Four actions to reduce social media risks for your child

You’ve heard the outrage, you’ve read the reports, and you’ve seen the headlines: social media may be harming your child. What now? You gave your child a phone years ago and nothing short of the jaws of life could extract that thing from your kid’s grip now. You’d like to keep your child safe, but it’s a tug of war between you and an industry that has thousands of brilliant minds, and has invested billions of dollars, just to keep your child online as long as possible. You feel hopeless, guilty, exhausted, and maybe even angry. I get it. I have done research on technology and adolescent mental health for 25 years, delivered hundreds of presentations of our findings to parents, schools, state legislative offices, and even to the Senate and at the White House. In fact, I am writing this piece on a flight back from Switzerland, where I presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos among dozens of companies unveiling even more sophisticated versions of AI-driven platforms that are designed to occupy our children’s attention for even more hours per day. I am well aware of the potential benefits and harms of social media. But I am also a parent of two teenagers. I talk about this research all day, and then I spend each evening engaged in that same tug of war. It is almost impossible to raise a child today when tech titans have as much influence as parents in guiding our kids’ behavior.But they…Four actions to reduce social media risks for your child