I don’t recognize my friends’ kids anymore. And it’s not about clothes or memes. Recently a ten-year-old boy was visiting me. I asked him, “What do you like to do in your free time?” He answered, “Stay on my phone.” I asked, “Anything else?” He thought. Actually thought. Then said, “Watch YouTube while I’m on my phone.” I stopped laughing. Because at three in the afternoon he had no idea what to do without a screen. His mother, my friend, sighed, “He’s not like I was as a child.” She’s right. But not in the way she thinks.
We’re used to saying that children have changed. They’re more anxious, less alive, hooked on likes. But that’s not the whole truth. I ran a small experiment among families I know. I asked parents what they played at age seven. They said: Cossacks and robbers, dodgeball, secrets under glass, climbing on garages. Then I asked their kids, “What games do you play outside with friends?” Most kids said, “We don’t play outside. What friends? I have friends on Roblox.” And here’s the difference no one talks about on the news. It’s not about gadgets. Gadgets are just tools. It’s about the disappearance of emptiness.
Emptiness is the time when you don’t know what to do. When parents aren’t dragging you to a class, when the screen is off, and it’s raining outside. Emptiness is boredom. And that’s where everything real was born. That’s where we invented games from nothing. Torn cardboard boxes became spaceships. The ditch behind the garages was the Grand Canyon. A fight with the neighbor kid was an epic of good and evil. We didn’t know the word “procrastination,” but we were great at suffering from idleness and then heroically escaping it. Today’s kids barely know boredom. The phone is always in their pocket. Waiting in line? Grab the iPad. Bored in class? Scroll memes under the desk. Parents themselves panic at any pause and hand the kid a device just so they don’t whine. As a result, the modern child loses skill number one: creating a world out of nothing. They only know how to consume ready-made worlds. And that changes their psyche harder than any TikTok.
The second difference I noticed is about fear. As kids, we were afraid of real things. Dark basements, an angry dog in the yard, the bully from the next street, dad’s belt, a bad grade in our diary. Our fears were concrete and usually local. We knew: if you cross the street in the wrong place, you might get hit by a car. Fear was a teacher, even a rough one. Modern children have different fears. They are global, abstract, and live inside their heads. A twelve-year-old girl told me, “I’m afraid the planet will die from global warming and I won’t be able to do anything.” A ten-year-old boy said, “I’m afraid my videos won’t get enough views and I’ll be nobody.” They are not afraid of pain or danger. They are afraid of their own insignificance. That’s scary in a different way. Because you can run away from a dog. But you can’t run away from the feeling that you are nobody. Social media made visibility ratings public. Every child knows how many followers they have and compares themselves to a blogger with millions. The comparison is not with the kid next to them in class, but with an abstract god on the internet. The outcome is predetermined: you always lose. Hence the anxiety that our parents only developed by age forty, but now eight-year-olds already have it.
The third difference is the most painful for parents. They don’t obey you. They obey the algorithm. When I was little, the authority was mom. Then the teacher. Then the older brother. Now the authority is the recommendation feed. A child might not believe that sugar causes pimples. But if a popular blogger says the same thing, the child starts drinking water and refuses sweets. You say “don’t stay on your phone until midnight” and it’s just noise. But if TikTok itself shuts down at 1 AM, the child sees it as justice. A substitution has happened: algorithms have become wiser, more patient, and easier for a child’s mind to understand than live parents. Because an algorithm never yells. An algorithm always gives you what you want. A parent tells you what you need. And that’s the conflict of generations 2.0. In the past, they rebelled against ideology. Now they rebel against reality. The child escapes into the screen because there the world obeys them. Or at least creates that illusion.
But here’s what truly scared me. I noticed that modern children have almost lost the ability for horizontal play. In my childhood, play was horizontal: we sat on the floor, built cities from Lego, negotiated, argued, made up. There was chaos, pauses, stupid rules that changed on the fly. All of that trained social flexibility. Today’s children are brilliant at vertical play: leveling up, earning achievements, collecting loot boxes. They have perfect concentration, reaction time, and the ability to follow instructions. But they get lost when they need to just mess around without a goal. I once suggested a group of eight-year-olds play “The Sea Is Rough.” They didn’t understand. They asked, “What’s the script? Do we freeze? Then what? Who wins? Will there be bonuses?” They need rules, rewards, a clear system. They grew up in a world where every action is rated. Like, heart, points, level. In real life, no one gives you a like for helping grandma cross the street. And that silence of reality scares them. They don’t know how to get dopamine without a green button. It’s an addiction, yes. But deeper. It’s a loss of taste for the unpredictable.
Still, I don’t want to be the old man grumbling, “Back in my day, things were better.” No. Today’s children are different because the world is different. They are smarter than us. Seriously. An average ten-year-old can find information faster than I could after two years of university. They can edit a video, set up targeted ads, tell photoshop from reality. At age five, they swipe their finger on a paper book trying to zoom in. And that’s not a defect. It’s a new lens. They are not dumber, just different. But this coin has a flip side: they cannot endure. They cannot wait. They cannot lose without anger. One boy in front of me lost a board game, flipped the table, and said, “The game lagged, it’s unfair.” He transferred the logic of the digital world, where you can restart a level, into reality, where there is no restart. And that’s a big problem, because life doesn’t give you infinite lives.
What to do about it? I’m not a teacher or a guru. But I noticed one strange thing. Those children who are doing well mentally, who don’t fall out of reality, share one common trait. They have a screen free hobby. Not an expensive “enrichment class,” but a stupid hobby. Clay sculpting, raising snails, doing jigsaw puzzles, playing an out of tune guitar. Something that doesn’t give instant results. Something where you get your hands dirty and no one gives you a like. And these children know how to be bored. They can lie on the sofa and stare at the ceiling, and they aren’t afraid. Their parents realized in time and turned off the tablet not for an hour but for a whole day. They aren’t afraid of children’s tears from boredom and let those tears happen. Because from boredom comes creativity. That’s the law. Without emptiness inside, nothing new appears.
The scariest difference of modern children is not that they are glued to their phones. It’s that they have been robbed of the right to make mistakes. Hint systems, guides, walkthroughs, answers on the internet: they live in a world where every question already has a ready made answer. They don’t need to search themselves. They don’t need to fall and get up. But falling is what makes us human. The failure in a school crush teaches you to understand feelings. A scraped knee teaches caution. Instead, they have a guide called “How to survive a breakup in 5 steps.” It works like a painkiller, but it doesn’t heal.
I don’t know what they will become. But I do know that whining about a “ruined generation” is pointless. They are our mirror. We ourselves sit on our phones for six hours a day. We ourselves trade likes for real conversations. We ourselves stopped staying up late in the kitchen together. If we want them to come back to reality, we have to go back there first. Put away the phone at dinner. Take them to the woods not for Instagram, but for silence. Sit them down next to us and say, “I feel bored with you when you’re on a screen. Let’s just talk about nothing.” That’s scary. Because we haven’t talked about nothing for a long time. Because we’re afraid of pauses. But it’s the only bridge.
In the end, the difference is just this: children used to run away from home. Now they run into home, into their room, into their phone. The door is closed, headphones are on. They are close, but they are not there. And the main question I want to leave you with, not for an answer but for you to forward this text to a friend: what did you do today to make your child want to step out of their phone into your reality? Not because you took the device away. But because being with you turned out to be more interesting than TikTok.