Leaders debate strategies to support families navigating smartphone influence, social media and societal change to foster stronger parent‑child relationships.
At Davos, leaders argued that today’s parental anxiety is less a private failing than a predictable outcome of technological, social and institutional shifts. Clinical psychologist Becky Kennedy reframed anxiety as “the opposite” of capability: when childhood is optimized for happiness and friction is removed, adults inherit fragility. Parents, she noted, increasingly “fix feelings as opposed to help kids tolerate feelings,” eroding the very “time under tension” required for creativity and resilience.
NYU professor Jonathan Haidt located the inflection point in 2010–2015, when smartphones, front-facing cameras and platform incentives turned adolescence into “brand management” and made the device “an incredibly effective babysitter,” akin to “giving your kid morphine” if chronic. Trust expert Rachel Botsman described a macro pattern: “uncertainty going up… and trust going down,” pushing families toward control while kids retreat from real-world risk. The result is “too little risk taking in the physical world, and then too much risk taking in the online world.”
Panelists warned that AI shifts manipulation from attention to attachment, urging emergency limits on child-facing chatbots and renewed investment in “third spaces,” free play, and community infrastructure. As Haidt put it, “happiness comes from between,” not from content.
Welcome, everybody, to the session called parenting in an Anxious World, as part of the World Economic Forum annual meeting this year. My name is Maria. I'm the executive director of Safe Online. And during the day, I work to protect children from online harms through running a fund that is supporting solutions across the world. This sounds serious and important, but at night, an evening. I'm a parent, and I'm trying to be a mom who is present and a good enough parent, as we like to say. That's why I want to kick off this conversation with a personal story. Last week I'm traveling to Brussels for a m. Wake up. But of course, the night before, I prepared the snacks for school. Because that's what we do to feel less guilty for being away from our kids. And there am I. I'm standing there. I'm on these movable walkways. It's very early. And I look up and there is this massive advertisement, floor to ceiling. I'm looking at it, and I see this beautiful woman. She's laying on her side. She's smiling more or less my age. Very aspirational, very relaxed. But then I notice she has six arms. Six arms. One of them is propping her head. The other two are on her computer. The fourth one is scrolling on her phone and then two more are looking at her Fitbit, I think, and I'm like, am I hallucinating? Is this where we need to be? Do I need to be an exoskeleton human who has, who's part woman, part productivity machine, who is trying to achieve everything, and then he has, more than two arms because you need more than two hours to be a functioning adult nowadays. And I felt three things. I felt shock, I felt sadness, and I felt deep anger because I am there without my child trying to do the best that I can and do the things that I believe in. And I'm being told that I need to do more. The tagline underneath that advertisement is with the speed of our internet, you can do so much more. And this is the anxiety that I think we feel because we are being told that we are enough. But then, no, the algorithm, the social media, the advertisement tells us that we need to be more connected and more present, but also more boundaried and more productive. And I just want you to kind of help me make sense of that world in which we as parents just need to be enough, but also need to have support that we need through policies and practices to be the parents that we need to be. So I can't imagine a better group of people to talk about these things than the ones that I have here with me. There is Doctor Becky, who is the CEO and founder of Good Insight and Clinical psychologist. We have John, who is the professor of Ethical leadership from NYU Business School, Stern Business School. And then we have Rachel, who is the world's most prominent expert in trust, but also an author and artist. So welcome, guys. I'm really happy to have you all here. But also welcome to all of you in the room and also online. I will ask you the question, but also I will ask the audience to reflect on this. So let's kick off. Why does the world feel so anxious? And can you remember a moment when that particular shift that we are profoundly feeling felt embodied to you, a story, a moment? But yeah, I'll just kick off. Maybe. Becky, do you want to kick off first?
Sure. So one of the ways I think about anxiety is I think it's helpful to think about the opposite, which is capability. Right. And that's often the antidote to anxiety is doing something that makes you feel capable, which is usually stuff that's really scary, that's uncertain. That's risky. Right. And I think one of the things in this anxious world and that we definitely see in kids is there's been this shift to optimizing for happiness. In some ways, I think my job is to make my kid happy. And when you optimize for happiness in childhood, you actually tend to optimize for anxiety in adulthood, because in childhood, you're really learning. What range of emotional experiences am I capable of coping with? Not am I capable of exiting from not? Am I capable of avoiding, but am I capable of coping with? And the more we solve things for our kids right away and keep them away from the very experiences that are hard and that would lead to capability, they actually feel like there's a very narrow range of feelings, comfort and happiness and success that they're supposed to cope with. So then fast forward and they're faced with real adult challenges and their bodies kind of saying, I don't have any experiences watching myself struggle through this and survive it.
John.
