The Digital Education series continues by examining in greater depth a subject whose importance grows as the digital world expands its influence over human life, particularly during childhood, the stage most susceptible to influence and among the most consequential in shaping the mind and personality. It is during these years that the first features of the individual are established and patterns of perception, behavior, and response begin to form, setting in motion the development of the person who will later assume a role within the family, society, and public life.
Children can be affected by technology more profoundly than others. Digital tools may shift from being useful instruments to becoming an environment that imposes itself on their awareness, thinking, and behavior unless conscious digital education protects their natural development and prevents them from becoming mere recipients or followers of whatever reaches them through devices, platforms, and content.
This discussion follows the previous one, moving from defining digital education and the need for protection to examining some of the most significant risks children may face while using the internet and navigating the digital world. Yet any discussion of these risks should not begin with the child alone; it must begin with parents themselves. We repeatedly ask: Why do so many parents fail to appreciate the importance of digital education, and why do they not recognize the need to understand how to deal with the digital age and its risks when their children live within it every day?
I have spoken extensively with parents about this issue and warned them of its seriousness. Yet one recurring observation is a lack of concern and an insufficient awareness of the risks, except among those who have personally encountered the problem and witnessed its consequences. Those who have never experienced it or seen its effects may treat it lightly, while those who have witnessed the consequences may only then begin to understand the scale of what they have gone through. The problem, therefore, does not begin merely with a lack of information about the child; it also begins with a lack of awareness among fathers and mothers. Parents themselves therefore need digital education before they can educate their children in its use.
Anyone who wants to teach a child moderation in smartphone use should first ask about his or her own relationship with the phone. If both father and mother are intensely attached to smart devices and smartphones, how can they expect the child to behave differently? Walking down the street, we see that most people are carrying mobile phones: one person is scrolling, another is talking, and another is using the phone even while driving. At almost any time, one may look at ten people and find perhaps only one who is not holding a phone.
A condition has emerged that we might call “mobile-phone syndrome”: when people cannot see their phones, they may experience confusion, anxiety, disorientation, or a sense of being lost. When the internet connection is interrupted, a similar form of unease may appear, as though part of a person’s psychological stability has become dependent on the presence of the phone and constant network access. When a father or mother lives in this state of intense attachment, obsessive use, or pathological dependence, and the entire household is immersed in continuous digital use, it becomes difficult to ask a child to grow outside this pattern. The child sees the model every day and learns from it before receiving any direct advice.
The first message must therefore be directed at parents: pay attention, recognize the danger, learn how to deal with this issue, and do not become absorbed in the amusement and pleasure of smartphone browsing—that illusory pleasure to which a person can become addicted. The same applies to scrolling through Reels and the negative effects that continuous consumption of short-form videos may have on the individual, a subject that deserves separate examination later.
The Child’s Right to a Safe Digital Environment
Imam al-Sajjad, peace be upon him, says concerning the rights of the child:
“The right of your child is that you know that he is from you and will be attributed to you in this world, in both his good and his evil; and that you are responsible for what has been entrusted to you regarding his good upbringing, guiding him toward his Lord, Almighty and Majestic, and helping him to obey Him. So act toward him as one who knows that he will be rewarded for doing good to him and punished for treating him badly.” *Treatise on Rights*
This text establishes responsibility clearly. It speaks of good and evil, kindness and wrongdoing, and explains that the child has rights over the father and that the father is responsible for the child’s proper upbringing, guidance, and support. In our own age, therefore, a child has the right to be provided with a safe environment in the digital era and to have his psychological balance, social health, and natural development protected, because such protection has now become part of sound upbringing and care.
The technological wave has swept across the entire world, and Iraq has not been insulated from its effects and transformations. Many parents have found themselves confronting a digital environment in which they did not grow up and for which they received no adequate preparation to understand its mechanisms and risks. A father may use a smartphone every day without necessarily possessing precise knowledge of the content and influences circulating within this world, or of the boundaries between its benefits and harms. When children are involved, the issue becomes more complex, and serious questions arise about the signs that reveal when a child is beginning to be affected and how risks can be contained and addressed before they develop into a problem that becomes difficult to control.
Our children have a right to grow up in a safe environment that enriches their knowledge and develops their skills. They have a right to healthy development and a balanced life. Achieving this requires awareness and the investment of effort and time in understanding their digital environment, regulating it, and guiding it appropriately.
