Becoming a parent changes your perspective. Stuff that you are okay with doing or having or eating can be the exact opposite of what you want your children to do or have or eat. It can harm you, yes, but God forbid if it harms your children.
Probably like any other concerned parent, my wife and I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. Our final decision was that we want our children to be raised as far as possible from screens, social media, and AI-powered technology – at least until they are old enough to use them consciously.
By now, we’ve seen enough evidence (and real-life consequences) to know that excessive exposure to screens and social media can be deeply harmful for kids, particularly during early development and adolescence. Nothing against parents who choose differently, though. Like everything else, it’s an option parents must make based on multiple reasons, weighing all pros and cons.
In our specific case, we decided not to. Our concern isn’t technology itself, but what it quietly replaces. We want our children to learn how to connect and talk with real people, and not just with annoyingly positive computers that will cheer up at anything they say.
After all these years researching creativity from a sociocultural perspective, one conclusion became impossible for me to ignore: human connection matters more than anything else. Knowing how to effectively connect with people is what will get you good friends, a good job, a good family, and hopefully a promising future. Not the internet. Not AI. Not technology. PEOPLE. Real relationships are what shape who we become and how we navigate the world.
For example, if you were alive around the early 2000s like me, you probably remember how wonderful the internet was. It was a magical place where you could connect with people from anywhere in the world and have quick access to their thoughts. But these “good old days” are long gone. Most of the internet today is inhabited by bots (and people with anger issues). It became a targeted advertising wasteland.
Also, children need to learn how to think for themselves and how to deal with feelings like frustration to navigate adulthood (and life itself). Again, technology can’t do it for us. Actually, the opposite is true: we need to disconnect to have time to think, reflect, and wonder. We need time to sit with an idea long enough to truly understand it. There is no prompt for dealing with the discomfort of not knowing.
I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it’s not a secret anymore that we all became data livestock for big tech companies. What surprises me is that TV advertisements targeting kids are highly regulated since the 70s for a reason – and social media is finally following the same fate – but we pretend that AI-powered toys, for example, will serve a different purpose (besides, I can already hear “but the AI said I can!”).
However, to not sound like a hypocrite in the (possibly near) future, I recognize that I may fail spectacularly in this mission of keeping my kids away from it. I may even be the one responsible for giving them their first screen or AI-whatever gadget, when my sleep-deprived future self crumbles in the face of a non-stop crying human being.
I realize this might just be fear of the unknown, given that we still don’t know the long-term effects of AI exposure – for kids, adults, or elders alike. But better safe than sorry, right?
At the end of the day, this isn’t about winning a battle against the convenience of technology or pretending we can stop the world from changing. It’s about intention. It’s about choosing, again and again, to prioritize human connection over artificial ease. Even if I fail as a parent sometimes, and I probably will, I want my children to grow up knowing that their ideas matter and that the most meaningful answers in life rarely come from a screen.
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Felipe Zamana: Teacher, Writer, Speaker, and PhD Researcher | Bridging academic knowledge and professional practice through Education | Strategic Creativity Management for Decision-Makers. LinkedIn