Photo: Maarten van den Heuvel for Unsplash
I’m trying something new this week: five stories you should read, and why. All of them cover topics near and dear to How To Be Brave: teens, tech, learning, and how to show up well for our kids.
If you like it, please let me know: As always, I welcome your feedback. Please also consider forwarding it and asking your friends to subscribe, or posting it to Substack notes or LinkedIn. My goal: to make the lives of parents and educators easier by curating, synthesizing, and doing some light touch meaning-making.
The Relationship You can Prescribe (Pam Cantor’s substack)
Pam is a friend and writes about the science of human possibility. Her knowledge, experience and background as a child psychiatrist are only a few of the reasons you should read and follow her.
This week she writes about what human connection unlocks in us, and reminds us that too often those relationships are left to luck.
“The single most important input into a developing brain — the steady presence of someone who believes in you — is handed out almost entirely by chance,” she writes.
The relationships she formed in her life, she writes, were almost entirely due to luck. “The right person happened to be in the room at the right moment. Someone happened to see something in me that I could not yet see in myself. I did not earn those people, and I could not have ordered them. They arrived, and because they did, my life went one way instead of the other. I have written before about how decisive they were. What I have not said is how arbitrary it was that I got them at all.”
Pam wrote this essay after returning from the Big Brothers Big Sisters national conference. Mentoring, she argues, isn’t soft or extracurricular. It is, in her words, “one of the most evidence-based things a human being can do for another.” A landmark 1995 study found those matched with mentors were measurably less likely to use drugs, half as likely to skip school, and reported stronger family relationships 18 months later.
But there was a catch: the benefits concentrated in relationships that lasted. A match that collapses can leave a child worse off than no match at all. Trust matters. And trust usually takes time. Big Brothers Big Sisters knows this, and does it at scale. Pam’s reflections on the conference are powerful.
“Belief in someone does something physical,” Cantor writes. “It shows up in the body as a shift in chemistry that opens the brain to the fuel it needs to grow.”
Protecting human connection in an age of AI will require work. Understanding the biology of that connection, and what it unlocks, will imprint on us the essential nature of that protection.
At 17, she sued Meta and Google and Won. Now She’s Ready to Tell Her Story (Bloomberg).
Kaley Glenn-Mills started using YouTube at six years old. At nine, she was on Instagram. By the age of 16, she was spending 16 hours a day on her phone. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent in the landmark case K.G.M. v. Meta et al. It’s the most damaging verdict to hit social media in a quarter century. The court awarded her $6 million in damages, and the case has been dubbed social media’s Big Tobacco moment. This Bloomberg profile reveals a heart-breaking twist: despite suing the platforms that she says caused her anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia, Kaley is still on them. “Even now, even after the lawsuit, I’m still addicted,” she told Bloomberg Businessweek. “I’m still scrolling my life away.”
Internal Meta documents shown to the jury included this gem: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.” Both companies are appealing. There are 2,500 similar cases pending in California alone and over 10,000 across the US.
Two reasons: One, precedence. For decades, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been Big Tech’s get-out-of-jail-free card, shielding platforms from liability for content posted by their users.
But Kaley’s lawyers didn’t argue that Instagram and YouTube hosted bad content. They argued that the design of the platforms—infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, autoplay, notification engineering, engagement-maximizing features—was itself a defective product that caused harm. Judge Carolyn Kuhl agreed.
Two: Kaley still scrolling her life away made me think of a line from my book: brains develop as they are used. Habits are hard to break, especially when they take root in early adolescence and are then shaped over many developmentally-important years. Those internal documents show that this shaping wasn’t an accident: it was a business plan. If Big Tech wants to know why parents are stark raving furious about edtech and AI, look no further than the evidence of this case.
Folarin Balogun and the consistency vs common sense trade-off (No More Marking, Daisy Christodoulou’s substack).
The World Cup has been fun, collective, and beautifully unifying at a moment when our world needs all of those. Even if you don’t give a whit about football (soccer) it’s hard to avoid being a little caught up in the joy and despair, and the excellent outfits and videos produced from the whole thing (Norwegian rowers in NYC subways! Scottish fans drinking their way through Boston!)
I love watching sports so I am biased, but I will forever remember this summer in part due to the epic games: Egypt vs Argentina, England vs Mexico, Portugal vs Spain, USA vs Belgium.
And then Trump had to tarnish it all. USA striker Folarin Balogun got a red card in its game against Bosnia and Herzegovina. The call was controversial, as many calls are controversial in the World Cup. Trump then intervened, calling FIFA president Gianni Infantino to request a review of the decision. He then, of course, boasted about it publicly. FIFA, in an extraordinarily rare move, suspended the ban, allowing Balogun to play against Belgium—triggering fury from UEFA, Belgium’s government, and soccer federations worldwide, who called it a crossing of a “red line” that undermined the integrity of the entire tournament.
Daisy frames how to think about these decisions helpfully: do we want a principles-based approach or a rules-based approach? I found this weirdly thought-provoking as she of course then applies it to AI. It’s worth noting that Daisy, who writes about education and technology and writing itself, actually wrote a book about this, I Can’t Stop Thinking About VAR, in 2024.
