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Your Child Is the Product: A Parent's Guide to Taking Back Control From Apps, Algorithms, and Digital Distraction
Paperback
General ComputersGeneral Parenting
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 1 2026
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.23 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Your child's phone was not designed to entertain them. It was designed to capture them.
Every swipe, every notification, every just five more minutes is the product of a multi-billion-dollar industry built on a single insight: children's developing brains are the most profitable, least defended audience on the internet. In August 2026, that stopped being a theory and became a matter of legal record, when Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle claims that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately engineered to be addictive to kids.
Your Child Is the Product is the manual no parent was given. Written by data scientist and software engineer Dr. Yancy Dennis, it pulls back the curtain on the exact behavioral techniques - variable reward schedules, infinite scroll, social validation loops, FOMO engineering - that platforms use to hook young users, and shows you what the research actually says about the cost to attention, mental health, sleep, social development, and physical wellbeing.
This isn't a book about panic or prohibition. It's a practical, judgment-free playbook for taking back control:
- Understand the business model built on your child's attention
- Assess your child's actual digital habits, platform by platform
- Build a Family Technology Agreement that holds up under pushback
- Set consequences that work, and know what to expect when you do
- Raise a critical thinker who can navigate algorithms wisely, not just avoid them
The book closes with the 7-Day Family Digital Reset: a day-by-day action plan requiring no more than an hour a day, built to structurally change your household's relationship with screens, not just your intentions about it.
You are not a bad parent. You are competing with the most sophisticated engineering operation in human history, and nobody handed you a manual.
This is that manual.
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