I once lived with someone who had a two-year-old god-daughter. Occasionally, this wee lass was allowed to play on an iPad. One day, my housemate saw her god-daughter spot a butterfly fluttering outside the window. Her tiny toddler hand reached out, and her thumb and forefinger made a sort of pincer movement. At first my housemate was baffled, but then she realised. Her god-daughter was trying to zoom in on the butterfly.
This story has stuck with me because, well, it’s completely nuts. This kid couldn’t feed herself for god’s sake, and yet had mastered a digital zooming motion? She thought the window, or reality itself, was a big screen? At the time, I remember a feeling of dread creeping over me – a sense that something terrifying was coming our way. I suddenly realised the human race was breeding and raising iPad kids.
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Now, it seems, others are beginning to share my fears. “I need everybody else in my generation to promise that we are not going to raise iPad children,” a young Gen Z lad pleads on TikTok. “Your kids can’t read!” he shouts at all the older millennial parents out there. “You’re raising Gen Alpha, and they’re bizarre and terribly behaved.”
The reason for this, according to this self-proclaimed social scholar, is the fact Gen Alpha have had screens shoved in their faces since birth. This might sound a bit rich coming from a 20-something recording an impassioned front-facing TikTok, but hear him out, because he makes some solid points.
“If I’m older,” he says with youthful vim, “and I have my kids, and I bring them to a restaurant and I see fellow parents at the table next to me and their kids have iPads, in a restaurant, in public, I’m gonna scream… Can you not make your child behave for more than five seconds? Can you not give your child enough attention and actually converse with them? Why do you have to give them an iPad to make them shut up?”
Look, I’m sure there will be a bunch of stressed out, exhausted parents out there uttering a hollow laugh. ‘How little this childless boy knows,’ they will think. ‘When he has kids, then he will know the deep and desperate desire for a moment’s peace, and he too will say yes when the six-year-old wants to look at whatever the equivalent of Taylor Swift videos will be in 2035.’ And OK sure, they have a point – who can really say how they’ll parent until they’re up close and personal with temper tantrums and prolonged sleep deprivation?
But there is a serious point here, too. Gen Alpha – meaning anyone born between 2010 and 2024 – are defined and utterly subsumed by the digital world. The oldest are now 13. When I was that age, I’d just got my first flip phone, and logged into Bebo a few times a week to update my “Top Nine” friends.
Today’s 13-year-olds are basically a different species. Their parents have shared photos and embarrassing videos of them online since day dot. They graduated from iPads to smart phones when they were eight. They knew how to contour before you did. They probably know their way around the dark web. And the seven year olds? Well, they were born in the Trump-Brexit years, it would be weird if they weren’t “bizarre and terribly behaved”.
With a 2017 study from Common Sense Media finding that nearly 80 percent of children have access to an iPad or other type of tablet, these days it’s stranger for a kid to be offline than extremely online. So should we all be scared of what’s coming? Are Gen Alpha kids really “an absolutely terrifying nightmare to deal with,” as another TikTokker puts it? And are iPads and screens really to blame?
Ryan Lowe is a child and adolescent psychotherapist and spokesperson for the Association of Child Psychotherapists. When she watched the “iPad kid” call-out videos, she felt the stirrings of hope “that perhaps Gen Z will be better equipped to parent in the digital age”.
Most of the points raised in the viral TikTok “are valid and well observed”, Lowe says. “The issue with screens is not that they are terrible in themselves, but that they are being used as babysitters, and to shut children up.” This means they’re not playing or engaging with the world around them, or being included in conversations.
“Really importantly,” she adds, “it means they’re not learning the basic skills of patience and containing themselves long enough to manage something difficult or frustrating.” This can disadvantage kids because “if a device is put in front of a child the minute they start to fret or find things difficult, then that’s the only way they learn to cope with difficult feelings”. This can then prompt the kind of “bad” behaviour these Gen Z TikTokkers have noticed.
“The children will have no strategies and no experience of managing their feelings or dealing with frustration,” continues Lowe. “Their behaviour and their capacity to learn in classrooms will be significantly affected.”
Behavioural and neurodevelopmental optometrist Bhavin Shah says there are a couple of other really important consequences of iPad use. “The first is that more children are becoming short sighted than ever before.” Increased screen time is one of the biggest factors for this. Children under the age of three can also pick up underdeveloped fine motor skills and a difficulty in visual spatial awareness, says Shah, “because children are used to a 2D world instead of the real one”. Basically, might we be raising a fleet of clumsy, myopic tyrants? There’s certainly evidence this could be the case, anecdotal as it may be.
Chloe tells VICE about encountering a tyrannical iPad kid in the wild, while working for a luxury knitwear brand at her boss’s home. Her boss had a five year old who “was an absolute terror”, in Chloe’s words. “Once, I was packaging a very fancy jumper, and this child comes in and hits me with his iPad,” says Chloe, who asked to be anonymous for privacy reasons. Her boss just laughed and left the room. “He continues to smack me laughing uncontrollably at his reign of terror and jumps on my box, destroying it.” The next day, the “horrid child” told Chloe she was fired, which she sensibly took as her cue to leave the role. “Basically, yeah, I was fired by a four year old,” she says. The truth is much worse though: She was fired by an iPad kid.
There’s more solid evidence, too, which suggests iPads at home and at restaurants are only the tip of the iceberg. There are mounting signs smart devices at school are causing issues – especially as blended learning and classroom technology has become the norm post-pandemic.
According to new research from Impero Software, a survey conducted with 2000 secondary school students found a quarter had watched harmful or violent content online while in the classroom, and 17 percent were watching it on a school device. More than one in ten (13 percent) have viewed X-rated content such as porn, and 10 percent have used gambling sites – again, all in the classroom. Looking at these stats, it’s hardly surprising that many schools are now implementing bans on phones, in an attempt to curb cyber-bullying and to prevent iPad kids from maturing into full-blown gambling addicts during maths lessons.
Safeguarding expert at Impero Software Vic Raynor emphasises the need for a balanced approach, though. “Our research suggests there are real safeguarding issues surrounding the use of mobile phones,” she says. “But is the answer really to ban them outright?” Raynor points out that a ban could prompt kids to use devices secretly – “with students hesitant to report cyberbullying due to the fear of getting in trouble for using their phones or having them confiscated” – and could also limit the positive use of mobile technology for learning. Instead, she believes the solution is “to embrace technology for its positives and focus on educating students on the importance of responsible use and practising proper digital citizenship”.
Ultimately then, it might not be the screen that’s the problem – it’s what you do with it that counts. But as we become more aware of the ways the internet may be rotting all of our adult brains (Facebook Boomer radicalisation, anyone?), it makes sense to remain cautious.
“I do think we should be concerned about the amount of screen time that young children are exposed to,” Lowe concludes. “We are so careful about what we give our children to eat, we would never feed them addictive substances at a young age. I think it’s important to expand this to what is being put into children’s minds, to carefully bring up our children to be able to manage their own minds and feelings, and to carefully distinguish the difference between screens enabling them and disabling them.”
Basically, if your toddler starts trying to zoom in on reality, maybe cut the screen time down, before they get to the point of using their iPad to beat people up.
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