Every generation seems to think it is special, and most of them have a legitimate reason to. Baby Boomers grew up during the postwar economic boom, Gen X was shaped by the rise of the latchkey kid and millennials came of age alongside the rise of the internet and the Great Recession.
I’m 27 years old, so I am part of the older Gen Z cohort, and we were the last to experience the world as children before it became fully co-opted by tech. Now, I’m sure some older generations would disagree, but VHS tapes, CDs and Walkmans are a totally different ball game from growing up in a world where everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket. When I was a kid, Google was just a search engine, YouTube was free without ads and Apple was just a lunchtime snack. Instead of falling asleep scrolling, I fell asleep with a book in my hands.
Admittedly, I was only nine years old when the first iPhone came out, but there was no way my parents were getting me that. I was only allowed my first iTouch when I was 14, and it only worked over Wi-Fi. (I know, boohoo.) And a Razr flip phone when I was 16. This seemed common among the parents of early Gen Zers I knew. They seemed aware that unfettered access to any information at any time might fry our receptors a bit, and they couldn’t have been more correct. I am immensely thankful for my childhood that wasn’t centered around screens, and every time I see a kid buried in one, I can’t help but feel bad for them.
Moonbug Entertainment, the company behind CoComelon and Blippi, has tested episodes on children and monitored when they looked away. Its production process also uses detailed YouTube viewing data to determine which characters, songs and story elements hold viewers, then reproduces the successful elements. A 2025 study of 528 school-age children also found that short-form video use was significantly associated with more inattentive behavior, with the relationship strongest among younger children. And when children are handed screens every day from a young age, constant stimulation becomes their baseline.
In 1984, 35 percent of 13-year-olds told the National Assessment of Educational Progress they read for fun almost every day. By 2023, that number had fallen to 14 percent, while nearly a third said they never or hardly ever read for fun. When interacting with the real world and reading books become taboo, the results are predictable. In 2024, according to the Nation’s Report Card, just 35 percent of high school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. Nearly a third could not even clear the basic bar, which includes skills as elementary as drawing conclusions from ideas explicitly stated in a text or using context clues to determine the meaning of an unfamiliar word. After graduation, nearly 30 percnet of American adults now score at the lowest literacy levels, up from 19 percent in 2017. There is a current sentiment that we are raising people who prefer screens to books, when in reality, we are producing people who increasingly cannot understand anything that demands more than a few minutes of sustained attention.
As children’s programming companiesmaketheir shows quicker, more colorful and more fantastical to keep kids watching and revenue flowing, parents have a greater responsibility than ever to protect their children’s attention. Banning screens altogether is unrealistic, but setting limits and making children sit with their boredom until they discover fun outside the algorithm probably does more for their growth than sticking them in front of an infinite slop loop perfectly engineered to keep them watching.
Now, parents will decide whether the generations after us grow up playing Roblox with strangers and scrolling TikTok or roaming the neighborhood with friends and reading the classics that shaped generations before them. I know which one sounds more appealing to me.