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The first Toy Story movie came out in 1995, the year Internet Explorer was introduced and Amazon was still in its infancy. Tamagotchi, the tiny, pixelated video game that had hundreds of millions scrambling to keep their digital creatures alive, didn’t reach the U.S. for another two years. That year, Pixar’s ultimate villain was an 11-year-old boy who got a little too creative with rearranging the heads and arms of his secretly anthropomorphic toys.
Thirty years later, Toy Story’s new antagonist is nothing so anachronistic as a child who plays with plastic cars and action figures. The villain of Toy Story 5, as suggested by the teaser trailer released last week, is a digital tablet. “The age of toys,” title cards read, “is over?”
The age of toys may not be over, but Pixar is right: It has been overshadowed by the iPad age. Interviewees at NPR balked at the idea of 6- to 12-year-olds requesting iPads for Christmas in the salad days of 2010. Today, children are getting them while they’re still in diapers.
“Forty percent of children have a tablet by age 2,” Common Sense Media reports. “While their screen time remains steady at about 2.5 hours per day, there has been a shift in how screen time is being used. Gaming time has surged 65% in four years, and traditional TV viewing has declined, while short-form video platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts are on the rise.” Just two years later, by age 4, the number of children with tablets rises to nearly 60%.
Tablets are in children’s hands everywhere, from restaurants to airplanes to the kitchen table, so Mom and Dad can get a break. Don’t forget that the phenomenon has earned its own term: “iPad kids.” I recently overheard a father at my 3-year-old son’s T-ball game threatening his little slugger with “no iPad and no internet” if he didn’t behave. Members of Generation Z, aged 15-28, and Generation Alpha, aged 1-15, are growing up in a time of rapid digitization. Their Generation X and millennial parents, who had much less access to digital technology, if any, in their formative years, are making up the answers as they go along.
Many of us seem to grasp the idea that screens are generally bad for our children. But the problem, and perhaps the reason tablets remain so ubiquitous among the juice box-drinking crowd, is that we don’t take the time to consider why this kind of screen time is bad for our children — and what exactly it’s doing to them.
The making of an iPad kid
It would be false to say we don’t yet have data on screen time’s effects. The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt has become somewhat of a guru for parents worried about their chlidren’s tech intake. Haidt blames the epidemic of anxiety and depression among young people — more than 30% of adolescents have an anxiety disorder — on smartphones. And even parents know excessive screen time fries your attention span.
Children who spend too much time glued to their iPads aren’t just courting mental health issues and ADHD, though. American Psychological Association research shows, disturbingly, that screen time use is a vicious circle of emotional dependency: “Spending too much time on screens may cause emotional and behavioral problems in children — and those problems can lead to even more screen use.”
A whopping 1 in 5 children under 8 is using a screen to regulate emotions, according to Common Sense Media. Screens aren’t just a form of distraction and quick dopamine. They are becoming like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors for children. Sad? You have to wait until you’re older to get a prescription for Zoloft. But you can pick up an iPad and drown your problems with Ms. Rachel today.
“Frequently using digital devices to soothe young children may backfire,” suggests a headline from the University of Michigan’s academic medical center. The author interviews a pediatrician who conducted a study on 3- to 5-year-old children using smartphones and tablets as emotional coping mechanisms. The results suggest that tablet use “was associated with increased emotional dysregulation in kids, particularly in boys.”
Yet the study concludes gently that “pediatric health care professionals may wish to encourage alternate calming approaches.” “May” is too soft a word. They absolutely should. My pediatrician wants to know whether we have smokers or guns in our home. Why doesn’t he ask if we have iPads?
All of these problems are equally disturbing. If we already have data to suggest that early, personalized screen time is redesigning children’s attention spans and ability to be happy, isn’t that enough? Should we really care about emotional regulation issues, too? The answer is yes, and not only because children deserve to develop healthy coping mechanisms, but also because this particular side effect gets to the heart of how our unfettered internet access is changing us all for the worse.
Do screens make us less human?
“He actually changed my life, literally.” That’s what an 8-year-old who beta-tested a toy from the San Francisco-based startup Bondu said. “Say goodbye to screens,” its website proclaims over video clips of children in whimsical magician and superhero attire playing with velvety stuffed dinosaurs. But there’s a catch. The tech world isn’t suddenly trusting in plushies to become more exciting than screens. But it is investing in artificial intelligence.
Bondu bills its product as an “AI-powered plush that inspires imaginative play through two-way conversations.” Children get a stuffed dinosaur for Christmas, and suddenly, Mom and Dad are off the hook for both screentime guilt and playdates. Win-win?
The problem with screens, however, isn’t just the blue light or the overstimulating noises and colors. It’s the fact that children are turning to them for emotional validation that they should be finding from parents and friends. Swapping the screen with an artificially intelligent stuffed animal won’t help children become more creative or self-sufficient. It will just shift their attention from one shiny object to another.
Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, told the San Francisco Standard that these toys run the risk of “emotional entanglement,” saying that “as a broad social experiment, it is completely reckless.”
And no, this issue isn’t suffering from a lack of research.
“We have way more evidence than we need right now to recognize this is a really bad idea, and the upsides are almost nonexistent,” he said.
THE LATEST TIKTOK TREND: ‘I WANNA BE A MOTHER’
Unfortunately, Bondu is not alone. The paper reports that “the total market for smart toys is expected to grow from $2.2 billion in 2024 to $6.4 billion by 2032.” As early screen time for children becomes more taboo, frenzied parents are going to be scrambling to find alternatives that get children back to a kind of Christopher Robin childhood. But the answer isn’t AI toys, which steal children’s creativity by letting them outsource their thinking to an all-knowing stuffed cyborg. Somehow, I doubt the hero of Toy Story 5 will turn out to be AI.
What children really need is to learn how to be human, not from screens or artificial intelligence, but from the real humans in their lives. The more “screen time” becomes a bad word, the more tech companies will attempt to capitalize on the zeitgeist by offering their own innovations. But putting newer, different tech into old-school toys is nothing more than hiding the same wolf in a stuffed sheep’s clothing.