Raising Kids In The Algorithm Age

What if the loudest voices shaping your child’s mind aren’t in your home, but inside their phone? 

As a physician, a dad, and a creator, I walk through the paradox of using social media for good while watching the same systems chip away at kids’ mental health, attention, and empathy. We pull back the curtain on how algorithms exploit developing brains, turning streaks and notifications into compulsive loops that feel like connection but often deliver anxiety and shame.

I share real clinic moments, panic attacks sparked by a broken Snap streak, friendships derailed by a two-letter “OK”, and pair them with evidence from systematic reviews and meta-analyses linking problematic use to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and stress. 

We also dig into early childhood research showing that heavy screen exposure correlates with weaker language and executive function, and we explore how digital communication strips away tone and context, making misunderstandings more likely. 

But it’s not all doom. Phones can be powerful tools for curiosity, science learning, cooking, making, and building. The key is purpose: skills over validation, creation over comparison.

You’ll hear the rules that work in our home and with families I advise: delay the smartphone where possible, skip high-risk apps for middle schoolers, set clear time limits with opt-in extensions, and use positive reinforcement rather than threats. We cover coping skills for boredom, rejection, and frustration, plus simple scripts for talking about cyberbullying, predators, and media literacy. Finally, we zoom out to schools and policy, calling for digital hygiene norms, algorithm transparency, and age protections that put child well-being first.

If you’re looking to replace panic with a plan, this conversation offers practical, science-backed steps to raise resilient, emotionally grounded kids in a hyper-connected world. Listen, share with another parent or educator, and leave a review with the one boundary that has made the biggest difference in your home. 

Your idea might help another family tonight.

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Peace, love, plants!
Dr. Jules

