In an era of unprecedented crisis when toddlers swipe before they talk and teenagers’ text more than talk. We are giving our kids too much of the wrong bytes, and suddenly we find ourselves succumbing to an aggression that not even the best antivirus on earth can protect us from. Once convenient, it has become a mini-epidemic of digital dependence, leaving a trail of lost and dislocated young people who grow more de-linked, disturbed, and downright dangerous.Consider this latest incident that rocked our society: the young boy was fearful of his right to a mobile phone being taken away and inflicted injuries on his mother with a bat. The most chilling part wasn’t the violence but the aftermath: a child showing complete emotional detachment almost from killing his parent. This is the time that all the comforting illusions that we’ve built in our minds about children and the technology used by them come crashing down into this harrowing reality.It was perhaps the biggest social experiment ever conducted in our entire history: giving tools of psychological manipulation to the developing minds of a generation without knowing what the eventual outcome would be. Now the results are surfacing, and they are catastrophic. Children are expressing levels of aggression, emotional flatness, and addictive behavior that would have been unthinkable a couple of decades ago. The manipulation engines behind social media and mobile gaming are fascinating our children but rewiring their neural wiring in ways that we are only beginning to grasp .The medical profession has responded with hard-won frustration. While they have established growing levels of youth anxiety, depression, and aggressive behavior, remedies usually are the equivalent of moderate screen time — a Band-Aid on a ruptured artery. In fact, most children spend more time interacting with screens than they do human beings, fundamentally reshaping their social and emotional development. The notion that that can be addressed by gentle guidelines is catastrophically naive.With far too many mobiles and tablet devices becoming high-tech baby sitters, giving into convenience rather than their children’s mental well-being, many parents have inadvertently played a role in this. The same parents who would not even remotely consider offering their child a cigarette breathe not a word when they give a similarly habit-forming device to their child. The mother attacked represents thousands of other parents who, far too late, try to take back control only to find the level of digital dependency grown to be too deep, too quickly.It’s in that light that the role of the tech industry within this crisis cannot be overstated. They’ve adopted the most advanced psychological practices in developing the kind of products that target every weakness of a child, hidden behind the veneer of “connecting people” and “entertainment”. Their algorithms are maximized for engagement price, no matter what that price comes at the cost of a child’s mental health or a family’s destruction. The token gestures of the industry toward “digital wellness” are nothing but PR exercises in avoiding an uncomfortable reality: their products are addictive.Educational institutions have largely surrendered to this digital invasion, often hastening the problem under the guise of “technological literacy.” Schools boast over the provision of tablets and computers but miss the very fundamental skills that are being lost – in-person communication, regulation of feelings, and true human interaction. The pandemic merely accelerated this trend, and now many schools are highly ingrained in digital-based teaching methods.This crisis calls for such intervention that needs to be immediate and radical. What the legislation needs is treating tech companies like all other industries that impact public health. What it requires is compulsory mental health impact assessments for digital products marketed to children. What it requires is a complete paradigm shift for how we view technology in education. What it needs is for parents to wake up to the reality that they don’t need to get them addicted to this stuff at young ages.The consequences of inaction are already visible and escalating. The boy wielding a baseball bat is no anomaly – he’s a warning. A warning that we are raising a generation of children who are losing their capacity for empathy, emotional regulation, and human connection. This is not about what we see happen: this is the quiet destruction of our children’s ability to function as emotionally healthy human beings.The answer won’t be easy or painless. It will demand that parents make some very hard decisions; it will demand that schools fundamentally rethink their approach to technology; and it will require society to acknowledge that we’ve made a terrible mistake in the way we’ve handled children’s exposure to digital devices. The question isn’t whether we can afford to take drastic action – it’s whether we can afford not to.We’ve crossed the line for light hints and middle-of-the-road actions. We are facing generations of children who are addictively linked, aggressively individualistic, and dis-affiliated emotionally. Every day we wait to take the serious action only ruins more children with this digital epidemic. When will it be the next violent incident? Not if, but when. How many families should be destroyed before we realize this is not the crisis and take it seriously?
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