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    Kids growing up online

    Kids growing up online: Help kids grow up safe and well online.

    97% of American teens go online every day, and four in ten are online almost constantly. Schools can cut bullying: a program that cost about $27 a pupil in its first year reduced it in a randomized trial.

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    Ryan K. Hertel · heyitskenton

    The problem

    What we're up against.

    • Online, nearly all the time.

      97% of teens go online every day, and four in ten say they're online almost constantly.

    • Bullied online.

      46% of American teens have faced at least one kind of cyberbullying.

    • Sextortion is surging.

      Financial sextortion, where criminals blackmail teens over images, reached more than 50,000 reports to the national tipline in 2025, about 137 a day, up from more than 36,000 in 2024.

    • Lives lost.

      The national center knows of at least three dozen American teenage boys who took their own lives after being targeted this way.

    • AI raises the stakes.

      Reports to the tipline in 2025 included more than 400,000 involving generative AI.

    What works

    Proven, and ready to grow.

    • School programs work, modestly.

      Across many evaluations, school anti-bullying programs reduced both bullying and being bullied, though the effects are modest.

    • Cyberbullying programs too.

      Programs aimed at cyberbullying cut being bullied online by about 14%.

    • KiVa, in Finland.

      In a large randomized trial in Finland, the KiVa program improved 7 of 11 outcomes within nine months, including how often children were bullied.

    • KiVa, in Britain.

      In a randomized trial in British primary schools, the share of pupils bullied fell to 17.7%, against 20.7% in schools carrying on as usual.

    • Spotting fakes.

      Teaching high school students to check sources the way fact-checkers do improved their judgment of what they read online.

    What a family could fund

    Where the money goes furthest.

    • A proven school program.

      KiVa cost about $27 more per pupil than usual practice in its first year, and about $2 a year after that: our arithmetic in dollars.

    • Taking images down.

      The national center's free Take It Down tool received more than 130,000 requests to remove more than 273,000 images and videos, by its own count.

    • Someone to text.

      Crisis Text Line, free and open day and night, supported 1.5 million conversations in a year, by its own count.

    • Telling real from fake.

      The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit, says its resources have taught 3.5 million students.

    • Research nobody else is funding.

      The Surgeon General noted that robust, independent analyses of social media's safety for young people haven't been done yet, work a family could pay for.

    Honest limits

    What money can't promise.

    • Experts disagree.

      One widely read book argues that phones and social media caused a youth mental health crisis, while other researchers find mostly no, small or mixed links.

    • No proof of harm at scale.

      A National Academies panel found there isn't enough evidence to say social media changes adolescent health across the whole population.

    • Results don't always travel.

      KiVa had no significant effects in a Czech trial, and a digital literacy lesson that worked in America had none in rural India.

    • Smaller than hoped.

      In the British trial, the drop in bullying was smaller than in earlier studies elsewhere.

    • Safety lessons can miss the mark.

      Many internet safety lessons don't match what research shows about how harm actually happens online.

    Hard questions

    Asked and answered.

    1. You might ask

      Isn't the worry about social media a moral panic?

      Ryan

      The evidence points both ways. The Surgeon General said there isn't yet enough evidence to call social media safe for children, and when Facebook arrived at American colleges, students' mental health got worse. But across large datasets, the link with well-being is negative and small.

    2. You might ask

      Is sextortion really rising, or just reported more?

      Ryan

      Partly both: a 2024 law changed some reporting, but reports of financial sextortion still rose from more than 36,000 to more than 50,000.

    3. You might ask

      Why not just ban phones at school?

      Ryan

      Bans alone aren't backed by evidence yet: in English schools, strict phone rules weren't linked to better well-being, and among American children, compulsive use, not total screen time, tracked with suicidal behavior.

    In the slider

    See what your fortune could do here.

    Kids growing up online

    The slider prices this cause with these numbers:

    • A proven school anti-bullying program costs about $27 a pupil in its first year: our arithmetic in dollars from a randomized trial's costs.
    • The whole need here is every student in America's public schools, about 49.5 million.
    • The effect is modest and was measured in British primary schools: the share of pupils bullied fell to 17.7%, against 20.7%. It targets bullying among peers, not strangers online.
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    More of the Blueprint

    Keep reading.

    23 more chapters on the way

    Back to Keep 100

    Sources

    Every number in this chapter, and where it came from.

    1. Source 1: Teens, Social Media and AI Chatbots 2025 (opens in a new tab)

      Pew Research Center, 9 December 2025. Checked 16 October 2026.

