Child in Modernity

Every morning, as I enter the classroom, I look into the faces of my five-year-old children, who run to me with tiny steps, their eyes shining brightly. In their innocent curiosity, in their search for the world in the wing of a butterfly or a handful of soil, I see the purest form of the human soul. Yet unfortunately, today that unique period we call childhood is quietly slipping from our hands, caught between the cold and rapid gears of modern times.

Childhood is not merely about growing taller or increasing in age. It is a profound spiritual and emotional construction process that cannot be sacrificed to speed, consumption, or ready-made visuals. Today, this natural development is being replaced by a deep state of overstimulation and loneliness hidden behind bright, cold glass screens.

Our childhood was about touching the earth, falling and scraping our knees, turning a tree branch into a horse and running through the streets until the evening call to prayer. We learned the world through our senses, through mud, and by looking into our friend’s eyes. Both mind and soul are nourished precisely by this tangible, living contact.

Today, we condemn children to passive inactivity, imprisoned by the hypnotic flow of screens. The child, once an explorer, an experiencer, and a dreamer, has become a passive consumer of ready-made images. Alienation from one’s own nature and innate instincts begins in the earliest steps of life, with fingers sliding across cold glass.

Play is not something invented to occupy or distract a child; it is the child’s bread and water. It is the language through which they express feelings when words fail, and the sanctuary where they soothe their inner turmoil.

When we surrender a child to the artificial and rapid rhythm of screens:

• The Capacity for Imagination Weakens: By providing ready-made images, we take away the child’s power to build their own world in their mind.
• Patience and Focus Disappear: The bright, sudden changes on screens keep the mind in a constant pursuit of speed, leading to an inability to remain still and a tendency toward quick frustration.
• Empathy and Emotional Bonds Break: A child who spends the day staring at a screen becomes deprived of gestures, facial expressions, and the tone of human voices. They struggle to feel another’s pain or joy.

The solution is not to curse technology every time we pick it up or to roam the house like a constant enforcer of bans. We cannot take the device from the child’s hand and leave behind only a void. The issue is to open another space that touches the child’s heart.

• Turn the Home into a Warm Refuge: We must transform our homes into living nests where screens are turned off, stories are told, families sit together at the table, and games are played.
• The Healing Power of Eye Contact: A child calms and matures not by seeing thousands of colorful pixels on a screen, but by seeing the unconditional love and acceptance in their parents’ eyes. Turning off the screen and looking into the child’s eyes is the most beautiful therapy possible.
• Return to Nature and the Earth: We must entrust our children once again to the earth, the trees, and the streets. Time spent in nature restores a mind exhausted by overstimulation and reconnects the child with their natural rhythm.
• Be an Example Through Action, Not Words: Telling a child to stay away from screens while we constantly hold our phones is an empty echo. Children do not follow what we say; they observe and live by what we do.

Protecting our children’s childhood is, in fact, protecting our own future, our compassion, and our humanity. Will we leave them ready-made, soulless digital worlds—or will we leave them open, free spaces where they can build their own dreams and walk barefoot on the earth?