The answer is uncomfortable, because a child's formation does not happen only in the classroom. It happens all day long, quietly, through forces we almost never choose deliberately. Ask any father or mother who is responsible for their child's education, and the answer will come quickly: the family and the school. That is true, but incomplete. School occupies only a few hours of a child's day. And formation — the way a child learns 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 the tablet, in the grocery-store 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 act unnoticed and the child is formed by accident, by whoever has the best algorithm, rather than by those who love them.

1. Stories: the formation that does not look like teaching

Every child is formed by stories long before being formed by arguments. Before a child can reason about what is right or wrong, they learn through narrative: who the hero is, who the villain is, what makes someone admirable, and what happens to those who act in a certain way. A cartoon, a game, a series, or a short video carries within it an answer to enormous questions: what is worth wanting? What does it mean to be successful? What is funny, shameful, or 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 look like teaching, story teaches with such force. What often goes unnoticed is that the problem is rarely one bad story. It is the diet. A child who consumes hundreds of hours of narratives designed 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, when discussing the education of the young, was deeply concerned with the myths and narratives children would hear from an early age. He understood that early childhood is profoundly formative and that children receive the impressions presented to them. The medium has changed — from fables told at night to videos that autoplay — but the mechanism remains the same. The practical question: what view of life is embedded in the stories your child consumes most? Were you the one who chose it?
Child absorbed in a tablet, with the screen light softly reflected on the face
Stories form precisely because they do not look like a lesson.

2. Language: words expand or shrink the world

There is a truth about intelligence that almost no one mentions: we think with words. And the size of the world a person can think about is, to a large 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 become one in the mind, indistinguishable. Those who have more words think with greater nuance. Those who have fewer think in blocks. Language is formed by absorption, not only through lessons. A child gathers vocabulary — and with it, a tone and a way of seeing life — from the sources they spend the most time with. If those sources are rich conversations, adults who explain things, and books that are read, the child inherits a broad repertoire. If they are mostly short videos with a few repeated words and a constant tone of mockery, the child inherits a narrow repertoire and the worldview attached to it. That is why the tone of conversations around a child forms just as much as their content. Children notice whether adults approach the world with curiosity or cynicism, generosity or complaint. That atmosphere enters them before any explicit lesson does. The practical question: where do most of the words and the tone your child learns come from? Do they expand or shrink the world your child is able to think about?

3. Admiration: every child imitates what they consider great

Every child becomes, to some extent, what they admire. Admiration is one of the most powerful engines of human formation because it requires neither effort nor persuasion: a child simply wants to be like the person they consider 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 father to child. What has changed, and changed radically, is who is available to be admired. In the past, a child mainly admired those seen up close: parents, a remarkable teacher, a grandparent, the saints they heard about. Today, children have unlimited access to an endless display of people manufactured to look admirable: influencers edited to appear enviable, characters designed to captivate. And children model themselves on those they see most. If a child spends hours every day watching a certain type of person, that is the type they will want to resemble, no matter how empty it 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: many people are competing for your child's admiration, and most of them do not love your child or have any commitment to who that child will become. The practical question: who are the people your child admires most today? Would you be happy if your child became like them?
Father and son folding paper airplanes as the child watches and imitates the adult
Admiration forms because, sooner or later, it becomes imitation.

4. Attention: content also trains the ability to concentrate

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 ability 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, an instant reward with every tap. This is not an accident; it is design. There is scientific evidence that this accelerated pace can come at a cost, at least in the short term. In a widely cited experiment, researchers Angeline Lillard and Jennifer Peterson randomly assigned sixty four-year-old children to three groups: one watched nine minutes of a fast-paced cartoon; another watched a slower educational cartoon; and the third spent the same amount of time drawing. Immediately afterward, the children in the first group performed significantly worse on executive-function tasks — skills related to concentration, waiting, impulse control, and problem solving — than the children in the other two groups. We need to be honest about what this finding can show. The study measured immediate effects, right after exposure. It does not allow us to claim that an afternoon of videos permanently "ruins" a child's attention. Later research has continued to examine short- and long-term effects, and results depend on the content, age, context, and design of each study. What the evidence does allow us to say is that the type of content matters — a great deal. This is exactly where the most common mistake in this conversation appears: the problem was never the screen itself. The experiment itself proves the point. The educational program, shown on the same screen for the same amount of time, did not produce the same negative effect as the fast-paced cartoon. The screen was the same. What changed was what was on it. A screen is a medium. The same screen that delivers a flood of shallow stimuli can offer a live class with a teacher shaping a child's reasoning, a good documentary, a good reading experience, or a conversation with someone on the other side of the world. Condemning screens as a whole is imprecise, especially at a time when so much good also happens through them. The distinction that matters is not simply between "with a screen" and "without a screen." It is between content that asks something of the child — that asks the child to think, follow, and dwell on something — and content that asks nothing, merely delivers stimulation and demands passivity. Two children can spend the same amount of time in front of a screen and come away from the experience in completely different ways, depending on what that screen asked of them. The practical question: does what your child consumes ask them to concentrate and go deeper, or does it merely keep them entertained while delivering stimulation?

From guilt to awareness

If you have reached this point with a certain weight on your chest, that is understandable. It is uncomfortable to realize how many forces are forming your child without any of them having been deliberately chosen. But the goal is not to create guilt. It is to create awareness. The two lead in opposite directions. Guilt paralyzes. Awareness sets us free, because it gives parents back a power that seemed lost: the power to participate. The answer was never to "take everything away" from the 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 called for is not isolation. It is intentionality.

The difference is called 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. It is not about controlling every stimulus — that is impossible. It is about carefully and fearlessly choosing the stories, words, references, and types of content that surround your child. And above all, 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. At Acutis Academy, formation does not end when class is over. School and family walk together so that every story, every word, and every lesson is ordered toward the formation of the whole person.

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For further reading

  • PLATO. Republic, Books II and III.
  • LILLARD, Angeline S.; PETERSON, Jennifer. “The Immediate Impact of Different Types of Television on Young Children's Executive Function.” Pediatrics, v. 128, n. 4, p. 644–649, 2011. DOI: 10.1542/peds.2010-1919 .