What We Owe the iPad Kids
Members of Gen Z were the test subjects — now we’re finally old enough to warn the kids coming next.
We are the first generation old enough to speak meaningfully, from personal experience, about what social media does to a person while still young enough to remember exactly how it feels. Older peers can offer sobering perspectives to the next generation that few others can, and if we want them to learn from our regrets, we owe it to them to start speaking up.
Last week, Reconnect Stanford was invited by Piedmont Unplugged to spend the evening with a group of Bay Area students — and their parents — for a fireside heart-to-heart on social media.
We came to tell the truth about why we quit, what no one warned us about, and why we care so deeply about the kids who are beginning to feel the pressure to log on, too.
In all honesty, now that I’m in college, I don’t spend much time around the younger side of Gen Z or Gen Alpha (despite having a 7-year-old sister), and it already feels like a whole era has passed — especially in terms of technology — since I was that age. In the past few years, there has been no shortage of half-funny, half-alarming commentary warning about the “iPad kids” who “Gen-Z stare,” so I came into the event curious. I wasn’t sure what to expect as we got ready to sit down with a group of slightly younger peers to try to meet them where they were.
Turns out, bracing myself was unnecessary. What we found was a wonderfully engaged, thoughtful, funny group of young people. Most came to us with firm handshakes and killer eye contact. They were reflective, candid, and far more tuned in than the stereotypes would have you believe. I speak for the whole team when I say we bounded out of the experience with a hopeful glow and more energy to keep doing this work, not just because the students were impressive, but because they were so clearly hungry for honesty and the stories we had to tell.
The experience confirmed that the generation right beneath us does not need more adults who grew up outside the wild west of social media vaguely gesturing that phones are bad. They need people just a little older who can say: “I know. I remember. I hated this feeling too”. We speak directly from the middle of our own recovery process, and know exactly what it is like to feel left out, overstimulated, insecure, addicted, numbed out, and embarrassed by a screen time stat.
Hearing from social-media veterans, close enough to your age to be believable, has the ability to make younger peers think twice in ways phone bans and screen-time limits alone often cannot. It gives some meaning to the madness when we tell them how badly we wish our own parents had had the foresight to protect us in the same way. Recalling out loud how disorienting life online was for us, they begin to understand that opting out is not deprivation. It just might be their ticket to freedom.
In Conversation with Generation Alpha
We opened by addressing the obvious: many of them had probably not chosen to spend their evening at a fireside discussion about social media. Fair enough. If my parents had dragged me to something like that in middle or high school, I probably would have resisted, too. Naming that right away seemed to relax the room. The mood shifted. Their ears perked up.
To our delight, the conversation got real, really fast.
We got curveball questions all night. One thing none of us expected was how many students wanted our advice not just for themselves, but for their parents: when should I get a phone? When, if at all, should I be allowed to use social media? What actually makes sense? We do not have a perfect formula for parenting. What we do have are our own regrets, our own stories, and the questions we wish we had learned to ask much earlier. We hope that our mistakes — alongside the work of the researchers and experts studying these issues seriously — can help younger students start asking those questions for themselves sooner than we did.
If we wanted vulnerability from students, we knew we had to model it without holding back. If anyone can tell when they’re getting the polished version of something, it’s middle and high schoolers. We weren’t there to do that. One of our team members, Mahalia, received a round of applause mid-panel for her searing remarks on how social media affected her body image as a young girl, and what it was like to watch it similarly claw at her younger sister, now removed from the feed that so deeply warped her self-image.
By the end of the night, many students told us they had gotten more out of the conversation than they had come in expecting when their parents dragged them here. They mentioned both the raw personal stories and the science behind them as highlights of the discussion. They were drawn in by not just hearing that social media can be harmful, but hearing what it actually felt like for people who had lived in it until they couldn’t stand it anymore.
We speak with urgency because we wish someone had warned us.
I never had older peers who could look me in the eye and tell me the truth about what a life lived online was stealing from me — from us — while I was living through it. I had no slightly older role model to help me make sense of the absurdity of social media norms while I was growing up inside them. Getting to be that person for an evening — shaking students’ hands and earning enough of their trust to hear their honest, deeply felt reactions to their peers getting smartphones, to being the only one who doesn’t know the TikTok dances, to being left alone with YouTube Reels in a 5th grade classroom, and to watching classmates stumble upon things no child should be exposed to so early — was both jarring and deeply fulfilling.
We are not standing above them, wagging a finger at the next generation. We are barely older than they are! We are just the kids who got thrown into this first, trying to make something useful out of what we learned the hard way. We are not asking them to do something we never had to do. We are inviting them into a struggle we know intimately ourselves. We want to help end the cycle of addiction for the generation that comes after us, so that they might have fewer regrets than we do.
Older peers can reach them in a way others often can’t; not the government, not parents, not school administrators.
To the kids of the 2010s, to the guinea pigs of the internet: tell your stories. Please, talk — with your siblings, with your teammates, with your younger friends. Ask them how they feel. Tell them how you did, and what you would change if you could turn back the clock. There’s a reason why half of Gen Z wishes TikTok was never even invented; it’s our responsibility to explain why to Gen Alpha before they get pulled in deeply enough to feel the same regret themselves.
If we want the next generation to have a freer, saner relationship with technology than we did, that begins with honesty. We must speak plainly and refuse to pretend the experiment we grew up in was harmless when so many of us know it was not.
Laying bare our regrets, our struggles, and all those years spent bent around our feeds — loudly, honestly, and with love — may be one of the most powerful ways we can help the next generation find their way back from the algorithm.
At the very least, we owe them some company.
Founded in 2025, Reconnect Stanford is a Stanford student-led movement & non-profit dedicated to helping people step away from addictive platforms and toward meaningful connection, time, and attention. We build community around social media sobriety through stories, support for students who delete, peer-to-peer mentorship with middle and high schoolers, and events where peers disconnect together.
To learn more and support our cause, visit reconnectstanford.org. To submit a guest piece, email reconnectstanford@gmail.com.
About the author: Truitt Flink is the co-founder and President of Reconnect Stanford. Raised in Austin, TX, she is a second-year design student at Stanford University. She deleted her social media accounts in 2024.
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