One of the most important back-to-school preparations, along with bedtimes and homework routines, is resetting your family’s digital habits. The timing matters this year. On Aug. 26, Meta reached a historic settlement with a broad coalition of states in which it agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle claims that Facebook and Instagram were designed to addict children. It is the largest consumer protection settlement in history, with the exception of the Big Tobacco cases of the 1990s.
It is a clear signal of the real risk these platforms carry.
This is a conversation for everyone, not just parents of teenagers. Habits form years before a child opens Instagram. YouTube, Roblox, Snapchat and group texts all share social media’s features: algorithms, advertising and contact with strangers. If you spend time online, you’re living in that same attention economy along with your kids.
The U.S. Surgeon General found that teens spending more than three hours a day on social media face roughly twice the risk of poor mental health outcomes. That’s an association, but we don’t need a decades-long study before making commonsense changes at home.
Benefits and risks vary by child and context, but the Surgeon General, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) agree: Protect sleep, watch for problematic use, and strengthen in-person connection.
Here’s what matters most at each age, since what your child needs looks very different at four than it does at sixteen.
Preschool and Early Elementary
If your child is on a screen, choose high-quality content and watch together when possible. Turn off autoplay and avoid apps built around constant rewards. Don’t let a screen become the only way your child learns to tolerate boredom.
Ask the most important question: what is this replacing? A video call with Grandma is real, reciprocal contact. Contrast this with an endless feed of short videos.
It’s worth taking an honest look at our own habits too: phones at the table, notifications interrupting conversations, photos posted without asking first. Grandparents and other caregivers can help by following the same rules.
Elementary School
By elementary school, children need digital literacy, and they aren’t necessarily getting it at school.
Teach them that ads may look like ordinary posts, influencers may be paid, and people online may not always be who they say. “Private” messages and photos can be copied and shared.
Sit beside your child and learn how the platform works, whether strangers can contact them, whether messages and location sharing are turned off, and whether they can spend money without you knowing. Don’t assume something is safe just because it looks kid-friendly.
Please don’t rush the smartphone. There’s no research-supported age that’s right for every child, but elementary school is probably too early for most. Ask whether your child can follow rules unsupervised and tell you when something uncomfortable happens. A basic phone or watch may meet the need without opening every door at once.
Middle School
Digital life matures faster than most of us expect at this age. A 2024 survey cited by the AAP found that nearly a quarter of children have seen pornography online by age 11. Your child may not have a phone yet, but the child on the bus next to them probably does. By early middle school, gently start naming pornography, sexting, cyberbullying and contact with strangers, since waiting until high school may mean waiting until after exposure has happened.
Lead with openness, not shame, and with a plan: “If anyone sends you a sexual image, asks you for one, or makes you uncomfortable, don’t forward it or negotiate. Save the evidence, block and report the account, and come to me. You will not lose your phone for telling me the truth.”
Group chats deserve particular attention, since exclusion, gossip and conflict can follow your child home after school ends. Help them mute chats and leave cruel conversations. Kids also need to know social platforms can be a route to alcohol, nicotine, cannabis and counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl.
High School
Teenagers need increasing privacy and independence, not a system built to hold and manipulate their attention indefinitely. Agree on guardrails before there’s a crisis. Look beyond screen minutes, and notice whether tech time is interfering with sleep, whether they can take a break once they’ve decided to, and whether it’s crowding out schoolwork or relationships.
Our kids aren’t getting enough sleep which affects mood, cognition and academics. A 2024 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Pediatrics journal found that once the phone was in bed, kids fell asleep 30 minutes later and lost nearly that much sleep overall. The fix is one habit: phones charge outside the bedroom.
Watch too for repeated exposure to extreme dieting, body-image or self-harm content. Algorithms learn quickly, and pausing on one kind can shape what comes next.
Problematic use can also be a symptom rather than the cause. ADHD, autism and other neurodivergent traits can make disengaging from stimulating platforms harder. A lonely or depressed teenager may retreat online, sometimes into unsafe spaces. An anxious child may compulsively monitor group chats and feel more anxious. When in doubt, a pediatrician or therapist can help.
Ask Your School Practical Questions
It helps to ask your school whether they teach social media safety, what filtering is used on school devices, how cyberbullying gets reported, and what parents can control at home. Laptops shouldn’t become an unmonitored back door around family rules. The Beverly Hills Unified School District, for example, uses monitoring tools like Gaggle on district accounts.
Watch California
Parents need support from smart legislation. We can’t compete with design built by the world’s most sophisticated companies. AB 1709 will reach the Senate floor this week and could soon be on Governor Newsom’s desk. It would ban addictive features like algorithmic feeds and autoplay for users under 16. This is a big deal.
Whatever happens in Sacramento, our children are growing up now. We don’t need perfect legislation to make their digital lives safer, and we don’t need perfect parenting. We can start tonight: move the phone from the bedroom, have the conversations and make sure your child knows that no online mistake is too embarrassing to bring to you.
Erica Felsenthal, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist (PSY 21357) in Beverly Hills. She has testified twice in Sacramento about the impact of social media on youth mental health and serves on the board of the Organization for Social Media Safety.
This column is for informational purposes only and does not constitute psychotherapy, psychological treatment, or clinical mental health services.
