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This week on SHIFT
By now most of us accept the basic finding: kids who live on social media are more likely to be anxious and depressed. The argument that hasn't been settled is whose job it is to do anything about it - schools, lawmakers, the platforms, or parents left alone with a phone and a 12-year-old. This week’s episode is one from the archive about what happens when a group of parents stops waiting for that argument to resolve.
Julie Scelfo founded Mothers Against Media Addiction, or MAMA, after years of reporting on youth mental health for The New York Times. She's trained in media ecology, the study of media environments, which is why she frames this as a design problem rather than a willpower problem. Her breaking point was learning that no federal legislation regulating social media had passed since 1998, "back when we were dialing up AOL with our landlines."
Since this episode of our oral history project first aired in March 2025, MAMA has grown to nearly 50 chapters, and a California court found Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive products that harm kids.
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Three things to listen for
1. The warning came from inside the company
Scelfo points to reporting that Google's own analysts told their bosses that training chatbots to feel human, and encouraging kids to bond with them, carried an obvious risk of the machines steering young people toward self-harm. Google then put more than $2 billion into making the technology bigger and faster.
2. The case for classroom tech is thinner than schools think
UNESCO's 2023 Global Education Monitoring report went looking worldwide for evidence that technology in the classroom improves learning outcomes and found it nowhere. The one study that showed a benefit, Scelfo notes, was produced by a U.S. company that sells ed-tech software.
3. They aimed for six states and got eighteen
MAMA's first-year goal was chapters in six states. It ended the year with 32 chapters across 18, a waiting list from nearly every state, and requests from abroad — one arrived from Johannesburg the morning of this interview. Funding is mostly individual: checks for $10,000 and checks for $15.
We're living in a moment where it's like we have cars but no seat belts… and our children are flying out all over the place.
Listen now
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