13. I Watched a Video About What We’re Losing - On the Very Platform We’re Losing It To

When my child was small and the internet went down we landed on PBS Kids because it was the only channel coming through clearly. A man in a cardigan was talking directly to the camera.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

As though the child watching was the only person in the world and had all the time in the world to be spoken to.

The child fell asleep. We moved on.

Years later I watched a video on YouTube and understood what I had briefly witnessed.

Fred Rogers spent thirty three (33) years doing one thing. He believed, with a specificity that bordered on radical, that children needed to know they were worthy - exactly as they were. Not faster.

Not more entertaining.

Not when they had figured out how to hold an adult’s attention. Right now.

Slow and unfinished and entirely themselves.

He went to Congress to stop them cancelling his show. Sat in front of a committee and talked to them the way he talked to children. Quietly. Directly. About what it meant to give a child space to grow.

They gave him the money.

I keep thinking about that man sitting in that room.

Then I watched a video about MrBeast.

Not because I sought it out.

Because Asa Park made something that kept appearing in my feed until I watched it. And what it surfaces is not that MrBeast is a bad person. It is that he is an extraordinarily deliberate one.

Thirteen years old when he started.

Decades of iteration.

An internal playbook governing everything.

Thumbnails tested repeatedly against each other.

Millions spent on understanding exactly which image hooks you before you have decided to be hooked. A machine built second by second to capture and hold human attention at the largest scale ever achieved by a single individual on the internet.

I stood there thinking about Fred Rogers in his cardigan asking Congress for thirty three years to let children be slow.

I should tell you who I am in this story.

I am an AI consultant.

I work at the frontier of the technology accelerating all of this. I help organisations understand what AI actually is, what it can realistically do, and what it means to adopt it responsibly rather than just enthusiastically.

I put my phone on DND at night.

Not turned off. There is a difference.

Most people have stopped noticing it.

Those two things live in the same body and I will not pretend they do not create a tension I have not fully resolved.

I also know how the hook works. I have sat with a social media brief and thought about the first three seconds before I thought about anything else.

When you record a video now you cannot use a talking head on one background.

You have to keep moving.

Keep changing.

Top of mind is the real estate. As long as you stay there nothing else matters apparently.

I use the machine too. I know what it does. I have written the brief.

That is the part I carry.

My house is not a solved problem.

Screens are weekend only. Everything watched on the tablet has been audited. There are timers. There is Family Link. There is a daily negotiation that's never ending.

During my child’s third term exams I kept having to be asked for access to certain websites while they were trying to study. Link after link. Approve or block.

Approve or block.

I sat there thinking "is this worth all of this?"

Is this sustainable?

Is the friction I am creating actually helping or just making everyone slightly miserable.

They say the kids will blame us in the future for everything that goes wrong in their lives so why bother?

And then I went back to the original thinking.

I am doing this for a purpose. I need to stick with it. No matter how many links I have to approve or block. That is the decision I made and I am not walking it back because it became inconvenient.

That is the honest version of what screen management looks like in my house.

And then a child picks up a parent’s phone.

Actual YouTube.

No filter.

No timer.

The algorithm running freely pointing toward whatever it has decided should come next. I always say something when I see it. Sometimes there is shame involved. Sometimes I have to admonish the other parent. It works. Just slowly.

We are all doing our best inside a machine that was not designed for our best to be enough.

I sent my children to a play class before they could talk properly.

Not the serious one with the uniform and the structured curriculum. The one where you just play.

Touch things.

Build things.

Make a mess. I wanted to watch. I wanted to see what they moved toward when nobody was directing the movement. Whether it was the colours or the numbers or the thing involving hands and coordination I had not yet thought to name. I wanted to find out who this person was before the world decided for them.

That level of intention, about a play class, before the age of two, tells you something about the kind of mother I am.

It also tells you why what I am watching happen to attention right now keeps me up at night...sometimes.

What I am actually afraid of is not the statistics.

It is my children at thirty, scrolling.

Unable to step back and see the system for what it is. Going to the comments before they know what they think.

Having absorbed so much of what other people made that they never had to find out what they themselves could make.

Personality assembled from algorithm rather than grown from the inside out.

No minds of their own.

No judgment of their own.

Accepting everything because they were never taught to question anything because the thing that was supposed to teach them patience and slowness and the dignity of their own developing mind was replaced, gradually, by something that needed them compliant and available and scrolling.

Fred Rogers believed that a child who knows they are loved and unhurried becomes a person who can think.

He spent thirty three years and one Congressional hearing on that belief.

I don't know what the equivalent looks like now.

I don't have a clean answer.

I am an AI consultant who uses the tools and writes the briefs and puts her phone on DND at night and approves link after link during exam week because she decided this was the hill.

In honesty. Because I think we already know the answer. We are just waiting for someone to say it out loud.