This is what frightens me.
Really, just that — it frightens me. And I have to write about it, because I see it every day and I can no longer remain silent.
You get on any bus in Warsaw. You look to the left, to the right. Everybody is sitting with a phone in their hand. The mother, the father, the grandmother, the teenagers, me. But that is not what worries me most. What worries me most is the child in a pram, holding a phone in their little hand. Eighteen months old. A year old. Sometimes even younger. They hold this device with both hands, looking at the screen with an absolute concentration that a three-year-old does not show for any human face.
You walk into the waiting room of a paediatric hospital. Thirty children with their parents. From every little table a screen sticks out. Mum has hers, the child has its. A silence that you will not hear in any other waiting room in the world — because no one is talking to anyone. Here and there somebody is smacking their lips watching a short video. The nurse calls the patient — twice, because the child did not hear. They were watching.
You walk into a restaurant on a Saturday. The family at the next table is ordering lunch. After three minutes a tablet stand appears on the table and the child is already eating pasta in front of a cartoon. The parents settle in comfortably as well — at last they can talk. Only not to each other and not to the child. Everyone is looking into their own. Three people at one table, three separate worlds.
And we do not call this a problem. Because “that’s the way it is today”, “the world has changed”, “children have to learn technology”, “what was I supposed to do to calm them down”.
Let me name what we are actually doing.
An infant with a phone in their hand
American paediatricians (the American Academy of Pediatrics) have been saying the same thing for a long time, in a way so simple it is hard to twist: zero screen until the second year of life. After the age of two — a maximum of one hour a day, with an adult next to the child, with deliberately chosen content. After the age of six — a maximum of an hour and a half. A personal phone — not before the age of thirteen.
These numbers sound abstract until we look at what the actual Polish family reality of 2026 looks like.
A mother comes into the preschool to pick up her child. In her hand she is holding the child’s phone — its own, not a shared one. Three-year-old Filip gets it right after he takes off his slippers, “so he doesn’t whine on the way home”. After leaving the preschool Filip watches cartoons in the pram. At home, during lunch, he also watches. Mum says: “otherwise he won’t eat, that’s how it’s been from the start”. In the evening, during the bath, Filip has the phone on a shelf, because “otherwise he won’t get into the tub”. Before sleep — three more cartoons on YouTube, so he will fall asleep.
Filip spends four, five, six hours a day in front of a screen. He is three years old. The paediatric guidelines say: a maximum of one hour a day with an adult next to him. Filip’s mother has never heard of these guidelines, and if she hears them — she will not believe them, because “Anka’s child is the same and nothing is wrong with him”.
Let us come back to the facts.
What happens in a child’s brain when they look at a screen
I will skip here all the publications the internet is full of. Let me say it more simply — from what I see in the preschool room.
A child who has had constant access to screens since birth does not learn to focus on anything that is not a dynamic, colourful, fast-changing image. Cartoons for the youngest children today are designed so that a single shot lasts a second and a half. Sometimes a second. Every longer shot loses the competition, because the child’s attention drops and the parent switches.
That child, when they come to our classroom — where everything is slow, quiet, static, calm in colour, where working with material lasts twenty minutes without any change — does not know what to do with themselves. They jump from shelf to shelf. They pick up material, put it down after half a minute. They come back to the teacher: “I’m bored”. They cannot sit with one task for longer than three minutes, because the habit of focusing is not in the brain — throughout their whole life so far they have been taught that the stimulus comes by itself and you do not have to look for it.
Concentrating attention is a competence that grows with practice. Just like the calf muscle — it will not grow if you do not walk. The brain of a child who for two years has watched screens that switch every second does not practise focusing. Quite the opposite — it learns to jump. And then in two years’ time the same brain is supposed to go to school, where the teacher explains something for ten minutes without any animation.
Blue light, which a child’s eyes should not see after sunset
Here we are talking about physiology, not pedagogy.
The human eye, every human’s eye, is built in such a way that — on the basis of the amount and the colour of the light reaching it — it regulates the production of melatonin, the sleep hormone. At sunset, when the light shifts to warmer, redder, darker tones — the pituitary gland begins to release melatonin. Two hours later we are sleepy. Three hours later — we fall asleep.
The screen of a smartphone, a tablet, a television emits strong blue light, whose wavelength is the same as that of midday sun. For the brain — it is midday. Regardless of the fact that the clock says 21:00. Melatonin is not released. The child does not become sleepy. Or they fall asleep, but into a very shallow, restless sleep, from which they wake at five in the morning exhausted.
In the preschool room you can see this immediately. A child who in the evening watches cartoons on a tablet until ten p.m. comes to us in the morning green. Sleep-deprived. Irritable. Tearful. After lunch they want to sleep so badly that during the nap they fall asleep in three minutes — and then will not get up.