From her Substack:
At its core is a conflict between two different ways of making decisions: the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.
The letter of the law says that we should prioritise a consistent set of rules and a clear process. We should stick to that process even if sometimes it delivers odd outcomes, because consistency and clarity are important end goals in and of themselves.
The spirit of the law says we should prioritise getting to the right decision. If our rules and processes deliver the wrong decision, what is the point of them? Sometimes you need some common sense to fix obviously absurd outcomes.
This is a paragraph I really loved: “In football, and maybe in other areas too, we have a lot of leaders who are keen to stick rigidly to processes that aren’t working. We also have a lot of leaders who don’t care about processes at all. What we really need — and don’t have — are leaders who care a lot about designing and reforming processes so they are more likely to reliably lead to the right outcome.”
This feels like an important lesson as we try to figure out how to do everything from fixing education to regulating tech.
Alex Russo (who writes about and monitors education journalism via The Grade) and Dan Meyers (who built a popular math app called Desmos, writes Mathworlds and works for edtech company Amplify) had an interesting conversation about tech in education.
Meyers argues that schools have essentially been immunocompromised for decades. The systems surrounding kids, he says, have “not been doing a good job of filtering out lousy ideas, which has led to a lot of ‘sickness’ inside that system.” Kids are using tools that don’t work and that are “cognitively de-skilling them” — and nobody in the edtech industry called it out because the industry had no shared definition of what works and what doesn’t.
The immune response is now coming. Not from schools or media, but from parents: blunt, heavy-handed, and late, but finally functional. Parent communities said “this is not working” (see this NYT story on how parents are winning in their fight to reclaim kids’ childhoods).
Healthy systems develop antibodies: The capacity to recognize and reject what’s harmful. Schools haven’t. The edtech industry flooded in, the immune system failed, and parents are now dealing with the consequences. This is tricky. Parents are now asked to be on the frontline of everything: social media and AI out of school, and now edtech inside of schools. And people wonder why we are frazzled, angry and pissed off at tech companies?
A working paper from UC Irvine’s Sina Rismanchian and researchers at McGraw Hill analyzed millions of student interactions with the ALEKS math platform before and after ChatGPT’s arrival. Some interesting patterns emerged. On word problems, the kind easily pasted into a chatbot, highschoolers spent 31% less time after ChatGPT launched, and correct-answer rates on proctored placement tests fell from roughly 80% to 60%. On graphing problems—harder to outsource to AI—performance held steady. The researchers call it “cognitive surrender.”
The paper hasn’t been peer reviewed and can’t prove students were using AI, but the divergence appeared precisely where outsourcing was easiest and vanished the moment students were supervised. Could be a coincidence, more likely a pattern.
My two main concerns about AI use and kids are emotional dependence and manipulation, on the one hand, and cognitive stunting on the other. The evidence that both are happening is growing.
Ok I said 5, but here is one more…!
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called for a ban on student-facing AI in elementary schools. This was a bit of an about-face since the AFT partnered with OpenAI and Microsoft last year to provide AI training to its members.
Right before she called for the ban, she visited a school to see Khanmigo, an AI chatbot created by Khan Academy, in action. What she saw helped to change her mind. (Here’s our take on Sal Khan’s U-turn in The Atlantic)
And while I’m adding extras, I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave out…
What if It’s Not the Phones? (The Atlantic)
Many of us inside the teen and tech debate know the debate between Psychologist Peter Gray and The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt well. Haidt believes social media and phones caused the teen mental health crisis. Gray says it’s academic pressure, particularly the introduction of the Common Core. The Atlantic just published a piece detailing the debate, also folding in psychologist Candice Odgers, critiquing both and offering a third explanation: “Caregiver mental health is by far the strongest predictor of childhood mental health,” Odgers said. And it has fallen.
Rebecca and I dug into all this research for The Disengaged Teen and found the unsatisfying answer that the mental health crisis is not all due to phones (but phones cause plenty of problems and should, for example, be banned in schools) and academic pressure is a major stressor for some kids, and way under-reported, while also finding too many kids are bored and unchallenged. And we noted the powerful adult explanation: kids need us to show up and help them and adults are suffering a lot. In other words, there are a lot of causes and if we single one out, we risk putting all our energy into that one and ignoring the others.
We want single-source causes so we can have single-source solutions. But life doesn’t work this way. Yes, we should regulate Big Tech so they stop designing addictive tech and marketing it directly to teens. Yes, we need a conversation about banning dumb edtech and finding the right dosage levels for useful, bounded edtech. And hell yes to Odgers: adults need major support. (See research from Making Caring Common documenting this trend).
Journalism lives on the simple; the distilled; the counterintuitive, the hot take. I LOVE journalism and journalists which is good because I am one. But the single-source approach does a disservice to those of us looking to raise healthy teens. We need ideas, each other, better social support and fewer silver bullets, which rarely work and always disappoint.
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