The importance of such awareness becomes even clearer when we consider the scale of screen exposure in children’s lives. The concept of screen time now encompasses time spent outside school use in front of a computer, television, tablet, handheld gaming system, gaming console, or smartphone. Estimates indicate that more than twelve different types of screen-based media are available to children.
Although between 75 and 80 percent of parents have expressed concern about the effects of digital media, screens remain deeply present in children’s lives. Data indicate that 40 percent of children have their own tablets by the age of two, rising to 60 percent by the age of four.
The phenomenon expands with age. Forty-two percent of children have phones by age ten, rising to 71 percent by age twelve and 91 percent by age fourteen. A study conducted in Baghdad found that 90 percent of children aged ten and under use smartphones and that 37 percent own their own phones.
In the United States, children between the ages of eight and twelve were found to spend an average of four hours and forty-four minutes per day in front of screens, excluding school-related use or homework. Between 2015 and 2019, daily computer use for homework or watching online videos also doubled.
These figures show that the issue is no longer one of occasional or limited use of a single device. Children are living within a screen-dense environment, making an understanding of its health, psychological, social, and cognitive effects a fundamental part of the responsibility of digital education.
The risks should therefore be addressed gradually: health risks, psychological risks, and social risks. Before entering into those details, however, we must first understand what a child is and how the child develops, because understanding risk begins with understanding the child’s own needs and the nature of the developmental stages through which he or she passes.
Stages of Child Development and Building a Relationship with the Real World
The first stage is the **sensorimotor stage**, extending from birth to approximately two years of age. During this period, children learn through their senses and actions and develop basic concepts such as object permanence—the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen. The appearance of the world dominates the child’s thinking at this stage, while logical reasoning of the kind that emerges later has not yet developed.
From the first day of life until approximately age two, a child knows life primarily through what the senses receive. The child sees objects, feels them, and interacts with them through the external world. This stage is therefore, at its core, one of direct contact with the objects surrounding the child.
The second is the **preoperational stage**, extending from approximately age two to seven. Children begin to use symbols and language but still have difficulty with logical reasoning and may struggle to view things from another person’s perspective. From around age two to five, the child increasingly begins to judge, learn about, and test objects, gradually developing a form of interaction with them.
The **concrete operational stage** follows between approximately ages seven and eleven. Children become more logical in their thinking and begin to consider other people’s ideas and feelings more realistically and to understand their relationships and effects. All of this remains connected to the external world and to real objects in front of them.
The **formal operational stage** begins in adolescence and continues thereafter. At this stage, the individual develops the ability to think abstractly and solve hypothetical problems, while personality and life become more broadly shaped on the basis of the preceding years.
These developmental stages are influenced by several major factors. Foremost among them is biological maturation, through which abilities develop naturally; interaction with the environment, which shapes the child’s understanding and learning processes; social experiences provided through interaction with peers and adults; and equilibration, understood as the internal drive to achieve harmony between what the child knows and what the child actually experiences.
As presented here, these stages show that the early years up to age eleven form a crucial foundation in the child’s relationship with the real world, because the experiences acquired during this period become part of the basis on which personality is subsequently formed.
Leaving the Real World for the Virtual World Too Early
From the first day of life, the child primarily needs to deal with the external, real, physical world. The child sees a toy, soil, food, and surrounding objects; holds things by hand; has experiences with them; learns where they are, where they came from, and where they went; and, if a toy disappears, begins searching for it. All of this belongs to a tangible real world in which experience is formed through direct engagement.
When we instead give a one- or two-year-old child a mobile phone and prematurely transfer attention from the external real world to the virtual and electronic world, we alter this process and may create a form of imbalance. A child who is supposed to construct early knowledge through physical objects and direct experiences instead has a large share of attention attached to a ready-made virtual world that presents images, sounds, and movement without the child actually living through the experience itself.
The problem begins here because the educational process human beings have historically experienced as direct engagement with the real world may become disrupted. A premature departure from the real world into the virtual one can occur, and from that point problems related to development, interaction, and learning may arise.
During the stages of development, the child needs physical and biological development as well as psychological and social development in order to grow as a normal person and human being. After age eleven, the child moves into a stage in which the formation of a broader social and personal identity begins. Before and during that transition, the child needs to exist in the real, physical world rather than allowing the virtual world to replace it.
The child also needs what educational specialists call biological maturation: physical and biological development that requires bodily movement.
