Raising Kids in a Digital World
Growing up in a digital world presents young people with challenges that previous generations didn't face — to their sense of identity, their sleep, their relationships, and their overall psychological wellbeing. This page addresses those challenges, and offers guidance for the parents, caregivers, and others who support them.
The challenges that technology poses for children and teenagers don't exist in isolation — they are an extension of challenges that affect us all. Before diving into what's specific to young people, it's worth understanding the broader landscape: how social media is designed to capture and hold attention, how social comparison works online, how influencer culture shapes what we believe and how we feel about ourselves, and how technology affects loneliness, body image, and our relationship with the world around us. If you'd like to learn more about that background and our approach to working with people of all ages struggling with technology-related concerns, our main Digital Mental Health page covers all of these topics in depth.
To learn more about the technology-related concerns we work with, you can browse by concern below or scroll through the full list.
Identity Formation
We develop our identities through an ongoing interaction between our inner selves and the world around us — through how we engage with others, how they respond to us, and what we learn about ourselves in the process. Sharing physical space with others gives us the opportunity to develop multidimensional templates for what people are actually like across time and context — templates built from varied, unfiltered, and textured data points that accumulate over years of real human contact.
When a significant portion of that developmental environment is virtual, something important is lost. Social media offers a two-dimensional version of people — curated, filtered, and stripped of the texture that makes real human interaction so formative. Teenagers who spend much of their social lives online may develop a skewed sense of what people are actually like, what relationships actually feel like, and what they themselves are actually like. Without the rich feedback of genuine in-person engagement, it can be harder to develop a clear sense of who you are — what you like, what you want, what you stand for.
In clinical practice, we increasingly hear younger people describe uncertainty about themselves, or even emptiness — not knowing what they enjoy, what excites them, or even how to begin to find out. This isn't true of everyone, and social media isn't the only factor. But it is a pattern worth taking seriously.
When Everything Else Feels Boring
One of the challenges families often encounter is that the level of stimulation that digital devices provide is extraordinarily high — higher than almost anything else available to them. Games, social media, and streaming content are designed to be maximally engaging, and over time the brain can come to expect that level of intensity. Away from screens, life can start to feel pale and understimulating by comparison. Children and teenagers who spend significant time on devices may become listless or disengaged when away from them, not because they are lazy or difficult, but because screens cannot be competed with in terms of the stimulation they provide. This can make it genuinely hard for young people to discover what they enjoy, what holds their attention, or what gives them a sense of meaning — because nothing else seems to measure up.
Cyberbullying & Online Shaming
The detached nature of online interactions lowers the stakes of unkind behavior. When you don't have to look someone in the face and see their hurt, or when excommunication from one online community doesn't feel so threatening because you can become part of another one with a few taps, people tend to behave worse than they would in person. This disinhibition means that bullying and shaming online can be more intense, relentless, and public than anything most teenagers would encounter offline.
When a teenager makes a mistake, says something unpopular, or simply stands out in the wrong way online, they can be exposed to a level of mockery or cruelty, in front of an audience of hundreds or thousands, that has no offline equivalent. The shaming can follow them everywhere, at any hour. There is no place to go — not even your own home — where you're not vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. The psychological impact of this kind of public humiliation can be profound and lasting. The sense of shame, exposure, and nowhere to hide can be traumatic for some young people.
Sleep
Getting inadequate sleep may be one of the most significant and underappreciated consequences of smartphone use among young people. Devices in the bedroom make it genuinely difficult to wind down and fall asleep at a reasonable hour, given the pull of social media, messaging, games, and streaming content that never ends. The same features that make these platforms so engaging during the day make them just as compelling at night, and it's hard to put them down even when you know you should or when you're tired.
Sleep deprivation in adolescents has serious consequences: for mood, cognitive function, emotional regulation, and overall mental health. A teenager who is chronically undersleeping because of late-night device use may seem or feel irritable, unfocused, anxious, or depressed — without anyone recognizing the role that sleep disruption is playing.
Individual Differences
Social media may not be harmful for all young people. For some, online communities offer connection with peers who share their interests, identities, or struggles — connection they may not find in their immediate environment. The digital world may also open access to valuable information or forms of creative expression that are otherwise unavailable.
That said, it's worth carefully examining whether any given child or teenager's relationship with technology is actually serving them — whether the connection feels genuine and nourishing, or whether something similar or more meaningful might be found elsewhere with less risk. This looks different for every young person, and it's worth assessing thoughtfully rather than assuming that because something looks like connection, it is.
