KIDS ALL THE WAY DOWN
KIDS ALL THE WAY DOWN: HOW PLATFORMS ENGINEER ENGAGEMENT begins with a mismatch every parent eventually notices: you hand over the phone for twenty quiet minutes, and by the time you look up, the screen has drifted somewhere you never chose. The book examines how digital platforms are designed to capture and hold children's attention, and what happens when systems optimized for engagement become part of childhood itself.
DARREN CROSS and HARRY POLONER were there as the modern creator economy took shape, helping build some of its earliest scaled businesses. They watched YouTube evolve from a distribution platform into an ecosystem in which creators, algorithms, advertisers, and audiences continually adapted to one another. That experience provides the starting point for a broader examination of the platforms young people use most, from YouTube and TikTok to online games.
The book looks upstream at the systems themselves: what platforms measure, what those measurements reward, and how product decisions made in pursuit of engagement shape behavior. The result is not another argument that screens are bad, nor another demand that parents somehow outmaneuver technologies designed by some of the world's most sophisticated companies.
Drawing on research and the ordinary moments where these systems meet family life, the book argues that protecting children online requires changing where the burden falls. Parents still have a role, but safer childhoods online cannot depend on vigilance alone.
The technology to do better already exists. More protective defaults and better product choices can create a safer environment for children without requiring a wholesale redesign of the internet or diminishing the rights and experience of adults.
Kids All the Way Down is written for parents, educators, policymakers, media professionals, and anyone trying to understand how engagement became the organizing principle of the modern internet, and what we can do about it.
Kids All the Way Down: How Platforms Engineer Engagement begins with a mismatch every parent eventually notices: you hand over the phone for twenty quiet minutes, and by the time you look up, the screen has drifted somewhere you never chose. The book examines how digital platforms are designed to capture and hold children's attention, and what happens when systems optimized for engagement become part of childhood itself.
Darren Cross and Harry Poloner were there as the modern creator economy took shape, helping build some of its earliest scaled businesses. They watched YouTube evolve from a distribution platform into an ecosystem in which creators, algorithms, advertisers, and audiences continually adapted to one another. That experience provides the starting point for a broader examination of the platforms young people use most, from YouTube and TikTok to online games.
The book looks upstream at the systems themselves: what platforms measure, what those measurements reward, and how product decisions made in pursuit of engagement shape behavior. The result is not another argument that screens are bad, nor another demand that parents somehow outmaneuver technologies designed by some of the world's most sophisticated companies.
Drawing on research and the ordinary moments where these systems meet family life, the book argues that protecting children online requires changing where the burden falls. Parents still have a role, but safer childhoods online cannot depend on vigilance alone.
The technology to do better already exists. More protective defaults and better product choices can create a safer environment for children without requiring a wholesale redesign of the internet or diminishing the rights and experience of adults.
Kids All the Way Down is written for parents, educators, policymakers, media professionals, and anyone trying to understand how engagement became the organizing principle of the modern internet, and what we can do about it.
When platforms can foresee the risk
and already possess
the tools to reduce it,
where does responsibility belong?
— Kids All the Way Down
About
the authors
DARREN CROSS has spent two decades inside media's biggest shifts, from modeling Netflix's early streaming pivot at Wedbush to helping scale Disney-acquired Maker Studios. His work focuses on how audiences form habits—and how to build the operations that support them. He holds a JD and an MBA and leads distllr, a fractional-executive firm for creator-led businesses.
HARRY POLONER is a digital media executive who has worked at the forefront of music publishing, rights, streaming, and the creator economy for 25 years — across EMI, ASCAP, Reservoir, SONGS, Maker Studios, Amper Music, and beyond. A longtime champion of the creator economy — and still actively working at the intersection of music and video, across rights acquisition, content strategy, distribution, and platform optimization.