A few years ago I sat in the auditorium at my kids’ middle school and watched a speaker put two pictures on the screen. On the left, a handgun. On the right, a smartphone. Then he told a room full of parents those two things were the same thing.
He was scheduled to give a similar talk to the students the next day.
I went home and told my kids they had my permission to skip it.
Here is why, and here is the 90 second tool I use instead.
TL;DR
The problem: Fear is a business model, and you are the customer. Not because anyone is lying to you, but because scared parents are a much easier audience than capable ones.
The fix: Three questions you can run any scary headline through, start to finish, in about 90 seconds. They turn fear into a decision instead of a knot in your stomach.
- What actually happened, and how did it happen? Not the outcome. The mechanics. Where did this start?
- Where is the off ramp, and is it in my house? Every one of these stories has a step where it could have stopped. Is that step a setting, a conversation, or a habit?
- What does the solution cost me? Especially the take it all away solution. What does it cost your kid socially, and what does it cost you the next time something goes wrong and they quietly decide not to tell you?
Your one task this week: Catch one scary headline about kids and technology (you will not have to look), run it through the three questions, and decide either what you are going to fix or what you are going to stop worrying about.
The one line to remember: A warning makes a kid anxious. A rehearsal makes a kid ready.
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What happened in that auditorium
I knew this speaker before I ever sat down.
He had a name in the parenting world. He traveled. He got booked at schools, churches, and conferences. And I had seen enough of his material to know that I did not think he understood family technology.
Full transparency: after a 20 year career in IT, I can be a little snobbish about this. I feel like I have the background to back it up, and I appreciate when my peers have similar backgrounds. I am not a marketing person who woke up one day and decided to educate people about technology. This guy’s background was not in tech, and yet there he was, teaching parents about it. He was not in the settings menu. He was not watching what these apps actually do behind the scenes.
So when I found out he was coming to my kids’ school, I did not go because I felt obligated. I went because I genuinely wanted to see what he would do with that room.
Here is how it went.
He pulls up the gun slide. Handgun on one side, smartphone on the other. The line is: when you hand your child a phone, you are handing them a loaded weapon.
Then came the newsreels. Headline after headline after headline. Kid harmed. Kid exploited. Kid in trouble. Kid gone. One at a time, for a long time.
And I am watching the parents around me, and you can feel the room getting smaller.
Then we get to the solutions. I am genuinely curious at this point. He has thoroughly scared this audience. What is he going to recommend?
The solutions were, and I am not exaggerating or compressing: take the technology away, and give your kids longer hugs.
I rolled my eyes through the entire thing.
Why “just take it away” is a wish, not a plan
Look, hug your kids. Truly. Great advice. I am in favor of it. No notes.
But that does not help the parent who has to hand a Chromebook to a fourth grader on a Monday morning because the school requires it. It does not help the parent whose kid does homework on a shared laptop. Or whose kid’s entire friend group is coordinating on a group chat. Or who works a job and needs to be able to reach their kid after school.
Taking it away is not a plan. For most families it is not even an option. It is a wish.
And then there is the part I keep coming back to. He was giving a similar presentation to the students the next day. I do not know exactly what the kid version was, but I have a hard time imagining it was much different: make them afraid of the technology they already have, and encourage them to be okay with more hugs from mom and dad.
Since I teach this stuff, I already knew my kids knew what to do. So I told them they could skip it, because it was not going to be informative and it might even be a little misleading.
Now let me be honest about something
Otherwise this whole thing is just me being annoyed into a microphone.
He was a very popular speaker at the time. Way more in demand than I am. Not even close. I do a presentation at a local middle school and there is hardly anyone in the room.
It is not because he was a fraud. I think he believed every word he said.
He was more popular than I am because he was telling parents something they very much wanted to hear: technology is the bad guy, you do not have to understand it, you just have to keep it out of the house.
And I get why that lands. I really do. Because it is so much easier to take it away than it is to learn it.
If you have ever said “I’m just not good at technology,” or “my kid knows way more about this than I do,” or “I’m not a tech person,” then that message is not scary. That message is a relief. It means you are off the hook. It means the answer was never something you had to go learn or do. The answer was a no, and you already know how to say no.