So I'm a I'm a social psychologist and generally a social scientist. And a few months ago I began calling myself a techno determinist. Now, that doesn't mean that everything is caused by technology, but what it means is that technological changes, whether they're talking about fire, roads, the printing press, electricity, steam engine, internet, smartphones, these things change the playing field that everything else happens on so that unless you start with that, you're just going to be mystified. Why is all this weird stuff happening? You got to start with the technology. The internet came in. It was amazing. We're all connected for free. It's going to be the best friend of democracy. But then gradually it evolved into the various business models evolved and it became much more addictive. And the big one was smartphones, because now you can be on every moment, you can be on while you're in the elevator, you can be on. When you're on the toilet, it moves to the center. So now to the question, why are we anxious? Why does it feel that everything's anxious when we face the world with a sense of control and we have a feeling like there are challenges, but I have the capability. I know I understand this, and I can I can deal with it. That's energizing. That's that's goal pursuit. But decades of research on job satisfaction show that when people feel as though things are coming in and I don't have the resources, and I'm Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line, of course, you're anxious all day long, so it's affecting all of us. We all feel overwhelmed. I would say the moment when I noticed that something was wrong, it was 2014, and I noticed there was a glitch in the matrix. That is in 2014. That's when Gen Z showed up on campuses. That's when some college students started saying, we need trigger warnings. We can't read a book because it's traumatizing. Like Shakespeare, you can't read Shakespeare. Everything got weird. And then also got weird internationally. That's the 2014 is when social media sort of reached a sort of saturation on our phones with threaded comments, so that now everybody can fight with everybody all the time. So 2014 is when I felt something just changed, like something is weird. And I've been studying that ever since.
Amazing. Rachel, how about you?
So on a macro level, sort of a general principle in our lives is that the greater the uncertainty, the more trust that we need. And when uncertainty seems like it's increasing, or to your point, visibility into that uncertainty, not just like daily uncertainty, but what you call like pressing uncertainty and existential uncertainty. You need more trust. And then if that trust is not developed in yourself, in others, in institutions, in technology, in your neighbors, it's it's like an anxiety right? Because you've got uncertainty going up and trust going down. And then the pressure that puts on parents because the social structures around them can't hold them, then also transfers to the children. And then there's a deeper answer to this which we can get into, which is how the children are developing a tolerance or a lack of tolerance to that uncertainty because of the lack of risk taking in the physical world. But that's that's a long answer. But on a macro level, you've got like uncertainty going up, visibility into that, uncertainty going up and then trust going down in so many different areas of their lives. And that comes together and makes us feel anxious. And when we feel anxious, we try to control things. Control is a sign of a lack of trust. And then we think we're in control because we tap, we see where our Uber is, we can see who's replying, and then we realize we have very little control. And then so we go on.
Wow. You've covered quite a lot already. So we have a range of emotions you need to be able to feel to kind of cope with the anxiety. Right. We need to that type of resilience but also skill to feel those emotions. But then technology is determining kind of like the range at which we can or speed at which we can feel or actually have the time to embody those emotions and go through them. And that is the whole issue of trust. John, why don't you walk us through kind of like, what was that change that happened over the last few decades? And then we'll go from there?
Sure. I mean, the key period is 2010 to 2015. That's when everything really changed. So, you know, the internet comes in and it's amazing and we all start using it. But it doesn't really change our, the fabric of every moment of our lives. It's not portable. You have to dial up, you know, if you're a kid, you have to sit at your parents computer to get online. Social media comes out. Oh, wow. You can catch up with your old high school friends or whatever. And again, it doesn't change the fabric of our daily life because you have to sit down at your parents computer to use it. In 2018, the iPhone comes out in 2007 and it was an amazing Swiss Army knife. It has all kinds of tools on it, including a flashlight. Okay, so that's great. No problem. 2010 very few teens have an iPhone. They're still having they're still on flip phones, which is a communication device. You text your friends, you call them. Right. So everything's fine until 2010. And we're all techno optimists. We're all like, oh, this is so amazing, these gods in Silicon Valley. Thank you. What gift will you give us next? And, that period now, now everything changes for the negative. So 2010, the first front facing camera comes out and on iPhone and then, Samsung copies it, Instagram comes out. It's a photography website. In 2012. Facebook buys it and they don't change it at first. But that's when all the girls go on. It's 2012. That's also the year that Americans at least flip over from, mostly on basic phones or flip phones, to mostly on smartphones. By 2015, everyone has a smartphone with a front facing camera, social media on their smartphone, and most of the kids, especially the girls, are now doing this all the time. We took take. I mean, I feel such sympathy for for young women. Imagine the worst parts of middle school. It was bad for all of us, right? Imagine the worst parts of being a girl at the age of 12 or 13, in school. Now multiply that by ten and take it over the weekend and overnight. You can never get away. Never. You are always a brand manager. You are always managing your brand. No more play. It's just brand management. And so it's this very compact period, 2010 to 2015, when our world changes with massive ramifications for politics. Democracy is a conversation. No. Yuval Harari says when it was in the agora in Greece, it was one kind of democracy when it was carried out in newspaper articles and television and public square, it was a different kind of democracy. And now we have democracy. As a conversation carried out on Twitter, it's not clear that it's going to survive. So that's what I really focus on as this transformational period. And we're all struggling to understand what the hell is happening to us since then.