Children naturally run and move and can barely remain seated. From the moment they wake in the morning until they fall asleep at night, they are in almost continuous motion. This movement is neither excessive nor meaningless; it is part of the developmental process itself. The body needs movement, muscles need to develop, and the nerves and senses need to function within a changing and diverse world.
When a child is given a phone, however, movement may decrease. If movement remains reduced over time, part of the natural biological developmental process may be disrupted because the child no longer moves to the same degree. Muscular and neurological activity diminishes, while patterns of sensory use involving sight, hearing, and movement are also affected.
When a child is deprived—whether through the child’s own habits or the surrounding environment—of natural movement and continuous sensory experience, development may no longer follow the natural pattern in which movement and interaction are necessary.
When Screen Dominance Becomes a Health Risk
The consequences of reduced movement do not stop at the loss of real-world experience. A child spending long hours in front of television, video games, or a smartphone can fall into a sedentary lifestyle, which may increase risk factors for obesity, particularly when prolonged sitting is accompanied by sweets and fast food while watching or playing.
Obesity, in turn, is associated with an increased risk of several chronic illnesses, including heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and elevated blood cholesterol.
Concerns have also been raised about how excessive screen use may affect the development of certain brain functions, particularly the frontal cortex associated with judgment, decision-making, and emotional control. Fast-paced and highly stimulating video games are among the forms of screen use that produce especially high levels of nervous-system stimulation because of the heightened arousal accompanying them.
Sleep problems add another dimension. Light emitted by electronic devices may interfere with the sleep cycle, while prolonged browsing or gaming can delay bedtime and cause children to lose track of time, leading them to sleep late or obtain insufficient sleep. This may later affect mood, concentration, and academic performance.
Strong attachment to devices may also produce problematic behavior. A child may lie in order to extend screen time, claim not to have used the device for long, or pretend to be asleep and then hide a phone in bed for later use. The issue then shifts from screen time alone into a behavioral pattern that affects honesty, discipline, and self-control.
Prolonged sitting in unhealthy positions can cause postural problems and chronic pain in the neck, back, and lower back, especially when tablets and smartphones are used in positions that keep the head and neck bent for long periods.
Vision problems and dry eyes may also appear as a result of continuous staring at screens, especially smaller devices that encourage children to bring their faces close while playing games or watching videos.
Anxiety and depression are also among the risks discussed in this context, because extended screen time can increase isolation and weaken direct human interaction during a period when social relationships form part of psychological and emotional development. The child may become accustomed to solitude and the virtual world at the expense of developing the ability to communicate in real life.
These effects overlap with educational problems. Lack of sleep, weak concentration, frequent mental drifting, and constant attachment to screens may reduce academic achievement and diminish the desire to study. These outcomes are closely related to the problem of attention fragmentation discussed later.
Some violent video games and content built around scenes of aggression may also contribute to a tendency toward violence. A child may become accustomed to violent scenes and less sensitive to them, or begin imitating what is seen and using violence to solve problems or deal with others.
There is also discussion of effects on the brain associated with continuous exposure to electronic devices, accompanied by tension, headaches, greater emotional reactivity, and frustration. Taken together, these concerns make health a central component of digital education rather than merely a side effect of excessive use.
Social Maturity
Alongside biological maturation, a child needs interaction with the environment through different stages from the first day of life until approximately age eleven. Children need communication in order to recognize, learn, and explore the meaning of life, as well as social experiences and interactions that help build balance within the personality.
A strong example can help clarify this point. Imagine taking a two-, three-, or four-year-old child and placing that child alone in a room for years: unable to run or move freely, as though inside a cage; unable to interact with the external environment; unable to look at things, contemplate them, and think about them; unable to communicate with others, gain experiences, or engage with people. If the child were brought out after seven or eight years, that child would be a stranger to the world and would experience profound alienation.
This example illustrates the loss of interaction; it does not mean that using a smartphone is literally the same as living in a locked room. But when the phone becomes a broad substitute for the real world, it can deprive children of parts of the experience they are supposed to acquire through movement, communication, and exploration.
When biological maturation, social interaction, knowledge of the external environment, learning, exploration, and curiosity are all reduced, essential aspects of the child’s development can be impaired. We might describe this as a form of impairment: the child’s capacity for balanced development is hindered by the loss of essential experiences.
The effects may later appear in various problems associated with child development. The physical characteristics of a child’s body and muscles begin taking shape through natural development, and when development becomes abnormal, problems may continue into later stages of life, including issues related to the nervous system, vision, or perception.
