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I remember being genuinely appalled the first time I saw it happen.

There it was, at a restaurant: kids at a family dinner table, headphones on, eyes locked onto glowing tablets. No conversation. No family engagement. Just silence, each member in their own, isolated world.

In the early 2010s, portable screens became the ultimate pacifier. The cheapest babysitter. The blue-light glow casts a spell that quiets children instantly. And very much like cancer, the danger wasn’t loud. It was silent. We did not know just how deeply the disease had metastasized until it was too late.

Now legislators and lawmakers are starting to see the impact and take action.

Last week, Australia implemented legislation raising the minimum age for social media to age 16. That’s a great start. Similarly, 32 states have banned phones in classrooms.

What concerns me more is that, as we enter the correction and overcorrection phases for social media and smartphone usage, we are dangerously behind the conversation when it comes to artificial intelligence and the serious damage that will be done if we don’t stay vigilant and act fast.

New technology has often sparked controversy. And by no means am I opposed to new technology. In fact, I am often first in line to get new gadgets or deploy new software solutions. You can judge me, but I live in the unique paradox of eliminating portable screens from my children’s world to the best of my ability, all while wearing a smart watch.

With the invention of any new technology, you see resistance. If you step back and look at the last seventy-five years, a pattern emerges that’s almost impossible to ignore. Every major technological shift follows the same generational rhythm. We experience it. We challenge it. We overcorrect. Then, eventually, we recalibrate. That’s the Generational Pendulum I write about often.

Think about just three innovations in the last century: Television. Video games. Cell phones.

Each one sparked fear. Each one triggered concern. Each one forced parents to step in and push back.

And now, for the first time, countries like Australia are doing exactly that with social media, placing hard limits on access for children under sixteen.

The difference is this: with every other technology, the challenge and recalibration came faster.

With social media, we hesitated.

And with artificial intelligence, we haven’t even begun.

When television entered American homes in the 1950s, it didn’t sneak in quietly. It sat right there in the living room. Everyone watched the same shows, at the same time, on the same screen.

Parents could hear it. See it. That visibility mattered. As concerns grew about violence, attention spans, sleep, and behavior, parents challenged television itself. Congress held hearings. Researchers studied it. Pediatricians weighed in.

The conclusion wasn’t that television was harmless, but it wasn’t the cultural apocalypse some feared either. Families recalibrated. Ratings systems emerged. Educational programming flourished. Screen-time guidelines became normal. Content locks on streaming platforms were employed. The pendulum swung, and settled.

At first, it was Pac-Man. Later, it was an Italian-American plumber in a red shirt and overalls exclaiming, “It’s-a me, Mario!” as he bounded across pixelated worlds.

Then the graphics improved. The storylines darkened. Violence became more realistic. Parents panicked again.

Large-scale reviews of the research consistently found little evidence linking video game play to serious violent crime, even if short-term increases in aggressive thoughts or emotions could be measured in laboratory settings (Ferguson & Kilburn, 2010; Ferguson, 2015).

Juvenile violent crime in the United States peaked in the early 1990s and then fell sharply as video games entered the mainstream. Youth arrests for violent crime declined by approximately 77% from their 1994 peak to 2019 (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2021), even as U.S. video game revenues exceeded $10 billion annually by the early 2000s (Entertainment Software Association, 2023).

The point isn’t that video games prevented violence, but that the apocalyptic predictions never materialized. Once again, parents challenged the technology, research caught up, and the generational pendulum recalibrated.

Then came cell phones.

The first fear was physical. Brain cancer. Early animal studies fueled headlines, but decades of human data never supported the panic (Interphone Study Group, 2010; National Cancer Institute, 2024).

That fear faded as the next fear emerged. Texting and driving. And this fear was and still is justified. Texting while driving increased crash risk by more than twentyfold (Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, 2009). Distracted driving has been linked to over 3,000 deaths every year in the United States (NHTSA, 2023).

So we acted. Laws were passed. “Car Mode” appeared. Voice-to-text and hands-free systems became standard. Cultural norms began to shift. Distracted driving deaths did not collapse the way many hoped. They plateaued. We mitigated the risk, but we didn’t eliminate it.