And parents, parents have very little guidance on.
Like, yes.
Do you allow this? Do you let them? With what age? What does it mean?
Yes. If I could.
Add just one more thing. As we all get busier and especially what's been shown, you know, women are working more and more outside the home, but yet they're spending more and more time caring for kids because we have this hands on model. So now what happens? They're incredibly stressed and everybody discovers just give the kid the device. He's happy. You're happy. We all have peace. I can do my other. I can use my other six arms, including scrolling on my own phone. So we all discovered that the iPhone is an incredibly effective babysitter, but it's about the same as giving your kid morphine. Not a good idea to do it continuously throughout their childhood.
Yeah. I mean, Rachel, we just spoke about this, the convenience part, right? That's the convenience part. Because when you're overwhelmed, what is the most convenient thing you're going to go with that? The friction is not there. Let's get back to that. But I want to ask Becky first. We've heard from John what happened. You work with so many parents. You've been so critical for so many of us during pandemic and afterwards, walking us through all of that. What are you hearing from? Like, what are they currently overwhelmed with and what is your advice to them now as you navigate that?
Yeah, I mean, I think the three of us kind of were all talking before there's this unwinnable situation. I mean, there's, you know, a ton of empathy for parents, too, who are managing so much the demands of their job. They're on slack all the time. It never ends. Childcare is so expensive. They're so stressed. There's so much stuff going on. And then in their home, I think what's happened in terms of even our relationship with our phones is I feel for me too. I'm a mom of three. My tolerance of my kids distress has to be lower than my parents tolerance of my distress. If I was melting down or whining about something and my parent didn't want to deal with it, I don't know. They'd have to read a newspaper. It would be like very effortful to disconnect from that situation. We're all like, oh, I just could be on Instagram or I could be responding to, you know, something else. We have such easy dopamine as parents. And so when our kids are going through very normal things of childhood, whining and tantrums and pushback, those are normal things because kids are born with all the feelings and none of the skills, so it comes out in behavior. But I think what we're more compelled to do than ever is just yes. Whether it's a device or a quick solution, try to fix feelings as opposed to help kids tolerate feelings. So I'll give a story this. The situation has come up so much with parents. My kid really wants to be with their best friend in class next year, so I'm going to call the school and say, hey, you need to put these two kids together because my kid needs to have a good school year. There is nothing better for kids than not being with their best friend the next year, because we don't feel capable in advance of a hard situation. You build capability after you survive a hard situation. So because we just don't want to deal with the whining because our lives are so hard, we continue to steal all the opportunities. We're kids build competence and anti-fragility which again, is that protection from anxiety?
Yeah, that's that's a really good thing to to to to to Rachel. That kind of relationship between like risk and uncomfortable bits and trust. Like how does that look like in modern parenting but also in kids like, what are you what are you seeing? What are your thoughts there?
Yeah. By the way, I wish we could ban the phrase frictionless design. Like, I mean, so much of Silicon Valley around taking out the friction in our lives. It's it's I mean, it's just so damaging, but risk and trust. I feel like when you understand the relationship between risk and trust, like, so many things become clear. And maybe I'll set this up, actually, with, a picture from your book that I can never forget. And you describe, I think it's a boy, and he wants to go to the park on his bike. Is he 9 or 10? Yeah. And the mom says, no, it's not safe. And so he comes. He shoves his bike at home, and then he goes next door and he plays Fortnite. And even in his own 910 year old brain, he can understand the disconnect between those two worlds. And this is so key, because what we're seeing is risk taking in the physical world, is declining and spend any time in a playground. The language of parenting, not just even a playground, it's all around safety. It's all around minimizing what could go wrong. And so the easiest way to think about risk is it's it's probability. And so parents are always trying to reduce that probability that that child won't be uncomfortable for the year because their best friend will be next to them like that. That is the mindset of parenting. And it becomes a language. It becomes a behavior. It becomes a decision making mechanism. And so you've got the parents trying to take risk away from their kids. You've got kids not experiencing physical risk and not developing that resilience. You look at all the things that are banned in schools. It's ridiculous. Like conkers, cartwheels. I was in Australia like they banned running. Running. I mean like touching, touching touch. Yeah. I mean the list you should actually Google. It's absolutely fascinating. Right. So we've banned all this stuff a cartwheel, a handstand running across the playground. And they're not taking those physical risks. Now why is this key. Because a child's development in them their trust development. It happens to about the age of six. We continue to develop that. But their trust in themselves that they can fall and pick themselves up, the trust that their parent will know when to put their arms out and when to say, actually, you're okay, keep going. Right. That is very early. So they don't develop that. And then in parallel the kid goes into the other room and then they are over trusted in this online world. And they're allowed to take all these kinds of risks. So you've got a lack of risk taking in the physical world, and then too much risk taking in the online world. And then we wonder where their judgment is. We wonder why they're not resilient because they can't be. They're not developing that self-trust. And that I think is something you guys are doing amazing work in the online world. But that physical piece like that is the other piece that we need to focus on. The play piece. The playground piece.