The Loss of Natural Development and Building the Capacity to Adapt
This brings us to the central issue of this discussion: Why is natural development being lost in the digital age?
When imbalance occurs, part of childhood itself may begin to disappear because one of a child’s most important needs is interaction with external objects and learning their meaning through play, contact, and movement. The social environment stimulates children, gives them experience, and teaches them how to adapt to the external world.
Natural childhood means learning to adapt through contact with the outside world, experiencing different social situations, and developing the psychological capacity for endurance, patience, courage, and dealing with pain and failure. Children must learn from their mistakes and experiences because experience—not information alone—is fundamental to emotional and social development.
Through these experiences, the child learns to confront difficult challenges, negotiate, and manage conflicts. Personality is built from the accumulation of real experiences rather than merely from a flow of information.
Much of life consists of action and reaction. A child learns, for example, that fire burns by approaching it or attempting to touch something hot. That experience teaches the child that the object is harmful and should not be approached. The child learns through experience and interaction with the external environment.
Through this process, children develop strength, adaptability, and resistance to challenges and learn from mistakes and experience. At the same time, psychological, muscular, and physical capacities develop naturally: the heart, blood vessels, movement, brain, eyes, and other organs all develop, while contact with life itself teaches endurance and patience.
If we isolated a child inside the home and did not allow that child to go out and play with other children, the child would lose natural social contact. When eventually placed among other children, the child might feel alienated and not know how to interact because children in ordinary social life compete, struggle, argue, and play. Sometimes one child may hit another and then return to playing. These are all shared, ordinary forms of human interaction through which children learn how to confront, retreat, negotiate, exercise patience, and restore relationships after conflict.
All of this represents gradual natural development. Complete immersion in digital technology, video games, and smartphones can deprive children of a substantial part of this development when digital life becomes a substitute for the external world. This is where psychological fragility and weakness may begin, because personality is not formed in a vacuum; it is formed through confronting external challenges.
A child goes to school and goes out to play in order to mix with others, learn, undergo experiences, and interact. Through this process, the child gradually develops what may be called **psychological resilience**.
Such resilience is not built by removing every pressure and challenge from a child’s life. It develops through natural exposure to different situations, through which the child learns how to deal with them and emerges with a greater capacity to adapt.
The idea can be compared to physical immunity. This does not mean deliberately exposing children to illness. Rather, in ordinary life the body interacts with its environment, deals with change, and gradually develops resistance to disease. Children encounter common childhood illnesses, influenza, and other conditions as part of ordinary life, and the body develops resistance.
In the same way, psychological resilience is built through natural exposure to challenges, pressures, and different experiences. Absolute protection from every challenge may leave a child fragile when the first real confrontation eventually comes.
There is a useful analogy involving trees. Trees exposed to wind become stronger because when wind comes from one direction, the tree extends its roots in the opposite direction to stabilize itself. When the wind comes from another direction, the roots become stronger there as well. Gradually, the root system develops and becomes more resilient.
It is said that an experiment was conducted on trees of a type normally exposed to wind. When placed in an environment without wind, they grew extremely quickly, but when eventually exposed to wind they fell immediately because their roots were weak.
The example illustrates the meaning of genuine upbringing: raising a child to face pressures and develop the capacity to adapt to different challenges. If every experience, interaction, and confrontation is removed and the screen becomes the dominant substitute, we may not be protecting the child so much as depriving the child of the roots needed to face the world later.
Natural Play and Reclaiming the Real World
The meaning of natural development becomes clearer when we consider outdoor play. It is not an optional recreational activity beyond the child’s needs; it is part of comprehensive development.
Playing and moving outside the home improve cardiovascular fitness and motor skills, contribute to balanced physical development, and give children an opportunity for natural exposure to the environment and sunlight, with its connection to vitamin D production.
The value of outdoor play is not limited to physical health. It extends to cognitive, social, and emotional development. Nature provides space for exploration, experimentation, and problem-solving and opens the child’s senses to a diverse world that stimulates wonder, curiosity, and imagination. It also places children in situations that have not been designed in advance and that do not provide ready-made responses in the way many applications and games do.
Playing with other children offers unstructured social interactions through which children learn negotiation, conflict resolution, cooperation, competition, respect for boundaries, and how to understand other people’s reactions. It also provides opportunities to manage frustration, anger, happiness, victory, and defeat.
