids have been exposed to it accidentally through social media, ads, or search results. Morell argues that parental controls don’t work — one kid used the parental monitoring app on his phone to access pornography.

Beyond these disturbing stories, Morell describes the regretful gaps and distance created once personal devices are introduced into households: silent dinners, isolated siblings, social media–addicted kids of all ages. The default settings of Silicon Valley platforms assume that parents are irrelevant or intrusive. Parents are not failing, Morell argues. They are being overwhelmed, duped, and out-designed.

The last part of her book provides parents with ways to rebuild and hold the boundaries against the immense and constant allure of digital conveniences. Those who are successful find other families, model healthy tech use, adopt alternative devices, move from allowing children to use tech in private to creating common spaces for it, and prioritize real-life responsibilities and fun. She emphasizes shared technologies like a desktop in a common room and family movie night. She wants to get kids excited about replacing screens by swapping in new skills, indulged hobbies, time with parents, and service.

For Morell, the solution is not cultural analysis but moral fortitude and legal intervention. She supports age verification and design mandates that by default would require parental oversight of app downloads for minors. She has praised recent state laws seeking to restrict data collection on children, require default protections, and restore the power of parents to make decisions about digital exposure to adult content.

While Zeavin’s Mother Media shows that anxieties over maternal mediation are nothing new, that history should not be taken as a reason to dismiss Morell’s concerns. Battles over how families should care, and what technologies can assist or govern that care, have often been productive. Concerns about the influence of television on children led to the Children’s Television Act of 1990, which introduced requirements for educational programming and limits on advertising. Earlier struggles over the well-being of children led to child labor laws, public schooling, and the development of pediatric medicine. Rather than prove that concern is overblown, as many skeptics still believe, this history shows examples of how debate and discomfort have helped build the institutional and technical infrastructures that now protect, educate, and support families. Today’s debates over digital platforms should be understood as part of that lineage.

Both Zeavin and Morell push us to recognize that settling on screen-time limits — restricting access to personal devices in hopes of promoting healthy development — as the strategy for protecting kids concedes too much. It is an attempt to address the problem Big Tech has wrought without requiring any fundamental changes to the technology itself or the culture it creates. What we need is not just unplugging but reimagining. And here, the combination of ideas from Zeavin and Morell becomes crucial.

Morell calls on families to resist Big Tech, and for regulations to make that resistance easier as well as less necessary. She recognizes that families may need to find the strength to live counterculturally, but also argues that the burden cannot fall solely on individual families. She supports structural reforms that restore the moral authority of parents through meaningful parental consent, that constrain the extractive logic of digital platforms by limiting data collection and addictive features for children, and that re-establish social expectations around formative relationships through strong age-verification. While her toolkit includes specific regulations, Morell also knows that strong families need strong communities.

Importantly, Zeavin does not double down on the family as the exclusive institution of care for children. Instead, she invites us to look outward to the social, economic, and technological structures that shape how childcare is given and received. She subtly frames many contemporary anxieties about digital parenting technologies as moral panics and appears skeptical of critiques that blame technology alone for the breakdown of the family, often redirecting focus to structural issues like gender roles, labor inequality, and economic precarity. Her vision does not emphasize stronger families in the traditional sense but care that is collectively supported: by extended kin, by local communities, and by public infrastructure. She warns against debate that revolves around extreme nostalgia or purity.

Together, the two authors provide the motivation to make significant social and political investments in changing technical infrastructure in ways that support the future of the American family. If we are to resist the platformization of the family, we must ask what new and old functions serve the family and how technical infrastructures may provide those functions. What tools and arrangements serve intimacy, incremental independence, tactile exploration, and intergenerational understanding? And which lead to distraction, addiction, and isolation?

There are some signs of this sort of reimagining. France recently passed a nationwide ban on screen exposure for children under three in nurseries and public settings, an institutional signal that screens in early childhood can no longer be left to parental choice alone. In the U.S., the Supreme Court this summer allowed Texas to enforce a law requiring pornography websites to verify the age of users, marking a significant moment in the country’s efforts to impose barriers around adult content online. Australia is going further. Under its Online Safety Act, the country’s eSafety Commissioner has drafted rules that require a wide range of digital services like search engines, social media platforms, and streaming services to implement rigorous age-verification mechanisms before allowing access to minors. Together, these initiatives indicate a growing willingness among policymakers to reshape the legal and technological architecture surrounding family life.

Meanwhile, new coalitions of educators, technologists, and parents are imagining what it means to build pro-child, pro-family technologies from the ground up — not merely to reduce risk, but to cultivate presence, attention, and relational depth. In Washington, D.C., Hardy Middle School emerged as one of the first phone-free public schools and was featured on the Today Show for improving student engagement and focus. Nearby, St. Jerome Academy in Hyattsville, Maryland created a low-tech, classical, Catholic curriculum that has transformed a school on the cusp of closure into one bursting at the seams. At home, some families are reviving landlines as shared communication hubs and experimenting with DIY text-message walkie-talkies. The device market has exploded with non-addictive options: minimalist phones, e-ink tablets, and wearables designed for safety without scrolling. Teens are forming Luddite Clubs and opting for “boring phones” as a badge of independence. Churches and community groups are organizing unplugged retreats and Sabbath-style digital fasts. This constellation of experiments shows that concern is giving way to creativity. These pioneers are not simply resisting screens, but restructuring how time, attention, and care are mediated in the first place.

We have imagined a world where robots read bedtime stories, where smart homes soothe and surveil, where children’s emotions are data points and parental instincts are inefficiencies. Hannah Zeavin and Clare Morell tell us that it’s time to imagine something else.