If you’re raising a teenager today, it can feel like every parenting decision carries enormous stakes.

Parents are bombarded with alarming headlines about adolescent mental health: rising anxiety, loneliness and depression. Social media, smartphones and academic pressure are often cited as the causes. Every week seems to bring a new explanation for why teens are struggling.

The message many parents absorb is simple: Don’t make things worse.

After hearing that often enough, many parents start to worry that one wrong move could make things worse. They try not to push too hard or enforce too many rules, fearing that doing so might add to their kids’ stress.

But in the process, something important can get lost. In today’s parenting culture, many parents have quietly grown afraid to claim their authority.

We see this tension every day. As clinical psychologists who have spent decades working with parents and adolescents — and as parents of teens ourselves — we have a front-row seat to how uncertain many parents feel about claiming authority as part of their job.

One of the most stabilizing forces in a teenager’s life is knowing that the system around them has structure — and that capable adults are holding it.

When parents provide that structure, teens feel something psychologists sometimes call “containment”: the sense that big emotions and messy moments are held inside something steady and reliable. Without it, all that intensity can start to feel exposed. It’s like an egg without a protective shell.

That matters because adolescence is a time when feelings get bigger before self-control fully catches up. Teens feel things intensely and react quickly. They care a great deal about friendship, belonging, status and independence.

This means that big emotions are part of adolescence. Teens are supposed to push limits and argue about rules. They may slam doors or act like your boundary is the most unreasonable thing that has ever happened to them.

Big feelings often lead to big behaviors. A parent’s job is to stay steady inside them. Here are a few ways that can look in real life:

• Stay calm. This means remembering: I’m the grown-up here. Your teen may be turbulent, but you don’t have to be. Sometimes it helps to pause, take a breath and remind yourself: I’m the pilot, not the turbulence.
• Validate the feeling while holding the limit. You can say, “I know you’re really upset, but answer is still no.” Two things can be true at the same time: Your teen’s feelings are real, and your boundary still stands.
• Say less. When teens escalate, more words often add more chaos. Resist the urge to explain, defend or lecture. A simple “I hear you” or “You’re really mad” can go further than a long explanation.
• Give space when space helps. Sometimes the steadiest thing you can do is step back. You might say, “I’m here when you’re ready to talk,” and then give them room. Giving space can help everyone settle.

A lot of confusion today comes from how we think about autonomy.

Autonomy means gradually learning to make decisions within the safety of a clear, steady structure.

Teens push for autonomy. Parents hold the boundaries that make it possible. Inside those boundaries, teens test limits, negotiate responsibility and learn to tolerate frustration — experiences that build judgment and resilience over time.

Without that structure, teens aren’t really practicing independence. They’re just unmoored. And deep down, even when they push against limits, most teens feel safer when a parent is willing to hold the line with calm and care.

Every family’s structure looks different. It might include where phones live after 9:30 at night, what “I’ll be home later” really means, or whether a party requires a parent present.

It also includes the norms that shape family life, like how people treat one another, how conflict is handled and what accountability looks like.

Remember, structure gives teenagers something to grow inside of — a shell that holds things together while something stronger and more independent forms within.

Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist, mom of three, and the founder and CEO of Good Inside, a parenting company and next-generation movement. Through her bestselling book, “Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be,” TED Talk and podcast, she has built a community of millions of parents who turn to her for practical, sturdy and compassionate advice.

Dr. Sheryl Ziegler is a licensed clinical psychologist with over two decades of experience working with children and families in private practice. She is the author of “Mommy Burnout: How to Reclaim Your Life and Raise Healthier Children in the Process,” and the forthcoming book, ”The Crucial Years: The Essential Guide to Mental Health and Modern Puberty in Middle Childhood.”

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Jonathan Haidt says he wants to bring fun back to college.

The New York University Stern School of Business professor and author of bestselling book “The Anxious Generation” has been teaching college students since the mid-1990s.

He’s noticed a change in the atmosphere on campus over the years, he said at an early-March fireside chat at NYU to introduce the school’s latest initiative, NYU IRL, which aims to help students be more present by offering phone-free spaces, among other efforts.