And if that is you, I am honestly not making fun of you. I want to be really clear about that, because you are the entire reason my show exists. You are not the punchline here. You are the person I am talking to right now.
So two things:
- Technology is not the bad guy.
- You are far more capable of this than anybody has bothered to tell you.
Fear is permission to never open the settings. And I understand why that permission feels so good, because opening Settings at ten o’clock at night when you are exhausted and the menu does not look like the one in the video is genuinely awful. I know. I have watched thousands of you tell me exactly that in the comments.
But permission to never open the settings is not the same thing as a plan.
The fire swamp, or: why I am not soft on this
Now the part where I turn this around on myself, because if I do not, somebody in the comments will.
I have a signature talk I give to parent groups, and in it I walk parents through what I call the fire swamp. Yes, Princess Bride. Stay with me.
In the fire swamp there are three terrors: the flame spurts, the lightning sand, and the R.O.U.S. (Rodents of Unusual Size, which Westley famously does not think exist, right up until one tackles him).
In my version:
- The flame spurts are the content nobody went looking for that shows up anyway.
- The lightning sand is the scroll. The thing that looks solid until you are standing on it and 40 minutes are gone before you notice.
- The rodents are the people. Actual bad actors, actually looking for your kid.
I tell parents about a toddler sobbing in front of a tablet because autoplay went sideways and served up a knockoff cartoon that was not a cartoon. I say the word sextortion out loud in a room of parents and I explain what it means, because most of them have never heard it before.
So no, I am not the person who thinks the internet is fine and everybody needs to relax. The raw material in my talk and the raw material in that speaker’s talk are honestly almost identical.
So what is the difference?
Every single terror in my talk is followed immediately by a job.
- Flame spurts: you listen for the popping sound. In the movie, there is a pop right before the fire. There is almost always a signal before the thing.
- Lightning sand: you find your vine. You know where it is before you need it.
- The rodents: you face them together. Which means your kid already knows, before anything ever happens, that they can come to you and not get screamed at or grounded until they are 30.
He picked a metaphor with exactly one move in it. A loaded gun has no technique. There is no version where you carry it well. Do not touch it. Conversation over.
I picked a metaphor with terrain.
And here is what everybody forgets about that movie. Westley and Buttercup walk into the fire swamp terrified and convinced they will not survive. By the time they walk out the other side, Westley has broken all three terrors down into things you can see coming and handle, and he is remarking that the trees are actually quite lovely. The swamp did not get safer. They got competent in it. It went from the place that would kill them to the one place in the kingdom where nobody could follow.
His talk ends with a parent saying no to everything forever. Mine ends with a parent who knows the terrain well enough to look their kid in the eye and say “as you wish.”
“Okay, but this time it really is different”
Somebody is already thinking it. Let me argue against myself.
I have had that thought too. I have sat in my own kitchen and thought, man, it would be so much easier to parent without all of this.
And then about four seconds later I think: did my parents sit around thinking it would be easier to raise us without MTV rotting our brains?
Because they did. Frequently. And we turned out mostly fine. Fellow Gen X, unite. (Also worth noting: MTV shut down its dedicated music channels across the UK and Europe at the end of 2025. So MTV does not even really play music anymore. Who actually won that one?)
So part of me knows this is the oldest story there is. But some of it is genuinely new, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Two things specifically.
1. Access. When I was a kid, the danger was some creeper in a van outside the school. It had a shape. It had a location. You could point at it and stay away from it. Now that stranger is inside our house at 11 o’clock at night, and he sounds like a 14 year old girl who thinks your son is funny.
2. Proximity. It is dramatically easier to reach content that will hurt your mental health than it was when I was growing up. It used to be one gross magazine at somebody’s friend’s house and you had to actively go find it. Now it is two taps, and often it finds you.
I am not going to sit here and quote you studies about screen time and brain development in either direction, because the honest answer is that the science is still genuinely being argued about. As of 2026, researchers are still openly disagreeing about how strong the link is, what the mechanisms are, and how much of it is the amount of time versus what kids are actually doing with that time. Anybody who tells you it is settled is selling you something, including if they are telling you it is settled in a reassuring direction. That is the same trick, just aimed at people like me.
What I will tell you is what I have watched for 20 years. Access is different. Proximity is different.
