I turned off my kids' devices. They came back to life.

By Wendy Yurgo, Op-ed contributor Wednesday, August 26, 2026

I recently found myself defending a decision I never thought would require much defense: first restricting, then eliminating digital platforms and gaming for my own children. I had watched their attachment to the devices grow, along with changes in attitude and behavior that concerned me.

What finally settled the question was what happened when the devices were substantially restricted. The difference was noticeable. They were more present, more engaged with the world around them, and the constant pull back toward a screen began to loosen.

What surprised me was not disagreement. Parents disagree about technology all the time. What surprised me was how difficult it has become to imagine childhood without these devices, as though access to an iPad, a gaming platform, or a constant stream of digital stimulation has moved from privilege to necessity.

I did not arrive at this decision casually. For more than two years, I have researched the dangers children face online, work that ultimately led me to publish seven pieces on Roblox and the 764 terror network.

After everything I learned, I realized there was a deeper part of the story I had not yet told.

Long before we reach the predator, we need to talk about the developing brain.

These dangers are different but not entirely disconnected. The same engagement architecture designed to keep a child online longer also increases the time that child is exposed to everyone and everything in that digital world. More engagement means more opportunity for interaction, and when children are involved, some of those interactions become dangerous.

The human brain does not finish developing at 18. Maturation continues well into the 20s. The prefrontal cortex and the systems responsible for planning, judgment, impulse control, decision-making, and self-regulation are among the last to mature. There is no birthday when a switch flips and the brain is suddenly complete. We are placing extraordinarily sophisticated attention-capture technology into the hands of children whose capacity for judgment, inhibition, and self-regulation is still under construction.

Once I understood that, the conversation stopped being about “screen time.”

It became a question about what is happening on the other side of the screen.

In 2026, the American Academy of Pediatrics shifted from counting hours in front of a screen to examining a child’s digital ecosystem. Today’s children interact with games, social media, algorithms, artificial intelligence, notifications, personalized recommendations, and platforms that continuously respond to their behavior.

The AAP describes deliberate design choices, autoplay, endless feeds, notifications, rewards, and personalized recommendations intended to capture attention and shape behavior. These are not accidental features. They are part of an engagement model built to keep the user there.

Now consider the brain on the receiving end.

Children and adolescents are highly responsive to novelty, reward, and social feedback at the same time the systems for inhibition, judgment, delayed gratification, and impulse control are still developing. On one side is a brain learning how to regulate attention and resist impulses. On the other is technology built by some of the most sophisticated companies in the world, whose business models often depend on capturing and holding that attention.

We still describe the resulting conflict as a failure of discipline. The child will not get off the iPad. He cannot stop playing. She checks her phone constantly. He becomes angry when the game is removed.

Researchers are beginning to examine what repeated exposure to these systems may mean for the developing brain.

Children need boundaries and parents must enforce them. But treating this as merely a contest between parental discipline and childhood self-control ignores the third participant: the product itself.

A longitudinal study in JAMA Pediatrics followed young adolescents for three years and used functional MRI to examine neural responses to anticipated social rewards and punishments. Children who habitually checked social media showed different developmental trajectories in regions involved in reward anticipation, salience, motivation, and cognitive control.

The study does not prove social media caused those differences, and the researchers did not claim it did. But we should not dismiss the finding simply because causation remains unproven.

The mechanism is familiar. A child checks for a message, notification, or reward. Sometimes one appears; sometimes it does not. That uncertainty itself can reinforce the behavior, because the next check might deliver what the last one did not.

Many games use similar reinforcement. Unpredictable rewards can be particularly effective at sustaining engagement because the child never knows when the next one will come.

The technology is also learning from the child. Modern platforms collect behavioral data, personalize content, and refine predictions about what will keep a particular user engaged.

A television does not study the child watching it. A bicycle does not collect data on the child riding it. The games many of us grew up playing did not observe millions of users and continuously improve an engagement system.

Today’s platforms can.

At what point does personalization become manipulation when the person being personalized is 8, 9, or 12 years old?

For children who already struggle with attention, inhibition, or impulse control, the concern becomes even harder to ignore. A systematic review and meta-analysis found an association between ADHD symptoms and gaming disorder, involving both inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity. The research does not establish that gaming causes ADHD. It does suggest that children who already have difficulty regulating attention and impulses may be particularly susceptible to problematic gaming.

Most children who play games do not develop gaming disorder, and many games involve creativity, strategy, and skill. We do not need to claim every child with an iPad is addicted to question whether products deliberately designed around repeated engagement and reward deserve greater scrutiny when the users are children with developing brains.

The concern is not limited to attention. Emotional regulation matters too. A developing child has to learn how to tolerate frustration, delay gratification, and recover from disappointment without an immediate reward waiting to replace the discomfort. Yet many digital platforms are designed to do the opposite, delivering novelty, stimulation, or reward the moment boredom or frustration appears.

Parents should also notice what happens when the device is removed. Some children put it down and move on. Others bargain, become angry or agitated, fixate on its return, or struggle to find anything else equally satisfying. We have grown so used to these reactions that we often interpret them simply as evidence the child loves the game.

Difficulty disengaging may itself be information.

American Psychiatric Association has identified “Internet Gaming Disorder” as a condition warranting further study. It’s not that ordinary gaming is pathological. The point is simpler: compulsive and problematic gaming are real enough that major medical institutions are defining and studying them.

What troubles me most is how completely we have placed the entire burden on parents while rarely questioning the architecture they are fighting. Parents have real responsibility. We should be far more willing to remove devices, restrict games, withstand a child’s anger, and refuse to let digital entertainment become the automatic reward for good behavior or the cure for boredom.

But parental responsibility and corporate responsibility are not mutually exclusive.

If a company manufactured a physical product for children, deliberately built in mechanisms to make them use it longer, continuously collected data on each child’s interaction, refined the product with that data, and monetized the child’s continued engagement, we would never answer concerns by saying parents simply needed better discipline.

Because this product lives behind a screen, that has essentially been our response.

The AAP is now calling for child-centered design, stronger privacy and safety defaults, greater control over algorithmic feeds, autoplay off by default, fewer designs that prolong engagement, and greater accountability for companies whose products reach children.

My work on 764 began with predators. I wanted parents to understand who could be waiting on the other side of a game their children considered harmless. That work remains critical. What has changed is that I am now looking earlier in the chain.

Before the predator appears, there is already a child, a device, and a developing brain. There are rewards teaching the child to return. There are notifications interrupting whatever came before them. There are platforms growing more sophisticated at predicting what will keep the child engaged.

We do not yet know everything this is doing to a generation of developing brains. Anyone claiming otherwise is getting ahead of the science. But we know enough that continuing to shrug and call it “screen time” is no longer acceptable.

The question is no longer whether our children spend too much time looking at screens. The question is what happens when the most powerful attention-capture technology ever developed meets a brain that is still learning how to control its own attention.

We should have started asking that question years ago.