Haidt said life on campus has grown much more tense over the years. Colleges once felt like places where students could freely explore new ideas, he said, but in the era of smartphones and social media, many worry that something they say could spread online and get them ostracized or “canceled.” Instead of openly debating and learning from experts or one another, students often remain on the defensive.

This change came in tandem with the introduction of social media and the smartphone, he said, as well as the spike in youth mental health issues he has long warned about.

That’s where the new NYU initiative comes into play: an effort to help students become more present and enjoy campus life again. Among his advice for Gen Zers in the audience, Haidt gave three tips for staying off your phone.

Haidt’s advice is to “get all of the slot machine apps off your phone,” he said. Delete your profiles on them altogether, or, if you feel like you still need to use apps like Instagram to communicate with people, delete them on your phone and use them on your desktop computer.

“Don’t waste your time posting,” he told CNBC Make It. “Don’t look at other people’s posts, especially strangers.” If your friends are primarily using Instagram to communicate, fine.

“But get it off your phone,” he said, “because your phone is always with you.”

Next, Haidt would recommend building healthy morning and nighttime routines.

For some people like Harvard professor Arthur Brooks, a healthy morning routine means working out first thing in the morning and doing some analytical meditation by attending Mass or doing a Catholic meditation in his car. Brooks also recommends delaying his coffee intake, he previously said on his podcast, “Office Hours with Arthur Brooks.”

An optimal nighttime routine might mean making a to-do list to ensure you get through your priorities today and get through the rest tomorrow, licensed clinical psychologist Shelby Harris previously told CNBC Make It.  

However you build your waking-up and going-to-bed routines, experts agree to avoid looking at your phone right when you get up and right before you go to sleep.

Finally, Haidt recommends turning off the majority of your notifications. That includes news updates and email notifications.

“Many teens and adults find that turning off all, or almost all, notifications is helpful” to avoid distractions and reduce screen time, clinical psychologist Nicole Beurkens previously told Make It.

Ultimately, there’s no set amount of time Haidt would have Gen Zers use their phones each day. What matters is how they use them.

“If their phones were truly just tools that they used for maps and music and basic texting,” he told Make It, “then I wouldn’t give a fixed amount.”

The key, he said, is avoiding endless scrolling.

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When Warren Buffett stepped down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of 2025, the company held an enormous stash of cash. Berkshire reported more than $370 billion in cash equivalents on the books at year-end, largely held in Treasury bills. 

It wasn’t a matter of simply being more conservative with his investments in his old age, 95-year-old Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick in “Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy.” Rather, he explained, it would take an enormous investment to move the needle in a portfolio of Berkshire’s size. And he hadn’t been able to find an investment worth spending his large cash pile on.

“It’s external circumstances,” he told Quick. “Believe me, if after we get finished talking you say, ‘I’ve got a great $100 billion new idea.’ I would say, ‘Let’s talk.’”

All in all, Buffett said he would rather be putting his money to work making more money. While the cash on the company’s books brings in a modest amount of interest, Buffett prefers productive investments, such as stocks, that can grow at a compounding rate over time above and beyond the rate of inflation.

“It’s at certain levels necessary, but cash is not a good asset,” he said. It’s like oxygen for your portfolio, he added — cheap to obtain and necessary, if unexciting. Essentially, Buffett likes to keep some level of cash to pay obligations and as “dry powder” for any attractive acquisitions.

“You do need oxygen, and if you’re ever without it for four or five minutes, you will learn,” Buffett said. “And cash is that way. So you always need to have it available, because you do not know what will happen.”

When he was running Berkshire’s immense portfolio, Buffett’s cash dilemma wasn’t necessarily relatable to everyday investors — not many of us have more money than we can reasonably deploy. But the Oracle of Omaha’s approach to managing cash is nevertheless in line with what many financial pros recommend for their clients.

Notably, Buffett doesn’t flee to the safety of cash or bonds when he believes the market is overvalued or that a crash is imminent. Even though the cash position grew as he and Berkshire waited for attractive opportunities, he said repeatedly that he’d prefer to be invested.

