I want to say something that is going to make some parents uncomfortable. Not because I am trying to be harsh. But because I think the truth said clearly and with love is more useful than the comfortable version said quietly. Kids today are not worse than we were. They are not harder to manage. They are not a different species. They are children. They have always been children. And children have always done exactly what children do. They run. They resist. They push against every boundary they encounter. They refuse to sit still. They negotiate when they should obey and obey when they should question. None of this is new. What is new is us.
We Outsourced the Job
There is a scene playing out in households all over the world right now. A toddler is sitting in front of a screen for two, three, four hours at a stretch. Cocomelon. Peppa Pig. Whatever algorithm decided to play next. And the parent is somewhere nearby, finally able to breathe, finally able to finish a thought, finally able to exist for twenty minutes without someone climbing on them or demanding something.
I understand that scene. I am not judging the parent in it. Parenting is exhausting and anyone who tells you otherwise has never done it with full presence. But I want to name what is actually happening in that scene because I think we have been too polite about it.
We are renting out our children's attention to a corporation so we can have a break from them. And then we wonder why they cannot hold a conversation, why they struggle to sit through a meal, why they seem restless and disconnected. The screen is not the problem. The replacement is the problem. When entertainment becomes a substitute for presence rather than a supplement to it, we have made a trade that the child pays for long after we have forgotten making it.
What Was Different Before
When I was growing up in Jamaica, a child was never really alone. Not because the adults around me were saints or because the parenting was perfect. But because the structure of community life meant there was always someone present. If not your parents then a sibling. If not a sibling then a cousin. A grandparent. A neighbor who watched you the same way they watched their own. The village was not a metaphor. It was a literal daily reality.
Parents back then were not necessarily more patient than parents today. But they were more present by default. The distractions competing for their attention were fewer. There was no social media pulling them into another world while their child stood in front of them. There was no endless scroll. There was just the immediate reality of a child who needed something and an adult who had to respond to it.
What that presence built in us, even when it was imperfect, even when it was rough around the edges, was a felt sense of being seen. Of mattering in real time. Not as a notification. Not as something to manage between other priorities. But as the actual priority.
The Patience Problem
Here is the honest diagnosis. The problem is not that children today are more difficult. The problem is that our patience has been eroded by a world specifically designed to compete with it.
Social media is engineered to be more stimulating than a child asking you the same question for the fifth time. A phone notification creates a dopamine response that a toddler's voice cannot match. We are living in an attention economy and our children are losing the bid for our focus to algorithms that have billions of dollars and the smartest engineers on the planet working against them.
When we run out of patience with our children we reach for a screen because it works immediately. The child is quiet. We get relief. But we have just taught our brain that screens solve the problem of an overwhelming child. And we have taught our child that when they become too much, they get handed away. That lesson does not disappear. It lives in the body.
What We Owe Them Instead
I am not writing this to make anyone feel guilty. Guilt without direction is just suffering and suffering does not make anyone a better parent. I am writing this because I believe that naming what is happening is the first step to changing it.
Children do not need perfect parents. They need present ones. They need to know that the adult in the room is actually in the room. Not physically there while mentally elsewhere. Actually there. Eyes available. Attention available. Patience available even when it is hard to find.
With Avi, I make a practice of putting the phone down when she is talking to me. Not every time. I am human. But enough that she knows the conversation we are having is more important than whatever is on the screen. That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. It is the whole thing.
Kids have not changed. They still need exactly what they have always needed. Time. Presence. The reliable experience of an adult who chooses them. We have changed. And the good news about that is that change is available in both directions. We changed away from presence. We can change back.
"Children are not things to be molded but people to be unfolded."
Jess Lair