You likely come across a child around the age of 5 playing on an iPad at a restaurant. At first glance, this is not a problem at all; the child who would otherwise be yelling and crying is completely immersed in the iPad screen to the extent that it ignores its loud natural behavior. This is an issue. The fact that the child is ignoring their natural behavior must mean something, perhaps that the iPad has complete control over its actions. 

The reason that this issue is so dire is because of the control the iPad has over the child. The iPad is the real world’s communication with the child, controlling how it thinks and acts, and molding its personality into a way that the iPad teaches.

According to Holistic Child Psychology, excessive screen time can cause children to become less social because they are overstimulated by the screen. The reason that this is a greater issue in children than adults is that children are more susceptible to addiction because they tend to do whatever pleases them.

The major issue that arises with addiction is that the way that the iPad manipulates children is widely uncontrolled, and the content that the child is exposed to can cause the child to be taught inappropriately. 

For example, many children whose parents allowed them to play the popular first-person shooter game, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2012), were in a sense, “raised” by the game. This means that they were exposed to possibly explicit content at a young age without the consent of a parent.

This gets worse when considering that grown adults can verbally communicate with children when they are playing, meaning that they can, of course, help them in the game, but also do other malicious activities, such as expose them to adult content just for the fun of messing with a child.

However frightening this might sound to parents, it generally is not a big deal. A child being manipulated by a video game is the main result of insufficient exposure to real-life situations and excessive exposure to video games. 

Most children who are exposed to real situations outside of video games understand the boundaries of decision-making, and can even handle a situation where a grown man is communicating with them using explicit language.