Thanks, I Hate It

Your Kid Doesn't Want the Algorithm. They Want You.

I recently had a digital experience that made me throw my phone and scream into a pillow. This is not an exaggeration. My dear friend Steven and I share many things that make us so close, but one of them is grief and the trauma of sudden loss. Steven lost his partner and I lost my sister. The grief is always evolving, but remains braided into all of our experiences, and is a tether between us as well. Anyone who has experienced grief knows it doesn’t play by any set rules and sometimes just invades your day without warning. Steven had been having one of those moments and had reached out to me over DM so those feelings would have somewhere to go and someone to bear witness to them.

I opened Instagram and saw the message, and before I could read it, Meta’s AI that I did not give permission to access my DMs, asked me if I wanted it to summarize the message for me. I do not know how to fully describe how irate I felt at this stupid notification. No, Meta. I really fucking DO NOT want you to summarize a deeply human message from one of my dearest friends who is asking for care and connection. And all I could think about in that moment, while screaming into a pillow, was how helpless I felt.

I am not anti-AI. I use it for work, find it immensely helpful for certain tasks, and know that it offers amazing opportunities when it comes to accommodation and support for neurodivergent folks. Like anything tech related, it is not all or nothing. I am neither an AI optimist or convinced it means the inevitable demise of our society. I just know that I kind of hate it sometimes.

Those occasional bursts of hate are because of the messaging it’s rapid incorporation (both voluntary and not) sends to our kids. That summary is best, that everything in our lives should be frictionless, that there is always an answer close at hand and curiosity is a waste of time, that we should always be striving for more, that you can outsource the most essential aspects of our relationships to a probability machine that is, as my husband Max calls it, a benevolant psychopath.

My good friend was visiting last week and we went out to dinner and I was being so annoying because I could not stop watching this table next to us. A father and his son were out and the Dad was on his phone basically the entire time, even when he was talking to his kid. The son’s face lit up every time the Dad engaged and chatted with him briefly, and the kid was not on his phone. At one point his son was just sitting there, looking at his Dad, clearly anxious and wanting to talk. And after about 5 minutes of the Dad ignoring him and being totally absorbed in his phone, the son reluctantly picked up his phone, opened Chat GPT, and started chatting with it.

These are my I Hate It moments. I have no idea what was going on, and I am fully aware that Dad could have been using his phone for any number of reasons, but what I saw was the inverse of the story we are always being fed: kids are addicted to their screens and want nothing to do with their parents. This kid was probably 15 or 16, but watching him hope for his Dad’s attention made him look about 6. This kid wanted connection, he wanted to matter. And in the absence of human connection, he turned to AI.

I do not think all tech is evil nor do I have a screen free home. My kids watch tons of long form, story based TV shows, they love Danny Go when they need to get the wiggles out on a rainy day, and I LOVE snuggling with them and watching movies. And there have also been hundreds of times I have put a show on so I can finish some work. I just get pretty freaked out that we are being too chill about AI’s impact on young people and are going to get too worried, too late in the game.

When parents come to me for coaching and want to talk about tech, I always make them start with their own digital habits. Adolescents have the best bullshit detectors in the game, and if we try to shift your kid’s habits without addressing yours, that is going to lead to a giant nothingburger and lots of conflict. Those are some of the best coaching sessions I ever have because parents always come in so heated (and I get why) about their kid’s habits, and leave that session way more aware that is an ecosystem issue, not just a “their kid” issue. And that the digital habits they are worried about are actually a call for connection. I was on a podcast that I love called Screen Less, Play More and was telling the host, Cynthia, that if we want kids off their devices, we have to create IRL opportunities that give them the same things they are seeking when they go on their phones: entertainment, connection, fun, etc. Otherwise, we are doing nothing to disincentivize the kid’s belief that all good things come from screens. I am not telling you to have screen free homes and be obsessively trying to hang out with your kid, we all know this is going to be a big fail for tons of reasons. Creating IRL opportunities is about being open to having kids over more, to be the parent that has a phone basket, to have board games or card games available, to let them run wild in enclosed space without over monitoring. And yes, it does mean sometimes forcing them to hang out with you, and pushing through their eye rolls and whines. My family called it Forced Family Fun. It happened every few weeks for a few hours, and it was non negotiable.

