How Anxious Parents’ Screen Addictions Are Creating Insecure Kids

-OpEd-

BOGOTÁ — “The Holocaust did happen. COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives. There was no widespread fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. These are three statements of indisputable fact. Indisputable — and yet, in some quarters of the Internet, hotly disputed.” The lines are from a June 2024 editorial in the scientific review Nature. I quote this to explain an important factor cited in relation with increasing anxiety levels among parents: We live in a world of fake news channels, which are both prolific and watchable all day, on television or online.

Weeks ago, El País devoted several articles to a similar idea. In one opinion piece published on Nov. 24, titled “No Silver Bullet Against Disinformation”, the Spanish daily warned we were losing the battle against it.

Yet neither Nature nor El País paid attention to another matter of crucial, cultural relevance: We live in an age of negative news.

Switch on any news bulletin, and you’ll be saturated with war and invasions, floods, kidnappings, global heating, hurricanes, femicides, child abuse and murder, among other calamities. Then a bit of sports and entertainment, and that’s your news for today! There is nothing visionary there, no big scientific news, very little on art, humanity and culture, and hardly anything on kindness, empathy or solidarity, which tend to be the dominant traits of a large portion of human beings.

The phenomenon is compounded exponentially on social media, to the point where hate, insults and degradation are the norm — like an editorial line set in the sewers.

An interesting UN document from 2021, Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives, analyzed 14 million books from the past 125 years to find a significant increase over the past two decades in expressions of anxiety and concern in many parts of the world. In other words, it is becoming normal and habitual to highlight the negative, speak of tragic events and cultivate fear and despair.

Helicopter parenting

Negative news has had a devastating impact on culture. In our period, parents are increasingly fearful and anxious, believing their children will face intolerable dangers should they go out to a park, on the street or to the cinema. They already assume they could be kidnapped, hoodwinked or molested. Even at school they’re already expecting them to be hurt or bullied by older schoolmates.

Ideally, for many of them, they would keep a tab on their children at all times. Before, children spent big chunks of their time in parks or playing on the street. During holidays for example, the deal made between parents and children was to set a time to be back at home. Generally they would go out early, return for lunch and go out again until dark.

Today’s kids are practically locked up at home, playing alone online. Indeed, the parents are the ones turning them into web and gaming addicts. A recent report by Colombia’s CIVIX Foundation, compiled with European Union backing, found that Colombian children spent on average 10 hours a day online. You read right: 10, or in other words, all day.

Children are now spending a whole lot more time with their parents.

They are no longer playing freely outside, climbing hills, riding bikes, playing pick-up games, or sharing conversations and activities with other children. Thank goodness for the schools, where they can still interact!

Children are now spending a whole lot more time with their parents. In the United States, children spend three times more time with their parents — compared to Colombia — who take their children to the park, football, cycling or school and are effectively keeping a constant eye on their children. They have a term for it: helicopter parenting.

I wrote in another column that kids raised by these helicopter parents were more fragile, insecure and intolerant of failure. I observed they find it hard to interact with other children, because when can they really interact or play freely, if they are under perpetual parental supervision?

Kindergartens now provide them with an app to watch what their children are doing every minute of the day. These are parents who think that observing their kids in real time will calm their nerves — but it won’t. Their anxiety is never assuaged because, as the psychologist Jean Piaget observed, in so many words, a lot of what they see is not real so much as a figment of their imagination.

For this increase in parental anxiety, we’re seeing a proliferation of online courses and home schooling. Such options may seem ideal for the parents who feel safer, but make no mistake, their children will later pay the price.

Benefits of freedom

Certainly, living is a risky business. Dangers probably do lurk on the street or in a park, even if multiple studies have shown there are fewer and lesser dangers today than 50 years ago. Wars, murders and rape have all steadily fallen in numbers, as the author Steven Pinker explains in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Yet evidently, parents do not believe this, perhaps for all the time they spend online and on social media. What they fail to understand is that one of the biggest dangers is precisely to lock up their children at home and stop them from playing with other children. Because they are raising children with considerable social and emotional weaknesses, for example in terms of their resilience, their ability to take setbacks or their flexibility. They can expect emotional crises with the onset of their teenage years.

The parents will also see it one day, when it is too late.

What psychologists and educators will tell you is that emotional crises or “nervous breakdowns” are increasingly common among youngsters who lived with overprotective parents. These are parents who fail to see the dangers of keeping their children at home and watching a screen all day. As the Aymaras would say, unhappiness is to live alone, and this ancestral nation would certainly see such children as raised to be profoundly unhappy throughout their lives. The parents will also see it one day, when it is too late.

There is something they can do now, which is to stop watching so much dismal news, and let their children play and live in greater freedom.