I referenced a report called The Family Tech Cycle in a recent interview. One line in particular made me want to track down the researcher that wrote the report:
"Families are absorbing cognitive and emotional labor that product design could meaningfully reduce."
I've been thinking about the concept since I first read it because it named something I'd been hearing from other parents but hadn't quite articulated. It’s a lot of work for parents to keep up with every device and platform and not be blindsided by a missed parental control or new social situation for your kid.
Amanda Lenhart is the lead author on that report and a senior fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. She’s been researching how kids and families use technology since 1999, which means she’s been watching this longer than most of us have been parents - and even before she became a parent. I reached out and we got to talk about all of it. You can find the full interview on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any podcast app.
The basic idea
The report's central argument is something I think most parents will recognize the moment they hear it: companies design for moments. The download, the first login, the feature launch. Families mostly live in the ongoing mess between those moments.
Every device kicks off a cycle of decisions, setup, and management that doesn't end when the box gets recycled. Instead, the cycle restarts with the next app or situation that comes up.
She's been watching this for a while
Amanda started at Pew Research Center in 1999, where one of her first major reports was about instant messaging. At the same time she was coaching high school rowing, watching her athletes attempt to practice while still processing whatever had happened in an IM window. She’s been tracking the evolution of this stuff ever since, which gives her a unique perspective.
Her thinking has shifted quite a bit in that time. "When I started, I was much more in the camp of this is really transformative technology and I think it's probably pretty good. Now I think it has a lot of complexity. Some good, some bad, and some in the middle." Which tracks with how I think most of us think now: somewhere between the optimism we started with and a more complicated present.
Amanda also has four kids spanning nearly two decades and she describes parenting through a series of microgenerations. Each child landed on completely different platforms in completely different ways as even the platforms themselves changed. One was a minimalist Facebook user who mostly used it for sports organizing. Another gravitated toward Reddit-style conversational spaces. Another was, in Amanda’s words, a master of Instagram. Same house, same parents, totally different digital lives. The point isn't just that technology and platforms change between kids - which it does. The kids themselves are different and change over time too. And what worked or made sense for one doesn't automatically transfer to the next.
"We're kind of in it all the time," she said. "It never stops."
I've felt this already with my own daughters and they're still pretty young. New apps, new devices, new requests. Generative AI, which we discuss, is the kind of new technology that offers different capabilities and changes what parents need to think about.
What families are feeling now
Amanda and the team used co-design to study families’ relationship with technology. It’s a methodology where you work with actual users to both surface problems and prototype solutions, rather than just asking them questions. They asked kids and their parents to do things like “design their dream phone” that would help them feel safe and connected to the people they loved - including things like family rules.
Sessions were held at YMCAs and community centers in Missouri, New York, and Oklahoma. Kids sat on floors with cardboard and markers and built things. 41 parents, 53 kids ranging in age from 4 to 14.
Younger kids wanted things like fairness and explanation. Not no rules, just rules that made sense to them. Amanda said that when you actually tell kids why a limit exists, a lot of them just accept it. "Once you explain why, a lot of kids are like, yeah, I accept this. This is about me being safe."
One thing the research team didn't anticipate: how much kids worried about social exits. When a hard time limit drops them out of a game mid-session, their friends don't know what happened. It just looks like they disappeared. Kids found this genuinely stressful, and they wanted tools to handle it gracefully, a quick message that said hey, my time's up, I'll be back tomorrow. Author and teacher Ash Brandin made a version of this point in our earlier conversation: games are social spaces and kids aren't just passively consuming when they're playing. They're in the middle of something with other people, and pulling them out abruptly has social consequences they actually feel.
The parents’ perspective is also interesting. Amanda described one mother that couldn't afford the fees for her teenage boys to play football, so she bought them one phone to share between them. A device designed entirely around individual ownership, handed to two teenagers to figure out together. There were also parents across income levels who were furious about being charged for parental controls on devices they'd just purchased. The feeling was: please don't make me pay to turn something off that I just paid you to turn on.
And, parents are also navigating very different technology perceptions across complex co-parenting relationships. Technology gets entangled in broader family context.
