A “Truth” Campaign Against Big Tech: How to Give Kids Agency and Purpose
A teacher’s take: Why we should stop being enforcers and start giving kids agency and insight.
Despite some encouraging momentum in the battle to reclaim childhood from screens, adults are still failing to convince kids to hop on the less-tech bandwagon. As a teacher, here’s my take on the situation (and from speaking with my colleagues, they share similar concerns). We know that lots of screen time and social media are crippling for young people, and we are trying to do something about it. The elders are telling the juniors that they need protection from their evil screens, and the youth aren’t buying it. They think we’re freaking out, overreacting, dramatizing. They also see us using all the tools we demonize. In short, we haven’t figured out how to reach them.
To their credit, young people actually are paying attention to the news. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center study, 48% of teens say social media harms people their age, up from 32% in 2022. Still, parents are significantly more concerned, with 55% being extremely or very concerned about teen mental health compared to 35% of teens. According to the study, 74% of teens say social media makes them feel more connected to their friends, and only 14% think social media negatively affects them personally. Meanwhile, social media is the top reason parents give when asked about what most negatively impacts teens (44% say social media has the biggest negative impact).
Adults and kids aren’t on the same page regarding a major health concern. At this juncture, we are faced with two possibilities.
Big Tech and their products have become too powerful. We are too late. There is no going back, and we will continue to grow more dependent on devices and less capable of functioning on our own. Screens win.
We have yet to outsmart Big Tech and their products. We know we have a societal affliction, and we just need to put our heads together and figure out the cure. The ultimate comeback story.
Ever an optimist, I’m going with option two, and an analogy to the battle against Big Tobacco gives me hope. It wasn’t so many moons ago that everyone knew cigarettes were bad for you, and they smoked them anyway. Young people were motivated to rebel against authority, but not the tobacco companies. Instead, they rebelled against the well-intentioned adults who told them to stop smoking. Eventually, the truth® campaign flipped the script and convinced the youth that companies were exploiting them (and killing them), and that same rebel spirit was directed toward manipulative corporations. Checkmate.
Aside: The tobacco industry has continued to shake its stubborn fist. Big Tech will be no different. That’s fine. As I like to tell my own kids, that’s just the way it goes.
Moral of the story: we are still at the stage where kids are rebelling against parents and teachers (uncool authority figures) telling them to get off their screens. They aren’t worried about the long-term health effects that we’re shouting about. They aren’t upset with the Big Tech villains.
To me, they mostly seem frustrated that we are treating them like incompetent fools rather than competent decision makers. And until we offer them some agency around this issue, which seems fair enough considering we don’t plan to drop our own phones down the well, we shouldn’t expect to have much, if any, success.
Apart from flipping the script on Big Tech companies, I think there are a few key messages for parents, educators, and youth advocates to rally behind.
Collective Relevance
Rather than scolding kids for their dependency, adults need to convince young people that developing agency is relevant to their future success. This will likely take a collective effort from people who are far more successful and influential than me. Unfortunately, many of the cultural icons kids look up to incentivize hyper connectivity. We need people with social capital in business and athletics, not just academia, to advocate for moderate screen time and social media use. Until that happens en masse, parents and teachers will have to do their best.
Jonathan Haidt has already made the argument for a collective approach in The Anxious Generation (and we’ve seen a promising response). Without a collective effort, we will fail. If we only offer case-sensitive solutions to deal with the heavy users, we will die by a thousand cuts.
There should be a clear understanding between schools, families, and students prior to communal participation. Families should not be surprised by their kid’s access to technology and the internet after they join a community. I think this should hold true for all youth organizations—sports, camps, etc.
There should be a common message about the relevance of modest screen time for developing agency:
Less dependence on screens and media leads to greater personal agency and the likelihood of achieving one’s goals.
Adults need to frame this message positively, not with threats nor scare tactics. This might look like a coaching staff forbidding their players to take out phones during practice times (collective effort) while emphasizing the need for optimal focus to improve performance (relevance). A negative approach would be having an unclear phone policy and then chirping at a player who checks Instagram between drills: “And you wonder why you’re on the bench?”
