Transcription
It was Fred Rogers' first encounter with brain rot content that changed the trajectory of his life and motivated him to become the Mr. Rogers we know today. He describes this experience saying, "I was all set to go to the seminary to become a minister. But I went home my senior year for a vacation and I saw this new thing called television and I saw people throwing pies in each other's faces and I thought this could be a wonderful tool. Why is it being used this way?"
And so, alongside the new research on child development that emerged in the 1960s emphasizing the importance of children's emotions, Mr. Rogers decided to go into TV in order to foster emotional development in children and to teach them how to deal with complicated life issues like death, divorce, and war. Understanding the importance of silence for reflection and contemplation, Mr. Rogers also made sure to have long periods of quiet time on screen as he played with his puppets, set things up, or just sat there.
Show these moments of silence to an iPad kid raised on AI slop and Coco Melon today, however, and they're going to feel like they're being waterboarded. Because while Rogers had an idealistic view of his generation's tech as a tool for childhood development, the same optimism can't be said for my generation's outlook on today's technology. With many millennials and Gen Z fearing the future world their children will grow up in. And while previous generations have always picked on the younger ones, with Gen X being called slackers, millennials entitled, Gen Z anxious, what I hear all the time now from people my age and younger is, "Our generations cooked." With this self-awareness of one's own generation being a problem, feeling very new to me. Another common phrase is, "Our parents were right. It really is that damn phone." Making this phenomenon go a little bit deeper than the typical old man yells at cloud meme.
With much of Gen Z already vowing not to raise so-called iPad kids. Because while my generation was the first to grow up fully online, Gen Alpha, those below me, are the first to grow up with tablets, smartphones, and social media, and all of the endless brain rot content and slop that comes with that. And so in this video, I'm going to look at what screen time is doing to kids' brains, how the behaviors produced by excessive screen time are showing up in the classroom, and how we've moved from historical authoritarian parenting styles to the opposite extreme of gentle parenting, assuing the sort of golden mean of parenting styles that Mr. Rogers popularized through his work and how all of this in combination is screwing an entire generation of kids. And because every generation is born into a world full of positives and negatives with the goal for many of us being to increase the positives, I am also going to discuss solutions to the iPad kid problem. Because while it may feel unprecedented given the new technology, we've actually overcome very similar issues before as a society and we can do so again. We're not cooked yet.
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Part One: The Failures of Millennial Parenting. Before the 1960s, most parenting was based on forming moral behavior rather than nurturing a child's feelings. Beating or hitting your kids for bad behavior was common and socially acceptable to where it was normal for schools to have paddles and canes to use on students up through the 1970s. And while hitting your kids is still common in some families and cultures and paddles in schools are still legal in some states, this form of discipline as a whole has declined in the West in favor of supporting and nurturing emotional development in children.
When it comes to gentle parenting, or millennial parenting as it's often called, we've swung from the historical extreme of excessive corporal punishment to an overemphasis on feelings to the point of neglecting discipline and boundaries.
"Give me my phone, you idiot."
"Hands are not for hitting. I don't like that. That hurts."
It's gotten to the point where some parents will let their kids hit their siblings or them repeatedly, and all they'll say is, "I can see her feeling frustrated. Can we try making a different choice?" Which of course doesn't work. Part of parenting and moral instruction involves hurting your kid's feelings. For instance, putting them to bed despite them crying and throwing a tantrum or not buying them that toy they really want or putting them in a timeout when they bite their sister. You don't have to hit your kids with a belt, but you've got to do something. But unfortunately, a lot of parents are more concerned with being their kid's friend than they are with being their kid's parent and actually having to instruct them through life.
And just as paddles in the classroom reflected common authoritarian parenting styles at home, this new form of parenting is also mirrored in today's classrooms with many teachers complaining that they aren't allowed to discipline students or aren't supported by administration when they need to. Bad behaviors and tardiness have become the norm, and classes are becoming more and more disruptive, leading to cycles of burnout. We've gone from teachers using the paddle on kids to kids straight up assaulting teachers. And people just seem to accept that this is the new normal. There has to be a balance between emotion and consequence. And feelings are not always supposed to take precedent. The entire point of behaving morally is doing the right thing even when you don't want to because you know what is good and bad and right and wrong.
