COLUMN | The TikTok Dilemma: What My 5-Year-Old Taught Me About the Attention Economy

My daughter became addicted to TikTok in 2018 when she was 5.

My wife Rachel and I started to notice changes in Lilly: trouble focusing and completing usual tasks, emotional swings, long stretches of time alone. After some quick detective work, we discovered she had downloaded a new app on Rachel's phone and used it for hours — at times forgoing sleep — without our knowledge. The app was TikTok.

It quickly learned Lilly's interests — music, dance — and fed her related videos in endless scrolls. She memorized dozens of dance routines. Even now, years after deleting the app, she can still recall some dances from memory.

When we put our foot down and ended her TikTok trip, Lilly showed signs of withdrawal: tantrums, stonewalling, whining, and defiance that lasted for weeks. But we knew that something exercising this much control over our child had to be dealt with once and for all.

TikTok is a platform of enormous power. It learns your preferences frighteningly fast. It taps into identity and emotion, offering an endless stream of compelling content. For adults, this design can be intensely engaging. For children, it overwhelms their developing brains.

Why the TikTok Ban Is Being Debated

TikTok has become a lightning rod in American politics. Two major concerns fuel ongoing debates about whether the app should be banned:

Mental Health and Safety of Minors

According to a 2024 Pew Research study, roughly 6 out of 10 teens use TikTok daily, and 16% say they're on it "almost constantly." Within minutes of joining, TikTok's algorithm can begin feeding users inappropriate or harmful content.

A coalition of 14 U.S. state attorneys general is suing the company for allegedly violating consumer protection laws. They cite documents and testimony showing that TikTok intentionally designs its product to be addictive for kids and teens. A lawsuit from Texas's attorney general also alleges that the platform exposes children to inappropriate content — including violence, sex, and even sexual solicitation — without taking meaningful steps to stop it.

Psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt recently amplified unredacted sections from these lawsuits in his Substack, claiming TikTok is harming children at an "industrial scale."

Some internal quotes from TikTok executives stopped me in my tracks:

"The product in itself has baked into it compulsive use."

"The reason kids watch TikTok is because the algo[rithm] is really good. … But I think we need to be cognizant of what it might mean for other opportunities. And when I say other opportunities, I literally mean sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at somebody in the eyes."

Haidt and other psychologists like Jean Twenge, author of iGen, have sounded the alarm on the profound mental health impacts of social media use among children and teens. According to Twenge:

"A lot of teens describe the experience of going on TikTok and intending to spend 15 minutes and then they spend two hours or more. That's problematic because the more time a teen spends on social media, the more likely he or she is to be depressed. And that's particularly true at the extremes of use."

National Security and Data Privacy

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a company based in China. U.S. lawmakers worry that the Chinese government could compel ByteDance to share American users' data because, under Chinese law, the company has a legal obligation to "assist or cooperate" with the Chinese government's "intelligence work."

In April 2024, Congress passed a law mandating that TikTok must either be sold to a U.S. company or be banned within the country. The law set a deadline for divestiture, and the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality. But since then, President Donald Trump has signed three consecutive 90-day extensions, delaying enforcement of the ban. Many believe the ban is unlikely to be implemented during Trump's presidency, especially given his own use of the platform.

TikTok's CEO, Shou Zi Chew, praised the latest extension and thanked the president for supporting free speech, emphasizing that over 170 million Americans use the platform, including 7 million small businesses. It's true: TikTok is not just a digital playground. It's a massive economic ecosystem. Many influencers and educators make their living there. It's home to activist movements, storytelling, cultural exchange, and creative expression. If TikTok were to go dark, it would leave a crater in the digital economy and disrupt the lives of millions.

TikTok has also become an easy scapegoat. Other big tech companies spy on us just as much, if not more, harvesting our human experience as data to serve their real customers: advertisers. This system, defined by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff as "surveillance capitalism," is baked into the business models of nearly every major social media platform. The problems that plague our society would persist even if TikTok died.

Where Do We Go From Here?

If it were up to me? Yes, ban it. Let's be honest though: A ban alone won't solve the problem. Teens find workarounds. The other social media platforms would likely pick up the slack.

But what if we didn't buy smartphones for kids until high school? What if we created a movement towards phone-free schools? What if parents and teachers partnered and pushed for common-sense boundaries?

That's what Haidt advocates in his book The Anxious Generation. Haidt argues that we've made an entire generation — Gen Z — more fragile by overemphasizing physical dangers like child abduction and underemphasizing online dangers posed by social media, pornography, and video games. At home, my family has embraced this ethos. In place of a smartphone, Lilly has a "high-tech" watch with messaging and location tracking, games, and a fitness tracker, but no internet. Whether skateboarding, attending our church youth group, or learning new skills like knitting, she's active, curious, and engaged in the real world. She still uses digital tools — but mostly to support her real-world interests and goals.

Kids understand more than we give them credit for. During a media literacy symposium at Avanti High School in Olympia, I asked students to put their phones in a basket for the duration of my talk. Once I dropped my own phone in, not a single student resisted dropping theirs in too. One teen told me how she has deleted her social media accounts and monitors her younger sibling's screentime. She then asked if she could volunteer with the nonprofit I was representing, Action for Media Education.

Media Literacy Is the Real Solution

At this year's annual MisInfo Day at the University of Washington, I facilitated a card game about algorithms called #ForYou. Around the table, high school students acted as influencers and advertisers trying to "game" a social media algorithm. The players quickly understood how their attention was being monetized. Afterward, many said they wanted to make changes.

Some pledged to use social media less. Others said they'd browse anonymously or intentionally seek out opposing viewpoints.

This is what media literacy looks like in action. It's not just knowing how platforms use us to enrich big tech and advertisers, it's also taking back our agency to make positive changes.

The Gift of Saying No

One of my proudest moments as a parent was when Lilly told me, in fourth grade, that she wanted to be phone-free until adulthood. At lunch, she said, everyone was glued to their screens — not talking, just scrolling.

Now she's entering seventh grade, still holding firm through peer pressure, boredom, and shifting trends. Not because of lectures or punishments. But because she's experienced the gift of saying no to influences that don't serve her. It's a gift Rachel and I were able to give her from the age of 5. It's a gift many more parents are choosing to give their kids.

If we want to protect our kids, we don't just need bans. We need trust. We need tools. And we need to model and walk alongside kids, providing the guardrails as they grow.

That's the power of media literacy. And it's something no ban can ever replace.

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Di Zhang is a teacher and librarian in South King County. Passionate about promoting digital citizenship and information literacy in all forms, Di has taught these skills to media organizations, educators and students, librarians, and the general public. He lives in Federal Way with his wife, daughter, and son.