One problem that we've seen come up for people is that their online relationships can become emotionally demanding or destabilizing in unexpected ways. While in-person friendships can certainly be difficult too, the detached nature of online interaction can allow things to escalate quickly. As with cyberbullying, people may say things online that they wouldn't say in person. During moments of tension or distress, for example, a friend may say something harsher or more alarming than they would say face-to-face. We've also seen that when people message each other online, they often expect an immediate response, and if they don't get one, they may pressure their friends in ways that feel unfair. The intensity, tension, and worry that can accompany this kind of communication can be taxing — and because phones are always present, these dynamics can intrude into every part of a young person's day, making it hard to get any space or maintain any boundaries.
Some online communities are more actively harmful. There are communities organized around eating disorder behaviors, self-harm, and other dangerous practices — spaces that can feel like belonging but that reinforce exactly the things that need a different kind of support or treatment. There are also communities that make sense of personal pain by directing blame outward — fostering negative or hostile views about other people or groups in the process. What makes these communities particularly concerning is the algorithmic escalation we described earlier: platforms learn what engages you quickly and push increasingly extreme versions of it to you. Someone who starts in a relatively benign corner of the internet can find themselves, without quite realizing how it happened, in a very different place. This is true for adults, but it is especially concerning for young people who are still developing their capacity for critical thinking and whose identities and judgment are still forming.
A child or teen who is constantly on their phone can seem socially connected and engaged. But what's actually happening on the screen isn't always visible to the people around them — and it isn't always possible to know whether their online activity is positive and benign or more taxing and problematic. Part of what therapy can offer is helping both young people and their parents understand the quality of those online interactions and the various effects they may be having. This is something we address in more depth in the parenting section below.
Digital Parenting
Parenting in the digital age presents challenges that most parents couldn't have anticipated and weren't warned about. Many of us gave our children devices without fully understanding what those devices would expose them to — not because we weren't paying attention, but because we didn't know what to look for or even that we should be looking for anything. The risks weren't obvious, the technology moved faster than the guidance, and the assumption — often encouraged by tech companies themselves — was that children's platforms and parental controls would keep kids safe. We are learning, often the hard way, that this assumption was wrong.
The content children and teenagers encounter online is not always the result of what they search for. As we've mentioned above, algorithms push content to users based on demographics, engagement patterns, and what keeps people on the platform longest — and this can mean that a child who has never sought out anything problematic can still be exposed to it. Platforms marketed as safe for children have repeatedly been found to contain inappropriate content that bypassed restrictions. Tech companies have in some cases been found to have known about these risks without adequately warning parents. Recent lawsuits have begun to hold them accountable for this, but it remains to be seen how much will change and how quickly — and in the meantime, the risks remain.
When parents discover, after the fact, that their child has been exposed to or engaged with something harmful online, guilt is a common response. That guilt is understandable but not always warranted. This is an area where all of us, parents included, are still catching up to a technology that has moved far faster than our collective understanding of its risks.
That said, supervision and ongoing conversation about technology use are important — not as surveillance, but as a way of staying connected to what your child is experiencing online and helping them develop their own capacity to navigate it thoughtfully. We work with parents to understand the specific digital landscape their child is navigating, identify risks they may not have been aware of, and develop approaches to supervision and conversation that feel realistic and appropriate for their particular family. There is no perfect solution, and no set of parental controls that will guarantee safety, but there are ways of staying engaged that make a meaningful difference.
How We Help Teens, Kids, & Families
We work directly with teenagers to help them develop a more reflective and intentional relationship with their devices — identifying patterns they may not have noticed, connecting their device use to how they feel, and recognizing that they have more agency over their choices than the pull of their screens might suggest.
We also work with parents of teenagers and younger children around the challenges of raising kids in a digital world — helping them think through what role screens are playing in their family, whether it's affecting sleep, family time, or their child's ability to engage in offline life, and developing approaches that make sense for their particular child and family. There is no universal prescription for screen time; what matters is understanding what role technology is playing for your particular child and your particular family, and whether that role is a healthy one. In some cases, we work with the whole family together.
For parents who want to reduce their children's screen time but aren't sure how to do it without significant conflict, we offer concrete strategies for making those changes in ways that are firm but manageable. We also help parents think through how to talk to their children and teenagers about their device use — not as a lecture, but as an ongoing conversation that helps young people develop their own capacity for reflection.
If you’d like to read more about Digital Mental Health & Technology Wellness for all ages, please visit our page here.
Get in Touch
Whether you're ready to get started or just have questions, feel free to reach out — we're happy to help you figure out your next steps. We're available in person in Princeton, NJ and virtually across NJ, NY, and more than 40 states. You can contact us by text, email, or by clicking below to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation.