The teens on our youth advisory council are amazing. Their insights and perspectives were essential to this book. Thank you to Amaiya Altamirano, Luis Baez, Zoe Brita, Hayden Brown, Luis Roberto Cortes III, Nate Dixon, Devren Edouard, Adyra H. Fine, Ashyah Galbokke Hewage, Ruiqi (Yuki) Guan, Eli Horwitch, Alex Hyman, Nicola Kachikis, Edna Kinyanjui, Marigold “Goldy” Lewi, Ria Lowenschuss, Emmaline Miller, Milan Moise, Priscilla Park, Ella Smith, and Zoya Unni, among others. We learned so much from each and every one of you.
We couldn’t have carried out our multifaceted research project without the support of a fabulous, dedicated research team. We are especially grateful to Chloe Brenner and Sol (Peter) Lange. Chloe was close to all the details and her perspectives unequivocally shaped our data collection, analysis, interpretation, and writing. Sol is a natural connector who brought creative wisdom and positive energy to all our youth advisory work. Together, Chloe and Sol helped to facilitate discussions with our teen advisors that opened new lines of focus for our work. Daniel Gruner and Laurence Li provided key support for coding and quantitative analyses, and each played an important role in helping us explore our data. Andy Riemer and Damaris Altomerianos were key contributors to early data management and exploration, too, and we benefited from their careful work.
We were fortunate to have feedback on the manuscript in progress from an awesome group of critical friends and family members. We are especially grateful to Alexis Redding and Amanda Weinstein for their careful reads of every chapter. Each offered detailed comments, including celebration of where we hit the mark and frank criticism where we missed it. We are thankful too for Sophie Choukas-Bradley, Ariana Zetlin, and Abigail Feldman, for their sharp eyes and on point suggestions throughout the manuscript. Sophie also directed us to literature we were missing, and we were so grateful to have her expert eyes on the text. Liz Kline gave us invaluable feedback on our first iteration of this book—coaching us on ways to strike a balance between research and practical insights. We also appreciated opportunities to tap insights from colleagues in adjacent fields, including Jeff Temple and Justin Patchin who each generously responded to our questions about their areas of expertise.
We are thankful, too, to a group of critical friends who shared valuable comments on specific chapters of our manuscript: Tina Fetner, Wendy Fischman, Jessica Kauffman, Jen Ryan, Katy Sazama, and Jacob Watson, as well as Adrianne Billingham Bock, Lisa Utzinger Shen, and other members of the Democratic Knowledge Project research group.
Our Common Sense Media colleagues have been long-time, valued collaborators. We’re especially grateful to Linda Burch, Kelly Mendoza, Rebecca Randall, Eisha Buck, Tali Horowitz, and, in earlier days of this work, Darri Stephens and Brisa Ayub.
Harvard Graduate School of Education has been a terrific intellectual home for each of us. Our Project Zero colleagues were enthusiastic supporters and sources of guidance who leaned into this interest with us, often coming by our office or sending us emails to share the latest digital dilemmas from their own lives and families. We consistently benefit from the support and guidance of wonderful colleagues, including Sarah Alvord, Tina Blythe, Liz Dawes Duraisingh, Shari Tishman, Rick Weissbourd, and Daniel Wilson. We are thankful for opportunities to share our research and ideas in progress with the Civic and Moral Education Initiative (CMEI) and the New Civics Early Career Scholars Program, and thank Meira Levinson, Helen Haste, and Janine Bempechat for their feedback on different aspects of this research.
Much of the work we do is in close partnership with educators and schools. We appreciate all the educators who helped support this work, especially Ron Berger and EL Education. One of the teachers who we interviewed a few years ago described her aim of preparing her students for decision-making that happens “at ten o’clock on a Saturday night.” This became a guiding aim for much of our work. Thanks to all the educators who have continued to inspire and support our research.
We are grateful as well to our longtime colleague and advisor, Howard Gardner, for strategic advice on the final manuscript and general support for our work across the last decade-plus. We are lucky to have Katie Davis as a friend and a close colleague, and she shared relevant insights from her own work and expertise on youth development and tech design.
We feel fortunate that our editor, Susan Buckley at the MIT Press, saw the promise of this project and then viewed the pandemic as a good reason for more data collection rather than a stumbling block. She encouraged us to turn up the volume on youth voices as a key feature of the book, and we are so thankful she did. Comments from anonymous peer reviewers from the MIT Press offered a number of suggestions that strengthened the manuscript. We appreciate Julia Collins’s careful copyediting and Kathy Caruso’s editorial leadership. We are thankful to the artist Oleg Shupliak for generous permission to reprint his Double portrait of Van Gogh (2011) in the opening pages of this book.
Our agent, Jim Levine, has been a consistent champion of this project and provided wise counsel as we navigated our way through the process of finding the right publisher. We are thankful, too, to Courtney Paganelli at LGR for her helpful suggestions. Angela Baggetta joined our book team with full enthusiasm and we so value her wise counsel and publicity support.
The Susan Crown Exchange (SCE) shares our deep interest in digital well-being and our belief in the inherent value of uplifting youth voices. Kevin Connors and Haviland Rummel have become valued thought partners; we appreciate their sustained interest in our work at every turn. We are ever grateful to Susan Crown and to everyone at SCE for making this project possible.
Other funders supported this work along the way, and we truly would not have been able to launch this research program without their early support. Thanks, especially, to Anne Germanacos for her support of Emily’s dissertation research and early postdoctoral work; the MacArthur Foundation, which funded our earlier research via the Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network and Digital Media & Learning Initiative; and the funders who supported our collaborative work with Common Sense Media, including the Bezos Family Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Niagara Cares.
We wrote and edited much of this book together over Zoom, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our family members became accidental officemates as we read and reread paragraphs to each other. We are enormously grateful to Ella, Carrie’s teen daughter and our at-home, always-on-call teen advisor (even when we would interrupt a Zoom class to ask for her take on teen data about sexting). Thanks also to T for patience with Carrie as she spent long hours on this book when T would have preferred undivided attention. Emily’s daughter Nina was born in the midst of this project, which gave Emily a new (and still growing) appreciation for the wonders of child development and the full catastrophe that is parenting.
We—Emily and Carrie—have loved being partners in this work. We also feel so grateful for the steady support of our other key partners: Jason and Perry. We love you so much, and we appreciate all that each of you do for our respective families. Tiffany was an unwavering champion of us and this book every step of the way; we especially value her pointed sarcasm and humorous commentary about our project aims. Carrie is thankful to her mother, Judith Lowitz, and her aunt, Carol Porter, for their loving presence and cheerleading. Emily also thanks Margot, Gary, Helene, and Michael for invaluable support—always, and through this book process especially. The opportunity for her own grandparents’ close involvement in this chapter of Emily’s life has been an incredible gift. Finally, Bob Selman’s mentorship has been both professionally valuable and personally meaningful to Emily on many levels, and his focus on research grounded in young people’s perspectives clearly had a reverberating influence.