“If I Were to Destroy the Next Generation”: What This Viral AI Plot Reveals About the Risk to Our Kids, and What Parents Can Do About It.
A friend of mine recently sent me a viral post that’s been doing the rounds. It was supposedly an AI-generated response to the question:
“If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation?”
The answer was unsettling and immediately struck a chord. The sinister tactics outlined were uncomfortably familiar. Here's a summarised excerpt of the tactics:
“Hijack their attention... Redefine success as fame... Undermine family and the efficacy of parents... Cut kids off from nature... Confuse pleasure with purpose... Replace meaning with mockery... Enslave them with debt and distraction... Weaken them physically... Make them spiritually hollow.”
When I read the final line I had a visceral uneasiness. It reads:
“If I were the devil, I wouldn’t come with horns and pitchforks. I’d come with a sleek app, a soothing voice, a personal algorithm — and I’d whisper: ‘This is freedom.’”
This post didn’t go viral because it painted an unforeseeable dystopian future. Quite the opposite. Everyone reading recognises how it merely is holding a mirror up to the potent harms that already exist in our modern society.
There have been many beneficial and positive outcomes from the surge in technology advances. The media we consume from it is often interesting, enticing and engaging; and all parents know that it’s an incredibly reliable babysitter whilst you need to get some things done.
Though, I’m starting to think that the convenience of allowing devices to babysit our kids really is making a deal with the devil.
I’m trying not to be dramatic about it, but as I’ve researched the degenerative impact of a technology based childhood, my mind floods with examples of real clients and families from the therapy room suffering from the issues described in the research. As a child and adolescent psychologist, I see this erosion in subtle but powerful ways:
Parents tell me they knew it was time to get help when their child starts talking about hurting themselves or wanting to die.
Becoming a YouTuber is the most common response to, ‘What do you want to be when you're older?’
Teens who are too depressed, anxious or uncomfortable to ask peers to hang out and are left isolated and scrolling.
No matter the attributes of the parents, when it comes to enforcing rules and separating children from devices, violent outbursts are becoming commonplace
Johnathon Haid’ts popular book, ‘The Anxious Generation’ highlights these concerns and brings the receipts to back up his claims. In his words:
We rewired childhood in the span of a decade. If we want to raise strong, healthy kids, we need to undo the damage—and we need to start now.
If the problem is cultural erosion, then the antidote is cultural repair. The beliefs, values and behaviours that children adopt begin at home and as parents we have tremendous influence. Below are 6 essential practices that can help counter this drift.
6 Family Practices Parents Can Adopt to Protect Kids in a Digital Age
1. Protect Their Attention Like It’s Sacred
The first thing “the devil” hijacks is attention. It’s the gateway to every learning, connection and purpose. Below, under each practice, I have included an extract from the original article and italiced it in quotation marks such as:
“Create devices that feel essential, but are engineered to be addictive. Use infinite scroll, auto-play, dopamine loops, and FOMO. Make them believe that consuming is creating, and scrolling is learning.”
What we can do as parents:
Designate tech-free zones (e.g. meals, bedrooms, car rides).
Explain to kids that their attention is susceptible to being hijacked and call out the trickery. Just like their bodies, when they grow up, they alone will be responsible for keeping it safe.
Normalize boredom. If you can’t be comfortable without, you can’t expect them to be either. Embracing it together is often the seed of creativity and adventure.
Delay access to devices and social media. Set screen limits that are age-appropriate and sustainable.
Note: only 15% of Australian parents are able to keep the screen-time of their children under the recommended amount (a maximum two hours of recreational screen time outside of school work from the age of five to 17; a maximum of one hour for two to five year olds).
Haidt’s four fundamental reforms:
No smart phones before the age of 14
No social media before the age of 16
Phone-free schools
Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence
References: ABS (2023); Radesky, J. S., & Christakis, D. A. (2016); Davis & Downing (2024)
2. Re-orient back toward character and away from admiration
“Teach them that a viral moment is more valuable than a decade of hard work.”
To paraphrase Haidt, adolescents are now growing up in a funhouse mirror of peer comparison and their self-worth is being derived from likes and comments. In this world, the fear of exclusion never ends. Kids need to be guided to adopt character traits and virtues that can serve them for a lifetime, rather than act in ways that rapidly elevate their status.
They say ‘comparison is the thief of joy’ and this was no truer for the girls who grew up in the age of Instagram filters and the forward-facing selfie-camera. The highly-curated presentation of teenage lifestyles leaves children and adolescents feeling insecure, unsatisfied and not-enough. According to Haidt, this phone-based childhood takes the lionshare of responsibility for the 161% increase in depression for teen boys and 135% increase in girls since 2010 in the United States. In Australia, data indicates a similar trend with a strong and consistent increase in teen mental health hospitalisations:
Peer and group acceptance matters tremendously to adolescents and throughout this developmental period they will try on some different ‘outfits of identity’. Long before social media teenagers have mimicked their idols and made bids for glory with their peers. Whilst this is a normal part of growing up, as parents it’s critical we stay as a safe haven for them to return to for dialogue as they rehearse being adults. As they make bids for social acceptance, our job is to continue to make our own bids of guidance and wisdom in open communication with them.
