Meta has agreed to pay nearly $17 billion to settle lawsuits filed by dozens of U.S. states accusing it of designing Facebook and Instagram to foster addiction among minors.Some time ago, it caught attention to know that some executives of large technology companies strictly limited their children's access to social networks. Perhaps no one knew better than them the power those algorithms had to retain attention.The 17,000 million accepted represent the implicit recognition that something went wrong. What we can no longer recover is the lost time or the consequences that all this business may have left on an entire generation of young people and adolescents.If a company pollutes a river, the money from the fine can be used to clean it up. If an accident is compensated, the victims can be compensated. But how is adolescence repaired? How is the deterioration of self-esteem, the permanent comparison with unreal lives, the lost hours of family coexistence, or the anxiety problems that many psychologists associate with the intensive use of social networks compensated?I'm clear: there are damages that can no longer be repaired.And this is the most important thing. The problem is not just Meta. The problem is that the legislator and the judiciary continue to arrive late when it comes to technology. It happened with the internet. It has happened with social networks. And it will happen again with artificial intelligence.It is not about stopping innovation. The Internet and social networks have brought extraordinary things. AI will also bring them. The issue is something else. If we know that a technology can modify behaviors, generate dependence, or affect delicate processes such as learning, mental health, or the development of minors, does it make sense to wait ten years to start regulating it?Bill Gates has just written on his personal blog that governments must pace the advancement of AI with the capacity of economies to absorb the labor and professional retraining that it will entail.Technology will continue to advance much faster than laws. And needless to say, also much faster than social and economic policies. Precisely for this reason, the big debate should no longer focus on what sanctions we impose when damage has already been done. It should focus on what limits we want to establish before damages appear that no compensation can repair.It is something that I find incomprehensible. How is it possible that we take so long to adopt measures and establish limitations to protect health, employment, and job stability?And this is said by a liberal.

Meta accepting to limit Instagram and Facebook use to two hours daily for minors under 18 in the United States is important news. The agreement with different North American states also includes nighttime restrictions, fewer notifications during school hours, and more age controls. It's a victory that limits are starting to be put in place, but we need to go further.

Last week, a trial began in Oakland that could mark a before and after for the technology industry. In just four days, Meta has agreed to introduce substantial changes to Instagram and Facebook and pay 17 billion. The agreement avoids a sentence, but above all, it avoids weeks of testimonies, internal documents, and headlines that would have allowed the company's business decisions to be publicly reconstructed. Accepting the agreement on the fourth day can therefore be read as an extraordinary concession, but also as a reputational risk mitigation strategy. Meta pays, redesigns part of the product, and raises a firewall before the trial reaches Zuckerberg. The markets seem to have interpreted it this way: the stock price rose by 1.3% after the agreement became known.

Living with a teenager during the holidays is a great balancing act. Families want to make the most of their time together after an intense school year full of responsibilities, but teenagers need just the opposite: more freedom, fewer schedules, and to feel they can decide about their time. Understanding this apparent contradiction is, probably, the best way to experience a summer with fewer conflicts and more complicity.For adolescents, holidays represent much more than not having class. They are weeks to recover sleep hours after months of academic demands, to free themselves from schedules, reduce stress and dedicate time to what becomes fundamental at this stage: friends. The peer group occupies a central place in identity construction, and sharing experiences with them is part of the natural process of growing up. This does not mean that the family loses importance, but rather that the adolescent needs distance and intimacy to discover who they are.

Historically, the arrival of summer has been associated with the search for seasonal work by thousands of young people who, upon finishing their academic year, want to have their own income. The motivations are very diverse: to go on a trip with friends, to get a driving license, to indulge themselves, to save up to survive the next school year, or to partially or fully fund their studies.

A couple of months ago, singer Amaia acknowledged in statements to a fashion magazine that she had low self-esteem, because it seems to be fashionable to be too thin, and she likes to eat. Unfortunately, in 2026 we are experiencing the boom of Ozempic and other slimming products. Therefore, it is important to help children learn to accept their bodies. What Elena Crespi, a psychologist, sexologist, and feminist, proposes is to make them understand that the world is diverse regarding bodies, and that even though the models they always show us are a specific type of body, if they look around they will see that it is full of diverse and fantastic bodies, with more or less functionalities: “Even though in series, movies, and social networks there is only room for bodies that fit within a model, they must be made to understand that each one is different and has its own capabilities”.

Summer means holidays, traveling and enjoying moments with your loved ones that daily rush often doesn't allow. But the company with whom we spend this time of leisure and pleasure can vary over the years. While children normally spend their holidays with their family, there comes a time when, as adolescents, they start looking elsewhere. There's always that first summer when they propose to their parents their desire to go on a trip with friends, away from the family. Although it's a totally normal situation, sometimes it's not perceived that way by parents, who have to learn to manage a role change in their relationship with their children.