Even facing these challenges Amanda underscores how parents were really trying to help their kids: "We didn't speak to a parent who doesn't want to do right by their kids. Everybody is trying their best in the situation that they find themselves in."
On families and AI
The report doesn't go deep on this, but Amanda says it came up in the sessions. Younger kids mostly wanted AI as a kind of protective filter to stop scary things like snakes or blood that friends sent them as a joke. They wanted it blurred, with the option to click through if they actually wanted to see it.
Amanda's bigger concern is relational and the potential for an emotional attachment to AI, something I've been thinking about too - even writing about AI friends last year. Amanda described sitting with her own kid after a conversation with a chatbot about Shakespeare, both of them a little surprised by how connected they felt almost immediately. "That's the thing that keeps coming up. Are we comfortable having children create these attachments to non-human entities?"
Amanda says she’s not against AI for kids at all. She thinks about it more in terms of use cases. Tutor, coding tool, creative collaborator, those can all be genuinely valuable. The problem she sees is when the homework tool becomes the companion, when kids are swinging between use cases inside the same tool without anyone really noticing. "I'm not sure it needs to be your best friend to do all these other things." Couldn’t agree more.
Clear historical parallels
Amanda says Joan Ganz Cooney founded Sesame Workshop and Sesame Street in the late 1960s from a specific belief: that television could be genuinely good for kids if someone actually designed it that way. "She looked around at this new technology called TV and thought this could be beneficial for kids," Amanda said. "She honestly believed that we could build good content for kids and we could do it by researching what worked."
Sesame Street wasn't just intuition. It was intentional design grounded in research about how children learn. The center Amanda works for takes that same premise and applies it forward. "Technology and media can be beneficial for kids if we design it right and intentionally and with research behind it." The question Joan Cooney asked about television is the same one Amanda and her colleagues are asking about smartphones and AI now. It can work for kids. But someone has to actually decide to make it that way.
Amanda’s own children + the smartphone decision
I always find it interesting when researchers who study something have to make a real decision about it in their own lives. So I asked Amanda about a decision she'd made recently as a parent rather than a researcher.
Last year her 12-year-old needed a phone for the first time. Not because of peer pressure or social FOMO, but for a pretty practical reason. She was going to fly alone to visit her grandparents, and as Amanda pointed out, there's no such thing as a pay phone anymore.
They spent about six hours setting the device up, which tracks completely with what the report says about unboxing being one of the most exhausting moments in the whole cycle. Maps yes. A coffee shop app yes. Cash apps yes. No real internet browser. No social media. Algorithmic video stays on the home iPad for when she's in the house, and doesn't follow her into her pocket everywhere she goes.
The most interesting part was her daughter's own reaction to the setup over time. Watching some of her friends struggle with more open access, she told her parents something that Amanda clearly found meaningful: "I really appreciate that I don't have social media right now because I see how my friends are really struggling to manage it, and I'm glad I don't have to try to do that."
Amanda knows high school is coming and the phone is going to open up gradually. That's kind of the whole point of the report. The cycle doesn't end, it just continues into the next stage.
Amanda’s advice for parents
Amanda's advice centers on tools for conversation more than control. She recommends things like a family media contract from somewhere like the American Academy of Pediatrics, a documented set of expectations that you build with your kids rather than hand down to them. "Sitting down with your kid, and this is a moment, and often it's at unboxing when you get the new device," she said, is when you lay out the why behind the rules.
Her script for that conversation is worth borrowing: tell your kids you're implementing a time limit because you want balance, because the dog needs walking, because Spanish homework matters, because "sometimes these videos just play all the time and it can be hard for us to stop watching."
"Inviting an interactive conversation with your child, knowing your child, having it be a conversation goes a long way towards getting that buy-in that means you're not locked in conflict over enforcement." She also pointed out that these conversations don't have to start from scratch. Templates exist, and the best ones are modular enough to fit where your family actually is, whether you're managing a smartwatch or navigating a full smartphone.
At the end of the interview Amanda had a good summary of the whole situation and I think it’s worth staying grounded in it: "Our goal is to get our kids through a beautiful childhood to a place where they're going to be great and functional and competent and agentic adults. These tools and platforms are designed to make you want to stay on. I want them to feel like at least they're making that choice and that choice is not being made for them."
