Scammers love a freshman

We can't quite believe it, but back-to-school season is somehow here again. We're closer to that first school bell than we are to the start of summer, when the sun was still up at bedtime and everything felt a little lighter, a little slower. And then the calendar flips and suddenly we're back in it.

For Nat, this year that shift comes with an extra layer. She hasn't done the University drop off yet, but it's coming, and the prep has us feeling all kinds of things already. Our two oldest are about to be separated at different schools, different cities, no moreevery day hangs. It doesn't help that our feeds are full of our American friends who are already living it, dropping their kids off at dorms this month, posting those videos that get us right in the chest before we've even packed a single box ourselves.

It got us thinking about back-to-school season differently. Half of you are launching a kid into a dorm room with zero guardrails. The other half are still very much in charge of the guardrails, and a lot of schools just changed the rules on you. So today's Rundown covers both ends of that spectrum.

Scammers are already targeting your college freshman and some are using AI to do it

Federal agencies put out a warning this month that back-to-school season has become prime hunting ground for fraud aimed at students and their families. We're talking fake scholarship offers, phony student loan forgiveness programs, sketchy off-campus housing listings, and scammers using AI-generated voice clones to impersonate a student or a school official and pressure parents into an urgent wire transfer. The Department of Education actually launched a national campaign this year just to fight identity theft inside federal student aid programs, which tells you how big this has gotten.

The thing about Freshman and First Years is that they're not (always) naive, they're just new. They have a new bank account, new independence, new pressure to handle the adult stuff without having help close by, which is exactly the vulnerability scammers try to spot. The single best thing we can do before drop-off is talk through what a real financial aid office, a real bank, and a real scholarship actually sound like because none of them will ever ask for gift cards, wire transfers, or your login credentials on the phone. Our biggest piece of advise is to agree on a family code word before you might need it. If a call ever claims to be your kid in trouble you can ask for the code word and weed out any potential scams before they become problematic. It sounds paranoid until the day it isn't.

More states are going phone-free in schools this year (you should check yours)

This one snuck up on a lot of parents. Bell-to-bell phone restrictions are now law or policy in something like 35 states, with big ones like California, New York, Michigan, and Texas rolling out enforcement for the 2026–27 school year. Some districts want phones off and stored all day, including lunch. Others allow them between classes. It genuinely varies block to block, which means the policy your friend's kid is under might not be yours.

Before the first bell rings, it's worth a quick email or a scan of the school website to find out exactly what your kid's district requires. And with that, a school-enforced reset is a great excuse to tighten things up at home too. If you've been meaning to look at your screen time settings before summer habits calcify into school-year habits, this is the natural moment to do it! Ten minutes now saves you a September full of renegotiating bedtime scrolling.

As we watch our own oldest kids get closer to launch day, we keep coming back to how the goal was never to raise a kid who's never seen anything bad online. It's to raise a kid who knows what bad looks or feels like and has a plan in place to handle what they saw or what happened. That's the whole project, and it's the thing we've been building toward for years without always realizing that's what we were doing.

Here are the eight things we've come to rely on most when it comes to our kids and digital balance:

1. Can they spot a scam before they click on it?

2. Do they understand that AI can be confidently wrong?

3. Would they recognize a deepfake, including a faked voice?

4. Do they practice real account security instead of reusing the same password everywhere?

5. Do they know what cyberbullying looks like, whether they're the target or just watching it happen to someone else?

6. Can they manage their own privacy settings without us hovering over their shoulder?

7. Do they know how to put the phone down and just be somewhere, uninterrupted?

8. And maybe the biggest one… do they know who to call the second something feels wrong?

None of that shows up on a report card. It's not a milestone anyone throws a party for. But it's the stuff we've been trying to teach this whole time, in a hundred small conversations that didn't feel like lessons in the moment. And if your kid is still a few years out from that dorm room, take it from us, you have more time than it feels like right now, and you're probably further along on this list than you think.

Go easy on yourselves this week. New routines are clunky for everyone, including us.

—Cat & Nat