This all sounds easy peasy as I write it. The truth is that achieving collective relevance will be difficult. Getting kids to believe that putting their devices away is relevant to their well-being and success will suck.
No Pain, No Gain
Any serious effort to limit screen time will come with challenges, and adults will need to embrace them. Kids will be bored. They will act out. They will get into real-life mischief instead of online mischief. When you remove the pacifier, they will scream, and parents and educators will bear the brunt of their outcry. All that said, just as you shouldn’t treat a crying baby with anger and judgment, we will need to approach kids with compassion and empathy.
This, I have found, is where the rubber doesn’t meet the road. We love the idea of unplugging our kids until we have to entertain them all day and keep them out of trouble. It is easier to cook dinner while your kids watch Encanto for the fifth time than it is to cook dinner while they scream at you and play another round of Destroy the House. But when you say no to watching Encanto for the sixth time, there will be blood.
And so we build the walls of our cells.
There’s really no way around this one. Being tech dependent is a bit like sitting comfortably in the eye of a hurricane. To leave the shelter of the digital bubble is to risk extreme discomfort—excommunication from the world. Between freedom and imprisonment, there is a violent storm to endure. What allows us to take the plunge toward freedom, to endure the storm, is agency.
Agency, the vehicle to freedom, is the best incentive we have to lose our attachment to our devices. We cannot have real agency when our phones and tablets and laptops steal our focus, when they tap into our wiring and influence our thoughts, which influence our feelings and actions, which define the brief experience we call life.
Here’s where we are really up against it. Young people (and, let’s face it, people of all ages) enjoy the experience that their devices construct. The strategy then is not to lecture kids about the relevance of agency. The strategy is to create conditions for agency so they can experience its relevance.
Insight Through Experience
As a kid, I was fortunate to go to summer camp. There, I gained the insight that I enjoyed life more without a screen. I didn’t have classes with someone lecturing me about digital citizenship. Digital what? No thanks. Instead, I got dropped off at the lake without screens and had the time of my life. I had proof, real-life experience, that hanging out in the woods with my friends, unplugged, was way more fun than any alternative.
You can’t force a kid to practice digital wellness (take it from someone who has tried to teach it), or whatever you want to call it. Kids do what they enjoy. Without an enjoyable alternative to their screens, they will choose the screens every time. Adults are the same. People working with kids must understand this. You can tell me I should cut my right hand off until you’re blue in the face. I won’t do it. I’m convinced that life with my right hand is more enjoyable than life without it.
As adults, we are responsible for creating conditions for young people to gain the insight, through direct experience, that they are better off spending less time plugged into their devices and more time practicing agency.
Summer camps do a pretty good job with this—if they don’t allow campers to bring their personal electronics. Schools are trying, and parents can do their best, but I suspect other third spaces—physical locations outside of the home (first place) or workplace/school (second place) that facilitate social interaction, community building, and social support—will have a greater impact. I’d recommend parents identify good ones and get their kids involved early.
The Path to Purpose
It won’t be social media bans or digital citizenship courses or even phone-free schools that reverse the “great rewiring” of the youth. It will be the collective understanding that developing agency and detaching from screens offers a better experience that is purpose relevant. We all have a purpose that motivates us. You cannot tell someone what their purpose is. It is discovered. As adults working with young people, the best we can do is to nudge and encourage that discovery as skillfully as possible.
To finish up, I’ll resurface four paraphrased tips from David Yeager’s 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People (2024):
Ask, don’t tell. Respect young people by treating them as adultlike. Adults are asked; children are told.
Find ways to honor the young person’s status — for example, point out their competence and expertise — rather than pointing out your own authority. Avoid an I-know-better-than-you attitude.
Validate whatever negative experiences young people may have had. Treat their feelings as real and legitimate. Then look for a way forward.
Presume agency. Acknowledge that the young person can make up their own mind, and then make it clear that you are rooting for them to make a good choice. Also, explain how their actions have broader consequences in the world.
When adults use a “mentor mindset” (high expectations, high support) rather than an “enforcer mindset” (high expectations, low support) (Yeager, 2024), they will be far more likely to help kids find a genuine path to purpose.
This post originally appeared on Medium with The Good Men Project.