No iPad Till After Dinner, Mom

Once a week, Jim sits down with his phone, logs in to his mother’s Facebook account, and scrolls through her feed.

His goal is simple: serve his mother’s algorithm a steady stream of inoffensive content he thinks will delight her and make sure anything inflammatory or scammy-looking is stamped NOT INTERESTED. At this point, it has become routine. He’ll tap the LIKE button under posts about Dick Van Dyke’s birthday, a few photo albums uploaded by distant family members, and the occasional cute cat video while blocking long-defunct Obama fundraising pages and clips of AI-generated men speaking directly to “the older woman holding this phone.”

Jim is a 48-year-old graphic designer who lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two cats. On one of our first video calls this past summer, his faintly stubbled face appears next to his now-80-year-old mother, Gloria, whose feed he has actively curated since April. Where he is unassuming and clean-cut, Gloria radiates a free-spirited energy; her cropped white hair is tucked under a blue headscarf covered in white mandalas, and she wears a tie-dye T-shirt. The two have an easy rapport. Occasionally, they break into side chats or finish each other’s sentences. “It’s just nice having somebody that knows me so well that they can even communicate for me if I need them to,” Gloria tells me.

She and her son have always been close. But their relationship deepened after Jim’s father died in 2024 and Gloria moved into an independent-care facility in Milwaukie, the nearby suburb where she was born and raised. Her husband had done the cooking, the ordering, the taxes. “I had it good,” she says. Without him, the apartment was quiet in a way she wasn’t used to. She felt lonely, especially at night. Her phone, she said, became a source of on-demand comfort.

Soon, he began to notice Gloria’s memory deteriorating. She missed social appointments she’d confirmed hours earlier, forgot the PIN number she had used her entire adult life, reached for words that wouldn’t form. The change was so swift he feared that she’d had a stroke without realizing it or that dementia had crept in. He took her to her primary-care doctor, and she was given a mini cognitive test, which she passed. The doctor assured him nothing serious was happening, so Jim began investigating on his own — which is when he realized his mother’s Facebook timeline was littered with 2 a.m. time stamps. He concedes it’s difficult, if not impossible, to draw the line between behavior directly caused by social-media use and the natural effects of aging. Still, he is convinced her screen-time binges were disrupting her sleep and if not directly causing her memory loss, at least worsening it. “It was taking away from her,” he says. That was when he intervened.

Gloria’s generation is the first to enter its most vulnerable years with unfettered access to the internet and, like the rest of us, it has trouble looking away. Americans over 60 now spend more than half their leisure hours in front of screens. But unlike millennials and most Gen-Xers, who have spent years navigating engagement bait, stealth marketing, and AI slop — and have developed a working instinct for what to trust — older adults tend to have little idea of what they’re looking at. This susceptibility is creating an entirely new type of responsibility for the adult children of these suddenly very online parents, who flock to Reddit to ask things like, How do I stop my dad from watching fake Bruce Lee AI slop? Is it possible to curate a feed for my anxious, elderly mother? and How can I stop my aging parents from believing fake news? “My mom spends countless hours on her iPad. Won’t even get out of bed until 11AM. By that time, her brain is so fried that she can barely comprehend or function,” one user writes. “Advice needed: Parent with early stage neurodegenerative disease worsening with AI YouTube,” says another. “YouTube AI ‘Doctor’ is telling my dad to skip his blood pressure medicine and my dad is thrilled!”

These adult children describe watching their relatives — call them iPad parents — ingest content they have no context for, slipping into a zombified state of consumption that their loved ones often believe is exacerbating their decline. “It seems like an addiction,” says Beth, a 51-year-old lawyer from Ohio, who tells me she has watched her 84-year-old mother’s attention span atrophy over the past few years. “It kind of has the same symptoms — getting fussy if she’s not online or just constantly going back to try and get online.” Her mother uses TikTok during all waking hours, including while watching TV shows and movies. Beth says she finds managing her mother’s screen time much more challenging than managing that of her two teenagers, who are largely analog and refer to their grandmother as a “screenager.”

Jim describes the kind of care required to monitor his mother’s screen use as overwhelming at times. He’s no tech expert, and strategizing against a feed designed to keep Gloria hooked can feel futile. There is also the fact that, in the past few years, his mother’s world has shrunk. Unlike managing her medications or her finances, regulating Gloria’s social media, which is a source of fun, a reflection of her life and interests, can make Jim feel as though he’s infringing on one of her few remaining outlets. When he first grew concerned about her Facebook use, he asked to delete the app from her phone entirely, leaving only Messenger. But Gloria refused — she wanted to access family photos. Who was he to stop her?

