PARENTS: I am inspired by the book “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt. This is a must read. Get the audiobook if needed but please do read this for the benefit of your kids and yourselves.
Please excuse the pessimistic tone of this particular essay; I’m mostly yelling at the advertisers and social media companies. I’m fortunate that my students have been universally fantastic to work with and are showing incredible growth into 2025.
A letter to the parents after one year. An open discussion on the problems facing modern students and tips/tricks to start helping our children recapture their childhoods.
I’ll start here: these kids are smart. However, they are extremely lazy and lack practice in too many key skills.
What makes them so smart? Gen Alpha and Gen Z have both grown up with the internet. I, as a younger millennial, remember a childhood without constant access to the internet. Furthermore, younger Gen Z students and Gen Alpha have almost exclusively experienced an algorithm based childhood. This fine-tuned algorithm based “learning” has resulted in internet kids that are hyper-logical and capable of incredible intuition, yet these same kids have ZERO outward drive and are content to just play Minecraft or “chill” as I am often told. “Brain-rot” as it is often called. *Games are great, but kids have never been worse at self-moderation or resisting online temptations.
Why am I mentioning algorithms? Well, I’m not anti-internet; obviously, given that this is a blog. The internet is likely the greatest tool that humans have built. I believe that the culmination and free flow of knowledge accessible to every individual, always, is a monstrous leap in culture akin to, and beyond, the printing press, light bulb, airplane, or car. The real internet masters are those from the 90s and early 2000s. When the internet was research, news, and forum based. The internet really was a digital library and (mostly) beneficial for learning. Then the internet economy and advertising-focused social media rolled around.
Ideas seem to start as a passion, turn into a business, and eventually become a racket. The internet is no different. Once a passion project of scientists looking to exchange information, the “internet” has become a behemoth of eCommerce, entertainment, advertising, and social media. “Internet” for me means any internet connected device (they’re not all created equal) and the concept of free-access information. So “internet” kids are those that have always had free-access to all information. Note, I am saying “access” and not “mastery.”
Around 2012, I remember thinking “wow, my timeline isn’t chronological anymore.” Perhaps predictably, American national math scores grew rapidly from the early 90s into the 2000s and peaked for all age groups (4th, 8th, and 12th) in 2013. All scores have since dropped and 2022, the last reported year by NAEP.gov, shows a continuing drop and a level close to that of 2003. Essentially, kids seemed to have gotten smarter and smarter and BOOM: plateau and decline starting in 2013.
I’ll get into the specifics in a later blog post, as this one will end with tips/tricks for parents, but long story short: the best programmers, designers, marketers, and financiers target working with FAANG companies. This list of companies is exclusively internet advertising, hardware, entertainment, and social media. All things that most easily generate revenue by capturing ATTENTION. Who has the weakest, most vulnerable, attention? Kids. Know what’s easier to hook a kid to than drugs? Useless information. Quick, fleeting, dopamine. Transaction based games. These build habits and patterns of thought and action instead of directly physically addicting kids (that’s for processed sugar to take care of, one more topic for another time!).
A brutal, efficient, and effective way to rip a child’s agency away from them before the parents even know what happened. Besides, most parents are being affected by all these attention factors too. The literal smartest people on Earth are encouraged and lauded for landing roles that, when viewed critically, are just shoving mental addictions onto us all.
The internet has become a racket. Internet learning and public schooling is convenient for teachers and administrators (and Chromebook companies, ha!) but tortuously slow and unengaging for students. A teacher or administrator thinks “Wow! This is great! We don’t even have to give them textbooks and each student has everything they need at all times!”
Therein lies the problem. Adults that have proper attention skills and maturity are making decisions based on a misunderstanding of how learning actually works. Learning is NOT about limitless access to information (though this helps when one runs out of things to study), but about logical skills and a confident consciousness built through intrapersonal communication. When too many of the words forcefully come from the outside, the inside doesn’t have a chance to speak up!
Furthermore, resilience and research-skills built up from trial and error are seldom found in internet kids. They know they could find what they need, and that’s good enough for them. They get enough dopamine from the Netflix, Instagram reels, and TikTok videos anyways. They’re not used to triumph so they shy away from any mental strain too. Okay, I could rant for as long as I live so I’ll stop here and get to the tips.
Tips for the parents:
- These kids CAN be reasoned with. But you’ve got to speak their language. Most likely your kids are more logical than you are, truly. You may be wiser and more experienced as a parent, but the average internet kid has a brain that works nothing like what adults are used to. Communication breaks down if parents EVER act like hypocrites or state something that can easily be fact-checked or logic-checked. “Because I said so” does. not. work. with internet kids.
- Give them real tasks and goals. Let them fail and figure it out. Yes, the world is competitive. Grades need to be handled and maintained. But everything else probably does not matter. Unless your child is already being recruited for a sport or some national level talent (state-level doesn’t cut it these days), the best thing you can do for them is teach them life skills like cooking, scheduling, and cleaning. However you cannot just give them a list of things to do because you said so. You have to make it fun, engaging, and challenging. Give them specific goals and resources but unlimited “play” and opportunity to try new things. That’s how we learned, that’s how the internet kids should learn.
- In an ideal world, kids will start to prioritize these life tasks and grades themselves. They’ll be busy and fulfilled enough that they won’t seek refuge in games or social media. But there needs to be accountability and discussion. You have no idea what things your child has seen on the internet. I would recommend escalating phone “detoxes” and “turn the phone off” pattern building that shows our children that phones are TOOLS and nothing else. Would a carpenter carry their hammer around all day and be addicted to it? As a parent, and human, you should join in these detoxes.
- I am experimenting with weekly task lists with my students in 2025. This has shown fantastic success. Along with grades, we (myself and the student) agree to attainable fitness, diet, focus–usually phone, and family goals each week. The student has true input on these assignments and we debate what is reasonable; they MUST build up this internal dialogue and intent. This is only done through real discussion and negotiation. They’re little adults after all.
Start slow, but start immediately. Recapture your own attention and help your kid find theirs.
Written with genuine hope that these kids will be alright,
– Amit