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By Wendy Yurgo
We would never knowingly hand an eight-year-old something engineered to make him crave the next hit, yet millions of parents do exactly that every day. We call it an iPad.
No, the hit is not a drug. It is the next level, the next win, the next Roblox reward, the next rare item, the next notification, the next surprise that may or may not appear when a child taps the screen. I am not interested in making hysterical comparisons the research does not support. I am interested in why so many children cannot seem to put these devices down, why taking them away can produce an astonishing reaction, and why we continue pretending the technology itself has nothing to do with it.
For years we called this “screen time,” which made the whole thing sound relatively harmless. Too much television was screen time. A movie was screen time. Playing Pac-Man was screen time. What children are holding today is something altogether different. The screen is simply the delivery mechanism. Behind it sits technology designed to learn what keeps a user engaged, deliver rewards, introduce novelty, personalize the experience, and eliminate the natural stopping points that used to tell us it was time to go do something else.
That is what we are putting up against a developing child’s brain.
And then we blame the child when the technology wins.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has finally moved the conversation beyond counting hours and toward examining what it calls the digital ecosystem surrounding children. It is about time. An hour spent FaceTiming Grandma is not the same thing as an hour spent inside a game engineered around rewards, advancement, social interaction, and repeated engagement. Content matters. Design matters. What the child is doing matters. Most of all, what the technology is doing to keep the child there matters.
Children are still developing impulse control, judgment, delayed gratification, and emotional regulation. That process takes years. The technology sitting across from them suffers from no such developmental disadvantage. It is backed by some of the most sophisticated companies on earth, extraordinary amounts of behavioral data, and a business model that benefits when the user stays longer, comes back sooner, and engages more.
That is not a fair fight.
Follow the Reward
And then there is dopamine, the word everyone seems afraid to use.
Every win, rare item, advancement, sound, animation or unexpected reward can reinforce the desire to do it again. Drugs obviously act on the brain through very different biological mechanisms, and I am not equating an iPad with a street drug. But addiction researchers have spent decades studying reward, reinforcement, craving and impaired control. The technology industry understands those same human vulnerabilities remarkably well.
The reward does not even have to arrive every time. Unpredictability can make reinforcement more powerful because the user keeps trying to discover whether the next attempt will deliver it.
Any parent who has heard their child say, “Just three more minutes,” only to hear the same thing three minutes later, knows exactly what I am talking about. What starts as a few more minutes turns into a negotiation and, too often, an argument when the device finally goes off. If you have ever physically taken an iPad out of a child’s hands and watched the reaction, you already know this is not the same thing as telling him it is time to put away his Legos.
The AAP calls part of what is happening here variable reinforcement. Parents do not need the terminology. We have watched it play out in our own homes.
The AAP now expressly discusses problematic digital media use that can become excessive or compulsive and design features that prolong engagement. The American Psychiatric Association has gone further, identifying Internet Gaming Disorder as a condition warranting further study and describing behaviors that include preoccupation with gaming, withdrawal when gaming is removed, unsuccessful attempts to control participation, and continued excessive use despite problems.
Then there is the brain research. A systematic review of neuroimaging studies involving adolescents with gaming disorder found neurological changes the researchers described as comparable to those seen in substance addiction, including impairments involving emotional regulation, reward-seeking, inhibition and risky decision-making.
That does not make gaming cocaine, and it certainly does not make every child who plays a video game an addict. But it should end the ridiculous argument that parents concerned about the addictive nature of these products are simply being hysterical.
The next round, the rare reward, the absolute meltdown when the device is finally taken away. None of this is happening in a vacuum. The companies building these products understand reinforcement very well. Parents should too.
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Now Add ADHD
Now consider children who already struggle with attention, executive functioning or impulse control. Research has found an association between ADHD symptoms and gaming disorder. That does not mean gaming causes ADHD. It means a child already struggling to regulate attention and impulses may be especially vulnerable to a digital environment offering immediate stimulation and repeated reward.
I have watched it in my own children, and I finally reached the point where what I was seeing became impossible to ignore. The attachment to the devices was changing. Their behavior around them was changing. Their attitudes were changing. Getting off became a fight. Ordinary life was increasingly competing against something capable of producing instant entertainment every few seconds.
My kids even talk about “Brainrots” while playing Roblox. In one wildly popular experience on the Roblox platform, children chase collectible characters through a constant cycle of acquiring, earning and upgrading. Yes, they are actually called Brainrots. You cannot make this stuff up.