We can’t do the growing up part for them, though, for me as a parent, the success criteria I’m working on is that my sons adopt at least some generational wisdom, communicate frequently and openly, and listen to at least a fraction of my advice. If they were to absorb only the traits and beliefs of their favourite YouTuber or Instagram influencer, that would make me deeply sad.
What we can do as parents:
Share family stories that highlight perseverance over perfection, integrity and forgiveness (or whatever family value you hold dearest).
Make it psychologically safe to talk about stuff-ups and bad choices. Organise their feelings with them and encourage them to face the world again with a little more wisdom under their belt.
Talk about values often and casually (“In our family, we…”).
Share stories about your own growth, mistakes, and values.
Celebrate their quirks and emerging preferences with interest, not pressure.
3. Fortify the Family Foundation
“Undermine parental authority… normalize absentee parenting through economic pressure and distraction.”
How we spend time as families is changing. Data - shown in the graphic below - from the Australian Bureau of statistics shows that since 2017 there has been a decline in just about every child cultural and creative activity. It doesn’t take a genius to understand how this time is now spent instead.
It’s easy to hope that the stand-in, pacifying devices are an equivalent. Unfortunately, that’s naive. Again, in the words of Haidt, “We took away their playground and gave them a portal to a world they weren’t ready for… The phone-based childhood is not just different from the play-based childhood—it is an inferior substitute that has made kids weaker and more anxious.”
The economic challenges many families face further compound this problem. Low-income families have been found to be more likely to be ‘media-centric families’ whose households are saturated with background media throughout the day, which is known to disrupt child play and interactions with parents.
Rather than a media-based childhood with pseudo-parents and mentors, kids and teens need warmth, rituals, and shared meaning.
What families can do:
Create unique and consistent family routines, rituals and inside jokes
A calendar of regular (eg. monthly) outings in nature and the community would buck the trends in the graphic below
Prioritize screen-free shared meals as a daily ritual
Take an authoritative approach to parenting rather than permissive
Note: If you don’t know your parenting style you can take a quiz here:
When we talk about anchoring kids in a strong family culture, it helps to understand the difference between routines and rituals. Both are important—but they serve different roles in a child’s development:
Routines – “This is what needs to be done”
Functional and task-oriented (e.g. brushing teeth, school drop-offs)
Done with little thought or emotion
Repeated regularly but often without deeper meaning
Rituals – “This is who we are”
Emotionally meaningful and symbolic (e.g. birthday traditions, Sunday dinners)
Deeply felt, often tied to family identity or values
Understood within the family and passed through generations
Creates a sense of belonging, continuity, and shared purpose
Including both in family life helps kids feel secure and connected. Routines create predictability. Rituals create meaning.
Reference: Fiese, et al. (2002).
4. Reconnect Them With Nature
“A 10-year-old can’t identify a magpie but knows every Pokémon.”
Haidt alerts us to how we’ve underprotected our kids in the digital world while overprotecting them in the real one. The ‘better safe than sorry’ mentality is robbing children of their chance to build resilience and regulation. In my work I observe a tendency to oversupervise kids and prematurely intervene, whilst very little thought and precaution is given to handing them the most dangerous and formative object they will ever own.
I’m no saint in this domain either. Dirt-under-the-fingernails play is messy and much less convenient. Whereas, putting the TV on to pacify my three-year-old is easy. It reminds me of the saying: ‘Easy choices now, hard life later. Hard choices now, easy life later’.
Haidt contends that devices become “experience blockers’ which block the experiences children need most - such as risky play, cultural apprenticeships, rites of passage and romantic attachments. By staying indoors and playing online, kids lose exposure to the kinds of challenging physical and social experiences that all young mammals need to develop basic competencies, overcome innate childhood fears, and prepare to rely less on their parents.
I can certainly resonate with Haidt’s position here. The memories that stand out most fondly in my childhood and adolescence seem to have characteristics he mentions. For example, as a young teen, going camping created some mild-risk adventures and physical challenges - such as carrying the biggest logs I could find.
Realistically we are all going to lean on the crutch of TV and devices from time to time, but it seems that for many of us this has become the rule rather than the exception. In order to grow up, learn and develop our kids need to go out and explore the world. They will do that intuitively whether that world is digital or natural.
What we can do as parents:
Establish a norm of playing outside and adventuring in the local parks and playgrounds at least a couple of times per week.
Frame nature as safe and fun rather than boring or “too hard.”
Determine the areas in which you are comfortable for your child to play unsupervised and discuss the methods in which they will seek help if they need it.