So no, I am not telling you this is a moral panic just like MTV and comic books and Elvis Presley and everything is fine.
I am telling you the new dangers need new skills, not a locked cabinet.
The difference between a warning and a rehearsal
Let me show you what that looks like in my house, because otherwise this is all theory.
There was a news story a while back. A teenage boy thought he was talking to a girl his own age. He was not. It was a scam run by adults who do this professionally, at scale. They talked to him long enough that he sent an image. Then the whole thing flipped the way it always flips, and someone was threatening to send that image to everyone he knew. His school. His team. His family.
He did not tell anyone. He tried to handle it alone. And he harmed himself.
I showed my kids that story. Not as a warning. Not with fear in my tone. Just matter of fact, at the table: here is a thing that happened to a real kid.
Then I asked them three questions.
- Would you have caught it? Somewhere in that conversation, would something have felt off to you?
- Would you have sent the picture? And I want your real answer, not the one you think I want.
- If you did send it and somebody started threatening you, would you tell us, so we could handle it together before you tried to handle it alone?
What I actually did there was run them through a drill.
I did not tell my kids a scary story. I gave them a rehearsal. Those are two completely different things to leave sitting in a kid’s head.
A warning makes a kid anxious. A rehearsal makes a kid ready.
Same headline. Same facts. Completely different result.
And look at where the two versions land. His version of that story ends in tragedy and a room full of terrified parents who go home and confiscate all the phones. My version ends with a kid who knows there is a door in this house at two in the morning if he needs an out.
That is the difference between fear that stops and fear that keeps going. Fear that stops is a warning. Fear that keeps going, into a plan, into a rehearsal, is training.
A warning makes a parent freeze. Training makes a parent move.
Kids do fire drills at school constantly. Does that make them afraid the building is going to burst into flames? No. It is mostly a fun way to get out of class for a few minutes. But if it ever happened, their feet would know where to go.
That is the goal here. Not fear of what might happen. Muscle memory for what to do.
The thing the data actually says, which nobody puts on a slide
Here is a number I wish that speaker had shown the room.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released new figures in June 2026. In 2025 they received more than 50,000 reports of financially motivated sextortion, an average of 137 a day, up sharply from more than 36,000 reports in 2024. That is the scary part, and it is real.
But here is the part that never makes the headline. Where the relationship to the victim was known, 94% of public reports came from the child victim or their parent, and most were submitted by the children themselves.
Read that again. When kids know reporting is an option, they report. Overwhelmingly, they are the ones who speak up.
That is not a story about kids being helpless. That is a story about kids who had a door, and used it. Your entire job is making sure that door exists in your house before anybody needs it.
If it ever does happen in your house
Keeping this here so you are not searching for it in a panic later. NCMEC’s guidance: the predator is to blame, not your child and not you. Get help before deciding whether to pay or comply, because cooperating or paying rarely stops the blackmail. Report the account through the platform’s safety feature. Block the person, but do not delete the profile or the messages, because those help law enforcement.
NCMEC’s free Take It Down service can help remove explicit images of someone who was under 18, and it works without the image ever leaving the device. For images taken at 18 or older, the equivalent service is StopNCII.org. You can also reach NCMEC at 1-800-THE-LOST, and the FBI has a resource page at fbi.gov/sextortion.
The three questions, in full
You do not run this on a schedule. You run it the moment your stomach drops.
A headline about some kids and an app you have never heard of. A friend forwarding you a screenshot at nine at night with no context. A speaker at your kid’s school. A thumbnail telling you the game your 10 year old has played every day for a year is dangerous. Something you find on your own kid’s phone and your heart starts going.
That feeling is the input. That is when you run this.
Ninety seconds. Three questions. And the goal is not to figure out whether you should be scared. The goal is to turn the fear into a decision.
Question 1: What actually happened here, and how did it happen?
Not the outcome. The mechanics.
The headline hands you the ending. You need the beginning. Where did this thing actually start? Because it almost never starts where the headline says it does.
That story I told you does not start with a photo. It starts with a stranger being allowed to send a direct message to a kid.
Different starting point, completely different set of things you can do about it. “My kid might send a photo” is a terrifying, unfixable thought. “Strangers can DM my kid” is a setting.
