Dr Hanif Kanjer - Founder Director, Rustomjee Cambridge International School & Junior College, February 2025.
There is a hidden pandemic that is silently threatening to engulf the bright futures of our young children, social media and online gaming, and on-demand OTT.
Addiction to social media monsters - Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, and online gaming is the bane of our times.
Children stay awake late at night until 2am either playing online games or scrolling mindlessly, consuming OTT or chatting with friends and strangers on social media.
From sexually explicit chats, to cyber bullying and dangerous challenges, besides varying degrees of toxic comparisons - it is a frighteningly dark world out there for young children to be navigating at all, let alone unsupervised. Childhood innocence is being lost because there is absolutely no one taking responsibility for the type of content children are being exposed to.
Parents report on battles at home with their children regarding the use of mobile phones, and often watch helplessly as the children refuse to listen or budge. Parents are failing to demonstrate tough love by taking away phone privileges. Large tech companies seem to only want to profit from these addictions.
With addiction to mobile phones they are also becoming socially awkward, with lower self esteem because of the constant comparisons. It damages their emotional, psychological and physical well being.
A lot of schools are putting in good efforts to create engaging curriculum, they often hit a roadblock with distracted and sleepy students in the classroom due to the easy access to mobile phones and social media.
We don’t encourage our young children to smoke or drink alcohol or do drugs. But we happily hand them the most damaging tool, out of love wanting them to be happy.
The way we have laws that don’t allow anyone below the age of 18 to drive, below the age of 21 to drink, girls below 18 and boys below the age of 21 to marry, we need laws regarding social media access.
We need to make Facebook, Instagram and Online gaming companies more accountable for their products, services.
If Tiktok can be banned in the country, Instagram can atleast be controlled - automatically block a student account, underage accounts or accounts of anyone who spends too much time on social media.
At my school, we are supporting parents by confiscating student phones if parents request us to or if we find behaviour challenges in our students.
Our experience shows that in most cases behaviour challenges are due to social media access and online gaming. Once we have taken that out of the equation, the children blossom.
But the struggle is for real.
And we need help.
We need broader, collective action. This pandemic can’t be solved by parents and schools alone. We need Government intervention to help stop this spread. We need tech companies and society as a whole to take responsibility and take decisive action.
Is anyone listening?
Dr Hanif Kanjer
Founder Director
Rustomjee Cambridge International School