Yeah, I'd love to. Great. I'd love to. I'd love to add on. First, there's this loathsome, greeting in the US since Covid, when you walk out, you know, the guards or whatever, you know, stay safe, stay safe. And like, no, I was like, no, stay adventurous. Like, don't tell young people to stay safe. They're already paranoid. And we we did a number on them with Covid restrictions. But what I want to add on here, which is just so helpful in understanding all of this risk and parenting is the attachment system. And if you've all heard the phrase, but just to be really clear about what it is, it's a cybernetic system first written about by by John Bowlby in the 1940s in Britain. And, it's the key thing is that we're all mammals, and mammals have this long attachment between the mother and the child. And so there. But the point of a mammal is you have this long attachment to nurture a big brain. How is the big brain going to get wired up? It's not from the genes. Genes don't tell the brain how to grow. It's from experience. And so the child has to have lots of experience and with a lot of failure and some fear, and they go a little further away and then they come running back. If there's a problem, they come back to the secure base and then they go a little further away. And this is exactly what Rachel's talking about, about trust in yourself. So in those first years, their internal working models are being formed like, yes, you know, I'm excited by this. I want to do this, but I can always go back to my mother for safety. And you do that thousands and thousands of times, and you have a competent kid who can go out on his bicycle, who can float down the Mississippi River on a raft when, you know, Huck Finn was 10 or 12 years old. So you need to do that over and over again. Now, what's happening now? We think, no, we don't let you out. It's too dangerous out there. So I'm not going to give you the experience that will actually make you more competent. But I'm going to put you into this unstructured world, which is physically safe. No one can hurt you physically if they're on your computer, although you're talking with strange men and sharing pictures, and they could actually get enough power over you to compel you. In one horrible example, they made the girl kill her own hamster while they watched, the sexual abuse that can take place over the internet is astonishing. So if we keep our eye on the attachment system and then we think, what are what are the relationships kids are going to have from now on, and it's with their teddy bears. First, because the teddy bear is going to be much more responsive. It has AI built in. It's going to be their tutor buddies, which will have personalities once, even well before they're ready for sexuality. It's Elon Musk is going to be pushing sexbots on them. So we have to see the attachment system. I mean, we let these companies hack our attention with devastating cognitive and emotional results. Now we're letting them hack our attachment and that will be catastrophic for humanity. So just an idea. I just I formatted the other day, I want to drop in here, parents, if you want to have grandchildren, do not give your children any chat bots.
And can I can I just.
Oh go ahead, I want to I want to.
Add on to attachment and why it's so important. Attachment, yes, is how kids learn trust. It's how they feel secure. But the other reason attachment is so important and we can all reflect on this on our own childhoods and lives, is the nature of a relationship you form with your early caregivers is the blueprint you take into adulthood for the relationships you seek out. Attraction in adulthood. All it is is the activation of your earliest attachment system. It's what feels like home. And if what starts to feel like home because it was wired early is something completely sycophantic, you can think about the rage someone will have in a relationship with a human who gets it wrong, who rejects them once in a while, who says, I don't know about that. I don't want to build on your idea. I would like to share my own idea. The body will say, I don't have a model for this, and it's not like then you develop emotion regulation skills just on the spot. Your body rejects that experience. It's such an injury to you. You've never ever dealt with that. So attachment beyond leading to self trust. It's the model you take into your older years, and it's actually what starts to feel familiar in your adult years. And so I think that also underlies the importance of forming secure attachments with real humans who mess things up, who don't get it right all the time, who hopefully then repair, who allow you to take risk. And that is a human to human interaction.
Can I just ask you about, the main topic, the hot topic of the whole meeting this year has been AI. We have been working in this space for very long time, working on harms and also well-being aspects of children being online. And those of us who work in that space are very worried. We are particularly worried because the whole model, which was already psychologically powerful enough and which was focused on attention, is now moving towards the attachment. So these blueprints potentially, that you would build with a human will have probably be built with a machine that you can't reciprocate with. How is this impacting the brain or our kids, and what will this mean? And then we will get to why is this at all a thing or possible to be to be happening? Rachel, do you want to kick off? We also had a comment on the previous one. I don't want to cut you out, but like, maybe like build on that as well.