And the parents say: “he just doesn’t sleep much”, “she has been like this forever”, “he has an owl rhythm”.
Well, he has not been like this forever. He was different for two years, until the parents started showing him cartoons before bed. Blue light is for a child — with a very thin, still-developing retina, with a plastic nervous system — far more harmful than for an adult. And a parent who themselves sits on the phone until midnight and also does not get enough sleep in the morning does not see the connection, because these are two instances of the same harmful practice.
A cartoon that is a drug
Here we get into the topic parents find hardest to listen to.
Every application, every game, every social network, every cartoon service for children is designed by behavioural psychologists to hold the user’s attention for as long as possible. This is not an accident. This is an entire industry — it is called the “attention economy” and has been operating for more than twenty years.
The mechanism is simple. A child’s brain — every child, every brain — releases dopamine when something new, colourful, unexpected happens. Dopamine gives pleasure. After a few dozen repetitions the brain learns: this gesture → this effect → this pleasure. A loop is formed. After a few weeks the brain needs an ever stronger stimulus to obtain the same dose of dopamine. That is exactly the same mechanism as in substance addictions.
A cartoon that changes its shot every second is, for a two-year-old, a stronger dopaminergic stimulus than most of the things this child can experience in nature. A walk in the park with mum — boring. Blocks on the floor — boring. A book — very boring. Because all these things are slower than the cartoon. The brain of a child, once exposed to the intensity of digital stimulation, loses sensitivity to ordinary reality.
And that is why later the same child does not want to go on a bicycle. Does not want to play with blocks. Does not want to listen to a story. Does not want anything. They want only the screen. And if they do not get it — they cry, scream, fall into a tantrum. Because their brain is in withdrawal. Yes. A three-year-old in dopamine withdrawal.
And the parent, instead of seeing in this a signal that they have just done something very bad to the child, says: “give him the phone, let him calm down”. And the cycle closes.
A generation that does not know how to be bored
In the Montessori method there is this concept: boredom as the beginning of creativity. A child who has become bored — will soon think something up. With a stick. With a piece of string. With an empty box. With a plaster on the elbow. The child’s brain is a factory of ideas; it only needs an empty field to start running.
That empty field is today being systematically taken away from the child.
A child who starts to get bored in the car — gets a tablet. A child who starts to get bored in a restaurant — gets mum’s phone. A child who starts to get bored at grandma’s — gets YouTube on a laptop. A child who starts to get bored before sleep — gets a cartoon. A child who starts to get bored in a pram, on the way to the park — gets a phone.
At some point that child’s brain gives up on inventing. Why should it invent anything when, every time it starts to jump between thoughts (which is precisely what boredom is), an external stimulus appears that stops it. The brain learns that its own ideas are unnecessary.
And in ten years’ time the same brain, as a thirteen-year-old, does not know what to do with itself on a Sunday. It has in itself no practice of being alone with its own thoughts. They write to mum: “I’m bored”. Mum writes back: “play on your phone”. And the cycle continues.
A three-year-old with TikTok. A ten-year-old with depression.
I will skip the detailed data on teenagers here — that is a topic for a separate article, and you have read about it in the papers anyway. Let me only repeat one number that should make all of us pause.
The frequency of depression among teenagers in developed countries has risen by around fifty percent in the last fifteen years — and the growth curve coincides exactly with the curve of smartphone uptake among children. That is not a coincidental correlation. That is not “some other factor”. The researcher who described this most loudly is Jonathan Haidt — and even his critics do not undermine the number itself. They only question the interpretation.
Meanwhile a Polish parent buys their seven-year-old child a first smartphone “because everyone in the class has one”. This smartphone has access to TikTok. To Instagram. To YouTube, where with one click you find content that no adult brain should want. The algorithm — and TikTok has the best algorithm in the world — within thirty minutes learns what most holds this particular seven-year-old in front of the screen. And it will serve them this for the next six years.
That seven-year-old, in six years’ time, lands in the teenage depression group. And nobody is able to say why. “He was doing well at school”, “he had everything”, “he had no problems at home”. Except that he did. He had the TikTok algorithm, which over five thousand hours had taught him that his body is too fat, that his life is too boring, that everyone around him is happier, that suicide is simply one of the options.
I know these are sharp words. I would prefer not to have to write them.
Mum has her own. The child has theirs.
There is one more observation that appears in almost every family I talk to.
The child learned the screen because the adults around them are on a screen all the time. You cannot tell a small child “don’t use the phone” if mum does not put hers down during dinner. You cannot forbid a child TikTok if dad spends two hours on it every evening. You cannot limit cartoons for a child if the television in the living room is on all day as background.
A child does not learn what we say to them. They learn what we do.