Develop a way to play physically with your child, whether that’s hands-on creations, wrestling, running or kicking the footy
5. Teach Discernment, Self-Control, Perspective-Taking and Forgiveness
“Create shame-free indulgence while ridiculing restraint.”
There is a commonality to many of the children and families I work with clinically. Firstly, they are unable to manage their emotions as effectively as their parents wish; secondly, they are commonly highly sensitive to criticism and repercussions; and finally, attempts to talk about and resolve conflict and recurring problems are avoided. This leads to breakdowns in communications with family members and rifts with friends. In these times of insecurity, the digital world can be an alternative safe haven to retreat to where the negative emotions are numbed by auto-playing reels and quick dopamine injections. But when the device goes off for the night, the interpersonal rupture remains and without the tools to fix it, it festers.
Relationships in the online world are quick and disposable. They don’t require maintenance and when they become challenging, they can quit with the click of a button. Conversely, when you reflect on the communities and environments you were raised in, perhaps you reach the same conclusions as I did that it was not so easy to escape, which required us to manage relationships and manage our emotions in order to sustain successful relationships.
My belief - which has been bolstered by many successful clinical interventions with families - is that the remedy to this is increased emotional awareness and social awareness (perspective-taking), a consistent framework for difficult conversations (sharing problems and perspectives) and a reminder of a parent's unconditional love. In other words, reconnection, reflection and repair.
What parents can do:
Help them discern the different types of positive and negative emotions and the behaviours that lead to those.
A teen may report that TikTok makes them feel ‘good’ but what positive emotion are they really naming? Grateful? Joyful? Loved? Contented? Fulfilled?
Practice conflict resolution with a consistent methodology. Start with easier problems. Like any skill, mastery comes through practice.
A good starting point is each party naming the emotion they felt in the conflict and the reason they felt that way. Simply listening and acknowledging each perspective is powerful but commonly passed over in favour of quick disciplinary fix or outright avoidance.
Let them make some low-stakes decisions and experience the results.
Create experiments with self-control or going without devices. Ask them to predict the results (eg. anticipated mood, boredom, discomfort etc.) and compare with what actually happens
Reference: Siegel, D. J. & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The Whole-Brain Child.
6. Anchor Them in Something Bigger
“Make them feel like nothing matters—so they seek numbness, not growth.”
The digital world can satiate us with endless dopamine hits that leave us stagnating. We can watch 4 hours of TikTok reels on productivity hacks and achieve nothing all day. All humans, including our kids, need purpose. Something to serve that is beyond our own temporary gratifications. Something that outlasts the dopamine hit.
What we can do as parents:
Identify and involve them in acts of service (eg. age-appropriate volunteering or helping roles)
List their characters strengths and discuss how they can be harnesses to help others.
Ask reflective questions: “What kind of person do you want to be?”
Final Thoughts
If the original AI childhood destruction playbook was a warning, then this article is a response: parents are not powerless. We are the culture-makers in our homes. While the world may be pulling our kids toward distraction, disconnection, and distress, we can guide them back to what matters: connection, character, community, and meaning. That doesn’t mean perfection or unplugging entirely. As a parent and a child and adolescent psychologist, my advice would be to choose things that are sustainable and align with your values. Your child won’t remember the content that went viral. But they’ll remember the family rituals you stuck to.
For convenience, a pdf checklist can be accessed for download with a summary of suggested actions. Implementing even a handful of these actions is a positive step in the right direction.
We can't outcode the algorithms, but we can outperform them in love and dedication to our families.
References:
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2023, July 26). Cultural and creative activities, Australia, 2021–22. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/people-and-communities/cultural-and-creative-activities/2021-22
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2024). Australia's health 2024: Chapter 8 – Mental health. AIHW. https://www.aihw.gov.au/getmedia/ba6da461-a046-44ac-9a7f-29d08a2bea9f/aihw-aus-240_chapter_8.pdf.aspx
Davis, B., & Downing, K. (2024, May 16). We’re told to limit kids’ screen time – but how does it actually affect their health? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/were-told-to-limit-kids-screen-time-but-how-does-it-actually-affect-their-health-235322
Fiese, B. H., Tomcho, T. J., Douglas, M., Josephs, K., Poltrock, S., & Baker, T. (2002). A review of 50 years of research on naturally occurring family routines and rituals: Cause for celebration? Journal of Family Psychology, 16(4), 381–390. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.16.4.381
Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.
Radesky, J. S., & Christakis, D. A. (2016). Increased Screen Time: Implications for Early Childhood Development and Behavior. Pediatric clinics of North America, 63(5), 827–839. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pcl.2016.06.006
Siegel, D. J. & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The Whole-Brain Child.
Appendices:
Appendix A - Hours per week Australia children spend on screens (ABS, 2023)
Appendix B: benefits yielded from screen exposure in early childhood (Radesky & Chistakis, 2016)