Yeah, I was just more going to comment on, some recent data. I was looking at a risk taking in teenagers because, you know, and you look at it and what's often portrayed is like, risky behaviors are going down, right? So you go drinking, drugs, teenage pregnancies and you're not, and you go, that's a good thing, right? And then you flip. Well, often you have to flip ten pages because then you go, well, driving, leaving the house dating. Right. So what happens is it's it's a retraction. Like people literally retreat. And so it's not just FOMO, it's fogo. Like they actually have a fear of going out. And we see in some countries around the world, I think it's in South Korea, there's parts of Japan where they pay a stipend the equivalent of like €500 a month for people to leave.
To pick up the phone when the phone rings are full on, like, check out.
That's that's so in Australia, did a study that 80% of Gen Z are like almost phobic of answering the phone. Now, why are they phobic? Because there's a risk, right? They're not in control in that moment. So I say this because when we look at those studies and those studies are often cited that actually people they're doing okay. Right. Because all these risky behaviors are going down. They're not taking any kinds of risks, and they're retreating in.
Relationship will be an informative chat bots.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, you know, a point that as we're all talking about AI and something we need to keep in mind is that, we've dealt with these companies before because there are some of them are the same companies that gave us social media, and what they did was they're in a race with each other to grab as much attention as possible. And what they do about the risk factors. Well, we know meta did a bunch of research. In fact, I put up a website, Meta's internal research, where we cataloged 28 studies that meta did, in which they found all kinds of harm. They did correlational studies, experimental studies, surveys of young people. So they have a huge amount of evidence. But what do they do? They never release it. Instead, they spend huge amounts of money to buy up civil society organizations to put in there using the tobacco playbook, to confuse us, to make us feel like, oh, there's no evidence that it's causation. How could you possibly tell correlation from causation? They keep doing this and doing this and doing this. It's the same companies. They're going to do the same thing with AI so we can all I mean, we don't have to do research to know that if children are growing up with their primary attachment, being a chatbot, that it's going to be a disaster. We don't have to wait 20 years for for my future students to argue over whether it's causation or correlation. So we've been here before. So I think we need a kind of a state of emergency declaration that while I don't want to make any comments about about AI in high school, secondary school, of course they're going to need to use it on the job market in the job world, of course, but brain development, childhood, you only get one, childhood, you only get one puberty. And so I think we need a kind of a state of emergency to say, keep this stuff the hell away from children, keep it out of elementary school, keep it out of the schools. Unless unless a specific application has been proven to be effective and safe. And so the, you know, a chatbot tutor that that responds to what you got wrong, that makes sense. That seems to work. So you can have very limited use of AI. Not at the age of five, six, seven, please. But by eight, nine, ten, I can see that I could be persuaded. Other than that, you better give us a mountain of evidence that this stuff is effective, because the gameplay, we know the game plan of these companies, we know that they have, they have raised so much money they have to bring it back. And many of you have heard the word in acidification. Why all of these apps? They start off nice, but then they become horrible because they have to start squeezing the customers for money. OpenAI just announced they're going to now start advertising. Of course they are. So we are right at the point where these platforms, the AI, it all looked nice. It's about to get incredibly hard on our kids.
And Becky, what does it do to our.
Yeah, I mean, I.
Think, you know, I've been in meeting after meeting here about how AI will take away a lot of the menial tasks and will allow us to do the more human stuff, connect with each other, be creative. I think what's totally missing from the conversation is the humans that supposedly are going to be able to connect with other humans and be creative along the way. We've downgraded their ability to be human by reducing friction. Right time under tension is a great exercise phrase. That's how you build muscle. It's actually not my area of expertise, but it's a good phrase time under tension. It's the same for thinking about how we deal with human emotions. Time under tension, time under friction. So if we are raising kids in a world where we are always reducing friction, our ability to tolerate frustration and friction is actually the single component of our ability to talk to other humans. Make a doctor's appointment. Be creative. Being creative is really about your ability to tolerate uncertainty and just create and create and trust something longer. That is no way going to be possible if we are downgrading the experience along the way. And so I think that's the part of the AI conversation that I haven't heard surfaced enough. Besides, the three of us were talking about it.
I'm going to do a quick another question, then we'll open for the audience as well. But something that I've been thinking about is, we know that vulnerability of kids, especially online, also comes from this disconnection from their local communities or parents or trusted adults. And what my biggest worry with AI systems is, is that by creating this frictionless, sycophantic relationships with chatbots, we'll even further away isolate the children from their local communities, parents, friends. And that makes you more vulnerable to abuse. What are your thoughts about that? Like, how do you because what are the relevance of these kind of all the pillars of that kind of support network around the child that it needs to have to be to be? I see your burning down.
