• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

We were told to monitor screen time, install the apps, and trust the platforms. We did, and our kids got hurt anyway. If you are a parent, you know the feeling. The door closes, the phone lights up, and you are shut out of a world that is shaping your child’s brain, body, and sense of self. That is not paranoia. That is modern parenting.

Here is the good news. Parents are waking up, organizing, and getting loud. And one of the clearest voices in that uprising is Nicki Petrossi, creator of Scrolling 2 Death, whose podcast and community are closing in on a million followers. Nicki did not come to this as a pundit. She came as a parent who saw the harms piling up and decided to act.

Nicki started where many of us did. She read the research, listened to the Surgeon General, and watched Jonathan Haidt’s work land with force. Then she did the next thing most of us never do. She built a movement. First, an education phase to get parents fluent in the risks. Then an action phase to push companies and lawmakers to do the obvious things they keep avoiding.

That shift from awareness to action matters. Federal progress stalled. State efforts grew, but unevenly. So Nicki and a growing coalition of parents and youth advocates moved to coordinated public pressure. Her new investigative podcast, “The Heat Is On,” co-hosted with Sarah Gardner, CEO & Founder of Heat Initiative, was designed to do one thing very well: turn frustrated parents into an organized force that companies cannot ignore.

This is not armchair activism. Nicki has stood with parents outside Apple and Meta events so executives have to look them in the eye. Tim Cook saw them at the iPhone 17 launch. She brought her nine-year-old to a New York protest. Afterward, her daughter said, “I want to do that again.” That is intergenerational action. That is a family deciding that silence is not safety.

I have watched Nicki up close. She is relentless. Not loud for the sake of volume, but disciplined. She takes lawsuit discoveries, product tests, and internal research, and translates it so regular parents can understand and use it. She is building a playbook for how you pressure a trillion-dollar industry with moral clarity and practical tactics.

Meanwhile, the platforms keep announcing fixes that sound good in a press release and fall apart on contact with reality. Instagram’s move to apply PG-13 style ratings to teen feeds is a perfect example. Movies are static. Social feeds are not. Billions of posts move every day. New features arrive weekly.

Nicki’s view is blunt: Treat this as a PR claim until independent testing proves otherwise. And include youth in the design. If teens are the ones living inside these systems, their voices belong at the table before the cameras roll.

You can see the defensive crouch from the companies. The minute watchdogs publish data, a press event appears. I watched it happen the day Arturo Behar’s findings landed. He is a parent and a technologist who knows what is technically possible. When he says a company could reduce known harms with code and chooses not to, that deserves more than a nod. It deserves change.

Some harms are not abstract. Talk to parents who have lost a child to an online pathway that began with a recommendation or a message that should never have reached them. The industry likes to call these tragedies outliers. Do the math. With billions of users, a tiny failure rate scales to industrial-level harm. As Nicki says, we need to learn those stories, not turn away from them, and we need to act like every family is at risk, because every family is.

And while we push companies and lawmakers, we have to talk with our kids earlier and more plainly than our parents ever did with us. That means honest conversations about pornography, drug risks, bullying, self-harm content, and the mechanics of manipulation online. Five-year-olds need age-appropriate frameworks. Ten-year-olds need scripts for what to say when a friend sends something they should not see. Teens need allies, not hall monitors. This is awkward and necessary. It is also how we win inside the home while we fight outside it.

I will be clear about where I stand. The platforms made a business decision to keep parents out. Disappearing messages, hidden folders, and opaque controls were not accidents. They were features. If a company can ship microtargeted ads at scale, it can ship safety at scale. It chooses not to when engagement is on the line.

Parents have a different bottom line: Keep our kids alive. Keep them healthy. Keep them whole.

If you are ready to move from anxiety to action, start here:

1. Subscribe and connect. Start by listening. Subscribe to “Scrolling 2 Death” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
Then join the campaign at scrolling2death.com/heat to be part of The Heat Is On — a movement that turns awareness into coordinated parent action.

2. Change one device or one feature. Pick a single change at home — and do it this week.
Delay your child’s first smartphone. Replace it with a Gabb, Bark, or Pinwheel phone.
If your kids already have devices, turn off disappearing messages, location sharing, and algorithmic “For You” feeds. Safety doesn’t require a total ban — just boundaries and intention.

3. Take it local — schools and state. Ask your principal about a bell-to-bell phone-free policy. If your district doesn’t have one, point to examples in Florida and Indiana that show it’s possible. And tell your legislators you support the Kids Online Safety Act — the bipartisan bill that would finally require platforms to make child safety the default, not the afterthought.

Nicki is showing a path forward. She’s turning grief and frustration into skill, strategy, and community. She’s translating complex evidence into steps any parent can take today. Most of all, she’s reminding all of us that this is a bipartisan, universal fight. Red states, blue states, public schools, private schools — every family is in this together.

Tech won’t fix what it profits from unless we force the change. Nicki is leading with courage and clarity. The rest of us need to follow — add our names, show up, and keep showing up until the defaults move. This is our job. Our kids can’t do it for us.

You can listen to a Substack podcast of an interview with Nicki  here.