Chapters

• 0:00 Section A

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:23

Yo, plant-based buddies, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today's topic is a personal one for me. I'm a doctor, I'm a dad, and now for the last few years I've been a content creator, but I'm still stuck in this strange paradox. I use social media to educate and inspire thousands of people every day, but at the same time, I'm watching these same platforms chip away at the mental health of our kids. Now, I've seen it in my clinic and I've seen it in my own home. Kids breaking down over cruel comments. I've seen one of my patients experience panic attacks simply triggered by a delayed text response. My own children have also felt like outsiders until we finally gave in and bought them each a smartphone. This podcast episode isn't about being anti-technology, but it's about protecting young and developing brains from a system that was never designed with their well-being in mind. Over the last 10 to 15 years, algorithms have been raising our kids, and if we don't step up, the cost could be devastating. Now, for thousands of years, childhood was nature's own school or boot camp. Kids learned resilience through real-world experiences, climbing trees, dealing with rejection, navigating challenges with their peers. I mean, we can all remember our first breakup, we can all remember our first fist fight or our first fight with words. That system or these experiences we went through during childhood, they built stress tolerance and problem solving and emotional balance. We learned right from wrong, and we learned that other people have buttons that we can press, and sometimes we use that to our advantage, and sometimes it backfires. That's the point of growing up. But then in one single generation, we destroyed all of that with a smartphone screen. And instead of practicing resilience in the real world, kids are now being trained or taught by algorithms basically engineered to keep them hooked. Now, I remember I was listening to a podcast maybe 10 years ago, and it was someone saying, People that you don't even know will be the ones raising your kids online. And I laughed at that until my kids turned like 10 or 11, and they asked me if I knew who Mr. Beast was. Now I had obviously no clue who Mr. Beast is. I'm assuming that a lot of people listening to this podcast will have no clue who Mr. Beast is. But very quickly I learned that he was the biggest influencer on YouTube. And that his videos were seen by hundreds of millions of people, and my kids thought he was a celebrity superhero. Now, it's important to know that algorithms are not neutral. They're actually specifically designed to hijack our child's attention, to trigger dopamine surges, and even to create compulsive behaviors. The same type of brain circuits that drive addiction are completely hijacked by the algorithm and by influencers who know how to hack it. Now, this is actually a systematic review, a very high-quality study that found that problematic social media use in teenagers is linked to higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. Now, think about that. These aren't minor impacts. They're literally shaping the mental health of our entire generation. Now, in my personal medical practice, I've been a doctor for almost 20 years. I've seen kids and I've treated kids with panic attacks that weren't caused by trauma, but because they broke a Snapchat streak. I learned about Snapchat streaks through real patients that I saw in the clinic. And for those who aren't aware, Snapchat is a popular social media app amongst child the age of my daughters, which is are right now they're 11 and 13, or they're going on 11 and 13. And these apps have built built-in algorithms that train and positively reinforce social connection through these apps, but can also make you feel guilt if you haven't reached out to certain friends for a while. So, for example, if you've been consecutive, like 30 consecutive days in contact with a specific friend, on day 31, the app is gonna encourage you, almost make you feel guilty if you don't interact with that person. And I've know of people that have streaks tolling hundreds of days, some even over a year, where they've not missed one day of contact with one specific person. And I've had patients crying in my office because of these streaks being unsustainable, and also because of either nasty comments or texts that were taken the wrong way. And I've been through it at home too. And for years, my wife and I we resisted giving our kids smartphones. We wanted them to grow up differently, but the peer pressure was too much to bear. And I remember them being in kindergarten, or I should say, at daycare, and electronics day was spent, my kids watching other people play their electronics because they didn't have any. Eventually we caved in and instantly we saw how their own social world shifted. And that tension between protecting them and helping them fit in is something that every single parent will face. We had limited smartphones and social media and electronics so much that my kids were the only ones without them in their whole social circle. And trying to help them become stable young adults. We had created unstable young children that were outcasts because of their the fact that they didn't have electronics. Now we've gone about worrying that our kids get hit by a car while crossing the street to letting them wander unsupervised through an infinitely big digital world. A world where bullying is invisible and predators are anonymous, and content is often years ahead of what are my kids of what my kids' brain can actually process. So my opinion is that there has to be a price to pay for all of this. And that's where the research comes in. We have a lot of research being done on the impacts of social media, the impact of smartphones, and unfortunately, that research is sobering. So, first, if we talk about mental health, teenagers who use social media heavily will report higher rates of depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. And we have meta-analysis consistently showing a correlation between problematic social media use and poor mental health. And I see it at the clinic live in real people. Now, the second big red flag in terms of social media or smartphone use is on cognitive development. Young children under the age of five who spend more than an hour a day on screens show lower language skills and weaker executive function. Studies even show reduced brain connectivity in regions responsible for attention and for language. And that doesn't even consider social and emotional skills like your tone of voice, nonverbal communication, eye contact, facial expressions, are being replaced with emojis and filters. And that erodes empathy because words without tone are interpreted through the reader's emotion and not the sender's intent. And I've seen that with my own kids. Today, literally like two hours ago, my daughter wrote okay in two letters, O and K, instead of her usual okay, o K-A-Y, and the receiver thought she was mad at her. Literally today, this happened. And now artificial intelligence is entering the mix. Kids are not only being shaped by other kids online, but by algorithms, by synthetic comment that we barely understand ourselves. I mean, the future of smartphones and AI looks very uncertain, and we have barely any laws regulating how children interact with this. Now, I don't want to be all doom and gloom and fear-monger's use of YouTube or or smartphones, and but there are some benefits of having access to an encyclopedia of information at in your very hand. My kids enjoy watching documentaries and learning about science and learning about their passions. My youngest daughter loves to cook and she uses apps and YouTube videos to help a sister in her passion for cooking up good food. My daughters have built robots and done a ton of arts and crafts using social media and smartphones. The issue isn't using them as a means of improving skills, it's using them for other reasons like validating your relationships with other people through likes and emojis and smiley faces. So, as parents, what do we do? Like, first of all, we don't panic, we parent and we lead. So here are a few steps that are based in high-quality science that I'd recommend as both a doctor but as a parent. Start by considering delaying the smartphone. There's a movement called Wait Until 8th, which simply means that we hold off on at least maybe grade 8 before giving our kids their own smartphone devices. And also limit social media access. Our kids right now at 11 and 13, they do not have a Snapchat, a Facebook, an Instagram, or TikTok. They do have a YouTube app. But no app is harmless. And so we should absolutely make make rules, strict rules. For us, what works is having social media screen time limits so that once they've spent 45 minutes straight on an app, they have to ask us through text to receive more time. And then we can use the extra time as positive rewards and reinforcements for chores in the house. Now, studies have shown that punishing children into avoiding bad behaviors is about 20 times less likely to produce the wanted outcome than rewarding them for positive behaviors. So instead of saying I'm going to cut your phone if you don't do this, saying I'm going to have you rewarded with an extra 15 minutes of screen time if you do your chores, or if you clean your room. These, in my opinion, should be screen time free. My kids on long drives have access to their phones, but we have them in the front seat, and we determine when they get them. Now, my wife is the guardian of that rule, and she does an amazing job. But on top of simply limiting access to smartphones, we need to teach our kids coping skills. Boredom, rejection, frustration are normal parts of growing up, and they're normal parts of life. Kids need to be able to learn to handle these feelings and emotions without instantly distracting or escaping into a screen. Now, one of the other probably most important things that we can do is to we talk often and we talk early about cyberbullying and mental health and predators online and media literacy. Kids need guidance, not only surveillance. And consider using parental controls, but don't rely on them. Maybe set screen times, set certain permissions to access certain content. Most parents have no idea what their kids are surfing online. And most importantly, remember you don't need to be perfect. None of us were trained for this digital age. What matters is that you're intentional and you're present, and that kids have confidence that you will not snap at them if they share with you alarming content that they want to make you aware of. This is it's not just about what happens in our homes. We need broader advocacy. Schools should be teaching digital hygiene. The way that they teach hand washing and policies should protect kids from predatory algorithms. There needs to be legislation and it needs to catch up to the exponential growth of this tech and of AI. And as parents, as doctors, as educators, we have a big role to play in shaping that conversation because if we don't, the algorithms will be raising our kids for us. So here's where I land. I'm a concerned parent, I'm a frontline family physician, I'm a social media user who sees both the power but the problems with our kids having access to these powerful technologies. We can't roll back the clock and we can't go back to a pre-digital age, but we can raise resilient and emotionally grounded kids in a world that feels like it's spiraling out of control. So stay human, stay connected, and as always, eat your veggies right on. I hope this episode has clarified the pros and cons of use of smartphones and social media. And I think most people listening are already awares of the pros, but are in denial of the cons. So I hope this episode has helped clear that for you to build sustainable connection and communication with your kids about social media use. Right on. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you at the next episode. Peace. Hey everyone, go check out my website, plantbase drjewels.com, to find free downloadable resources. And remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at DrJulesCormier and on YouTube at Plant Bays Dr. Jewels.