Feeding children screens

It is unfortunate that in today’s homes the dining table has been replaced by a play station, and spoons work only if a mobile screen is playing cartoons. Children no longer eat food, but they consume Wi-Fi signals. Parents hand over phones not as a treat but as a feeding spoon, and this has quietly become the new parenting style.

The results are plain to see: children are growing more irritable, stubborn and detached from reality. Their social lives are vanishing, replaced by a lonely digital bubble. Worse still, their mental and physical health is being sacrificed at the altar of convenience.

The solution requires more than complaints. Parents must set boundaries and model discipline by keeping their own phones aside during meals. Schools should launch awareness campaigns, encouraging physical play and face-to-face interaction. And above all, we must collectively reject the dangerous idea that gadgets are babysitters.

If we continue to feed children with screens instead of values, we will raise a generation that is full but never nourished.

AHSAN UL HAQUE

KARACHI