    2. Source 2: The effects and costs of an anti-bullying program (KiVa) in UK primary schools: a multicenter cluster randomized controlled trial (Bowes and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Psychological Medicine, 12 November 2024. Checked 16 October 2026.

      A randomized trial in British primary schools, with its costs.

    3. Source 3: Foreign Exchange Rates: G.5A Annual (opens in a new tab)

      Federal Reserve Board, 5 January 2026. Checked 16 October 2026.

      The average exchange rate for 2025, in dollars per pound.

    4. Source 4: Teens and Cyberbullying 2022 (opens in a new tab)

      Pew Research Center, 15 December 2022. Checked 16 October 2026.

    5. Source 5: NCMEC Releases New Sextortion Data: Over 100 Reports Received Daily in 2025 (opens in a new tab)

      National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 25 June 2026. Checked 16 October 2026.

      Reports to the national tipline, as counted by the center.

    6. Source 6: CyberTipline Data 2025 (opens in a new tab)

      National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Checked 16 October 2026.

      The center's own figures.

    7. Source 7: Effectiveness of school-based programs to reduce bullying perpetration and victimization: An updated systematic review and meta-analysis (Gaffney, Ttofi and Farrington) (opens in a new tab)

      Campbell Systematic Reviews, 5 April 2021. Checked 16 October 2026.

      A meta-analysis of a hundred evaluations.

    8. Source 8: Are cyberbullying intervention and prevention programs effective? A systematic and meta-analytical review (Gaffney, Farrington, Espelage and Ttofi) (opens in a new tab)

      Aggression and Violent Behavior, 1 March 2019. Checked 16 October 2026.

    9. Source 9: A large-scale evaluation of the KiVa antibullying program: grades 4-6 (Kärnä and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Child Development, January 2011. Checked 16 October 2026.

      A randomized trial in Finnish schools.

    10. Source 10: Lateral Reading on the Open Internet: A District-Wide Field Study in High School Government Classes (Wineburg and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Journal of Educational Psychology, 2022. Checked 16 October 2026.

      Compared with matched classrooms, not randomized.

    11. Source 11: Crisis Text Line (opens in a new tab)

      Crisis Text Line. Checked 16 October 2026.

      The organization's own account.

    12. Source 12: About (opens in a new tab)

      News Literacy Project. Checked 16 October 2026.

      The organization's own account.

    13. Source 13: Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory (opens in a new tab)

      US Department of Health and Human Services, 2023. Checked 16 October 2026.

    14. Source 14: The Anxious Generation: Book (opens in a new tab)

      The Anxious Generation. Checked 16 October 2026.

      The book's own summary of its argument.

    15. Source 15: The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? (Odgers) (opens in a new tab)

      Nature, 29 March 2024. Checked 16 October 2026.

      A developmental psychologist's review of the same book.

    16. Source 16: To Minimize Harms and Maximize Benefits of Social Media to Adolescent Health, New Report Recommends Setting Industrywide Standards, New Protections Against Harassment (opens in a new tab)

      National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 13 December 2023. Checked 16 October 2026.

    17. Source 17: Effectiveness of the KiVa anti-bullying program in the Czech Republic: A cluster randomized control trial (Klocek and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Evaluation and Program Planning, 14 June 2024. Checked 16 October 2026.

    18. Source 18: A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India (Guess and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 June 2020. Checked 16 October 2026.

    19. Source 19: Youth Internet Safety Education: Aligning Programs With the Evidence Base (Finkelhor and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 3 April 2020. Checked 16 October 2026.

    20. Source 20: Social Media and Mental Health (Braghieri, Levy and Makarin) (opens in a new tab)

      American Economic Review, November 2022. Checked 16 October 2026.

      Uses the staggered arrival of Facebook at American colleges.

    21. Source 21: The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use (Orben and Przybylski) (opens in a new tab)

      Nature Human Behaviour, 14 January 2019. Checked 16 October 2026.

    22. Source 22: School phone policies and their association with mental wellbeing, phone use, and social media use (SMART Schools) (Goodyear and others) (opens in a new tab)

      The Lancet Regional Health: Europe, 4 February 2025. Checked 16 October 2026.

      A comparison of thirty English schools, not a trial.

    23. Source 23: Addictive Screen Use Trajectories and Suicidal Behaviors, Suicidal Ideation, and Mental Health in US Youths (Xiao and others) (opens in a new tab)

      JAMA, 1 July 2025. Checked 16 October 2026.

    24. Source 24: Learn About the New Condition of Education 2025: Part I (opens in a new tab)

      National Center for Education Statistics, June 2025. Checked 16 October 2026.