I'd like to start this off because just before we were talking about that, we would talk about what is flourishing. What does it mean to flourish? What does it take to flourish? My first book was The Happiness Hypothesis. I reviewed ancient wisdom on happiness and the sources of meaning. And the. The conclusion is happiness doesn't come from getting what you want. That's very short lived. It doesn't come from within. In part it does. But the best answer is happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right kind of embeddedness relatedness between yourself and others, yourself and your work and your self and something larger than yourself. So as Freud said, love and work. Those are the first two. So kids need to be deeply embedded in real relationships with human beings who will still be there in a year or 2 or 3. So and then gradually they need to develop skills and something productive. They need to be of use to other people. And gradually they'll get they'll get a larger religious or political worldview. So you've got to get kids embedded over the course of many years. Think about the embedding. What does the technology do? We are now we all use technology. I am more closely linked to my wife and my children, because we can text each other all the time, and I'm more closely linked to everyone in the world, but I'm cut off from all the people in between because we all have our headphones in. Soon we'll have goggles on. So the technology brings us to connection with strangers, but it cuts out the middle field other than like you're very close relationships. So imagine raising kids where they aren't having friendships, they're not out playing. It's too dangerous, but they are connected to millions of strangers online. This is a world where you can't really have close, trusting relationships. You don't do anything productive. You're just creating content for the platforms, and you won't have a sense that you're part of something larger. You're just consuming content. And that's why you have a crisis of meaningfulness among young people.
Absolutely. And then, like, how does parent try the relationship, kind of help with that? And maybe then also, Rachel, for you, for communities more broadly. But Becky.
Yeah, I mean.
How does a parent child relationship help.
With how do how do you how do you kind of what can parents do about this dynamic. Like what is their role. Because again, you always speak about how a child needs skills and then a parent needs to help them build those skills to be able to cope. But if a parent also is left in the uncertainty of what is the right or wrong thing to do, like what is that?
Yeah.
I mean, everything is new.
In a hopeful way, right? Another core belief of mine is just it's never too late, right? We often say, and I'm sure I sit here hearing you too, and being like, oh, I messed this up with my kid and I should switch that. And it's too late. They're too old. It's not. I mean, you only get one childhood and there are things we can do today to change the course. And I actually think a mindset shift that is so helpful is just as a parent to remind yourself, my win my most. If I define my win not as a moment of ease with my child, but a moment of impact with my child. And I'm going to share this phrase that helps me. I call it sick joy just because it's easy to remember, okay? Like when my kid isn't in class with their best friend, I don't have sick joy to them. I'm not like, this is gonna be great for you. Children don't like that. But internally to say the way I'm going to cope with this with my child, I have sick joy knowing this is going to set my kid up for the day. That guess what? They're not going to get the promotion when they think they deserve it. They might go through a breakup. They're going to see their friend get a big house and be so jealous, just like they're jealous of their two friends who are together in class. The situation might change, but the circuit is going to be the exact same. And if I think about that impact, then my ability to show up with support because the opposite of fixing isn't demeaning. Hey, this isn't a big deal. You're not with your friends. Who cares? That is not helpful, and it's never been more important to be connected to your kid because you need to hear about the crazy stuff they're seeing online and they need to trust you. But support might sound like this is a bummer, and I have sick joy knowing I can say this is a bummer. Of course, you're upset today, and honestly, the first week of school might stink. And you know what? I know you're going to get through it. And I'll be here when you get home and you are going to go to school and you are going to end up having a great year. I believe this is hard and I believe in you. Those two things, to me, are the antidote to anxiety from a parent perspective. One foot in, I believe you, but we've lost the other one. I believe in you. We've lost the I believe in you. And I think that's important to bring back.
It's such a critical validation that a child needs. Rachel, how about the role of communities?