“Berkshire shareholders can rest assured that we will forever deploy a substantial majority of their money in equities — mostly American equities although many of these will have international operations of significance,” Buffett wrote in his 2024 shareholder letter. “Berkshire will never prefer ownership of cash-equivalent assets over the ownership of good businesses, whether controlled or only partially owned.”

Buffett said in that letter that periods of runaway inflation have, in the past, eroded the value of cash and left bonds in the dust. Investable businesses, by contrast, “will usually find a way to cope with monetary instability as long as their goods or services are desired by the country’s citizenry,” Buffett wrote.

Indeed, from January 1975 through January 2026, the S&P 500 index rose by nearly 6,700% compared with a 524% increase in the Consumer Price Index, according to data analyzed by Charles Schwab.

In general, Buffett has urged investors to invest regularly in a broadly diversified way over the long term. “Consistently buy an S&P 500 low-cost index fund,” Buffett told CNBC in 2017. “I think it’s the thing that makes the most sense practically all of the time.”

Some level of cash, however, remains essential because no one — not even Buffett — knows what will happen over the short term. “I may have read every book in the public library, but I didn’t find the answer then to the question of what the stock market is going to do next week or next month or next year,” Buffett told Quick.

Financial advisors typically recommend that everyday investors build and maintain an emergency cash reserve equal to three to six months’ worth of expenses. That way, should an emergency arise — such as a job loss or a surprise medical bill — you can safely keep the rest of your financial life on track.

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When Gabriela Nguyen wanted to do some spring cleaning as a teenager, she’d organize the apps on her phone.

“That was cleaning; it would make me feel better,” the 24-year-old tells CNBC Make It. “My actual room was in complete disarray, but it would feel better because my life was on my phone.”

Conflating her real and online lives was one of “a series of cracks” signaling her technology use had gotten out of hand, she says. “The apps became the center of gravity of my life in which the other things would orbit.”

Today, Nguyen has no personal social media. She practices what she calls appstinence, a play on “app” and “abstinence” that refers to “a firm push for young people to remove social media from their personal lives,” according to the website for her advocacy group of the same name, where she and other members of Gen Z help their peers take the leap. Founded in 2024 as a student organization at Harvard, the group encourages what it calls the 5D method: decrease, deactivate, delete, downgrade and finally depart social media.

But appstinence is not “a hard and fast line,” Nguyen says. “The idea is that you’re moving in that direction.”

Nguyen’s own road to appstinence was winding. She grew up in San Jose, steeped in the “techno-optimism of Silicon Valley,” she says. “It’s the local culture.”

She got an iPod Touch when she was 9 and her first social media account at 10. Her “trinity,” as she calls it, was Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. Instagram was your “public-facing portfolio,” she says. Snapchat was “where the business really went down in the day-to-day.” And TikTok was the “the maximal brain rotty thing.”

Nguyen felt like they degraded her attention span, sleep, energy, self-esteem and confidence, she says.

Social media companies have fought back against accusations over the years that their platforms are harmful to young people’s mental health.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testified in February, as part of an ongoing, landmark social media trial, that he doesn’t think people can be clinically addicted to social media. However, he said some people may experience “problematic use” of Instagram, including “spending more time on Instagram than they feel good about.”

In response to a lawsuit in 2024 alleging TikTok had “addictive features” and was “harming young people’s mental health,” TikTok said it was “proud of and remain deeply committed to the work we’ve done to protect teens,” citing “safety features such as default screentime limits, family pairing, and privacy by default for minors under 16.”

In 2024 testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in prepared remarks, “We want Snapchat to be safe for everyone, and we offer extra protections for minors to help prevent unwanted contact and provide an age-appropriate experience.”

But Nguyen says her experience on the three apps had a harmful domino effect in her life. “It’s not just that the scrolling itself gets worse; your perspective on the world gets worse as the doomscrolling keeps going,” Nguyen says. Still, she felt, “You can’t lose the only way that you know how to find out things that are going on or things that you like or keep in touch with people.”

A straight-A student in high school, Nguyen’s final straw was when she “couldn’t focus.” She recalls doing an assignment at 14 that took much longer than expected because of this “technological distraction,” she says.

