Who's Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children

From a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of commercial marketing on children, a timely investigation into how big tech is hijacking childhood--and what we can do about it

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies had become deeply embedded in children's lives, despite a growing body of research detailing the harms of excessive immersion in the unregulated, powerfully seductive, profit-driven world of the "kid-tech" industry.

In Who's Raising the Kids? Linn--one of the world's leading experts on the impact of Big Tech and big business on children--explores the roots and consequences of this monumental shift toward a digitized, commercialized childhood, focusing on kids' values, relationships, and learning. From birth, kids have become lucrative fodder for a range of tech, media, and toy companies, from producers of exploitative games and social media platforms to "educational" technology and branded school curricula of dubious efficacy. Linn persuasively argues that our digitized-commercialized culture is damaging for children and families as well as society at large, and maps out what we must do to change course.

Drawing on research and real-life stories that show the harms of immersing children in the profit-driven worlds of Big Tech and big business (while noting that many Silicon Valley elites wouldn't dream of exposing their own kids to the very technologies they've unleashed on other people's children), Who's Raising the Kids? is both an exposé and a guide. In addition to calling for societal change, Linn recognizes that families need guidance now, and the book includes a chapter on "resistance parenting" that offers concrete suggestions for protecting kids from exploitative targeting by tech, toy, and media conglomerates. Linn eloquently makes the case for no longer allowing kids to be treated as lucrative bundles of data and as mini-consumers ripe for exploitation and instead providing children with what they really need.