So as Becky was, I will comment as you were talking, Becky, I was thinking, before Christmas, both my kids happened to have black eyes and my left hand was in a cast, so it wasn't, what happened? We'd walk along the street and they'd be great parenting, and I'd sort of, like, put my. I was embarrassed, right? Because they both play contact sports and they both had injuries at the time. And I noticed their head started to drop. And it was it was actually amazing the number of times people said it was a bad look and I should have gone, yes, right. Like, let's celebrate this. And anyway, back to back to communities because I do think the local trust piece is the piece that we don't talk about enough, and it might be the piece that is not easy to fix, but is more within our control. So, if it's okay, I'll try and give you, like, the entire history of trust and technology in one minute. Right. So exactly one minute. Exactly. So when you, when you zoom out and this can explain so much of what's going on in the world, you can see how technologies change trust. Right. And it's it started off in local communities. We had to trust one another. Right. The tribe, the village parents in many ways had more help. And then what happened was that kind of trust. It wasn't scalable. So we went through incredible innovation and invented institutional institutions. And a lot of that local trust was replaced with systems, some great systems, things like everything from insurance to brands, education systems, the Postal Service, you name it. And that worked for a long period of history that we had trust in these institutions. Then came all these network technologies and messed it all up in a big way, because they took that trust that was like this, and they distributed it through networks and platforms. And then this question of accountability came into place, right? If you don't have the institution, you don't have the local tribe who is responsible when things go wrong. Now, we are still living through that massive disruption and transition, and along comes AI and creates another chapter of trust. Now I call it augmented trust, and it's really that line where you cannot distinguish between someone or something. So trust in someone and trust in something. That line now disappears. And this becomes really, really complicated. Because actually what we need is we need more of the local trust. We need more third spaces for these kids to go. You know, you say to any teenager, teenager, get off, where do I go? Where do I go outside? And it's interesting. I was with the UK government the other week and it was the first time, sort of the Department of Defence and the Home Office had really got together with like big community charities, and I found it really interesting that it was the first time people were going. Investment in communities is not a social investment. It's actually an issue of national security. And I was like, that connection seemed really obvious to me, right? Because those broken communities, those broken families, they are the most vulnerable, right? They're the most vulnerable to misinformation. Because what happens to those communities is two things. They either retract and become very, very insular or they become polarized. They go to the other side. So investment in communities and local infrastructures, that is the other side of this. That's what we need to hold parents, families, that social glue back at the local level. There's so much work to be done.
And I think this speaks to the kind of on a positive note, a lot of the times we expect parents to deal with these issues by themselves because they feel isolated. They don't feel they belong to these communities. Becky's building one of those communities back, but we are missing that component. But that requires investment, purposeful policy making and support of societies and private companies. And everybody has to have the buy in for that, because oftentimes we give parents strategies for individual level action, but then collective problems still remain. We'll get back to that. But we have eight minutes and I want to bring in the audience. Can we have hands up for people who would want to ask any questions? Oh, okay. There it is. First one, just wait for the mic. Mic, please. Thanks.
So I guess on two issues, one, creating a robust children's that's up to the parents and more within their control. But speaking of more on the social media and the smartphones, etc., there's most people in this room probably have a clear opinion on it, but the next 50%, the ones who are sort of saying, well, because everyone else has it, my kids will have it the last 20%. They believe it's positive in some way, so we're not going to address them. But how do you engage the ones that are sort of neutral on the issue and say, well, you know, everyone else is doing it, so I can't force my kid not to do it?
Maybe not a policy level.
When the anxious generation came out, I faced almost no criticism. The main thing people said was, it's too late. You know, the horse has left the stable. The technology is here to stay. They're going to have to use it eventually, so they might as well use it now. But it turns out that we actually could get them out of schools. And that's going around the world. And the results are spectacular. And as people see, oh, wait, you know, when kids don't when they're not watching porn and video games during class, they actually learn and have fun. It's like, oh, maybe I shouldn't let my kid be on the device all the time after school as well. We're getting age limits. Lots of countries are following Australia, France, Indonesia or committed, many other countries. So, yes, many people had a fatalistic idea that, well, everyone else has one. We just have to do it. But now, really, thanks to the mothers of the world who stood up right away and said, let's go, we're realizing, oh, no, wait, we have some agency here. And I think the same thing needs to happen with AI and chatbots, and we need to stand up and say, no, AI teddy bears make those illegal. Do not give chatbots to children. I think we can do this.
Anybody else?
Yeah. I get one more quick thing. You know, I love metaphors. And, you know, I think a powerful thing to think about as a parent is we say it's too late. Like, you know, the genie's out of the bottle, but I do. I always go back to a plane and thinking about being a passenger, and I'm flying from Zurich to New York City, and there's some light that goes off early on, and the pilot saying, well, like, I promise you guys, New York City. So I don't think I can land. You know, we're just going to keep going. Like, can you imagine you want your pilot to have the freedom to make a different decision when they have new information. And I think our ability to do that has to be collective. Like I agree, I when my kids were younger, way before smartphones were even a discussion, that's when the time is to join with other parents in your village and say, let's start talking about this now. Let's start those conversations. Even if you give an iPad, what time, how long? Like having that community, prevents you from being the parent who says, well, everyone else has it. That's number one. But to me, the skill that is so important to build way before any screen comes into your home is actually boundaries. I think this is one of the most important things that I teach parents. Our job often is to make decisions we think are going to be good for our kid, even when they're upset with you. It's kind of the ultimate form of leadership. Love is when you're able to hold that in mind and tolerate your kid saying all the stuff kids say to us. And if the first time you're setting a boundary is with social media, your kid's going to freak out. Not because they're the only one who doesn't have social media. They're actually freaking out saying, who are you? You've never said no to a cupcake, literally. And now you're trying to do this with my social life. So the earlier on you can say to your kid, no cupcake today, and it's okay if you're mad. Our relationship is strong enough to survive the night. Then by the time it even gets to phones. And if you have something within your community, it's going to be parenting within the same patterns. You've always parented your kid with boundaries, with connection, and not being so scared of them being upset with you short term.