On the topic of centering a child's emotionality as the forefront of your parenting style, I also want to quote from Slavoj Žižek who highlights another negative aspect of this form of parenting through his concept of permissive totalitarianism. He says, "Let's say you have an good old-fashioned father. It's Sunday afternoon. You have to visit grandma. The father, good old-fashioned authoritarian father will tell you, listen, I don't care how you feel." If you are a small kid, of course, I don't have care how you feel. You have to go grandmother and behave there properly. That's good. You can resist. Uh no, nothing is broken. But let's say you have this so-called tolerant post-modern father. What he will tell you is the following. You know how much your grandmother loves you. But nonetheless, you should only visit her if you really want to. Now, every child who is not an idiot, and they are not idiots, know that this apparent free choice secretly contains an even stronger, much stronger order. It's not only you have to visit your grandmother, but you have to like it. That's one example of how apparent tolerance, choice, and so on can conceal a much stronger, a much stronger order. Another."
"So we should go back to more like the dad that just says 'because I said so.' Absolutely. It's more honest."
The shame and guilt the child feels due to this form of parenting is that they feel like their emotions and actions always have to be congruous when that isn't the case when it comes to a lot of doing the right thing. But while most of us know that gentle parenting typically doesn't work to end a child's temper tantrum, there is another tool at the millennial's disposal, and that is to hand them an iPad. And that brings us to Part Two: iPad Kids and Brain Rot.
According to the World Health Organization, infants should have zero screen time, and toddlers shouldn't have more than an hour per day. It's also recommended that that hour be educational content watched with a parent, which is exactly the viewing style that Mr. Rogers set out to do with his programming. But as anyone in the US has seen with their own two eyes, many kids are given iPads seemingly right out the womb. It's used to numb them at dinnertime, numb them in the car, numb them at night, numb them at any given time whatsoever. This is resulting in developmental delays, screen addiction, a lack of emotional regulation, and lower levels of impulse control. And just as excessive reliance on corporal punishment can enter the realm of physical abuse, the excessive use of screens to numb out your child's behavior can also enter the realm of neglect, which is another form of abuse. Because letting the internet raise your child means that their iPad is their parent. I'm not above shaming parents despite not having kids, honestly. Because if you choose to bring a life into this world, you should at least concern yourself with actually raising that child.
And while some of this need to pacify kids is due to both parents having to work full-time, leaving them exhausted at the end of the day, there is a huge wealth gap when it comes to kids' screen usage. The latchkey generation, who saw the rise of dual-income households, at least for playing outside all hours of the day, even if they never really saw their parents that much. Because during free play, kids explore physical boundaries, come up with creative solutions to solve problems, get out their physical energy, and cooperate with others, forming social bonds. This is also how much of emotional regulation and impulse control is managed.
I talked in my last video about the default mode network and how idleness is necessary both for creative thinking and for having a sense of self because if your brain is constantly stimulated, there's no room for reflection or imagination and you can't gain mastery over your impulses like an addict. And we can see an example of how boredom leads to creative thinking through none other than Fred Rogers himself, who spent a lot of his childhood bedbound with illnesses with nothing to stimulate him or entertain him other than his thoughts. This connection with his imagination eventually resulted in his many puppets and characters with the main mission of his show being to teach kids how to regulate their emotions. In his testimony to Congress to defend federal funding for PBS, he said, quote, "And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health." And it was this insistence on teaching children how to regulate their emotions that actually ended up winning the funding.
And while here, Mr. Rogers is defending nonprofit educational content from being overcome by brain rot slop, this goal seems to have been lost in the era of Coco Melon, TikTok, and YouTube and AI slop as the profit motive and attention economy have completely taken over. Parents aren't enforcing 1 hour only of screen time with that screen time being Sesame Street or Bluey, which I haven't seen, but I have heard is good for kids, but are rather letting their kids become addicts to content that cuts every 1 to 3 seconds with overstimulating noise and colors and sound effects constantly blaring.
"Let's see how many seconds it takes for each one of these scenes to change. One, two, three. One, two, one, two, three. One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one."
It's no wonder kids can't control their impulses; they are literally experiencing withdrawals because their brains are addicted to this content. Like, and because they don't have any time to actually regulate their emotions, they have no silence to like reflect. They're going to freak out when you take their iPad away. It's just going to happen. And I don't view iPad kids as being the child's fault. Obviously, it is the parents' fault. And I honestly look at it very similarly to how I look at obese kids because number one, their parents are usually experiencing the same issue, whether it's a smartphone addiction or not having boundaries around food. Both issues are also exacerbated by poverty, which is just increasing the gap between rich and poor. And much like obesity, screen addiction and especially iPad kids, like giving screens to children, should be treated as a public health epidemic because mental health matters just as much as physical health.
