What We Feed the Mind

The current debate about children and screen time is real, and the concerns are serious. Studies on sleep disruption, on shortened attention spans, on the psychological effects of algorithmic content designed to provoke outrage or insecurity, all of this belongs in the conversation. Yet the instinct to simply ban or limit, while understandable, misses something. A child who grows up behind a wall, without ever learning to read a news article critically, to ask who produced a video and why, to notice when content is designed to humiliate rather than to inform, that child is not prepared. The wall comes down eventually. It always does.