Simultaneously, something else happened with cell phones that we didn’t fully understand at the time. They created the first real crack in visibility.

This was no longer a shared screen in a shared space. It was a private portal that slipped into pockets, backpacks, hoodie sleeves. And we know that hidden things fester.

The point is that, historically, parents have challenged what their kids were into. They have pushed back. They have overcorrected and then recalibrated. But when it comes to smartphones and social media, that process feels to have slowed dramatically. In large part because they make exceptional babysitters. They buy quiet. They buy time. In older kids, they seem to be the ticket to being in the “in-crowd” so parents succumb to their child’s wishes.

And so, we’ve left kids to their devices.

Literally and figuratively.

Social media isn’t like television. It isn’t even like gaming.

For the first time, kids are not necessarily consuming the same content as their peers. No two feeds are the same. Algorithms don’t just deliver information, they deliver what you are most likely to engage with, thus shaping your identity.

You’re often scrolling alone. Physically alone but experientially alone, living a reality no one else is living in quite the same way.

This is why we’ve seen sharp and measurable rises in adolescent anxiety, depression, and suicide. Between 2011 and 2021, persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness among U.S. teen girls increased by nearly 60% (CDC, 2023). Suicide increased by more than 50% among youth ages 10–14 from 2007 to its peak in the late 2010s (CDC, 2022).

Research has also linked increased social media exposure to a higher risk of eating disorders and body image distress (Holland & Tiggemann, 2016; NIH, 2022). In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a formal advisory warning that social media poses a “profound risk of harm” to youth mental health (Murthy, 2023).

We are only beginning to challenge it. Australia, for all the questions about the practicality of enforcing its new laws, is the first country to truly pump the brakes.

Television and video games were forms of entertainment that we allowed and even welcomed into our living rooms. They were content you chose to consume. They waited for human input.

More importantly, they gathered us. These technologies pointed outward toward shared experiences, shared stories, shared spaces, and authentic human connection.

Social media is different. It isn’t just content. It’s agentic. Algorithms study behavior, predict desire, and then nudge, reinforce, and redirect attention in real time. The system decides what will keep you engaged, and then quietly optimizes for that outcome.

Smartphones and social platforms didn’t enter our lives as villains. They arrived wearing a cape. They promised connection, learning, belonging, and community. And they delivered, without us pausing to ask whether the mechanism delivering that connection might fundamentally change the experience of being human.

We thought we were deepening human connection. Instead, we were deepening attachment to the device and dependency on the machine behind it.

Sir Isaac Newton’s laws in physics apply here too: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

We built technology to connect people, and in doing so, we changed how connection itself is experienced. We built platforms to foster community, and in doing so, we altered what community even means. We built systems to spread knowledge, and in doing so, we blurred the line between information and wisdom.

And I think the problem is we’re building technology better, stronger, and faster. In fact, it is so fast that we’ve stopped depending on the kinds of conversations that used to happen around a campfire. Those were the meaningful conversations. The slow ones. The human ones. But we don’t have the campfire anymore. We have the flicker of the pocket-sized screen. Everything becomes: how fast can you produce information? How fast can you get in front of people? How fast? We’ve built a machine designed for speed, convenience, and scale, and in the process, we’ve left behind the very reason we started all this in the first place: connection, meaning, purpose, and bringing people together.

Today, the sight of a device acting as a babysitter is already unsettling. We recognize the glow now. We sense the cost.

But the harder question isn’t about what we see today. It’s about what scene we’ll walk into a year from now and barely recognize.

Humanity has always been drawn to knowledge. To power. To transcendence. To become more than we are. Some traditions frame this as original sin. It’s not simply disobedience, but the desire to be like God. To know what we are not yet ready to hold. To collapse the gap between wisdom and capability.

Every generation inherits the unintended consequences of the one before it. That’s not a moral failure, it’s a human one. But what is different this time is speed. Artificial intelligence will not give us decades to notice the side effects, debate the ethics, and slowly correct course. The systems are learning faster than we are asking questions.

If we wait for the damage to become obvious, we will once again be reacting instead of leading. And by then, the most important choices will already have been made for us.