But besides the mental health issues that iPad kids are and will be experiencing, there's also the maybe more concerning fact that iPads are also making kids dumber. Which just brings me into the next section, Part Three: iPad Kids Can't Read.
It's no secret at this point that literacy and numeracy rates continue to decline as visual media replaces the written word, attention spans shorten, and classroom behaviors get more disruptive. According to the National Literacy Institute, 40% of students across the nation can't read at a basic level, and that number rises to 70% when it comes to low-income fourth-grade students. This is also where the majority of classroom behavioral problems occur, with 60% of them happening during reading assignments. And the problem is getting worse for adults, too, with literacy rates from the PIAAC showing that around 28% of adults have a kindergarten reading level and 29% have a fourth-grade reading level. And even among those in the most elite universities, many don't have the attention spans to read whole books. To quote from the viral Atlantic article, Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown's English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet. That's 14 lines of poetry.
And while I think technology can be blamed for a lot of this, there is also the soft bigotry of low expectations that we've been seeing in education, as another Atlantic article explains, quote, "Low expectations theory explains other trends that the smartphone thesis by itself does not." If the bar for grading and graduating were constant year-over-year, we would expect both to decline in line with student performance. Instead, we see the opposite. An ACT study found that the share of students getting A's in English rose from 48% in 2012 to 56% in 2022, even as their demonstrated mastery of the subject declined over that period. The same is true of other subjects, including math, social studies, and science. Over the same decade, high school graduation rates improved from 80 to 87% despite objective declines in academic achievement. And I certainly experienced this in my college experience, which was honestly a complete joke. I remember one of my classes on the first day, the professor said, "Everyone gets an A because I don't believe in like punishing learning in any way." Which just made me not learn anything. I don't think I read a single assignment for that class. Why would I?
And again, the younger generations are self-aware when it comes to this issue. I was watching a video on teachers quitting and dealing with Gen Alpha behavior. And all the comments were from middle and high schoolers saying things like they wish TikTok was banned, that they can't concentrate in class due to all the disruptions, and how their classmates can't write two paragraphs without ChatGPT.
But now that I've laid out the scope of the problem, I would like to talk about some pathways forward, some of which we're already seeing. And that leads us into the next section, Part Four: Solutions.
The negative effects of lead poisoning have been documented and speculated on since ancient times, though few actions towards regulation and reduction were taken. In 1786 in the United States, Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter on the harmful effects of lead that, quote, "You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist before it is generally received and practiced on." And sure enough, it wasn't until the 1920s and '30s that many countries began banning or restricting lead paints with much of the research into its harmful effects on children performed from the 1940s onward. In the United States, however, Dutch Boy brand paints, founded by the National Lead Company, marketed their products made from 91% pure lead directly to children until lead in consumer products was banned in 1978. Here are some relics from that time. This was from my grandmother's school where she taught grades 1 through 3. It was like a small schoolhouse with a few rooms and they dropped off these intending for these to be given to children to take home or to play with. A paint book for boys and girls. What were they promoting? Dutch Boy pure lead paint. There's a valuable coupon in the middle of this book. Be sure to give it to your father or mother. And what did teachers get for distributing this propaganda? Which it was. Wow. One of the gifts was a pure lead candy dish made of pure lead from the National Lead Company.
Due to corporate power, lead products were directly marketed to children decades after it was found out that it kills children. And the only thing stopping it was an outright ban. Similar to this, the tobacco industry is probably the most notorious for concealing medical information and just trying to get that sale, get that bag above all ethics whatsoever. And in 1986, the surgeon general reported that secondhand smoke could cause lung cancer and non-smokers. And about 20 years later, when I was a kid, I remember smoking in enclosed cars with children being banned back when the Terminator was our governor, uh, or as I knew him, Kindergarten Cop.
