30 Facts About Childhood Today that Will Terrify You
Why are we doing this to our kids?
This post was originally published by Ted Gioia on his substack The Honest Broker. Ted is a writer, musician, and culture critic. I first became interested in Ted after reading his fascinating 2024 post about how technology is changing many forms of culture in the same direction because of business models that monetize distraction and addiction. I think this recent post will be of great interest to readers of After Babel. We thank Ted for allowing us to share it.
—Jon Haidt
I’ve spent lots of time recently digging into the available information on the state of childhood today. I’m shaken by what I’ve learned — and you will be too.
Over the years, we’ve all heard that our youngsters are “at risk.” But it’s easy to dismiss warnings of this sort as idle fearmongering. After you’ve seen several generations grow up into responsible adults, you tend to stop worrying.
But this time, it really is different.
So many different parties now prey on youngsters — and they include some of the largest companies in the world. Parents struggle for solutions when the enemies are literally inside their home, embedded in ever-present tech that seeks to manipulate and monetize kids.
Below I’ve tried to compile a summary of the main issues we face. We can discuss solutions at a later stage, but right now I want to raise the alarm.
Let me add one more thing: I am not blaming the youngsters. Previous generations (including my own) must bear responsibility for this. And it’s adults, not kids, who need to take the lead in fixing this mess.
The State of Childhood Today
The average child now plays outside for only 4–7 minutes per day. Even inmates in top security prison get more outdoor time than this.
The time youngsters spend with friends has fallen in half — and it only took ten years for that to happen.
Children are entering school with autism-like symptoms due to the use of devices, as well as their parents’ excessive screen time — especially during breastfeeding. This is “leading to a generation of toddlers suffering from ‘still face effect’, an emotionless expression.”
From the same source: “Children are beginning school with low core strength, speech delays, poor bone density.”
70% of children quit organized sports by the age of 13. Participation has been declining steadily since the rise of smartphones.
Rates of obesity among children have skyrocketed in recent years. There are now more than 250 million obese youngsters, and that number will continue to grow.
Lack of physical activity is so extreme that teachers report children arriving at school “without the strength in their fingers to hold a pencil or even a knife and fork.”
From the same source: “Some are unable to use the toilet by themselves, hang their coat on a peg or even recognize their own name.”
Instead of playing with toys, many youngsters now watch videos of other children playing with toys. Entire web platforms are devoted to watching other people play. This level of passivity has never been seen before in history.
Test scores are plummeting. Everybody blames a different culprit — smartphones, COVID school closures, ChatGPT, etc. — but the decline began before the pandemic, and didn’t reverse afterwards. It’s now showing up in college entrance exams.
Reading skills among US students is now at the lowest levels ever measured. One third can’t even read at a basic level. “They can’t write a sentence,” laments one frustrated teacher. “They don’t know what state they live in. They don’t know what region of the country they’re in. They have no background knowledge. Most of them don’t know who the president is.”
Teachers report that many students lack even the most basic skills. They don’t know multiplication tables. They can’t tell time from a clock. They need a calculator to solve even simple arithmetic — problems that could be answered just by counting on their fingers.
Growing evidence indicates that these problems reflect a larger crisis — namely that youngsters are struggling to remember almost anything. The more they use modern tech, the worse this problem gets.
Mental health problems among children are skyrocketing. As early as age six, 16% of children have mental health issues that demand clinical care.
An increasing number of teens now use social media for more than seven hours per day.
Percent of teens using social media 7 or more hours a day, by gender and grade level, 2024. Source: Monitoring the Future data analyzed by Jean M. Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack. Half of the children surveyed say that parents should be concerned about their screen time. They admit that would be worried if they were parents.
But when parents try to limit access to social media accounts, youngsters simply do it behind their backs:
59% of children say they have seen a violent video online this year. They find these mostly on YouTube and TikTok.
85% of youngsters play video games — and many of them do so every day. But this is not an escape: 80% of teens say that online harassment over gaming is a problem. And it’s alarming that many of the most popular games (Fortnite, Minecraft, etc.) are about staying alive. We’ve come a long way from hopscotch and tag.
An increasing number of youngsters are now shifting from online gaming to actual gambling — at an age where this can easily develop into a compulsion or addiction.
Online crimes against children have increased dramatically. Crimes reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children doubled over a period of just 12 months.
School shootings have quadrupled in the last fifteen years.
“Sixty percent of 8- to 17-year-olds said they were concerned about someone using AI to make inappropriate pictures of them.” Parents are even more worried— with 65% expressing the same concern.
As screen time increases, youngsters report more problems with loneliness, depression, sleep deprivation, and dissatisfaction with life.
Unsealed court documents reveal that Meta knew for years that its social media platforms were harming children. The company hid this information from outsiders, including a congressional committee.
The company’s response instead was to target vulnerable teens with advertising which could take advantage of their vulnerability.
An increasing number of children have no siblings or cousins. Youngsters increasingly operate as loners without the benefit of family ties and support.
Because children are isolated from human companions, they turn to AI instead — but 37% of these AI interactions result in violent role play.
Most youngsters enter adult life without ever having gone on a date.
Source: Monitoring the Future Study 1976-2024 Almost 75% of Americans now believe that childcare cost is a major problem. This can cost $10,000 or more for a single child, and many parents simply can’t afford adequate care — hence many youngsters operate without supervision.
Is this the world we want?
I can’t imagine anyone looking at this information without fear and anxiety. You don’t even need to be a parent to worry what this will do to society — or is already doing.
If you haven’t seen the consequences yet in your own life, just wait. You will soon enough. Nobody can escape them.
The next step is to focus on solutions. We are fortunate that most of these issues can be addressed at a grassroots level. I’m happy to report that many families, schools, and communities are already taking measures.
 | A guest post by
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So I tend to agree with this, but some of the sources seem...not to be the greatest?
The first link just goes to a blog post that cites "the current statistics", and "4–7 minutes" doesn't actually seem to be based on current rigorous studies (unless someone knows of an actual source?).
The point that students are "struggling to remember almost anything" leads to a page that, as far as I can tell, doesn't say anything of the sort.
The assertion that kids "don’t know multiplication tables" comes from a study done in India – of course, math skills in India (and anywhere) are important, but we don't know what the situation was there previously; the article only mentions that there was a (slight) dip in overall math scores since 2017. I taught in a developing country pre-smartphones and most of the kids there didn't know their times tables, so this may be about educational inequality rather than technology.
Other links go to Reddit and even TikTok...it's always been easy to find anecdotal evidence that "kids today" are so much worse than they used to be.
Some of the other links are more difficult for me to quickly assess, but it's not clear that they all come from unbiased sources or large-scale studies.
I write this as a supporter and someone who is personally convinced that the overuse of technology has been a disaster for childhood (and adulthood). And I've only heard good things about The Honest Broker. I just think we have to be careful to build our arguments on the firmest foundation possible.
This! This this this!!!
This needs to be shared far and wide, read by every parent and policy maker. This is exactly what us teachers have been seeing and saying. But nobody listens to teachers. Thank you.