Real play therefore becomes part of building the human being psychologically and socially, rather than merely a way of spending time away from a screen.
Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
The issue does not stop at the physical or behavioral level. It also reaches feelings and emotions, because emotions themselves develop through being with other people and interacting with them.
We can take an example from social sports such as table tennis. It involves two or four players. When one child plays with another, there is action and reaction, a shot and a return, interaction and competition.
Through that exchange, children begin to read the other person’s emotions. They see the eyes, movements, and reactions; recognize whether the other person is comfortable or upset; observe when the person is pleased or angry; and gradually learn how to understand and respond to the emotions of others. At the same time, their own emotions, energy, enjoyment, participation, and competitive feelings emerge.
If someone takes a paddle and plays table tennis alone, however, boredom soon follows because there is no genuine exchange or interaction.
When video games and smartphones become substitutes for natural interaction, they may contribute to a freezing or weakening of emotional exchange and interaction with others. The child does not learn how to live as a social being and may grow into a socially isolated person who does not know how to manage emotions.
This leads to the modern psychological concept of **emotional intelligence**: the ability to understand emotions, use and manage them, and deal with others through emotional awareness.
A person may be extremely intelligent in mathematics yet weak in dealing with society, unable to understand when to speak and when to remain silent, how to respect others, or how to read their feelings and reactions. Excellence in one cognitive dimension does not compensate for weakness in communication and emotional management.
Emotional intelligence is learned in real life through interaction with people, observing faces, voices, situations, and experiences, and through mistakes, correction, competition, and cooperation. A child deprived of such experiences because of screen immersion may lose some of the learning opportunities needed to become a balanced social human being.
Our brains are designed to function effectively when an interactive and social environment stimulates curiosity and exploration. Excessive immersion in digital media during childhood, when it reduces social interaction, may therefore affect overall development, because interaction with people is not a secondary activity but part of cognitive and emotional construction.
Screen Use, Social Development, and “Virtual Autism”
In this context, a debate has emerged over the relationship between intensive digital-media use and certain manifestations resembling difficulties in social communication.
Autism spectrum disorder is associated with differences in neurodevelopment that produce persistent challenges in social communication and interaction, while some studies have examined early and intensive screen exposure and the accompanying reduction in opportunities for real-life communication.
Researchers, drawing on data from more than 80,000 children, found that boys exposed to screens for at least two hours a day during the first year of life were significantly more likely to receive an autism diagnosis by age three.
This comes amid an increase in autism-spectrum diagnosis rates over the decades. The figures presented here indicate a rate of one child in every 5,000 in 1975, one in 500 in 2005, one in 68 in 2014, and, later, a rate reported as one in 45.
A 2017 U.S. study found symptoms among children and adolescents with high levels of virtual-world use such as reduced ability to read emotions and form friendships. Some specialists in European countries including France and Romania have used the description **“virtual autism”** for manifestations in which a child’s connection to real social interaction and acquisition of basic communication skills weakens, producing outward symptoms resembling some of the difficulties observed in autism spectrum disorder.
A similar Australian study points to a reduced ability to recognize emotions and read facial expressions among heavy users of digital applications compared with lighter users or non-users. This may extend to difficulties in understanding and expressing emotions, recognizing certain social cues, accepting differences in points of view, or choosing the appropriate way to express them.
What matters in the context of digital education is that children in their earliest years need real faces, real voices, and direct interaction. The ability to read emotion is not built through images alone, but through an entire life of action and reaction, eye contact, dialogue, and varied situations.
Cognitive Development and the Flattening of Intelligence
We can then turn to the impact of digital and smart devices on children’s cognitive development.
At the beginning of the enormous technological wave, some people assumed that technology would necessarily lead to the development of human intelligence and that greater quantities of information and easier access to it would make people more intelligent because they could learn more quickly when information was readily available.
Yet what we see in some cases may move in the opposite direction, producing forms of foolishness, superficiality, and triviality rather than genuine intellectual development. The accumulation of information does not necessarily mean a greater capacity to think.
The enormous flow of information may leave individuals unable to analyze and absorb what they receive and may weaken critical thinking, reducing them to passive recipients who consume information superficially, from one direction and one source.
That is not intelligence. Intelligence involves analysis, perception, and the capacity to understand ideas, issues, and problems. Simply storing information without being able to analyze it does not amount to genuine cognitive development.
