Why Your Teen’s Brain Can’t Outrun the Algorithm
There are moments in parenting when you realize the things you once feared for your kids, the monsters under the bed, the shadows in the hallway, have quietly shapeshifted into something much harder to see. I had one of those moments on a long drive home from Nashville, with nothing but the open road, my dog Hopper riding shotgun and a podcast called Left to Their Own Devices to keep me company. I thought it would be background noise. Instead, by the time I pulled into my driveway in Michigan, I knew I needed to share what I learned about the digital dangers inside our kids’ hands, and why protecting them from those dangers is now part of life readiness and death readiness.
When my daughter April was little, she and my husband had a bedtime ritual that lasted forever. It always began with the same two questions: “What are you grateful for?” and “What do you have to put away?” These questions taught her to pause and reflect, to notice what filled her and what weighed her down. But kids grow, and their world expands. Their fears shift. “What do you have to put away?” quietly evolves from the simple worries of a child to the heavy, hidden things teenagers carry—shame, pressure, cyberbullying, predators, and algorithms that pull them in too deep. And the hardest part is that you don’t know what they’re carrying because they don’t want you to know. When April was small, everything she feared could be kept out with a locked door. But the monsters don’t live outside anymore. They live inside apps, inside algorithms and inside anonymous accounts.
Listening to Ava’s podcast made it painfully clear that our kids are growing up in a world we never knew, one where danger doesn’t just lurk in dark parking lots but in notifications, friend requests, and feeds designed to addict, shape, and trap. It’s unrealistic to expect teens with developing brains to have the impulse control we barely maintain ourselves as adults. When I was a teenager, a single bad race and the resulting local newspaper headline could crush me. If my worst day had played out online with real-time commentary, I don’t think I would have handled it well.
One of the most disturbing parts of Ava’s story was learning that sextortion has become a lucrative industry. These aren’t random predators; they’re organized criminal networks deliberately targeting teen boys with scripted scams. Sextortion cases involving teens have increased 18,000% in two years. A predator poses as a girl, sends a photo, asks for one back, and within seconds the threats begin: “Pay me or I’ll send this to everyone you know.” And kids, good kids, smart kids, kids with supportive parents, believe them. Some feel so trapped and ashamed that death seems like the only escape.
Then there’s the algorithmic danger. Ava developed an eating disorder in her early teens partly because of the Instagram algorithm. She paused one second too long on a bikini photo, and Instagram decided that was her interest. Her feed shifted overnight into calorie counts, weight-loss hacks, and “what I eat in a day” videos. She didn’t go looking for danger; the algorithm found her vulnerability and fed it to her repeatedly. Algorithms are engineered for profit, not mental health, and no teenager’s brain is equipped to outrun something designed to exploit their insecurities at scale.
As a parent, admitting that something bad could happen to your child is excruciating. But the danger online isn’t hypothetical. It might already be happening. We need to have conversations, real conversations, repetitive, awkward, eye-roll-inducing conversations that your teenager swears they don’t need and definitely doesn’t want. Silence is far more dangerous than any uncomfortable talk.
People think death readiness is about wills and binders, and yes, those matter. But at its core, death readiness is about protecting the people you love from the world they actually live in. It means talking about shame, predators, algorithms, sextortion, and mental health. It means being willing to name the things they’re carrying before they collapse under the weight of them. It means showing up before the crisis hits.
If you only do one thing after reading this, let it be this: the next time you’re in the car with your teen, or walking the dog, or standing in the kitchen after school, use the moment. Ask them what they’re carrying. They need the opening more than they’ll ever admit.
Listen to the full episode here:
