Kashmir’s Children Need Connected Homes, Not Just Connected Devices

Credit By: DR SALIM SAJAD

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30 Apr 2026

As digital distraction, academic pressure and family stress reshape childhood, Kashmiri homes must rediscover the balance of love, limits and listening

Parenting has never been easy, but in our times it has become something far more complicated than previous generations could have imagined. Today’s parents are not only raising children; they are also negotiating with screens, social media, competitive schooling, shrinking family time, mental health pressures, and a culture that constantly tells them they are either doing too much or not enough.

The result is a generation of anxious parents and overstimulated children, living in the same house but often in different worlds. Modern parenting, therefore, is not simply about providing food, education and discipline. It is about preserving emotional connection in an age designed to fragment attention.

For all the talk of progress, one truth remains unchanged: children do not grow well on material comfort alone. They need warmth, routine, boundaries, listening, and the reassuring presence of adults who are emotionally available. Research on parenting styles continues to show that children tend to do best when parents combine affection with consistency — what psychologists often describe as an authoritative style, marked by high warmth and clear expectations. Across cultures, the broad lesson is similar: children thrive where there is love, structure, and respect for their growing independence.

This matters because modern life often pushes parents toward two unhealthy extremes. One is control without connection: constant scolding, pressure to perform, and treating children as projects to be managed. The other is love without limits: a guilty permissiveness that avoids saying no, often in the name of freedom or busyness. Neither approach prepares a child for life.

A child who fears parents may become obedient but emotionally distant; a child who never hears “enough” or “not now” may struggle with frustration, discipline and responsibility. Good parenting is not about winning affection through indulgence, nor enforcing obedience through fear. It is about building character through trust.

The digital revolution has made this task harder than ever. Earlier generations worried about bad company in the street. Today, bad company — and bad influence — may sit quietly in a child’s hand for hours. Evidence suggests that higher recreational screen time is associated with more internalising and externalising problems, including anxiety, low mood, aggression and inattention, though the effects are often shaped by context rather than screen exposure alone. More concerning is the pattern that heavy use of four or more hours a day is linked with higher odds of anxiety, depression, behavioural problems and ADHD-related difficulties, with part of the harm connected to poor sleep and reduced physical activity.

But the wiser lesson is not that all technology is evil. It is that modern parenting cannot be reduced to merely counting screen hours. Experts increasingly stress that the real questions are: What is the child watching? At what time? For what purpose? And at what cost to sleep, play, study, exercise and human conversation? The American Academy of Paediatrics advises families to protect sleep, physical activity and offline relationships, and to keep devices away from bedrooms at night. That guidance is not moral panic; it is common sense supported by evidence.

Social media, in particular, has changed the emotional climate of childhood and adolescence. It is now possible for a young person to compare themselves endlessly, to be judged publicly, to consume unrealistic lifestyles, and to carry schoolyard pressures into the bedroom long after the school day is over.

Studies suggest that heavier social media use is linked to depressive symptoms, anxiety and psychological distress, though these effects are often small to moderate and sometimes complicated by the fact that already-distressed teenagers may turn to social media more often. At the same time, not all use is harmful; active and supportive interaction can sometimes help young people feel connected, while passive scrolling and cyberbullying are more closely associated with harm.

That distinction is important for parents. The answer is neither blind trust nor blanket bans. Children need digital literacy as much as they need moral guidance. Parents must talk with children not only about strangers and safety, but also about comparison, validation, misinformation, online cruelty and the illusion that everyone else is happier, richer and more successful. In earlier times, parents taught children how to cross a road. Today, they must also teach them how to cross the internet.

Another overlooked truth of modern parenting is that children are deeply affected by parental stress. A home can have all the right gadgets, schools and conveniences, yet still feel emotionally unsafe if adults are perpetually angry, distracted or exhausted. Research has long linked high parental stress with harsher and more inconsistent parenting. This is why modern parenting must include self-awareness. Parents who never rest, never listen, and never regulate their own emotions cannot reasonably expect children to develop calmness and resilience on their own. Children learn less from lectures than from the atmosphere.

In places like ours, this conversation also needs a local dimension. Kashmiri families, like many across South Asia, have traditionally valued interdependence, respect for elders and shared responsibility. These are strengths, not weaknesses. But modern pressures — migration, economic uncertainty, academic competition, and digital isolation — are eroding the patient, communal style of child-rearing that many households once relied on. We should not romanticise the past, because every era had its failures. Yet we should admit that children need something our hurried age is steadily stealing from them: unstructured family time, attentive conversation and the feeling of belonging without performance.

Modern parenting, then, is not about becoming trendier, softer or more technologically updated. It is about becoming more intentional. A good parent in this age knows when to guide, when to step back, when to say no, when to listen, and when to put away their own phone. The real crisis is not that children have changed beyond recognition. It is that adults are raising them in a world of endless distraction while forgetting that the oldest tools of parenting still matter most — presence, patience, example and love.

If we want emotionally healthier children, we must first create emotionally healthier homes. In the end, modern parenting is not a contest of perfection. It is the daily, imperfect, deeply human effort to raise children who are not only successful, but steady; not only informed, but wise; not only connected online, but securely connected at home.

(The Author is a consultant child psychologist and columnist)