Nguyen tried temporary digital detoxes and screen time limits for years; none worked. So she cut back more drastically. Early in college, she deleted Instagram, thinking, “This is kind of nice.” But then she spent more time on Snapchat. For a while, she says she had “a toxic relationship” with Snapchat and TikTok, repeatedly deleting and redownloading them.

She had a realization that “my real life had to outweigh the draw” of those apps, Nguyen adds. That meant “pursuing what I felt like they were giving me, but in the real world,” so she joined more clubs and student communities in her senior year.

Over time, she says, she got off social media for good.

One initial challenge was convincing friends she wasn’t cutting ties with them by going offline but rather that she wanted to invest more time and attention in her relationships in real life, Nguyen says.

“Me not wanting to Snap you anymore doesn’t mean that I feel like we’re drifting or you’re a bad friend or whatever,” she explains. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite.”

After getting off social media and being better for it, Nguyen says, she wanted to help others do the same. She and her appstinent colleagues offer what they call “digital lifestyle planning,” or peer-to-peer coaching to help people “re-design [their] relationship with technology,” the website says.

Nguyen says they’ve seen “overwhelming” demand for the service, with “several hundreds of people” reaching out to express interest in appstinence and roughly 2,000 people attending the organization’s in-person events worldwide.

One key element of it is that the coaches are digital native Gen Zers. “It’s not, ’Okay we’re here on the top of the hill preaching down to you,” she says. “I know how it is; I was literally there as well.”

And sometimes Nguyen still struggles with it. Her own de-entrenchment, as she calls it, will likely be lifelong, she says.

Today, she uses a “dumb” phone, which can call and text but has no internet, and she’s dropped streaming services. (It’s okay if a friend puts on a Spotify playlist when they’re together, she says, but otherwise, to listen to music, she has her car radio.) She uses ad-free browsers, keeps her bedroom screen-free and only checks email at a computer.

To talk with friends or family, she calls or texts. That way, she says: “There’s no ads, no algorithms, no AI slop.” Nguyen says she now has “much deeper relationships with a lot fewer people” than before.

Many of her friends today are off social media, too. “If we were all to suddenly make an Instagram, that would just be redundant because I already see them and talk to them on the phone,” she says. “What else could we possibly do on Instagram?”

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Parents and kids alike expect AI to play a major role in their futures.

Seventy-one percent of parents and 60% of kids and teens believe that by the time young people are adults, people will be so dependent on AI — specifically large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini — that they won’t be able to function without it, according to a new report by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that helps families make informed decisions about media and technology.

In fact, 12-to 17-year-olds are already leaning into AI: 59% use it to search for information and facts, Common Sense Media found.

“A lot of kids, including those in the surveyed age group, are turning to AI to help them study for school,” says Tiffany Zhu, assistant professor of global ethics and technology at Old Dominion University. “Many are asking AI questions when they are looking for quick information instead of typing questions into a search engine.”

Whether or not that shift is positive is still unclear. Here’s what experts say parents should keep in mind.

While some chatbot-generated content is harmless, some can also be problematic.

As far as their algorithms go, “we don’t have great visibility into what goes into the large language models,” says Michael Robb, head of research at Common Sense Media, adding that “misinformation and bias are certainly still a part of the outputs.”

“If not used carefully,” says Zhu, these bots “could also encourage black-and-white thinking and hinder [kids’] critical thinking skills.”

Researchers at Dartmouth and Stanford, for example, identified stereotypes against certain minority groups in some chatbots. And researchers in Japan found patterns of hallucinations, or factually inaccurate outputs, in various bots as well.

Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have looked into and acknowledged the various biases and hallucinations their bots can exhibit.

“I generally think that the majority of the burden should be on AI companies and the government to regulate and improve the design of popular AI tools,” says Zhu.

But for parents who want to ensure kids use AI to their benefit, Robb recommends having a conversation with them about these tools.

Let kids know that “it’s worth double checking and trying to understand where the information is coming from,” he says, since chatbots can sometimes provide incorrect answers.

Many chatbots let you see where they’re pulling their info from. Kids can click those links and see if they trust those sources, he says. They can also look up the information elsewhere and see if it matches.

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