Question 2: Where is the off ramp, and is it in my house?
Every one of these stories has a step where it could have stopped. Find that step. Then ask what that step looks like in your home.
Is it a setting? Is it a conversation? Or is it a habit?
Knowing which one it is tells you exactly what to go do. Settings get changed tonight. Conversations get scheduled. Habits get built over weeks.
And if the off ramp is not in your house at all, that is worth knowing too. That means it is a policy problem or a platform problem, not a you problem, and you are allowed to put it down. You are not required to carry every problem on the internet.
Question 3: What does a solution cost me?
Especially the take it all away solution.
What does it cost your kid socially? And I mean really, not in a way that waves it off. If the entire friend group coordinates in one group chat, removing your kid from that chat has a price, and you should at least know what you are paying.
And what does it cost you the next time something goes wrong and your kid does the math and quietly decides not to tell you?
Because a kid who has been taught the device is a loaded weapon, and has also been taught that messing up with it means it disappears, is a kid who will not tell you. They have run the numbers. Handling it alone looks cheaper.
That is the exact math you are trying to break.
Comparison: the two ways to handle a scary headline
| The warning version | The rehearsal version | |
|---|---|---|
| What you focus on | The outcome | The mechanics, and where it started |
| What the kid hears | This is terrifying and I am powerless | This is a thing that happens and here is my move |
| What the parent does | Freezes, then confiscates | Changes one setting, or has one conversation |
| The result in your house | A rule nobody understands | A rehearsed exit your kid can actually use |
| When something goes wrong | Kid hides it, because telling costs them the device | Kid tells you, because that is what you practiced |
| How long it lasts | Until the workaround is found (usually about a week) | It grows with them |
A family that is scared of this stuff asks what happened. A family that is ready asks where they would have gotten off the road.
What choosing calm costs me, in case you thought it was free
I want you to know this choice has a price, because I think you should know that it does.
It costs me views and clicks every single week. I watch channels covering the exact same topics I cover grow so much faster than mine, and I know exactly why. It is not because their information is better. It is because fear moves faster than calm.
I watched a mom gain hundreds of thousands of followers overnight with a story about her daughter getting groomed online. No solutions. No here is how we are fixing it. Just here is what happened. And everybody shared it.
I think about it like this: it is trauma bonding for the online world. The channel selling the trauma gets the bond, because fear creates a really fast, really intense connection. Everybody is scared together in the comments. Everybody is saying “oh my gosh, I had no idea.” Everybody subscribes in the same 20 seconds. It is a real bond and it forms almost instantly.
Calm does not do that. Calm is a slower bond. Calm is somebody watching a 15 minute video, fixing the thing, and not thinking about me again until the next time something breaks.
I choose the slower bond every single week, and I see it in the numbers every single week. Some weeks I do not love it.
And then somebody sends me a message that says “thank you for your video, I finally feel like I can do this parenting technology thing.”
That is what I am actually after. You feeling like you have got this.
The fear channels can never get that sentence. Not because they are bad at what they do, they are very good at what they do. They structurally cannot get it. Their model depends on you staying afraid. Mine depends on you not needing me anymore.
The time I sold out without noticing
I would be pretty insufferable if I left it there, like I am somehow immune to this. So let me tell you about the time it got me.
I started using a tool that scores your video titles. You type in a title, it gives you a number, and it suggests other titles that score higher. That is a genuinely useful thing. I still use it. I just use it differently now.
It would say “this title scores higher,” and I would think “okay, sure,” and take the suggestion. Over and over, for months.
Then one day I went looking for one of my own videos. I was about to make something and wanted to double check whether I had already covered it thoroughly. So I searched for it the way a normal person would search for it, inside my own channel.
I could not find it.
My own video, about a thing I definitely knew I had covered. Gone.
I had optimized myself right out of my own search results. The titles were technically higher scoring and functionally useless, because they were written to win a number instead of to be found by a person with a problem. I lost the search because I tried to make them clickbait.
So I went back and changed them all back to the words a real parent actually types when they are standing in their kitchen with a device in their hand. Titles that earn the click instead of baiting it.
And to be fair to the tool, this is not a hit piece on some plugin. The tool did exactly what it says it does. I am the one who clicked accept.