And here lies the dramatic truth of today’s Polish family: the adults themselves are addicted to screens. They cannot eat a meal without a phone next to them. They cannot put on the laundry without a podcast. They cannot go to bed without scrolling through Instagram until midnight. And out of this spiral — their own addiction — they drag the child, before the child even knows what is happening to them.
This is not a judgment. This is the state of fact I get to observe at every parents’ meeting. Everyone sits with phones in their hands, even while I am speaking. Some do not even try to hide it. The phone is an extension of the hand — both theirs and their children’s.
What adults can do — very concretely
I am not in the business of giving abstract advice. I am in the business of what works in practice. Let me list the concrete things I did at home, with my own children — and which I recommend to the parents in our institution.
1. Zero screen in the first two years of life. Firmly. Without exceptions. Even if mum is cooking, the child can be with mum in the kitchen in a safe chair, can observe, can play with a pot. That is normal life. It does not need a cartoon on a tablet for that.
2. Until the age of six — only with an adult next to them, a deliberately chosen cartoon, a maximum of forty minutes a day. That is: not YouTube on the principle of “I’ll launch it and let it run”. Not TikTok. Not apps with recommendations. A specific cartoon that the parent chose, knows, will watch together and then will talk about with the child. Forty minutes is two episodes of a short cartoon. Not more.
3. Screens leave the bedroom. All of them. Mum’s, dad’s, the child’s. The bedroom is for sleep and rest. The phone charges in the kitchen. The tablet stays in the living room. There is not even a television in the bedroom. After eight p.m. the entire household leaves screens. After a week of this habit, the sleep quality of the entire family improves noticeably. That is not a theory — that is my own observation.
4. Lunches and dinners without screens. Also without the parent’s phone next to the plate. The table is a place for conversation, not for sitting separately together. If the parents have nothing to say to a three-year-old at the table — they have to learn. That is a competence that grows with practice. The first weeks are awkward, then they are not.
5. Boredom is allowed. A child who is bored does not die. A child who is bored will soon think something up. Give them twenty minutes for that. Do not offer alternatives. Do not propose the screen as a solution. Trust that their brain has resources — because it does.
6. The first personal smartphone — not before the age of thirteen. A non-smart phone (for calls and texts) — from the age of ten, if it must be. But a smartphone with access to social media — not earlier. And even then with deliberate parental restriction of apps in the first two years. This is a conversation that has to be had with all the parents in the class, simultaneously — because the argument “everyone has one” is the only argument children know. If nobody has one, the argument disappears.
An appeal — out of care, not judgment
I know this text may be difficult for you.
If your child is six months old and you still have not touched them with a screen — well done. Do not give up. The first two years are the foundation.
If your child is one or two and is already watching cartoons — please, start withdrawing them tomorrow. A week without screens is enough for the child’s brain to reset. The first three days are hell (screaming, crying, pleading). On the fourth day the child starts to look for other things. On the seventh day they do not ask about the phone. That is the actual observation from hundreds of families.
If your child is three, four, five and is already deep in screens — it is also not too late. Harder, longer, but still possible. You have to start with your own phone, not with the child. Because as long as you sit on Instagram in the evening, you will not forbid them YouTube. Start with yourself. Hold out. Show the child that an adult can also do without.
And if your child is ten, eleven, twelve and already has their own smartphone — negotiate back. Turn on parental controls. Block TikTok. Block Instagram. Limit daily time. The child will protest — but the child will also have, by the third or fourth month, better sleep, more energy and more thoughts of their own. Your ten-year-old can still be saved.
I am doing this not so that you will feel guilty. I am doing it because every day in the preschool room I see children whose attention, speech, sleep, emotions are visibly disturbed by what we are doing to them at home — and none of us yet knows what will grow out of this first-from-birth-with-phones generation of children. The first data are frightening. The next will be worse. By the time they emerge, for these children it will be too late.
But for those who do not yet have a phone — it still is not.
About the author
Katarzyna Lis — founder of MOC Montessori Nursery and Preschool in the Białołęka district of Warsaw, where she works day-to-day as a teacher in the preschool group. She holds a degree in elementary education of Montessori Pedagogy, a qualification as a daytime caregiver, and a certificate in Catechesis of the Good Shepherd — a combination that reflects her holistic approach to the development of the child: their body, emotions, relationships, independence and inner world.
In her everyday work with children she does not “run activities” — she accompanies. She creates a space in which the child’s development happens naturally, at their own rhythm, and where the adult is there to look carefully and respond. The same philosophy — observation and response to the child’s signals — underpins her approach to the role of screens in upbringing.
Privately, a mother of four, combining the experience of motherhood with a passion for her work. This text was written for Dzieckologia as a practitioner’s voice — from the perspective of a Montessori institution that has, for years, looked at the child as a competent person from the very first months of life.
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Katarzyna Lis
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