And today, we see tech CEOs ban screen time for their own children, while the industries they work for dodge every regulation whatsoever to push more and more addictive content onto children's screens. To read from a New York Times article on tech CEO's parenting rules: Quote, "So, your kids must love the iPad," I asked Mr. Jobs. "The company's first tablet was just hitting the shelves. They haven't used it," he told me. "We limit how much technology our kids use at home." Since then, I've met a number of technology chief executives and venture capitalists who say similar things. They strictly limit their children's screen time, often banning all gadgets on school nights and allocating aesthetic time limits on weekends. I was perplexed by this parenting style. After all, most parents seem to take the opposite approach, letting their kids bathe in the glow of tablets, smartphones, and computers day and night. Yet, these tech CEOs seem to know something that the rest of us don't. Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now chief executive of 3D Robotics, a drone maker, has instituted time limits and parental controls on every device in his home. "My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules. That's because we've seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I've seen it in myself. I don't want to see that happen to my kids." You can't expect billionaire corporations to act ethically when there are no consequences for not acting ethically. Sometimes moral behavior requires consequences.
But on that topic, as I'm filming this video, there are some new laws that will affect iPad kids. One is Australia banning social media for minors. And the other is that many schools are finally adopting no-phone policies in the classroom so students can eventually focus on an entire sonnet. Now, when it comes to me personally, I don't believe in an all-out ban on social media purely for free speech reasons. I actually hate social media. I view it the same way as smoking. If you're an adult, you should be able to use it as much as you want. If you want to smoke 10 packs a day, go for it. Scroll through TikTok for 12 hours, go for it. But when it comes to children's access to things, that is completely separate. Like a 10-year-old shouldn't be able to go into 7-Eleven and get a pack of cigarettes, even if he says it's for his dad. Like, that's just really not something that should be allowed. I can see a very similar argument for brain rot and social media and the like, for children, especially because it's been proven to have such terrible effects on the developing brain. Like I said, children's screen time should be viewed as a public health epidemic because we are all unfortunately dealing with the effects of this.
Also, in my last video, I talked about the death of leisure and Aristotle when it comes to workaholism and brain rot. Something I didn't talk about in that video when it comes to virtue ethics is this golden mean idea that all virtue is the balance of excess and deficiency. I'll put a chart from Wikipedia up on the screen so you can see some examples. But basically, if you take some virtue like courage, the excess of that character trait would be recklessness while a deficiency would result in cowardice.
As for the parenting example, too much authoritarianism looks like physical abuse, whereas too much permissiveness looks like either neglect or emotional manipulation because everything in life requires a balance. Regulations shouldn't be so strict that it restricts free speech and people's rights to communication and so on, but it also shouldn't be non-existent. Otherwise, we would still have lead paint and toys in 2025. In fact, the iPad cases would probably be made with lead paint on them.
And while figures like Mr. Rogers were born into particular environments due for change, we find ourselves in the same situation with brain rot when it comes to kids' screen usage, even if more extreme than the 1960s. That's why Gen Z is vowing not to raise iPad kids. We are literally witnessing with our own eyes how terrible it is. As for some hope, millennials seem to be moving away from gentle parenting. Schools are undoing bans on suspensions and other forms of discipline. And the speedrunning of institutional collapse to the education system brought on by AI might cause a revolution that makes universities become something other than predatory student loan collecting degree factories.
In the lower-level classrooms, I'm predicting a return back to analog 100%. I'm talking timed essays, timed everything. If you're writing a book report, I'm watching. All you have is the book and a pencil. Like that kind of level of discipline because how else are these kids going to learn anything? Like the AI thing doesn't work, the screen thing doesn't work. Not to mention, Google Classroom is literally harvesting children's data from the time they enter school until the time they graduate now because everything is done on these private platforms through the school. Like, what are they going to do with all of that data? But the point of this section is is that there's typically unfortunately a very long delay between identifying an issue and there actually being a resolve to that. But it has happened before, and it can happen again, honestly, especially as the world becomes more and more vocal about this issue. A better future is possible, but it depends on how we act now. Also, civilizations are constantly being torn down and rebuilding themselves. That's like kind of humanity's whole thing. But hopefully, this solution will end faster than a lot of other issues in this world.
But let me know what you think. Do you think the iPad kid is a problem? Do you think it will be a problem? Do you think it will ever get fixed? Are we doomed forever? Are we cooked? Chat, are we cooked? Um, I hope you guys like this style of video. It's a little bit easier for me between some of my heavier content to do some shorter kind of videos. Um, but let me know what you think and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.