Parenting in the Uncanny Valley
You're not crazy. We’ve been sold a vision that’s… not quite right
Have you ever been creeped out by a wax figure? Made uneasy by an animatronic doll? You’ve experienced a psychological response initially hypothesized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori.
Mori’s research showed that as robots became more humanlike, subjects’ emotional response grew more positive, until the robot appeared almost human. Then, instead of empathy, they experienced a deep revulsion.
This is the Uncanny Valley.
This stomach-churning effect of human-like robots presented as human has permeated other parts of life as well. As I wrote about last week, Fairplay published a report detailing how Horizon and Meta have been collecting user data on children under the age of 13 for years, which is a flagrant violation of COPPA. My statement corroborates Fairplay’s findings, and testifies that leadership was very aware of these issues.
As an activist, it’s incredibly satisfying to stand up to Big Tech, David vs. Goliath, wielding the truth as resistance. As a parent, I just wish it all weren’t true.
Kids are dying from fentanyl-laced pills sourced online. They’re falling victim to sextortion on social apps. On Instagram, 13-year-old girls’ attention is being sold to corporations in their most vulnerable moments. Metaverse apps like Roblox and Horizon are grooming our kids to equate spending on digital goods with belonging.
And this week, After Babel’s Haidt and Rausch’s report details how Snapchat, like its peers, continues profiting off of our most vulnerable’s vulnerabilities. They presented damning research documenting how Snapchat knowingly exposed millions of minors to drugs, sextortion, and psychological harm. The report shows Snapchat isn’t just a product kids use, it’s a behavioral engine fine-tuned to exploit their compulsions, attention, and vulnerabilities for profit, while shielding abusers behind features like disappearing messages.
As a kid who grew up playing The Oregon Trail, I didn’t imagine that technology would evolve to create a digital trail of harm for our kids. As a teen who A/S/L’d with who-knows-who in AOL chatrooms, I couldn’t have imagined I’d be parenting in a world with these risks magnified and obscured. Technology was supposed to make life better, but is it making parenting more difficult and dire?
As I said in my statement to the FTC, “harming children for profit in the name of innovation isn’t innovation, it’s exploitation.”
The vision of modern parenting that includes Big Tech feels off because it is. We’re uneasy because we should be, because it’s not real. It’s a world that looks safe and connected but is often harmful, distorted, and unsafe by design.
We’re parenting in the uncanny valley.
Where digital spaces simulate connection but deepen separation and isolation
Where our kids are more visible yet more unseen than ever
Where parents are held accountable without support
Paradoxes of Modern Parenting
Digital spaces simulate connection but deepen separation and isolation
In recent years, a growing body of evidence has raised alarms about social media’s harmful impact on young people’s well-being. Usage is nearly universal, 95% of American teens are on social platforms and over a third use them “almost constantly.”
Such pervasive use is linked to troubling mental health effects: adolescents who spend more than 3 hours a day on social media (which is roughly the U.S. average) have about double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms.
Indeed, teen rates of depression, anxiety and self-harm have surged over the past decade in tandem with the explosion of smartphones and social apps. From 2009 to 2019, the proportion of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%; the share seriously considering attempting suicide increased by 36%; and the share creating a suicide plan increased by 44%.
Since around 2012, every measure of teen mental health, anxiety, depression, loneliness, and even rates of self-harm and suicide, has gotten significantly worse. Psychologist Jean Twenge links this decline to the rapid rise of smartphones and social media, calling it one of the most dramatic technological shifts in human history. As data scientist Chris Said puts it, "Social media was like a nuclear bomb on teen social life."
Causation has been demonstrated. In one study, Facebook caused depression in 2% of college students (an estimated 300,000 young adults in the United States).
In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General cautioned that social media presents a “profound risk of harm” to youth, citing correlations with depression, anxiety and body dissatisfaction, and concluded that “we cannot yet consider social media safe for children and teens.”
All told, the data paint a jarring picture of an emerging generation immersed in social media, often compulsively, and a growing consensus that this digital ubiquity is fueling greater depression, anxiety, self-harm, and disconnection.
Our kids are more visible yet more unseen than ever
Governor Kathy Hochul has made significant progress in banning phones from schools in New York. Yet her most vocal opponents are not tech companies, interestingly, but parents who want to maintain constant contact with their kids.
As reported by Ginia Bellafonte in the New York Times, “Governor Hochul has spoken to aggrieved first-grade teachers who told her that they are overseeing classrooms full of children wearing smart watches. ‘Mommy and Daddy were checking in all day long saying, ‘I miss you and can’t wait to see you,’’ the governor told me. ‘That’s a parental need,’ she said, ‘not a student need.’”
The Netflix series Adolescence makes one thing brutally clear: watching your kid isn’t the same as knowing them. The show follows a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a female classmate, but the real story is about what was missed and misunderstood in plain sight. In a world where parents are pinging their kids all day long and tracking their every move, Adolescence forces us to confront a hard truth: visibility isn’t intimacy.