That's an amazing strategy for sure. More questions I want to yeah.
Can I just add to that? I think also consistency in the no is absolutely key right. Like there's.
And following through.
Yeah I think it was was it Martin Luther King who talked about compass and thermometer. And I think so much of parenting around this is the thermometer like the reaction to the temperature or the moment or blah, blah, blah. But you've got to hold that north, right? And that that no has to stay the same all the time. And that's really hard.
I think.
Okay.
Go ahead.
Hello, I'm Luis from Unico, Brazil. We are an age verification solution working to enable trust in digital platforms. My question is who has the role to start this movement? Parents, platforms or policymakers? And another one is how much time we still have before we lose the generation.
Oh well, I'll start off. Thank you. I went to Brazil. I worked with some some of your people. Brazil is really one of the leading countries in this, in part because you have effective age verification. Clearly the the responsibility lies with the platforms. They're making an incredibly dangerous consumer product that has a gigantic body count already. And the AI companion bot industry also has a body count. A lot of dead kids already. So the responsibility lies with them. In the United States, we don't seem capable of ever making them responsible for anything. So for that reason, it has fallen to other countries to act, to begin some sort of regulatory legal framework. And it has fallen to parents to do a job that they are not equipped to do. This is not like a decision about can you have candy? I say, no, this is your entire social life is now online on these platforms that have bribed your state legislators to stop legislation. ET cetera. ET cetera. So, it's such an emergency, and it's so complicated that I would say we all have to be acting quickly. We don't have five years to get this right. We have to get this right this year.
And it's absolutely not fair to put the burden on the parents and digital literacy programs, because again.
That's a.
Talking point. It's such a literacy.
That's what they say.
Yeah, absolutely. Question.
Hi. I'm from India Step Foundation, which we are part of. We have started a campaign across the country called Celebrate Childhood Now. And it's all about giving parents permission to let their children be that 0 to 8 is a time when children need to get on a path of self-discovery and self-learning. Be there. Find the child in yourself. Let them be. There's enough neuroscience to back that is the best way to learn. The best way to take risks, the best way to learn coping mechanisms. So if you all could all it's been a wonderful panel. Can you talk about because there's a simple solution. Anybody can do it. So, and it's a societal mission which we're trying to make. This is going now to Brazil and South Africa as well. Your comments, all the three experts here, what is the role of free play in childhood, and will that help parents to be less anxious because some of you know, children love it really. But you have to let them be.
Can I just expand and have a closing question on top of that? Like, let's leave people with some sense of direction and possibility and solutions. So let's do a round of of all three of you. What is what is that path forward that we can do to change the system, support the parents, create conditions for trust and thriving of kids. Let's go. Rachel. John. Becky.
Okay, so the very essence of trust and trust based parenting, I describe trust as a confident relationship with the unknown, and that involves letting go. And free play means letting go. That is great. Trust in the online world. I wish we could take that word away and say you are not allowed to use it. We are having a risk conversation and whether we're talking about social media or AI, we are talking about the mitigation and the management of risk. We're not talking about whether you trust this technology or not. So for parents, I often talk about try to get out that mindset of probability, things that might go wrong and think about possibility, particularly with the young children, because that's the expansive free play growth.
20s each.
Oh 20 I would just say when my mother was raising me and my sisters, she learned from a child rearing expert the motto, don't just do something, stand there. And it was to let the kids work out the friction, work out the work out the problem. I co-founded an organization called Let Grow You Let Go, Let Grow with Lenore Skenazy, who wrote a book, Free Range Kids. And so go to org. We have all kinds of ideas for schools and for families to encourage kids to take risks, intelligent risks, be out with their friends. So we can't just be taking away the phones. We have to be giving them back an exciting, fun, wonderful childhood.
Yeah. I would just.
Add on I think our mindset around our everyday parenting really matters. Frustration, boredom, whining, meltdowns, protests those are all actually really not just normal but really healthy ingredients of childhood. And if you start to remind yourself in those moments, wait, this isn't actually a problem to solve, I probably have to do less right doing nothing. People always say, oh, you're just doing nothing. It's really hard to do nothing, okay? Because doing nothing externally means you're doing something inside. You're regulating your own emotions. You're being an adult. Often when we do something on the outside to fix something with our kid, we're doing nothing on the inside. Right? And so I think frustration, boredom, struggle, reconceptualizing those as your wins in parenting, makes them a little bit more tolerable.
Thank you. Becky. John. Rachel, this was amazing. And thank you, everybody for being here.