We are underutilizing one of the most important moments in our kids' lives, and I think part of why is that we've been handed a story about adolescence that makes disengagement feel reasonable. The eye rolls, the closed doors, the grunts. We've been told this is just what adolescents are like, that they don't want us anymore, that backing off is actually good. I think that story is doing us all a disservice. Our biggest job right now isn't to survive their independence, it's to work with their development. It’s to stay in the game and design for connection in small and big ways, even when, especially when, they make it hard. Adolescent expert Ronald Dahl and colleagues describe early adolescence as a sensitive period specifically for prosocial learning. It’s a time when the motivation to matter, combined with new capacities for emotional connection and contribution, creates conditions that are genuinely unlike any other developmental stage. The window opens. It also closes. What gets learned here about self, relationships, and whether one's actions matter to others tends to stick.

AI is optimized to be available, responsive, and frictionless, exactly what a kid who wants to matter is looking for. If we leave a vacuum where connection should be, something will fill it. The question is whether it's us or an algorithm. Design for Connection, the final direction in the WILD Compass is the answer to that question. It's the deliberate, unsexy, sometimes awkward work of making yourself more compelling than a screen. Not by competing with it, but by offering the one thing it categorically cannot: the experience of actually mattering to another human being.

This is why Design for Connection is not a nice-to-have. It is not a cozy bonus round at the end of a hard parenting day. It is the actual work. Because AI is not going anywhere, and it will continue to offer our kids a frictionless, always-available, never-distracted substitute for the real thing. The only antidote to a benevolent psychopath is a present human. And the window to be that human, to be the one who gets to shape what your kid believes about connection, about whether they matter, about whether people show up is open right now. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to be there.

5 Ways to Design for Connection TONIGHT 🩷 💫

1. The Terrible Playlist Ask your kid to make you a playlist of songs you will probably hate. Listen to it in the car without commentary. Bonus: they will be watching you the whole time. I don’t care how vulgar or intense the song is, no commentary in the moment! You can always bring it up later, but in the moment, just let them have the win of watching your reaction and feeling silly.

2. The Worst Part of Your Day Contest At dinner, everyone competes for who had the actual worst day. No fixing, no silver linings, just competitive complaining. Whoever wins gets to pick dessert or skip dishes. It makes hard feelings funny and makes the table a place where nothing has to be performed.

3. The Dumb Question Jar Fill a jar with genuinely stupid, low-stakes questions. Things like: “would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses” energy. Pull one out when the vibe is bad. Nobody has to be vulnerable. Nobody has to be right. You just have to be in the same ridiculous conversation together.

4. The Unsolicited Compliment Drop Once a day, say something specific and true about your kid with zero agenda and walk away. Don’t wait for a response. Don’t make it a moment. Just drop it and leave. “That thing you said at dinner was really funny.” Then disappear. Low stakes, high impact. Ideally in person, but if you adolescent is being particularly feral, can also be delivered via text or post-it note on a mirror.

5. The Bad Movie Night Let your kid pick the worst, most objectively terrible movie they can find and watch it together. The shared experience of watching something awful is deeply bonding. Mocking it together even more so. You’re not building memories through perfection. You’re building them through fun, dumb things.

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If this resonated and you want to go deeper, I'm running a free workshop on March 24th where we work through all four directions of the WILD Compass together. Come. It's free, it's live, and it will change the tone of your home faster than you think. Here is the link to register!

Coaching is where we take everything in these posts and apply it to your actual kid, your actual house, your actual dynamic. I have a few spots left! If you've been thinking about it, this is the nudge. Book a Sales Call Here!