Studies have linked excessive screen use with shorter attention spans, reduced concentration, and weaker information-processing capacity because the continuous flow of stimuli can overwhelm the child’s mind and increase cognitive load. Children may receive large quantities of images and information without sufficient time to analyze them or transform them into deeper knowledge.
Studies also suggest that excessive digital-media use may delay language development, particularly among children aged two and under, a stage during which direct communication with parents and the surrounding environment should be a principal source of language acquisition.
The fundamental problem is that, for many people, technology has shifted from being a factor that can serve natural cognitive development to being primarily a source of entertainment and pleasure, and then from pleasure into addiction and deep immersion, without sufficient awareness or understanding of how these devices exert influence. This may disrupt children’s cognitive development.
If we look at Generation Alpha—the generation born from around 2010 and raised at the height of technological development—there are observations concerning its relationship with education. Some members show diminished interest in studying or in believing in its importance, alongside intense attachment to devices, until much of what they know comes through those devices with all the valuable and poor-quality material, good and bad, that they contain.
Information may consequently become poor cognitive nutrition, a form of disorganized cognitive storage, and a burden on children instead of an organized process of knowledge that helps them understand, analyze, and critique.
Distraction, Impulsivity, and Cognitive Inflexibility
Among the most prominent consequences of disrupted cognitive development are distraction, lack of concentration, and an inability to deal with the external world with sustained attention and understanding, ultimately weakening the ability to learn naturally from life.
This can be observed in adolescents, young adults, and even older people. A person sits down to study with a page in front of them and a smartphone, iPad, and computer nearby. They read for a little while, pick up the phone and browse, return to the page, then shift again. This is the condition of distraction.
Parents often ask: Why are our children failing at school? They may then hire private tutors, although in some cases the problem is not a lack of tutoring but a lack of concentration because the student is surrounded by numerous distractions.
Even after a mobile phone is physically removed, the mind may remain attached to it: What arrived? Did I receive a message? What happened in the game? What happened today? What were they talking about? What did they say? What is the latest topic?
The distractions therefore continue within the mind even when the device is no longer physically present. The problem is no longer merely the phone being in front of the eyes; it has become a continuous mental attachment to the device.
An important issue emerges here concerning the effects of intensive exposure to smartphones and the internet, and even certain forms of lighter exposure. Some may say they use a computer, laptop, or iPad solely for learning. Yet specialists and psychologists working on digital issues and their effects argue that such exposure can be associated with higher levels of what are described as **impulsivity and cognitive inflexibility**, particularly among girls.
One study found that intensive exposure to smartphones and the internet, alongside other patterns of computer and television use, was associated with higher scores for impulsivity and cognitive inflexibility. Each additional daily hour of smartphone and internet use was associated with a higher impulsivity score.
The duration of exposure was also found to be associated with emotional impulsivity and cognitive rigidity regardless of other factors such as the child’s health, weight, or sleep duration.
This becomes particularly important because social interactions are essential to development. They help children learn emotional regulation, while digital media interfering with parent-child interaction may reduce opportunities to learn concentration and emotional control. This may later appear through internal and external problems such as a reduced ability to control impulses.
Impulsivity here means rapid agitation, intense emotional reaction, and aggression in responding.
If a child is sitting and browsing a phone and the father suddenly takes the device away, the child may explode in anger and say: “You stopped my game,” “You ruined my game,” or “You interrupted my conversation.”
In this context, such emotional reaction is linked to intense attachment and addiction and appears as an impulsive and aggressive response. The child may not have acquired the natural cognitive and social development needed to respond in a balanced way; instead, what might be called “mobile-phone upbringing” has become part of the child’s formation.
This point is important: the problem is not merely that the child uses a mobile phone, but that the phone itself begins to participate in shaping how the child interacts, reacts emotionally, exercises patience, and waits.
The data also indicate that the association between excessive smartphone and internet use and impulsivity was stronger among girls than boys. Researchers connect this partly to differences in the nature of use: girls tend to use phones and the internet more for social communication and social media, while boys tend to use electronic games more extensively.
Social comparison involving images posted on platforms may also affect adolescent girls’ psychological and emotional health and body image, as well as the different ways in which they deal with negative emotions.
Reels and the Constant Search for Stimulation
Closely connected to distraction is the issue of fast-paced content, such as edited short videos and Reels on social media and gaming applications.
Repeated exposure to this pattern can push people to seek ever-higher levels of stimulation, making ordinary activities that require sustained concentration—such as studying, reading, or completing homework—less capable of holding attention.
