Ask any mother or father who is responsible for their child’s education, and the answer will come quickly: the family and the school. That is true, but it is incomplete.
Because school occupies only a few hours of a child’s day. And a child’s formation—the way they learn to see the world, to desire, and to think—does not take a break when class ends. It keeps happening in the car, on the couch, on a tablet, in the grocery line, in every moment when something competes for your child’s attention.
The problem is not that these influences exist. They always have. The problem is when they operate unnoticed, and a child is formed by chance—by whoever has the best algorithm, rather than by those who love them.
The Stories That Form Without Seeming to Teach
Every child is formed by stories long before they are formed by arguments.
Before a child can reason about what is right or wrong, they learn it through narrative: who the hero is, who the villain is, what makes someone admirable, and what happens to those who act in certain ways. A cartoon, a game, a series, a short video—each carries an embedded answer to enormous questions. What is worth wanting? What does it mean to be successful? What is funny, what is shameful, what is normal?
A child absorbs all of this without realizing they are learning, because a story does not feel like a lesson. It feels like entertainment. And precisely because it does not feel like teaching, a story can teach so powerfully.
What often goes unnoticed is that the problem is rarely one bad story. It is the diet. A child who consumes hundreds of hours each month of narratives built only to capture attention, with no concern for what they form, learns to desire what those stories sell. Not because the child chose it, but because it is what they saw most.
That stories form people is nothing new. The ancients already knew it. Plato, in Books II and III of the Republic, while discussing the education of the young, was deeply concerned with which myths and narratives children would hear from an early age, because he understood that early education is formative and that a child absorbs the impressions placed before them. The medium has changed—from fables told at night to videos that autoplay—but the mechanism is the same.
So the practical question is not, “Does my child consume too much?” It is more precise: what vision of life is embedded in the stories your child consumes most, and did you choose it?
The Words That Expand—or Shrink—the World
There is a truth about intelligence that almost no one talks about: we think with words. And the size of the world a person can think about is, to a great extent, the size of the vocabulary they possess.
A child with few words is not simply a child who speaks less. It is a child who distinguishes fewer ideas, names fewer feelings, and formulates fewer questions. When the child has only the word “boring” to describe boredom, frustration, sadness, and impatience, those four experiences blur into one. More words allow for more nuanced thought. Fewer words make thought more undifferentiated.
Language is formed through absorption, not through a lesson. A child picks up vocabulary—and with it, tone and a way of seeing life—from the sources they encounter most. If those sources are rich conversations, adults who explain things, and books being read, the child inherits a broad repertoire. If they are mostly short videos with a few repeated words and a permanently mocking tone, the child inherits that narrow repertoire and the worldview attached to it.
That is why the tone of the conversations around a child forms them as much as the content. A child notices whether adults approach the world with curiosity or cynicism, with generosity or complaint, and that emotional climate enters them before any explicit lesson does.
The question is: where do most of the words and the tone your child learns come from, and do they expand or shrink the world your child is able to think about?
Admiration as a Force of Formation
Every child becomes, to some extent, what they admire. Admiration is one of the most powerful forces in human formation because it requires neither effort nor persuasion: a child simply wants to be like the person they find extraordinary and begins to imitate that person without being told to.
The mechanism is ancient, and it is good. This is how humanity has always passed on what it had best—from master to apprentice, from parent to child. What has changed, and changed radically, is who is available to be admired.
In the past, a child admired the people they saw up close: parents, a memorable teacher, a grandparent, the saints they heard about. Today, a child has unlimited access to an endless display of people manufactured to appear admirable—influencers edited to look enviable, characters designed to fascinate. And children model themselves on the people they see most. If a child spends hours each day looking at a certain type of person, that is the type they will want to resemble, no matter how empty the image may be underneath.
This is not about forbidding a child from admiring someone outside the home. It is about recognizing a contest that is already taking place, whether you want it or not: many people are competing for your child’s admiration, and most of them neither love your child nor have any commitment to who your child will become.
