An essay on what children truly need — and why we are giving them less and less of it.
There is a study from 1968 that you should know about.
George Land, a scientist who studied creativity for NASA, tested five-year-olds on divergent thinking — the ability to approach problems in multiple, unexpected ways. The kind of thinking that underlies invention, art, and the solving of problems that do not yet have a name.
98 percent of the five-year-olds scored at genius level.
The same children were tested again ten years later. And ten years after that. The results were consistent — and disturbing. At fifteen, only 12 percent scored at genius level. At twenty-five, that had fallen to 10 percent. Among adults over thirty: 2 percent.
Land asked the question that few people since have dared to ask aloud: what do we do to children between the ages of five and twenty-five that causes this?
That was 1968. Before the smartphone and the tablet. An eighteen-month-old toddler now averages more than an hour of screen time per day.
The body learns before the brain
Every child is born into a state of complete openness.
Neurologically, the right hemisphere dominates in early childhood. The child experiences the world directly — through all the senses simultaneously, without the mediation of categories or predictions. It feels the cold of a winter morning. It learns what falling means by falling. It understands heat through a burned fingertip.
This sounds trivial, but it is the opposite.
These direct, physical experiences are not incidental features of childhood. They are the building blocks of something essential: an inner compass. A neurological reference framework that teaches the child who it is, what feels safe, where its boundaries lie, and how the world works. As embodied certainty, rather than as abstract knowledge.
Scientists call this interoception: the ability to perceive and interpret the signals of one’s own body. It is the biological basis of what we call instinct. And it develops in the first years of life — or it does not develop fully.
What happens when a screen takes the place of bodily experience
Imagine a child receiving primarily two-dimensional visual (and auditory) stimuli in its first years of life — bright, fast, and continuously changing, but without smell or texture, without temperature, and without the physical consequence of a real action.
The brain adapts. That is what brains do.
But that adaptation has a cost. The visual channel becomes dominant. The other senses — touch, smell, and proprioception, which is the internal body sense — remain underdeveloped. The integration between these systems — the neurological basis of the bodily compass — is never fully established.
Recent research from Drexel University showed that children who had any screen time at twelve months were twice as likely to exhibit atypical sensory processing problems at thirty-six months. Each additional hour of daily screen time at eighteen months increased this risk by 23 percent. Other research, published in eBioMedicine in 2025, found measurable differences in brain development in children who had high screen time as infants — with slower decision-making at age eight and a half and increased anxiety symptoms at age thirteen.
These are not small effects. And these are only the first generations for whom we can measure this.
The anxiety wave has an address
We are living through an explosion of mental health problems among young people. Anxiety disorders, ADHD, depression, identity disturbances, social phobia — they are treated as separate conditions with separate causes. We speak of social media, performance pressure, climate anxiety, and the aftermath of the pandemic.
All of these factors play a role. But there is something that precedes them.
A young person without a well-developed inner embodiment stands in the world in a fundamentally different way. They cannot read the signals of their own body well. They are not sure who they are, what they want, where their boundaries lie — not because they don’t think, but because the neurological basis for that knowledge was never firmly established. They are therefore chronically oriented toward the outside world: toward what others say, toward what algorithms present to them, toward external confirmation as a substitute for inner certainty.
And social media does not merely make this worse — it is designed precisely to engage a nervous system that has no internal anchor. It’s drawing its user in with variable reward, constant comparison, and the continuous stream of external stimuli. The nervous system needs rest in order to know itself.
The problem is not the capacity to adapt
The problem with these young people is not that they cannot adapt.
Human beings are extraordinarily adaptive. An animal with a healthy nervous system relocated from a calm to a threatening environment adjusts — becomes more alert, sharper, learns the new context. And when the threat passes, it returns to rest. This works because the baseline calibration is intact.
The young person without a calibrated inner compass does not have that reference point. They adapt, but do not know what they are returning to. Their nervous system is chronically activated because it has no baseline of rest and safety to return to. The anxiety is not irrational — it is the response of a system that cannot find calm and safety within itself, because it never had the chance to come to know itself.
Interventions that treat symptoms without addressing the baseline calibration solve the second-order problem while leaving the first-order problem intact.
What children truly need
The answer is almost too simple.
Children need physical experiences. Real, direct, and sometimes uncomfortable experiences. A child that falls learns what falling is — it learns to estimate gravity, speed, agility and texture. A child that feels cold without a coat learns to read the weather and its own bodily signals. A child that is bored learns what lives inside itself when external stimuli fall away.
This is neurobiology.
The present but non-intervening adult plays a key role here. Not the parent who eliminates every risk, but the parent who is there when the child needs them — providing the safety of presence and support, without taking away the experience.
Research confirms this repeatedly. Outdoor play is one of the most powerful protective factors we know. It offers precisely what a screen cannot: full sensory input, physical consequence, unpredictability, social interaction and the quiet space to process internally.
It is not lost
There is something hopeful in this story, and it deserves as much attention as the warning.
The original state has not disappeared. It has been suppressed.
Neurological research consistently shows that adults who consciously return to physical, sensory experiences — through sports and meditation, somatic therapy, being in nature — show measurable changes in brain activity, interoceptive accuracy, and emotional stability. The system remembers. It simply needs the space to recover.
The natural human being retains the direct perception of the child and the skills and lived experience of the adult. It has both creativity and competence to tap into.
What we can do now
There is no simple solution, but there are choices we can make.
The first years of life are the most important as a solid base in the neurological architecture, a base that will carry everything that comes after this period. When parents see the need of this solid base then they try to prevent screen-time as much as possible. Up till the moment you see that your child “feels” the difference between reality and fiction.
This whole first period is essential, maybe even more then a high education. Because what good does a masters degree do if there is a lot of anxiety that holds everything back.
A child who gets bored, has the freedom to explore, is allowed to fall and fail, quarrel and reconcile is a child learning to know itself.
The mental health crisis among young people is being treated as a healthcare problem. It is that too. But the root lies earlier — in the developmental conditions of the first years of life. Treating symptoms without addressing that root is futile.
The question is not whether we knew that screen-time carried a risk. The question is whether we are willing to acknowledge how fundamental that risk is — and what we will do differently.
Mart Wijn is the author of The Uncalibrated Self: How Early Screen Exposure May Undermine Sensory Integration and Mental Health (Zenodo, 2026). The full paper is freely accessible at
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