Tech addicts: Young, vulnerable and violent

The abandonment of core parenting techniques is creating a “lost” generation of Indian children addicted to digital platforms and smartphones, and could irrevocably alter the society, experts warn.

This new form of addiction among children as young as 10-year-old has several consequences. Parents often face backlash when they make belated attempts to limit their children’s access to these technologies. A startling number of criminal cases and case studies are piling up in police stations, mental health clinics and education survey groups.

These cases reveal the full, grim picture: Children running away from homes when deprived of cellphones, assaulting their parents, indulging in or being victimised in serious crimes, and teens even prone to patricide when their online access is interfered with.

The crisis was crystallised in three recent incidents: In Chitradurga, a 16-year-old killed his father for taking away his mobile phone while he was playing an online multiplayer shooter game. In another incident, in Bengaluru last August, a 15-year-old girl murdered her father with the help of a male friend after he attempted to curtail the amount of time she spent online.

For one 17-year-old student, the draw of online apps coalesced around a sense of achievement. A habitual user of an online quiz app which provided real cash winnings, the high school student was described by a senior educator as having “gamed” the app, to point that he was highly successful in the online competitions.

When parents demanded that he stop, the youth admonished them, saying: “I am making money through my online use. I am becoming independent. What is your problem?”

The problem was that everything else in his life was suffering, including his relationship with his parents, friends, and his academic career.

“Only by channelling his verve towards competitive exams were we able to separate him somewhat from the app,” the educator said.

A new study by the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru on how social media content prompts negative experimentation in college students in Bengaluru lends credence to existing scientific findings.

The study involved a sample size of 300 people, ranging in age from 18 to 25-year-olds and hailing from middle or upper-middle socioeconomic status.

The inclusion criteria were those using the internet or smartphones for a minimum period of one year or above.

The results were stark: 36.33% of people said they experimented with tobacco after viewing social media content, 20% experimented with alcohol, 23% with gaming and 6.6% took to watching pornography.

This is just with regard to people seeing “moderated” social media content. In the case of online phone gaming, the dynamic changes and we start to see more violence-induced behaviour, said Dr Manoj K Sharma, coordinator of NIMHANS’ Services for Healthy Use of Technology (SHUT), which is working to rehabilitate those addicted to technology.

While a consensus is still lacking across researchers about the impact that violent video games have on minds, and whether this makes gamers more prone to real-life violence, Nimhans specified that there is growing agreement among scientists worldwide that violent video games have short-term effects on people’s psyche.

Dr Sharma pointed to a 2017 study by scientists in Berlin and Hamburg who determined that people playing a violent game remained in an agitated or aggressive frame of mind for up to 15 minutes after they had ceased playing the game.

“The situation is pathetic,” said Dr Shashi Kumar, General Secretary of the Karnataka Associated Management of Private Schools (KAMS), whose group has conducted studies about the escalating nature of the problem.

“We have seen incidents of intimidation of parents by older teenage children when they are denied access to a smartphone. The problem is not helped by the fact that children have been conditioned to use mobile-phones as young as one-and-a-half years old, in a bid by parents to keep them preoccupied,” Shashi Kumar said. He pointed out that he has personally witnessed acts of aggression by children. Among these was a Class 10 student who grabbed his father by the collar because the father would not give him a phone to use, he said.

This co-dependence on technology has reached such levels and are triggering incidents of real-life violence so unexpected that even seasoned mental healthcare professionals are at odds on how to address the problem.

Angry adolescents

There are two ways to understand how online usage is prompting children to physical aggression, explained Dr Sharma.

“One is that the child’s temperament, for various reasons, is channelled toward aggression and the second is psychological distress. In the case of children with aggressive temperaments, violent games could serve as a method of channelling that aggression in a safe space. In other instances, social media and smartphones give other children who are stressed or distressed, a method to express themselves. These platforms give these children a way to relieve the stress and a sense of community online,” Dr Sharma said.

A teenager offers her perspective. “My parents don’t allow me to go out to play with friends. They come home late from work. They hardly have time for me. So I connect with my friends through videos games. Once I start, I just can’t stop playing. On certain days, I play with my friends till morning and sleep in the school.”

In another incident, a 17-year-old boy turned alcoholic after watching promotional content online and it was late when parents came to know about it.

Misguided beliefs

For S R Umashankar, Principal Secretary of the Department of Primary and Secondary Education, the problem is rooted in how parents are choosing to rear their children.

“Many believe that if they enroll their children in ‘good’ schools by paying lakhs in fees, their job as parents is done. Later, they pressurise their children to study constantly — in order to justify the high tuition costs — stressing children. Priority should be that parents spend more quality time with their kids,” Umashankar said.

Misguided parental beliefs are also to blame, added Sanjay Sahay, Additional Director General of Police and head of Karnataka’s State Police Computer Wing, who with other experts working in the realm of cybersafety, mental health and education, conducts discussions on technology addiction at schools and colleges. “Research has shown that the neural pathways of the human mind change under sustained digital use. This affects behaviour,” he said.

Social withdrawal

“There are long-term implications to these kinds of online dependencies,” Shashi Kumar said, explaining that the children and young adults of today suffering from online addictions will become parents tomorrow.

“I think we can expect to see an escalation of social withdrawal in the society of the future, when more and more young parents will throw technology at their own children to placate them,” he added.

For educators, sometimes also at the receiving end of child aggression, the answer has been to induce students into subtle “technology withdrawal” programmes at schools.

Reverend Father Sunil Fernandes S J, the Principal of St Joseph’s Boys’ High School explained, “Most ICSE and CBSE schools follow the Department of Education’s rules that students be denied mobile phones while in class. Our school is no different, but we also hold periodic workshops to help reduce dependence on gadgets.”

Peer pressure

Despite this, out of the school’s student population of 3,600, Fernandes said there are nearly 40 to 60 cases of overt addiction among students. “There is a lot of peer pressure to do things that other kids are doing. This is exacerbated by the fact that nearly 20% of parents have given their children freedom without accountability,” he said.

To Srinivasa Raju, a public prosecutor working in juvenile court, it is this libertine atmosphere that is contributing to a growing epidemic of crimes by children.

“The irony is that while the number of juveniles involved in robbery and homicides has increased, the conviction rate is low for juveniles under the age of 16. Gangs have started to employ juveniles for crimes. Juveniles found culpable of murder get only three years conviction,” Raju said.

For Raju, the cause of the problem is clear: a lack of coordination, cooperation and care by parents who prefer to abandon children to their own devices.

“Denied a wholesome family environment, teens start to look for relationships on social media. At the same time, they are incredibly vulnerable to sexual predators and often fall in with the wrong people,” he said. Experts agreed that the negative digital behaviour of today is shaping the society of tomorrow.

For Reverend Fernandes, the cure to the problem can be as simple as love and affection. “Children change when they realise that people care about them. If parents engaged in their children’s lives more often, these kinds of troubles would go away quickly,” he said.