The question is: who are the people your child admires most today, and would you be happy if your child became like them?
The Content That Trains Attention
This is the most invisible influence, and perhaps the most decisive. The previous three shape what a child thinks and desires. This one affects the very capacity to concentrate.
Much of today’s children’s content is designed to capture attention as intensely as possible: rapid cuts, scenes changing every few seconds, one stimulus immediately following another, instant reward with every tap. This is not an accident; it is design. And there is scientific evidence that this accelerated pace comes at a cost.
In a widely cited experiment by psychologist Angeline Lillard and colleagues, four-year-old children who watched just nine minutes of a fast-paced cartoon performed significantly worse immediately afterward on executive-function tasks—the ability to concentrate, wait, control impulses, and solve problems—than children who watched a slower educational program or spent the time drawing. It is important to be honest about the limits of this finding: these studies measure short-term effects immediately after exposure, and research on lasting consequences remains debated, with results varying across experiments. One cannot claim that an afternoon of videos “ruins” a child’s attention forever.
What the evidence does allow us to say is that the type of content matters—a great deal. And this is exactly where the most common mistake in this conversation appears: the problem was never the screen itself. The experiment itself shows this. The educational program, on the same screen for the same amount of time, did not produce the negative effect associated with the fast-paced cartoon. The screen was the same. What changed was the content.
A screen is a medium, and a medium is neutral. The same screen that delivers a flood of shallow stimulation can deliver a live class with a teacher forming a child’s reasoning, a good documentary, a worthwhile reading, or a conversation with someone on the other side of the world. Condemning screens as a whole is simplistic and false, especially at a time when so much good can happen through them.
The distinction that matters is not between “with a screen” and “without a screen.” It is between content that asks something of a child—asking the child to think, follow, and stay with an idea—and content that asks nothing, delivering only stimulation and requiring passivity. Two children can spend the same amount of time in front of a screen and come away very differently, depending on what that screen asked of them.
The question here is the most decisive one: does what your child consumes ask for concentration and depth, or does it merely keep your child entertained while delivering stimulation?
From Guilt to Intentionality
If you have reached this point with a certain heaviness, that is understandable. It is uncomfortable to realize how many forces are shaping your child without any of them having been consciously chosen.
But the goal here is not to produce guilt. It is to create awareness, because the two are different and lead in opposite directions. Guilt paralyzes. Awareness frees, because it gives back a power that may have seemed lost: the power to participate.
The solution was never to “take everything away” from a child. It is neither possible nor desirable to raise a child in a vacuum, far from every story, every screen, and every influence. The world is part of a child’s formation, and it should be. What is needed is not isolation, but intentionality.
Intentionality is the difference between formation that happens by accident and formation that happens on purpose. It means no longer being a spectator of who your child is becoming and becoming a participant again. Not by controlling every stimulus—which is impossible—but by carefully and confidently choosing the stories, words, references, and kinds of content that surround your child. And above all, by knowing what is there.
Because the truth is simple and serious: your child is being formed now, at this very moment. The only question is by whom—and into whom.
And that is a question no algorithm should answer in your place.
Discover Acutis Academy and an education that uses technology intentionally, in service of your child’s integral formation.
Further Reading
- PLATO. The Republic, Books II and III. On the formation of character through narratives and the care required in choosing the stories presented to children.
- LILLARD, A. S.; PETERSON, J. “The Immediate Impact of Different Types of Television on Young Children's Executive Function.” Pediatrics, 2011. The experiment on fast-paced content and executive function in preschool children.
- LILLARD, A. S.; DRELL, M. B.; RICHEY, E. M.; BOGUSZEWSKI, K.; SMITH, E. D. “Further Examination of the Immediate Impact of Television on Children's Executive Function.” Developmental Psychology, 2015. A further examination of the original study.
- HINTEN, A. et al. “Meta-Analytic Review of the Short-Term Effects of Media Exposure on Children's Attention and Executive Functions.” Developmental Science, 2025. A review that brings the evidence together and acknowledges variation across studies.