Media multitasking and constant movement between forms of content are also associated with greater cognitive inflexibility, meaning a reduced ability to shift between different tasks in an organized way. This can affect academic performance and a student’s ability to remain with a single task until it is completed.
This helps explain how the pleasure of Reels and their continuous sequence can become a self-perpetuating cycle. Every short clip promises a new stimulus, and every movement of the finger takes the user to different content. The mind does not learn to wait, persist, or build sustained concentration; instead, it learns to move continuously from one stimulus to another.
The Illusion of Safety Inside the Home
Another highly important issue is that some families believe they are keeping children safe by preventing them from going into the street, keeping them inside their rooms, and providing laptops, iPads, smart devices, and video games.
The family sees the child physically present in the room, not going outside or interacting with strangers, and assumes that the child has therefore been protected from danger.
But this safety may be merely apparent, because the entire world can now enter the room through a device.
One teenage girl, in a story related by the author of a book, described sitting in her room while her mother cared for her, brought her juice and food, provided her with various smart devices, and believed she was protecting and looking after her. Yet the mother did not know what content was reaching her daughter through those devices or what the girl was learning from them.
A child or adolescent may therefore be physically present inside the home while the content reaching them has the capacity to influence personality profoundly. That content itself may be creating disruption while the family feels reassured simply because the child remains physically within sight.
Imagine a three-year-old child holding a smart device when suddenly harmful and inappropriate content appears. What happens to that child? The child may experience a severe shock followed by impulsivity, imbalance, and behavioral disturbance because self-control has not yet developed. Emotion may erupt without reflection, accompanied by intense agitation and violence, and the child may have difficulty exercising patience, particularly after developing a strong attachment to the device.
Statistics and figures cited in the article indicate an association between emotional agitation in children or adolescents and the degree of exposure to digital media and smart devices—whether one hour, two hours, or three hours. As exposure increases, levels of psychological agitation and aggression may also increase, while the capacity to regulate emotions may decline.
If we conducted an investigation or survey among parents today, we might ask: How many already struggle with their children’s emotional outbursts? Such difficulties are not merely hypothetical; they can be observed in many homes.
Passive Consumption of Information
Another important concept in this context is **passive information consumption**. This refers to children receiving information that does not suit their age, nature, or need for natural development.
A child needs particular information appropriate to the stage of development, not everything the internet is capable of delivering.
An abundance of information does not necessarily make a child intelligent or a genius. Who said that simply possessing more information creates genius? A truly capable child develops cognitively in a natural way, acquires the ability to analyze, critique, and understand, and at the same time develops social experience and the capacity to communicate with others.
Passive media consumption appears when children or adolescents browse social media without awareness or watch a continuous stream of YouTube and other platform content without critically engaging with or analyzing what they receive.
The child then becomes a recipient of ready-made narratives and superficial knowledge instead of interacting with content by asking questions, comparing, and analyzing.
This form of consumption can undermine critical-thinking skills and impede deep learning because it weakens the child’s ability to analyze, synthesize, and distinguish between truth and misleading information—skills that become increasingly important as the digital environment grows more complex.
This brings us back to the central idea: the digital age can give a child a volume of information far greater than the capacity to analyze it and connect it with lived experience. Without gradual exposure, selection, and education, the quantity of knowledge can shift from an opportunity for development into a cognitive burden.
Cartoons and the Flat World
Cartoons are another subject requiring particular attention. Many of us may not fully recognize the negative aspects of this world when it becomes the primary environment in which a child lives.
First, the cartoon world is a flat, one-dimensional world, not a real world containing a complete social life for the child. Children need what we might describe metaphorically as a “three-dimensional world”—a real world of multiple dimensions and experiences in which people move and come into contact with objects and other people, rather than a flat world viewed through a screen.
The cartoon world is also imaginary and contains a great deal of fantasy. Children naturally enjoy imagination and stories, and this is part of childhood. Yet excessive immersion in fantasy can draw a child away from the world of truth and reality into a purely imaginary world, making it more difficult to distinguish properly between the real world, the virtual world, and the cartoon world.
Excessive fantasy-driven content may create a form of disconnection from reality and make the distinction between fantasy and truth more difficult, particularly if cartoon characters and imaginary worlds become more present in a child’s life than real people and direct experience.
When children live excessively inside the cartoon world, they may become followers of cartoon characters. Those characters can begin to dominate their attention and feed them values, principles, and ethical frameworks unrelated to our customs, societies, or religion, presenting other values at a stage when children have not yet developed sufficient capacity for criticism and discernment.