The pull toward fear and clickbait is not always a guy with a gun slide and a booking agent. Sometimes it is a helpful little suggestion telling you a number went up. I never once decided to sell out. I just accepted a recommendation over and over until my own work was harder to find.
That is how it happens to everybody.
Your one task before next Tuesday
Catch one scary headline about kids and technology.
You will. They are everywhere. You will not have to look.
Run it through the three questions. What actually happened and how did it start. Where is the off ramp and is it in my house. What does the solution cost me.
Then come tell me in the comments what you decided not to worry about, or what you are going to go fix.
Either answer is a win. That is you choosing where your attention goes, instead of letting a thumbnail choose for you.
If you follow me on Instagram, I run a TLDR broadcast channel where I post headlines. Most of them are not scary, just things happening in tech and kids, but you might find a good one in there for this experiment.
Bonus round if you have older kids: run the rehearsal once. One headline, one kid, one question. “Where would we have gotten off that road?”
You are not behind. You are not bad at this. You are being sold something every single day by people who need you to stay scared, and you do not have to keep buying it.
Until next time, this is Family Tech powering down.
If you or your teen is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available in the US by call or text at 988, 24 hours a day. For sextortion specifically, NCMEC can be reached at 1-800-THE-LOST or gethelp@ncmec.org.
Frequently asked questions
What are the three questions to ask about a scary tech headline? One: what actually happened, and how did it happen? Focus on the mechanics rather than the outcome, because the story almost never starts where the headline says it does. Two: where is the off ramp, and is it in my house? Every story has a step where it could have stopped, and that step is either a setting, a conversation, or a habit. Three: what does the solution cost me, socially for my kid and in trust the next time something goes wrong? The whole thing takes about 90 seconds.
Is comparing a smartphone to a loaded weapon accurate? It is a metaphor with exactly one move in it: do not touch it. That framing does not help the family whose school issues a Chromebook, whose kid does homework on a shared laptop, or whose kid’s friend group coordinates in a group chat. A better metaphor is terrain you can learn to navigate, where each danger has a matching skill instead of a single prohibition.
What is the difference between a warning and a rehearsal? A warning gives a kid a scary outcome and nothing to do with it, which produces anxiety. A rehearsal walks a kid through a real scenario and asks what they would actually do, which produces readiness. Same facts, different result. It works the same way a school fire drill does: kids are not walking around afraid of fire, but their feet know where to go.
Should I just take my kid’s phone or tablet away? For most families that is a wish rather than a plan, because school devices, homework, friend group coordination, and staying reachable after school all run through technology. It is also worth counting the hidden cost: a kid who knows that messing up means losing the device is a kid who is much less likely to tell you when something goes wrong. That is usually the exact opposite of what you want.
How do I talk to my teen about sextortion without scaring them? Bring a real news story to the table matter of factly, without fear in your tone, then ask three questions: would you have caught it, would you have sent the image (I want your real answer), and if it happened, would you tell us so we could handle it together? You are rehearsing an exit, not issuing a warning. NCMEC data from 2025 shows that when the relationship was known, 94% of public sextortion reports came from the child or their parent, and most were filed by the kids themselves, so kids do speak up when they know they can.
What should we do if our child is being sextorted? NCMEC’s guidance is that the predator is to blame, not your child. Get help before deciding whether to pay, since paying rarely stops the blackmail. Report the account through the platform’s safety tools, block the person, and do not delete the profile or messages, because they help law enforcement. NCMEC’s free Take It Down service can help remove explicit images of anyone who was under 18, and StopNCII.org handles images taken at 18 or older. You can also reach NCMEC at 1-800-THE-LOST.
Is the research on screen time and kids’ mental health settled? No. As of 2026, researchers are still actively disagreeing about how strong the link is, what the mechanisms are, and how much depends on what kids are doing on screens rather than how long they are on them. Anyone claiming it is settled is selling something, in either direction. What has clearly changed since previous generations is access, since strangers can now reach kids inside the house, and proximity, since harmful content is a couple of taps away instead of something you had to go find.
Keep Reading
- How to Spot Sophisticated Online Scams: Red Flags to Watch
- Aging Parent Scam Protection Checklist
- The Truth About Online Privacy
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