In the close past, the image of a kid playing in the park, in a playground or sitting in a wheelchair for a walk with a smartphone screen in front of his eyes was unknown. Now telephone holders are fitted to children's walks, set on coffee tables, and the number of children calmed by screens is expanding and perpetuating.
The screens became part of everyday life — glowing at breakfast, in the car, on a school bench, in bed before bed. advanced technologies that were intended to facilitate life and support improvement are increasingly replacing real contact with another human being and are affecting the process of developing and increasing young children and the functioning of young people and adults.
There are many voices and studies demonstrating the harmfulness of premature and excessive usage of screens,
but the effectiveness of screens in attracting children's attention, the convenience of parents and the deficiency of systemic solutions make the fight against high-tech threats ineffective.
Many countries (e.g. Denmark, Norway, Austria) introduce legal solutions to counter the increasing number of kid dependence on screens, but in Poland the subject inactive raises quite a few controversy. Therefore, it is worth examining the arguments justifying the request to combat the widespread scourge of advanced technology abuse by children, youths, and adults.
Why do we request eye contact?
Eye contact and facial literacy are 1 of the oldest evolutionary skills. At 1 time, this efficiency has influenced the anticipation of endurance in the group, and it is now of large importance for social function.
A kid comes into the planet with the ability and request to make eye contact, and gradually brings to perfection the ability to read mimic signals. Eye contact and reflection of articular movements are besides the basis for speech development. Although this efficiency is simply a reflexive behavior, it develops and perfected under the influence of experience, in contact with the faces of others. As a result, a fewer years old kid easy recognizes emotions on the face of caregivers and can respond to them appropriately.
The improvement of this efficiency importantly impairs screens that do not reciprocate, do not react, do not read and do not express intentions and do not sound emotionally. They besides inhibit the ability to make eye contact.
Modern, subsequent generations of children and young people frequently no longer have a reflexive look at the face of a speaking person, including teachers at school. This reduces importantly the knowing of the content transmitted, affects the level of their memory and, above all, prevents fast reading of emotions and limits empathy.
Hearing is not the same as listening
When a tv is playing in the room, the laptop displays a story, and in the background you can hear an electronic toy – the kid can hear a speech, but does not decode it (it does not respond to it, does not separate from another sounds and thus does not understand). As Manfred Spitzer emphasizes in "Digital dementia", neural networks operate on a competitive basis. This means that erstwhile the brain deals with dynamic, colorful images and nonverbal sounds, there is no more resources for language selection. In specified an environment, the brain no longer considers speech crucial information.
As a result, the kid hears the words, but does not perceive to them. Speech sounds become background, noise, alternatively than unique stimuli, to which the kid should respond immediately, remembering them, gradually distinguishing from himself and imitating them.
The number of children with delayed speech development, auditory processing disorders, difficulties in knowing simple messages and instructions increases.
Children find it increasingly hard to perceive to the reading text and tell stories about another people’s events and experiences.
Daily communication with children is importantly limited in quantity and quality. Time for conversations takes distant devices, modern children are little and little aware of their parents, e.g. their workplaces, emotions, friends. Many adults justify themselves reasoning that many words appear in children's stories, heroes talk, talk to each other.
Meanwhile, the brain of a non-talking kid does not extract the sounds of speech flowing from the screens, which was clearly proven by an experimentation conducted by Patricia Kuhl involving children aged 10-12 months, stimulated by a native Chinese woman, through video recording and audio recording. He showed that only infants who had contact with and interacted with a individual recorded language patterns in their mind. Children in contact with the same material in a abroad language, at the same time and at the same frequency, but only through a screen or audio recording, showed no signs of any learning – their results and reactions to Mandarin were the same as in infants in the control group who had no contact with this variant of Chinese at all. Although the child's brain is structurally and functionally prepared to get speech, this process depends on the amount and quality of interactions with carers, listening intentionally to the child's speech with the preservation of visual contact and responding to reactions.
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Screen that administers dopamine
When a kid plays a game, his brain is given dopamine – a neurotransmitter of pleasure, rewards, motivation. It makes “one more level” more crucial than talking to a parent or solving a math problem. The center of the award in the brain matures before the frontal and prefrontal cortex, responsible, among others, for making decisions and knowing their consequences. Therefore, a kid and a teenager cannot defy the feeling of pleasance caused by dopamine produced by computer games, nor can they impose time constraints and balance the impact of online games with another activities, specified as reading books or moving activity.