We’re holding parents accountable without support
Adolescence also demonstrates the degree to which we’re in over our heads, parenting in a world no generation has faced before, without a map and without a net. Figures like Andrew Tate have existed in eras past, but they never before had channels that could disseminate their messages to billions of people–hundreds of millions of kids–in a matter of seconds.
We’re holding parents accountable while offering them no meaningful support. Billionaire tech company owners don't follow the laws that protect our kids – and where parental controls are surveillance apps, more show than function. Adolescence sits with the impossible conditions that we’re navigating through. Jamie’s parents aren’t bad parents, they’re parenting in a system that profits from our confusion.
At face value, the harm doesn’t look like harm. It looks like innovation, safety, and connection. But the more we try to meet modern demands with tech tools that weren’t built with our kids’ best interests in mind, the more off-balance we feel. That’s not a failure of parenting, that’s the Uncanny Valley. The systems insist they’re here to help but the outcomes tell another story. And the longer we pretend this is working, the more we lose.
Take those parental control apps that promise to monitor your child's online activity. Most people don’t use them, and those that do get dashboards and reports that create the comforting illusion of oversight, but can't capture disappearing messages, an emoji-driven sub-language, or easily accessible workarounds that allow the predators, billionaires and not, to operate with impunity.
You're sold peace of mind while your child navigates conversations you'll never see with people you couldn’t imagine.
The platforms know this, the predators know this, and somewhere deep down, we know this too. Yet we keep installing the monitoring apps, clinging to the wax figure version of safety they provide.
The radical path forward: believe your eyes, trust your gut
It’s time to set the house on fire with evidence and let the creepy wax figures melt. To end the illusion, no matter the clean-up.
That sick feeling in your stomach when your tween begs for Snapchat? The twist in your gut when you see your kid’s eyes glaze over after three hours of iPad?
If you’ve felt uneasy, you’re not lame. You’re not crazy. You’re smart, you’re paying attention. Keep paying attention, keep trusting yourself. This is an accessible and powerful act of resistance.
Technology executives widely report not allowing or delaying their kids access to the products they build. Believe their actions rather than their advertisements.
More and more of us are choosing to live by our own instincts instead of the scripts handed down by tech giants, rewriting the rules, rebuilding rhythms, and realizing that a grounded life off-platform isn’t just possible, it’s a reclamation of reality. Not rebellion but realignment.
Resources to support this realignment:
The Wait Until 8th pledge empowers parents to rally together to delay giving children a smartphone until 8th grade, and evidence suggests delaying social media apps much longer
Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt includes these calls to action:
No smartphones before high school
No social media before age 16
Phone-free schools
More free play and independence in the real world
The Light Phone / gabb / pinwheel are minimalist devices designed for kids and adults that prioritize function over endless connectivity
Fairplay for Kids is a non profit fighting for kids rights in the face of consumerism and commercialism and offers resources for parents
ScreenStrong helps parents transition kids off of recreational screen use with research and resources
We’ll need to face some uncomfortable trade offs
Can you tolerate disappointing your kids in the name of their safety? Put another way, there is no amount of complaining about a helmet that would cause me to allow my child to ride their bike without it. Consider limiting or delaying cell phone access, even if they’re devastated about it. In both cases, their noggin is precious.
Every scroll of our feeds creates advertising impressions which put cash in Zuckerberg's pocket, while our kids’ self-worth crumbles like a cookie. Can you tolerate very real sadness when you delete apps that you love but that monetize harm and hate?
We've been sold a vision of connected parenting that triggers our deepest unease. That gut-level response isn't paranoia, it's wisdom and intuition. The wax figures of Silicon Valley are melting, revealing something that mimics humanity without possessing it.
Big Tech still peddles a fantasy that research fundamentally contradicts. Data doesn't lie, even when the billionaires do.
Like those unsettling wax figures that trigger our deepest instincts of wrongness, today's digital landscape for children appears safe while hiding profound danger. The most radical act of modern parenting may simply be believing the evidence over the advertising, seeing through the illusion to what research consistently confirms.
When tech executives shield their own children from the very products they sell to yours, their actions speak volumes that their advertisements never will. Trust your unease. It's been the compass pointing toward truth all along.
The exit from this simulation of humanity has always been there, illuminated by our uniquely human subconscious warning mechanism saying something just isn't right, and by the growing mountain of evidence proving it never was.
YES! As adults we are hardly capable of controlling our own addiction to these devices and algorithms. It only takes 10 minutes of watching a kid navigate Youtube to see how it pulls in their brain, and to see their eyes dim as they mainline dopamine into their souls. I just watched the new Netflix mini series on the dangers of kid influencers on YouTube and it's the scariest thing I've watched in a long time. These kids are not kids anymore. :(
Appreciate this so much! One thing to keep in mind when trying to change a family media strategy is that a change will always be hard at first. You can't look at a couple days of complains about the wi-fi turning off at 8 and think that whole thing is a failure. I try to remind myself that kids get used to things quickly, they are famously resilient, and no one can force me to provide things like unrestricted internet access or junk food. I can be the weird mom.