But Roblox is one platform. This is much bigger than Roblox.
We have built an entire childhood culture around eliminating boredom. A child gets restless at dinner, give him the iPad. Long car ride, iPad. Waiting room, iPad. Meltdown, find the iPad. Good behavior, reward her with the iPad.
And yes, I have done it too. What parent hasn’t?
The problem is that boredom is not an emergency. Neither is waiting. Neither is frustration. Children are supposed to experience all three. They are supposed to figure out what to do when nothing interesting is happening. They are supposed to sit through conversations that do not revolve around them. They are supposed to lose games, wait their turn, read things that unfold slowly, and discover that the world does not produce a flashing reward every fifteen seconds.
Those experiences are not inconveniences standing in the way of childhood. They are childhood.
And I started wondering what we were teaching children when every uncomfortable emotion, empty minute or tedious experience could immediately be escaped through a device.
I Took Them Away
Eventually I substantially restricted the devices in my own home.
I did not do it because I had just read a study. I did it because I know my children, and I did not like what I was watching.
Then I watched what happened without them.
My children became more present. They engaged more. The constant pull toward the device began to fade. Ordinary things became interesting again. I could see the difference.
That experience sent me deeper into the research, and what I found made me angry because parents have spent years being told that everything happening inside this digital ecosystem is ultimately our failure to manage it properly.
Set limits. Use parental controls. Watch them more closely. Take the device away.
Yes. Absolutely.
I have been writing about children’s online safety for years, and parents have an enormous responsibility to know what their children are doing online. But parental responsibility does not absolve corporate responsibility.
That defense just collapsed under an $18 billion settlement.
On August 26, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion over ten years to resolve claims by nearly every state that Facebook and Instagram were designed to addict children. Meta denied wrongdoing. Florida refused to join the settlement, arguing that it did not go far enough. Still, Meta agreed to set two hours as the default daily limit for minors, block access from midnight to 6 a.m., mute notifications during school hours, and hide like counts.
Those are not content controls. They are brakes on the engagement machine. After years of telling parents to manage the product better, Meta has agreed to redesign the product itself.
Why should parents have to continually defend their children from products built for children?
If a toy company announced that its product observed what held a child’s attention, refined the experience based upon that behavior, delivered rewards designed to increase interaction, and became more profitable the longer the child used it, parents would have questions. If that company then shrugged when children had difficulty disengaging and told us we should have imposed better limits, we would have even more.
Put the same business model behind a touchscreen and somehow we call it innovation.
Your Child’s Attention Is Worth Money
A child’s attention has economic value. That is the ugly truth underneath this entire conversation.
Platforms built around advertising, purchases, subscriptions or engagement have every reason to keep users engaged and coming back. The more they learn about what holds an individual child’s attention, the better they can become at serving whatever is likely to hold it next.
Adults cannot resist this stuff. Look around any restaurant and count how many grown adults are staring at their phones.
Yet we expect a nine-year-old to demonstrate better impulse control.
That is absurd.
I am not calling for a ban on technology, and I am not pretending every video game is evil. Some games are creative. Technology can educate, connect and inspire. Our children are growing up in a digital world, and pretending otherwise is pointless.
The question is who controls whom.
We have spent years worrying about what children may encounter once they are online: pornography, predators, bullying, violence, exploitation, and the dark communities I have written about extensively. Those dangers are real. But there is a more basic question that comes first.
Why does the child keep going back?
We need to stop treating that question as an indictment of the child or the parent and start examining the machine sitting in the child’s hands.
I have.
And I no longer care whether my children think taking it away is unfair.
An iPad is not childhood. Roblox is not a developmental necessity. Gaming is not a constitutional right. Sometimes being a parent means taking away the thing your child desperately wants.
And sometimes the desperation tells you everything you need to know.
We are the parents. The machine belongs to us. The childhood belongs to them.
Turn it off.
About the Author
Wendy M. Yurgo is a Christian, attorney, entrepreneur, and the Founder and CEO of Revere Payments, a conservative fintech company serving many of the nation’s leading faith based and freedom driven organizations. She writes about where faith collides with the systems shaping our culture, bringing a legal and executive lens to the most urgent issues of our time. Her work is rooted in light, guided by principle, and grounded in truth. Follow Wendy on Instagram @wendyyurgo and X @paymentsSHEEO.
Wow. Phenomenal post, incredibly important. Thank you for this🙏🏼♥️