Clint and Pam Legaspi tried to take a balanced approach when introducing their now-12-year-old daughter to technology. Her first device was an educational LeapPad tablet, not an iPad. Later, they ignored her requests for an iPhone and instead gave her an iPod Touch, but only after carefully curating its apps: giving her access to Pinterest, Messenger Kids and Roblox but not TikTok, Instagram or Snapchat.

When her Bay Area elementary school started assigning Chromebooks to students, Clint—a former internet network operator and recent retiree—chose to buy her a laptop himself, so he could take special care to ensure the device was safe. He turned on screen-time limits, filters to weed out age-inappropriate content, and settings to prevent his daughter from downloading programs or erasing browser history without his permission.

Still, it wasn’t enough. In 2023, the Legaspis discovered that their daughter had secretly used her iPod Touch to FaceTime a stranger she met while playing Roblox. And later they found that she had been sharing suicidal thoughts with a chatbot from Character.AI—a platform that has attracted criticism for the emotional attachments some young people have formed with its bots—even though she was well under 13, Character’s minimum age for users.