The generation growing up alongside ChatGPT and AI agents is also the first to actively push back against the technology saturating their lives. The hottest gadget among Gen Alpha kids isn’t a smartphone or a tablet—it’s a vintage Sony Walkman. Australia became the first country to ban social media for children under 16 last year, with Austria, Indonesia, and other nations following. The US Supreme Court recently upheld a Texas age verification law that functions as a de facto ban, and school districts across the country are swapping iPads and Chromebooks for physical books.
This backlash isn’t coming from Luddite parents alone. The author, who works in tech, describes a striking pattern: many people employed at major tech companies keep their own children at arm’s length from the very products they build. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t publicly post his children’s faces on Facebook or Instagram. Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 bestseller The Anxious Generation pushed these anxieties into the mainstream, despite pushback from some developmental psychologists who question his conclusions.
Yet the central tension is unavoidable: AI is now woven into nearly everything, and kids can’t simply opt out of the world being built around them. That’s why MIT Technology Review partnered with Anyway, a magazine for teens and tweens, to ask young people directly how they feel about AI and what’s coming. The responses were complex and, notably, far more thoughtful and sophisticated than the typical hand-wringing about screen time would suggest.
The author’s own evolution mirrors this shift. After years of keeping his daughters on flip phones and off social media, he’s loosened the tether—an iPhone for the high schooler, an Apple Watch for the younger one. The devices have opened up their world rather than closed it, helping them build friendships that move fluidly between digital and physical spaces. The challenge isn’t keeping kids away from AI. It’s teaching them to navigate a landscape that didn’t exist when their parents were growing up—and that even the people building it don’t fully understand yet.
