Excerpt · Introduction

Read This First

I spent the better part of my career on the other side of the screen.

Not as a user but as an architect. I ran advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram and the platforms that followed them, and I understand how these systems work from the inside in the same way that a magician understands how an illusion works. I know what the lever does before it is pulled and I know what your attention is worth to the people who are selling it, and I know exactly how much money and intelligence has been invested in making sure that your child cannot put their phone down.

That knowledge is why my own kids are not on social media. Not in a preachy or restrictive way, but in the same way that a chemist who works with dangerous compounds is careful about what they bring home. I know what this stuff does and I kept it away from them.

I am not writing this book to feel superior about that choice. I am writing it because most parents don't have the same vantage point I had, and the people who designed these platforms were counting on that.

The honest version of what is happening

The smartest people on Earth, and I am not speaking loosely but literally, spent billions of dollars figuring out how to make your child unable to put their phone down. They hired neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists and machine learning engineers. They ran billions of experiments and built systems of extraordinary sophistication specifically designed to exploit the developing brain, and they succeeded beyond any reasonable measure of success.

This is not a parenting failure. You did not fail to raise a child with sufficient willpower or sufficient character or sufficient self-awareness. You raised a child, and then a system designed by the most well-funded engineers in human history ran a sustained campaign against their developing brain. The brain was not finished developing and was not designed to resist this particular kind of attack, and it lost ground.

That is what happened and it is the honest version, and it matters that you hear it because everything that follows in this book is built on the premise that you are not the problem and neither is your child.

But here is the other honest thing: it is now your responsibility to fix it. Responsibility is not the same as fault, and fault looks backward and responsibility looks forward, and this book is entirely about looking forward.

What you have already tried

I know what you tried first because every parent tries it first. You took the phone away and your child treated that event with approximately the same equanimity as someone in the middle of withdrawal from a substance they have been using daily for two years, which is to say not well. And then you either gave it back because the alternative was unbearable, or you held firm and discovered that taking the phone away did not solve the problem but relocated the misery.

You may have also tried parental controls and screen time limits and app blockers, and maybe a monitoring app that your child found and deleted inside of a week. You may have had the conversation, the one where you sat them down and told them you were worried and they looked at you with the particular expression that means I am waiting for this to be over.

None of it worked the way you hoped, and this book is going to explain exactly why and then give you something that does work.

Send me the full chapter at launch.

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