Do You Guys Use TikTok? A Teacher and Parent Weighs In
The question came from the back row, right as I was erasing the board after third period. “Do you guys use TikTok?” A kid named Marcus asked it, not to me, but to the room in general. Half the class nodded without looking up from their phones. A few shrugged. One girl said, “My mom won’t let me,” in a tone that suggested this was a permanent condition, like a birthmark.
I said something neutral and moved on to fourth period. But the question stayed with me, partly because I get asked a version of it at home too. My daughter is eleven. She has been campaigning for TikTok for about eight months, and her argument has evolved from “everyone has it” to a detailed PowerPoint-level presentation on why Roblox is basically the same thing.
So when Marcus asked, I was already in the middle of figuring this out myself.
What I’ve noticed, both in my classroom and at my kitchen table, is that TikTok isn’t really the issue. The issue is what happens to a kid’s attention when they have a feed that never ends and always knows what they want next. That’s the part that shows up in my classroom, and it’s the part that made me rethink how we handle it at home.
Here’s a small thing I saw in class. During silent reading, a student named Priya had her book open but her eyes kept drifting to the phone face-down on her desk. She wasn’t checking it. She just knew it was there. She read maybe two pages in fifteen minutes. Later I asked her about it, casually, and she said, “I kept thinking about a sound from a video.” Not a video she was watching. A sound. A six-second audio clip that had lodged in her head the way a song does.
That’s the thing I don’t think parents fully grasp until they see it up close. It’s not that kids are watching TikTok instead of doing homework. It’s that even when they’re not watching, the format is still running in the background of their brains. Fast cuts, quick payoffs, constant novelty. A novel chapter can’t compete with that rhythm unless the kid has practice sitting with slower things.
At home, we tried a hard no first. That lasted about three weeks. What broke it wasn’t a tantrum. It was a birthday party where my daughter was the only one who didn’t know a dance everyone else was doing in the yard. She stood at the edge holding a paper cup of lemonade, and I watched her decide to pretend she didn’t care. That was worse than any argument.
So we changed the rule. Instead of no TikTok, we set conditions that were specific and boring enough to actually enforce:
She uses it in the living room, not her bedroom. Not because I think she’s sneaking anything, but because the bedroom is where the scroll gets long and quiet, and I’d rather it be short and interrupted.
We do a “first ten minutes together” rule. When she opens the app, I sit with her for the first few minutes, not to monitor, but to ask questions. “Who is that? Why is that funny? What’s the sound from?” It’s awkward for both of us, but it turns the feed into something we talk about instead of something she disappears into.
Phone charges in the kitchen at night. This one mattered more than I expected. The first week was rough. The second week, she started sleeping better, and I noticed because mornings stopped being a negotiation.
I also started paying attention to what she does after TikTok, not just during. If she closes the app and immediately wants a snack, or snaps at her brother, or says she’s bored in a flat voice, that tells me more than any screen-time number. Some sessions leave her fine. Some leave her wired. I don’t punish the wired ones, but I do name them: “You seem kind of jagged after that. Want to go shoot baskets for ten minutes?” Often she does.
In my classroom, I’ve made smaller adjustments. I stopped treating the app like contraband and started treating it like a topic. When a kid references a trend, I ask them to explain it to me. This does two things: it gives them a chance to be the expert, and it gives me a sense of what’s actually circulating. Some of it is harmless. Some of it is mean-spirited in ways kids don’t always clock until you ask, “What do you think the person filming this wanted to happen?”
We also do a two-minute “algorithm check” once a month, usually on a Friday when everyone’s tired anyway. I ask them to look at their For You page and tell me what the app thinks they like. Most of them are surprised. One boy said, “It thinks I’m way angrier than I am.” That opened a conversation about how outrage holds attention, and why a feed built on attention might not be built on what’s good for you. No lecture. Just a question and some silence.
What I tell parents who ask me about this, usually at pickup or in emails, is to skip the big conversation about internet safety. Kids have heard it. It bounces off. Instead, try one small structural change this week. Move the charging cable. Ask one question about one video. Watch one scroll session from across the room and notice what happens to your kid’s face. That’s the data you need, and it’s more useful than any rule you could write on a fridge.
We’re still figuring it out at our house. Some weeks are fine. Some weeks I find her watching at 8:45 on a school night and I have to do the calm-voice thing while internally counting to ten. She knows more about the app than I do, and she knows I know that. I’m not sure where the line lands long-term. But we talk about it now, which feels like the part that matters. The other day she showed me a video of a dog that sounded like it was saying “grocery.” We laughed. Then she put the phone down and went to finish her math. That’s not a victory. It’s just a Tuesday. I’ll take it.
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