Raised, Not Programmed

My workspace is still down, so I can't edit the metadata .docx itself. Here is the full description with every em dash removed. You can paste it straight into Chiify's description field:

The parenting book for the age of algorithms: steady, evidence-based, and on your side.

You cannot childproof the world your kid is growing up in. Social media, group chats, AI companions, and pornography are not going away. Neither is adolescence itself: the friendships, the identity work, the risk-taking, the quiet mental health struggles that can flare into crises overnight.

Between the panic-industrial complex, which sells you monitoring apps, four-figure detox retreats, and documentaries telling you your kid is already lost, and the shrug of "kids will be kids," there is a way to actually raise a person in the age of social media and AI. Raised, Not Programmed is that way. Written by a mother of three from inside the years that matter most, it treats adolescence as the developmental work it is, and treats parents as capable adults rather than customers of fear.

But how do you actually stay calm and useful when your kid is spiralling, and how do you know what to worry about in the first place?

• What the research actually says about screens, social media, and teen mental health, and what it doesn't

• Three developmental stages (tween, early teen, late teen) treated as genuinely different work

• The topics that shape adolescence: friendships, identity, romance and sex, alcohol and drugs, mental health

• The tech decisions parents actually have to make: phones, monitoring, driving, social media, AI companions and pornography

• A field manual for the hardest moments: mental health crises, online crises, and what to do when everything has gone wrong

• Six practical field-note appendices: the conversations, the crisis playbook, a first phone agreement, a family driving agreement, age-by-age priorities, and if you can only do a few things

• Character over containment: raising the kid who moves through the world with judgment intact

• A steady middle voice between alarm and permissiveness, written to be read like a book, not a lecture

• A kitchen-table companion you can actually finish, then keep on the shelf for when you need it

For the parent who wants to finish a parenting book, and finish it with a plan