Digital planet rewards quickly, predictablely, repetitively. However, this is, especially for the immature brain, but besides for adults, a road that can lead to addiction.
The effect of this is seen in hospitals, where there are branches for high-tech children. The real planet and its hard rules, the uncertainty of success in relationships and the request to actively participate in interactions and adapt to changes become unattractive compared to easy to get dopamine in the virtual world. However, young generations will experience the effects of this throughout their lives, facing difficulties in establishing and maintaining real relationships with their partners, colleagues and friends.
Cognitive improvement – a planet reduced to the screen
The child's brain develops through multisensory experiences: children look, listen, touch, smell, act. For a kid to realize the meaning of the word “wet”, he must put his hands in the water to know what a “apple” is, he must see them, contact them, odor them, bite them.
Meanwhile, the screen stimulates at most 2 modality – sight and hearing. So knowing reality becomes flat, one-sided, impoverished, and simply impossible for a tiny child. It should besides be remembered that senses specified as sight, hearing, smell, and others, are perfected by experience. It is besides very crucial to integrate information flowing simultaneously with all senses during the experience of the world. As M. Spitzer notes, "The structure of the brain is influenced not only by what we spend much time, but besides by what we do not do." Modern children are moving little and less, drawing, touching, building, building, utilizing imagination, but increasingly moving their finger on a smooth screen, calling it, for example, coloring.
Motor performance
Children increasingly have problems with attitude, the civilisational challenge becomes their overweight, the level of manual fitness decreases. In these cases, the time spent in front of the screens besides plays a key role. Children control physical activity to mindless standing in 1 position before the monitor.
Too early the usage of graphic play tablets is 1 of the reasons for later dysgraphy, as precise usage of tools (including crayons/long description) requires systematic exercises.
Emotions in the AI era
Like speech development, emotional competences besides make in interactions with another people – adults and peers. specified relationships should be the main origin of dopamine - so valuable that unlike material sources specified as toys, gadgets, food, the brain does not get utilized to them and does not weaken affirmative reactions. Meanwhile, children and teenagers are increasingly experiencing their emotional state online: in the virtual planet they search acceptance, there they measurement their value with the number of hearts, sages, views, there besides meet their sometimes unimaginable scale of hate.
Emotional dependence on technology, especially artificial intelligence, is besides becoming a worrying phenomenon.
Microsoft's president, Mustafa Suleyman, has late warned against "psychosis AI" – a phenomenon in which people begin to treat artificial intelligence as a surviving being, reacting emotionally to her statements, asking her for advice and following her opinions.
Since adults cannot keep distance, this cannot be expected from children and teenagers, who are addicted to seeing and assessing themselves from information coming from the environment. Then Chat writing “greatly said”, “this is simply a very crucial question” becomes an attractive companion of virtual conversations and apparent relationships.
Apparent increase in safety
Modern parents show increasing concern for the safety of their children. What was the norm 20 years ago becomes unthinkable in the modern world.
Children do not go to the store without care, do not return from school, do not wear keys around their necks, and do not decision distant from the home without approval and control, frequently utilizing electronic devices. At any moment, parents can check their location, security, call. However, the same level of control is not applied in the virtual world. There, children frequently go to parties full of violence, fake news, hate, spend long hours playing computer games or watching worthless cognitive and emotional programs and movies. Until recently, children stayed at home as punishment, now they are punished by going for a walk or a playground. As J. Haidt notes, 1 of the reasons for the extremist deterioration of the intellectual state of our children and young people is “overprotectiveness in the real planet and deficiency of care in the virtual world”.
Knowledge of the impact of advanced technologies on the improvement and functioning of children and young people should influence decision-making by parents and institutions and bring
a complete ban on the usage of screens by children under three, clear regulations on the usage of social media by children and young people and smartphones in schools, controlled time spent on computer games.
If systemic solutions could be introduced for alcohol, cigarettes or gambling, it is besides possible to resolve the problems of early or excessive usage of advanced technologies in the process of raising and educating children.
Sources used:
Haidt, J. (2024). An anxious generation. Why depression, anxiety and suicide behaviour among teenagers got out of control – and how to fix this situation. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Profit i S-ka.
Spitzer, M. (2013). Digital dementia. How we deprive ourselves and our children of our minds. Słupsk: The Publishing home of Good Literature.
Spitzer, M. (2020). Artificial intelligence. Threat or chance? Słupsk: The Publishing home of Good Literature.
The head of Microsoft AI warns. There comes an AI in which consciousness will believe millions, iMagazine [accessed: 02.12.2025]
