I finished writing my book thinking I’d finally got a lot of thoughts out of my head and onto the page.
Turns out, I was wrong.
If anything, writing it made me more aware of how often technology shows up in our family lives — not as a headline or a policy debate, but as a quiet, everyday presence that shapes habits, expectations, and arguments over dinner.
Which brings me to the current conversation about social media and kids.
The ban is already in place. Access is restricted. Rules are enforced. In theory, the issue has been dealt with.
In practice, of course, life continues.
Some kids are already finding ways around the restrictions. There always will be. Not because they’re trying to be difficult, but because curiosity, connection, and experimentation don’t disappear just because a system says “no”.
At the same time, those same systems are catching people they were never meant to catch. I know this because I was briefly restricted from Substack myself — flagged by an automated process doing exactly what it was designed to do.
No drama. No outrage. Just a quiet reminder that when technology enforces rules at scale, it doesn’t exercise judgement. It applies thresholds.
And thresholds are blunt instruments.
This is the part of the conversation that matters most after the ban.
Not whether the rule exists, but what it reveals about how technology actually operates in family life. Because once rules are enforced by systems, the human work doesn’t disappear — it just changes shape.
A ban might limit access, but it doesn’t remove the underlying questions families are still navigating:
- how kids connect and belong
- how rules are interpreted versus intended
- how much responsibility we quietly hand over to systems
- and how we stay involved when the solution isn’t neat or final
Writing my book reinforced something I’ve long suspected: technology rarely arrives as a single decision. It arrives as a set of trade-offs. For every problem it constrains, something else is constrained too. For every edge case it catches, another one slips through.
That’s not a failure. It’s just reality.
What matters is what kids learn from watching how adults respond to that reality.
If the lesson is “the system decides”, we risk teaching passivity.
If the lesson is “rules are there to be dodged”, we miss an opportunity for something better.
The more useful lesson sits in the middle: technology can help, but it doesn’t replace judgement; systems are imperfect; and staying involved — curious, present, and willing to talk about trade-offs — is still part of the job.
The ban didn’t end the work.
It simply made the human part more visible, and what we do really matters.
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A small practice
When technology enforces a rule, name the trade-off out loud.
“This protects some people — and it also gets some things wrong.”
Making trade-offs visible helps kids understand that technology isn’t neutral or magical. It’s a set of human choices — and judgement still has a role to play.
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You raise a very tough problem for parents and society, when kids hunger for something that is highly stimulating, entertaining, and addicting. Studies showI constant device use isn't about positive reinforcement, it's because it erodes attention and the ability to regulate impulsivity. Kids are very impulsive, so this is going to be a big test. Is the ban working, at least for in the classrooms?