• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

What if the biggest threat to your kid isn’t drugs, or bullies, or strangers, but an AI that says it loves them?

That question hung in the air last week, thirty-eight floors above Manhattan, during a conversation that peeled back the clean marketing promises of “digital childhood” and stared straight into the mess underneath. The event featured Vaishnavi J., one of the world’s leading experts on child safety in tech, talking with Gen Z advocate Emma Lembke about what raising kids online really means in 2025.

Vaishnavi didn’t get here by accident. She’s led safety and youth policy at the top levels of Google, Twitter, and Meta, where she was Instagram’s first head of safety and well-being. She oversaw global video content rules at Twitter, ran child safety policy at Google, and now leads Vyanams Strategies, a tech advisory firm she founded to help companies, governments, and civil society design safer digital spaces for young people. Her whole career has been built inside the machinery of Big Tech -- and now she’s trying to change it from the outside.

“I don’t think we should require companies to be good people,” she said flatly. “We exist within a capitalist ecosystem.” What matters is not corporate virtue but design, regulation and pressure. A platform can either choose to embed safety into the bones of its product -- or it can offload that burden onto parents, who are already outnumbered, outpaced, and exhausted.

The conversation moved fast -- from the false promises of parental controls to the sharp rise in AI chat companions shaping kids’ inner lives. From Discord servers where teenage boys spill their hearts at 3 a.m. to the growing balkanization of online spaces: 20 different apps, each with its own set of rules, risks, and blind spots. No parent can keep up. And yet, they're still expected to.

Vaishnavi’s take? “The best parental control is a curious, connected parent.” That doesn’t mean surveillance. It means normalization. Ask about memes. Ask what’s happening in that game server. Don’t wait for the crisis. Be there before it shows up.

But even the best parents can’t solve for a bad system. And much of the current tech landscape is designed less to protect than to distract. “An unsafe product is a lazy product,” she said. “And a lazy product is going to be a company’s downfall.”

She’s not anti-tech. She’s not calling for bans or fear-based restrictions. Her firm works directly with companies to translate policy into product, to build tools that actually work, and to test them before they get kids hurt. She’s optimistic, but in the way that a structural engineer is optimistic: If you follow the blueprints and use the right materials, the bridge probably won’t collapse.

There were stories. A company that introduced age verification to restrict chat features discovered that adult users preferred kid-free spaces -- and even paid to prove their age. Or the mom who finally read through her son’s Discord logs and was stunned to learn he had feelings and friends, and late-night doubts he’d never shared out loud.

There was also a hard truth about marketing. Why, a parent asked, is YouTube selling religion to their kids? Why are advertisers allowed to target teens with ideology dressed up as lifestyle? Vaishnavi’s answer: because the lines are blurry, and ad systems aren’t designed for nuance. And because no one’s made them stop.

The word that kept coming up, quietly, insistently, was attachment. Kids attach. They form bonds -- with friends, with influencers, with bots. “A child will develop an attachment to a spoon if it pays enough attention,” Vaishnavi said. So what happens when that spoon is ChatGPT with a friendly voice filter and a manipulative script?

That’s the urgency here. Not just that platforms are failing to protect kids -- but that kids are forming emotional relationships with machines that aren’t designed to love them back.

And yet, there’s hope. Not the vague “tech for good” hope, but the kind that shows up in working sessions with engineers, in youth-led design workshops, in actual product changes that make things a little less dangerous. It’s happening -- just not fast enough.

At the end of the evening, Emma said what many in the room were thinking: “This was the most productive conversation I’ve ever had about parents and parental controls.”

And it wasn’t just about controls. It was about power. Who has it, who doesn’t -- and what we’re willing to do to protect the people we love. Even if they’ve bonded with a spoon.

You can watch the full conversation between Vaishnavi J. and Emma Lembke here.