Each year, the Joan Brossa Foundation adds more and more educational centers that want to practice poetry and art from a playful, experimental, and radical perspective, just as the poet Joan Brossa created. To break away from canons and innovate, to try new ways of writing, to play with the forms of language as if they were objects you can hang on walls... Brossa is intuition, play, and freedom, and so too is the educational program that the Joan Brossa Foundation's Centre for Free Arts makes available to schools and families.

In Europe, the debate about children, adolescents, and technology is intensifying. There is increasing pressure to limit access to social networks and strengthen age verification mechanisms. This shift responds to a legitimate concern. But, even so, the question remains too simple: how many hours do they spend in front of a screen? Reducing the problem to a sum of hours is convenient, but it distances us from what truly matters.

In school canteens, we have run out of croquettes. We no longer have banana yogurts, and the macaroni is wholemeal. The day there is a vegetable starter and lentils as a main course, the students (and indeed all of us) suffer a brutal shock because culturally for us they are two starters and we miss a main course. The changes in the canteen menus have added a bit more drama, if that were possible, to school food, which has always been in the spotlight. I have attended courses on communication in schools, and all attendees agree: one of the most common complaints is about food. Whether we are from a public or private school, from Girona or Penedès, the canteen issue is always a struggle, and it's very difficult to get it right. Once a week, which almost always tends to coincide with the fateful day of legumes, I have to serve meals at my school. And after many hours of serving meals under my belt, I have come to the conclusion that, even if Ferran Adrià himself came to spherify olives, there would be complaints.

When Maria (19 years old) started her first year of high school, she dropped all her extracurricular activities: “I was so stressed that just thinking about the hours I would have to dedicate to them made it clear to me, but it was a terrible decision; before the end of the course, I started to feel anxious, I spent the day studying”, she recalls. Now that she is finishing her first year of physiotherapy studies, she admits that she would do it very differently. In fact, when he started second year of high school, he picked up an extracurricular activity again, and little by little he found the balance between studying, leisure, spending time with friends, and taking care of himself. “I dedicated fewer hours to studying but I was more productive and happier”, she states. The false time thieves

What happened to Maria is common: adolescence arrives and the number of hours dedicated to extracurricular activities plummets. “Often the changes start with the type of extracurriculars they do in secondary school, which tend to be more geared towards training”, comments Òscar Bretau, emotional counselor and coach at Escola IPSE in Barcelona. In general, English and sports practice are the most widespread, although girls dedicate fewer hours to physical activity. During high school, when students tend to feel the pressure to achieve good academic results, it is recommended to “find a certain balance between studies and extracurriculars.” We must stop believing that “tivities done outside of class time are a waste of time,” points out Bretau. But he also adds that we cannot lose sight of the fact that a brain that is too busy and stressed does not perform adequately. “If all free time is used to achieve goals, performance will decrease and they will self-sabotage.” Besides recommending extracurriculars that can be a breath of fresh air, Bretau recalls the importance of doing nothing and sleeping a minimum of eight hours: “It is impossible for them to perform if they have not rested enough.” Fewer group activities and more 'scrolling'

Joan Carles Folia, educational advisor and coach, explains that it is common for young people to stop doing extracurricular activities upon reaching adolescence: “Around 11 or 12 years old, social bonds change, there is a hormonal explosion, and their interests begin to change”. Bretau also believes that there are significant differences between this generation of adolescents and previous ones: “Now they have the infinite scroll at their fingertips, which is very harmful to all brains but especially to the adolescent brain”. Technology, which is now presented as an alternative for non-class hours, attracts more attention from adolescents than any other sports, cultural, or leisure activity.

]]>

“My children started bringing their partners home when they were seventeen. It was logical for our way of educating. For me, sexuality is as normal as a kiss; no one should hide it”, says Elena Sánchez, mother of a daughter, Mar, who is 22 years old, and a son, Javi, who is 20 years old. The reality is that Elena is a statistical exception: 40% of Spanish families have never or almost never talked about sex education with their children, according to data from the FAD Juventud Foundation (2025). According to the report, sexual practices and pornography are still pending subjects: families prefer to talk about “more comfortable” topics like love or respect, but they avoid delving into the “how” and the “where”.

]]>

The Good Daughter, by director Júlia de Paz (Sant Cugat del Vallès, 1995), can now be seen in cinemas. It shows the consequences of vicarious violence and sexist violence on children, who are often unrecognized victims. And it does so through Carmela, a 12-year-old girl, who must periodically go to a meeting point to see her father, whom she idolizes. Little by little, however, the girl – and with her, the viewer – will discover who he really is and his way of exercising psychological violence.

