The story behind Catbird
I grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. In Appalachia, catbird is an old term of affection, the kind passed down through generations without much explanation because everyone already knows what it means. A child who is into everything, speaks their mind, and knows it too. Confident, a little precocious, impossible to ignore.
I grew up hearing my grandfather say it about the kids around him. Years later, when I had children of my own, that word kept coming back. Because when I thought about the kind of people I wanted to raise, that was it exactly. Not a checklist of skills or achievements. Just a kid who thinks for themselves, knows their own mind, and isn't afraid to use it. The kind of kid someone looks at and say, "she's a catbird".
But raising that kid felt harder than it should. I was watching what YouTube was doing in my own home, and it bothered me enough to go looking for answers. I read Nir Eyal's Hooked. I researched variable reward loops. I started to understand the actual mechanics behind the platforms my kids used every day. The more I understood, the more I realized the screen time battle wasn't the point. The design was.
I went looking for resources I could use at home. Something that would help my kids understand the world being built around them, and build the thinking skills to navigate it on their own terms. I couldn't find what I was looking for, so I started creating it.
Welcome to Catbird!
Kayla
Founder & Editor
What is Catbird?
A resource for the grown-ups raising the first AI-native generation.
Today's children are the first generation for whom artificial intelligence isn't a new development. It's simply the world they've always known. The platforms shaping their attention, their information, and their creativity are more powerful, and more deliberately engineered, than anything earlier generations encountered. Most kids move through that world as passive participants — consuming content they didn't choose, following prompts that weren't theirs, feeding data that decides what they see next.
That's not a parenting failure. It's the default for anyone who hasn't been shown otherwise.
Catbird exists to change the default — for the parents, caregivers, and teachers who want to raise a child who understands the world around them and knows how to think for themselves within it.
How it works
Two things, and neither works alone.
See the design.
Understanding how these systems actually work changes everything. What a variable reward loop is, why autoplay was built, what all that collected data is actually used for. A person who can see the design of a platform is someone who gets to decide how they engage with it. The newsletter is where we do that work — written for parents, in plain language, with one practical thing you can do with what you learn.
Build the skills.
The abilities that let a child act for themselves: critical thinking, creativity, independent problem-solving, and the confidence to follow their own judgment. These aren't nice-to-haves. They're the human skills AI can't replicate, and the ones this new era will reward. The activity kits are where we do this work — designed for kids, with no answer key and no right response.
Together, they raise a catbird.
One more thing
Not alarmist. Never prescriptive.
Technology isn't going away, and Catbird isn't here to fight it. We don't moralize, and we don't tell you how to parent. We explain how these systems work and give you practical tools to raise a kid who can navigate them with real independence. You'll leave more equipped than when you arrived.
Where to start
Each issue decodes the mechanisms platforms use to capture attention, and gives you one practical move to make at home.
Printable, no-prep activities with no answer key. Just a child, working something out, arriving at a conclusion that's entirely their own.