Marti DeLiema, a gerontologist at the University of Minnesota who studies elder financial exploitation, likens the process to getting an adult to give up driving in their later years. “Driving is part of your identity. It’s like a mark of freedom and independence,” she says. The online world is “also a source of your social connection.” All of this amounts to a particularly tricky balancing act for adult children: figuring out how to preserve their parents’ independence while protecting them from an ever-advancing slop-filled ecosystem. “It’s just like this slow chipping away at their agency,” says one child of an iPad parent from California. She has inherited her mother’s entire technological world, all the way down to her automated sprinkler system. “It’s very, very hard for me to know if I’m doing too much,” she says, “or not enough.”

For most people caring for iPad parents, the early days of their relatives’ online lives appeared harmless or even charming. As teens and young adults started using Instagram and TikTok, baby-boomers seemed to become Facebook’s beating heart; over the past decade, as smartphone ownership among seniors has more than tripled, they have nimbly joined groups, commented on pictures of one another’s grandchildren as they left for college, and hunted down old school friends. Occasionally, they ventured onto YouTube or Nextdoor. Jim’s early memories of his mother on Facebook were mildly embarrassing: He had a gig in marketing for a ballet company, and Gloria would often comment on his boss’s posts to boast about what a good job he was doing. “If they were to meet in person, she would probably just say the same thing,” Jim says. “But this is on a megaphone.”

The research around this early kind of internet access seems mostly positive. A meta-analysis published in 2025 pooled over a hundred studies of elderly adults and found that those who used digital technologies — which often require learning new skills, such as navigating software updates and jumping between digital interfaces — consistently had better cognitive health. Michael Scullin, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University who co-authored the study, calls the kind of skill sets learned through active online engagement “technological reserve.”

Then came a shift. “They both really started getting into it around COVID,” says one child of iPad parents in Oklahoma; after the 2020 election, their social-media addictions “seemingly skyrocketed tenfold.” Many adult children I spoke with associated the change in their parents with those months. The pandemic confined members of a generation that was already slowing down and isolated them from the church halls, card clubs, and grandchild rearing that had structured their weeks. Instead, like people of all ages isolated by lockdown measures, they turned to the internet for stimulation and connection — right around the time shortform video arrived on Facebook in the form of Reels.

While there isn’t much data on how endless clip-scrolling affects the brain, there is plenty of research on what preserves the health and function of the aging mind. Learning something new and difficult, staying physically active, keeping up social ties, and sleeping are all protective behaviors, Scullin says. Passive consumption — such as watching a lot of television, which decades of studies have tied to the risk of faster cognitive decline and shrinking gray matter in later life — is not one.

Most adult children seem to know instinctively that their parents’ social-media use has long since outstripped whatever cognitive good it once served. They have watched their parents surrender ever-larger portions of their lives to their phones, triggering a kind of grief and, occasionally, anger. Every hour handed over to the feed can feel like a choice on their parents’ part to willingly accelerate their own deterioration. Anne, a 55-year-old writer living in New York, regularly travels out of state to visit her mother, Rosa, who is in her 80s. She often arrives to an unsettling scene: Rosa on the couch, “hunched over” her phone, “slack-jawed.” Over the years, Anne says she has watched her mother abandon crossword puzzles, newspapers, and books in favor of the feed. “I don’t think a younger version of her would have recognized that behavior as something she had as a goal for herself later in life,” she tells me.

Anne describes her parents, who live in a continuing-care community, as “very competent people who have led very rich and full lives.” She has found it difficult to watch her mother lose many hours of her day to her phone. A few years ago, Rosa was diagnosed with a mild form of cognitive impairment, and her doctor’s advice involved working out and being social, but instead, “she’s just scrolling,” Anne says. She has found herself recoiling at the true-crime videos Rosa likes to watch, chiding her mother over her screen time. Watching Rosa immersed in her Reels, Anne sometimes becomes so aggravated she has to leave the room. “I do sound exactly like my mother would talk to me,” she says. “I say things like ‘Mom, stop watching those videos.’”

For many iPad parents, though, social media isn’t simply a way to pass time — it creates a numbing world outside of whatever pain, discomfort, and grief they have faced in old age. This is particularly true for women, 60 perfect of whom outlive their husbands in the U.S. Nicole, who lives in Southern California, has a mother in her 70s who has been bedridden for the past three years with complications from multiple knee surgeries. Things felt manageable when Nicole’s father used to visit every day, but since his death last year, her mother, like Gloria, has retreated further and further into her phone. “She doesn’t want to sit in her wheelchair. She would rather lie in bed, look at her phone, and watch TV,” says Nicole. Her mother was once an avid reader, golfer, and bowler; now, the majority of her time is spent watching what she refers to as “books”: text scrolling over an image of a couple in a romance novel–esque pose with a narrator reading graphic erotica aloud. “If they are having sex, you hear it,” Nicole says wryly. She often nags her mother about how it might impact the 100-year-old woman with whom she shares a room. “Your roommate’s over there,” Nicole often tells her. “What are you doing?”

Natasha Schüll, an anthropologis