]]>

Everyone is clear that reading is good and having the habit of reading is even better. For years we have been trying to do this from high schools, especially language teachers. I say we try because we don't always succeed. In a few high schools in Catalonia, half an hour is dedicated to reading every day. Where I work, this is done in all courses, from first year of ESO to second year of baccalaureate. Sometimes, on guard duty or walking through the corridors, you see that the youngest ones, those in the first cycle, still maintain the desire to read. The key word is "still", because I fear that with adolescence, a good part of the students lose the reading habit. Some, unfortunately, forever.

]]>

For young people, it is positive and necessary to have role models to follow, it helps them to build their identity, imagine different possibilities, find motivations, and know where to go. “The most important thing would be to have several role models, and for them to be human and imperfect, so they become a guide to look up to and not a pressure to imitate”, proposes Sylvie Pérez Lima, a registered psychologist and professor at the UOC. But what are young people's idols like in the digital age? From the 1960s to the 2000s, teenagers' bedrooms were transformed with posters of their youth idols hanging on the walls. “They were young people a bit older than them whom they looked up to, and they idealized their image and identity,” explains Carles Feixa, a professor of social anthropology at the UPF and coordinator of the Youth in Spain Report (INJUVE 2024). In the 1960s, teenagers appropriated their bedrooms for the first time and displayed their idols, especially musical ones, rock’n’roll and rock evolutions. In the 70s, they were revolutionary political idols –Mao Tse Tung, Che, or Fidel Castro–, who, with the crisis at the end of the 70s, ceased to have continuity. Then, consumer idols returned with more commercial music, not so much protest-oriented, and sports idols, especially in football and tennis, who were models of success. It is from the 2000s onwards that digitalization began and more artificial idols emerged, youtubers and influencers, who would go on to occupy an even more intimate space, social media. Lucía (15 years old) does have posters hanging in her room, a couple from one of the Spiderman movies and several of Sadie Sink (@sadiesink_), an actress from Stranger Things: “I follow her on social media and watch all the interviews she does, she's my crush”. What she watches most on TikTok and Instagram are reels of series, music, and especially humor, accounts that make her laugh –“many silly things, falls, and slips”–, Manu Rivas (@manurivasr) or Pablo Vera's (@pablovr11) dances, news channels, and people who explain things like Javi Hoyos's (@javihoyosmartinez) gossip.

]]>

Salt is known today for being the municipality with the lowest per capita income in Catalonia. Also one of the towns with the highest concentration of migrant population: nearly 40% of its residents are of foreign nationality. But what headlines have overlooked in recent years is that almost half of this town's surface area is still orchards and pastures. The Monar canal, parallel to the Ter river, marks the border between built-up Salt and the agricultural zone. Few facilities surpass it, except for a large high school built on fertile land. Located on the border with Girona, surrounded by greenery and with magnificent views of the Mare de Déu del Mont, lies Vallvera. A secondary and vocational training center with over 1,200 students inaugurated in 2008, it contrasts with its surroundings as a large gray sheet metal building with a concrete-filled courtyard. "In winter it's a refrigerator and in summer an oven, there's no middle ground!" laments the director, Ferran Maimir, who started this course with a direction very focused on working towards the renaturalization of the courtyard, but with a different method: having the students themselves build the shade with their hands.

]]>

Sleeping well is essential, as sleep allows the body and mind to recover and function correctly. In the case of children, sleep takes on even greater importance because it is key to their knowledge and cognitive development. As explained at the Sant Joan de Déu Hospital's Health School, babies and children need deep and restorative sleep to process what they have learned during the day, consolidate memory, and develop their motor and emotional skills. In adolescence, the hormonal changes typical of this stage can make it difficult for them to maintain adequate sleep schedules, which can have consequences on their mood and academic performance.

]]>

At three months old, Pau was rolling over, and by nine months he was already walking. As a baby, he was a chatterbox. We read together a lot, and this, in addition to reinforcing his literacy development, also strengthened our bond, his curiosity, and his imagination. He would run out of the house, his eyes always sparkling.

]]>

At Marta's house, with two girls, clothes haven't been a big expense. Throughout their childhood, they've made use of everything that friends' or cousins' daughters no longer needed. It's come to them through the seams, and that's why, even as little girls, both have been able to choose what they like and discard what they don't. They only bought the most basic items, like leggings, which are difficult to pass down. Both the older girl, 12, and the younger one, 8, have agreed on one thing for the past few years: they haven't worn skinny jeans because, apart from not finding them comfortable, they arrived just as wide-legged or flared trousers were back in style.

]]>

It was what I expected to hear. The German teacher at the Official Language School asked us to give our opinions on Sánchez's proposal to restrict internet access for those under sixteen. The debates proposed in language classes are always equally boring: climate change, artificial intelligence, new technologies... I exhale. Then someone said it was outrageous that children grow up with direct access to pornography, recording themselves performing lewd dances on TikTok, glued to the screen and... bullying Telematics. And another replied that in his day ("in my day!") all this was already happening in other ways. It was what he expected to hear, yes, but expressed in the German we know how to speak in that classroom.

]]>