Why can’t kids stop? Child anxiety in the age of digital overload

Australia’s new under-16 social-media ban sounds a blunt public-health alarm: a wired childhood harms young minds. By focusing on platforms while neglecting the deeper drivers of anxiety, the law risks confusing symptom for cause and underestimating the crisis.

Consider familiar scenarios: A nine-year-old in London sits frozen at the table, his packed backpack beside him and heart racing. In Mumbai, a mother comforts her child who fears sleeping in the dark. Despite unprecedented supervision – tracking apps, messaging, helicopter parenting – rates of child anxiety have risen sharply over the past decade, nearly doubling in some countries.

Child anxiety is among the most misunderstood mental health conditions. Its surge is attributed to a convergence of academic pressure, digital saturation, reduced unstructured play, and growing environmental precarity in the form of wars, pandemics, climate change, and political polarisation. It often appears as school refusal, panic over minor changes, unexplained physical complaints, or separation fears. Among under-16-year-olds, roughly 1 in 5 now meets criteria for clinical anxiety – 5-7 children in any classroom of 30 are grappling with anxiety. Common, impairing, and still widely misread as a child’s misbehaviour.

Can the staggering anxiety be interpreted as better emotional literacy? The science proves otherwise. Anxiety levels have increased alongside the near-constant use of smartphones and screens. A clinical trial found that reducing screen use for just two weeks resulted in measurable reductions in anxiety. Two-year-olds with five hours of daily screen time use fewer words than their peers limited to under an hour. Anxiety symptoms are appearing earlier and increasing steadily among children aged 5 to 16, longitudinal population studies prove, with particularly sharp rises beginning in late childhood.

Technology itself isn’t the villain. Many Silicon Valley innovators credit tinkering in digital environments to their systems thinking and resilience. Social media and short-form video, more than television or gaming, are linked to worsening attention and ADHD symptoms in pre-teens. Although the Australian ban excludes video games, children with ADHD are more susceptible to excessive gaming and online use. Equally important are the type of content, the child’s developmental stage, and whether screens replace boredom.

For most parents, smartphones soothe their child, allowing them to attend family events, hang out with friends, or attend a work meeting. But this well-intentioned strategy also teaches children that anxiety is something to be avoided. Clinically, the opposite is better. Anxiety diminishes over time, not through avoidance but through exposure. When discomfort is tolerated, and catastrophe doesn’t follow, the brain relearns safety: the prefrontal cortex gradually quiets the amygdala. Avoidance interrupts this learning. Technology, then, isn’t the cause of anxiety. It is the most efficient emotional pacifier we have ever created.

Modern parenting often aims to erase children’s discomfort. Reassurance sounds like: I’ll email your teacher so you don’t have to present; Let me check again that the door is locked. Each reassurance soothes temporarily but increases a child’s reliance on devices or parental accommodation. In some cases, accommodation extends to premature or poorly applied ADHD diagnoses, not when diagnosis guides skill-building, but when it lowers expectations and entrenches avoidance.

Decades of research across neuroscience, education, and psychology converge on a single truth: resilience is built by enduring distress, not erasing it. If children are being conditioned by systems engineered for addiction – at a stage when impulse control is biologically immature – why are they being asked to self-regulate environments designed to defeat even adult self-control? The same attention-optimising, conflict-amplifying algorithms that distort adult behaviour are almost certainly exerting even stronger effects on children.

Tech races to extract attention faster than parents understand the risks; thus, regulations offer public-health safeguards. Governments from the UK to the EU, the US, France, and Norway are now pushing age-based restrictions, algorithmic reform, and platform accountability. India, by contrast, has no age-based social-media prohibition for minors, leaving impulse control to parents and profit-driven platforms.

For parents, to raise capable children who think, feel, and relate deeply, we must protect the delicate developmental space where those capacities grow:

1. Resisting the urge to eliminate discomfort by communicating confidence: Instead of saying, Don’t worry, I’ll fix it, say, I know it’s hard. I know you can handle it.

2. Setting up firm, non-negotiable boundaries around technology: Device-free zones during sleep, meals, and homework are not punishment; they are developmental protections that require consistent enforcing.

3. Offer alternatives to screens. Shared reading, graphic novels, and audiobooks are bridges back to sustained attention.

Policies like Australia’s remove a family’s emotional pacifier; how families will handle the resulting discomfort remains to be seen. Anxiety in children often grows from a love that unintentionally communicates fear. If we want to raise capable children, the message cannot be that we will protect them from discomfort, but that we trust them to face it.

The writer is an international psychologist, former professor, and writer on culture, cosmopolitanism, and global affairs.