Recently on Instagram I saw a video of a few children being recorded while they were exposed to excessive screen time, contrasted with children who did not spend hours on electronic devices. It focused on highlighting how the eyes of those children are affected by blue light and how much the way they look differs from the “intact” look of children with restricted screen time. The difference was too great to go unnoticed. Children exposed to excessive blue light had this strange look which I sometimes poetically call “a gaze marked by a yearning for reason”, where you can clearly see that there is not a single thought to be found behind those eyes. And as I mostly use this term to describe the expression of my peers who I encounter in tutorial groups at university every day, I am an unquestionable expert at recognising this specific look.
It is heartbreaking to see how the children of today, who will become the architects of tomorrow, fry their brains and abandon curiosity, which youth is supposed to trigger. I work as an English tutor and I mainly teach children in primary schools. I can easily spot the pattern among children who notoriously answer “video gaming” when asked how they spend their free time. One pupil of mine recently said he did not know what a hobby was, which left me quite speechless. They are uninterested in the world, as the only world that matters to them is the virtual reality they are so familiar with.
It is such a rarity to encounter a child with a passion that, when I had a tutoring session with a girl who said she loved making bracelets in her free time, I almost stopped the session just to listen to her talk about how she had taught herself. And when she told me that other children at school laughed at her for wearing her colourful bracelets, I prayed she would never think about joining the muddle-headed army of children who do not see beyond their Wi-Fi range.
Rita Wiśniewska, a third-year European Law student