Parents sometimes feel that they are upbringing their children, while in fact, they try to keep pace with the world, which runs much faster than their experience. Whereas children used to spend their childhood playing in the street with neighbours, nowadays they live in their worlds created by mobiles, tablets, and video games.
For parents, this is not just entertainment; it’s a problem whose aftermath is reflected in years to come. Behaviors change, conversations decrease, stubbornness rises, and a silent struggle develops within the home.
The real crisis is not that children use screens-the problem arises when parents, exhausted, busy, or pressured, start treating the screens as supervisors and place their trust in them.
When children keep running to screens, parents see it as an “easy way to pass the time,” never mindful of the heavy price it brings. Screens fragment attention, alter moods, reduce children’s understanding of reality, and condition their brains to continuous, fast, and artificial stimulation.
That is why quick temper, inattentiveness, social withdrawal, impatience, sleep problems, and disinterest in studies have also become commonplace among children nowadays.
Parents often feel that technology per se is not harmful—and they are right. The problem is not the technology but its unregulated use.
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But many are unwilling to accept the fact that the very freedom they give to children is just what allows this addiction to take hold, simply because it makes their parenting easier.
Another root issue is a generation gap. Parents have grown up in times when there was little entertainment, and children learned how to entertain themselves.
Today’s kids are living in a world where something new pops up every second. In this case, without activity alternatives, attention, and time from parents, they are sure to get hooked to the screen.
The answer is simple, yet hard: First, parents need to set up clear rules about screen use that apply to everyone in the household and will not be compromised, either by fatigue or by emotional weakness.
Second, children need environments filled with real-life activities: outdoor play, books, small chores, time with parents-all of these play a key role in breaking screen addiction.
Third, the parents must reduce their own screen use, for children learn more by watching than by listening. And finally, consistency matters more than severity-if rules are compromised once, children learn that rules depend on mood, not importance.
After all, this fight is not against the child but against parental habits. The screen looks formidable only when the parental control is weak.
With well-laid rules, shared time, activities in the real world, and parents leading by example, children can gradually reconnect with life rather than living through a screen.
Otherwise, the question remains: are we raising our children, or is the screen raising them?
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