Animated content may carry values or messages that differ from the moral and cultural principles the family and society seek to instill, producing a conflict between the different sources of reference children receive—especially when the digital message is repeated more frequently than the family’s own message.
At times, cartoons, animation, and anime may also contain inappropriate content and may present atheistic themes or ideas involving disbelief in religion. If children are repeatedly exposed to such conflicting messages and negative characters, this may create a dilemma in their intellectual and moral development.
At the same time, it should not be ignored that animated characters and programs may provide elements that support creativity, language, and certain cognitive abilities. The challenge therefore lies in distinguishing enriching elements from risks associated with increased aggression, distorted perceptions of reality, exposure to inappropriate material, or conflicting values. Digital education is what should prevent the beneficial dimension from becoming an entry point through which negative effects become dominant.
The effect does not stop at values. Some children may experience disruption or deficiencies in language skills. They may stop speaking in the same natural way and instead adopt the language of cartoons, use expressions taken from animated programs, and live within their atmosphere.
According to observations cited from some books, families have taken their children to psychology consultants and counselors after severe negative effects connected with cartoons appeared, including becoming strongly influenced by them and adopting cartoon accents.
Some parents have also sought psychological consultation out of concern over behaviors children acquired from animated characters, such as adopting particular accents, imitating a character’s movements and clothing, or communicating in language associated with the cartoon world rather than the language used within the family environment.
I remember once seeing a child who may have been five or six years old sitting and speaking English even though our society is Iraqi. I wondered: Why is this child speaking English? It turned out that the child had a game entirely in English and had learned more English from the game than Arabic.
Some young girls have similarly learned Turkish as a result of watching Turkish television series.
How, then, can we expect children to develop naturally if harmful exposure to cartoons, smartphones, television series, and television itself takes over their lives?
All of this can strip away aspects of a child’s personality and prevent natural growth within the real external world, leaving the child cognitively, psychologically, and socially impaired—that is, with aspects of cognitive, psychological, and social development that should have been formed through real experience becoming disrupted.
Research published in *Scientific Reports*, a Nature journal, concludes that children need protection from the potentially negative effects of the digital environment and that smartphone exposure and media multitasking were positively associated with impulsivity and cognitive rigidity while being negatively associated with decision-making ability.
Digital Education for Parents Before Children
Ultimately, parents should be advised not to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that this is not a problem. Ignoring a problem does not eliminate it; it merely delays the moment when its consequences are discovered.
At a minimum, mothers and fathers should attend training courses, meet with consultants and counselors, learn, and become familiar with the risks of the digital age and how to deal with them.
When parents return home, they need to put their smartphones aside and be genuinely present with their children through real interaction. There should be real dialogue between fathers, mothers, and children because a child does not merely need a father who is physically present in the house; the child needs a father who is truly present and participating in life.
Parents should take their children outside and to parks, and fathers should play with their children. I know that many parents do not take their young children out because small children want to play and move and require effort and patience, and some parents lack the patience or inclination for that. But this is part of parental responsibility: taking the child along so that the child learns, gains social experiences, and does not remain confined to the home spending all available time in front of screens.
A child who begins the day or free time with television and cartoons, moves from there to video games, and then to a smartphone enters an enormous cycle of screens and virtual life. Natural development can become barren if those screens replace play, movement, real experience, and relationships with other people.
Let us take our children outside and play with them so that they can develop naturally. Let us protect their psychological and physical health because this is our responsibility. In the future, our children may hold us accountable and tell us: “You failed us in our upbringing.”
Digital education for children therefore begins, above all, with digital education for parents. A father who has not learned to manage his relationship with technology cannot help his child build a healthy relationship with it. Likewise, a mother who substitutes phone use for dialogue, time, and interaction cannot expect her child to grow up unaffected by that environment.
The digital world becomes dangerous when the virtual world begins to replace the real world during the years in which children need to develop physically, psychologically, socially, and cognitively and to build psychological resilience, emotional intelligence, and the capacity for concentration, analysis, and communication.
The responsibility of digital education is therefore not to remove children from technology, but first to preserve their real world: to give them play, movement, experience, interaction, friendship, and dialogue, and then to introduce them to the digital world in a way that allows them to use devices from the position of individuals whose personalities have already begun to take shape—not as children whose personalities are being shaped by the screen itself.
Comments