Tech and the Brains of Gen Alpha
I want to speak here to the parents of Gen Alphas. Who are they?
Generation Alpha consists of kids born — or yet to be born — between 2010 and 2025. They're the first generation to arrive on planet Earth whose brain function will be shaped entirely by life in the 21st century. This century and its challenges will define them. Broadly speaking, their parents are Millennials, and their older siblings are likely Gen Zs (born between 1995 and 2012).
A significant percentage of Gen Alpha kids already have access to digital tablets (43% before age six) and smartphones (58% before age ten). 65% of Alphas aged 8–10 spend up to four hours a day on social media. In 2024, 44% reported using TikTok, outpacing traditional television (39%). Over 30% engage with YouTube and YouTube Shorts for more than two hours daily.
This will be a smart generation. At least half are expected to earn university degrees, preparing them for a 21st-century economy where AI and robotics will have rendered many manual jobs obsolete.
The COVID-19 pandemic also shaped this generation. Many of the oldest Gen Alphas spent at least one full school year in distance learning. Since then, technology has become ever-present in education, and Alphas have adapted to learn in diverse modes.
Gen Alphas have access to smartphones and tablets from an increasingly early age. Children between 8 and 12 years old now average 4 hours and 44 minutes of screen time daily. Excessive exposure can lead to decreased attention, trouble focusing and potential impairments in cognitive function, particularly memory and executive processing.
What's the antidote? The time-tested character virtues: moderation, temperance, courage, fortitude, patience and justice toward self and others. When children cultivate these, they also develop the master virtue of practical wisdom.
Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher and Plato's most formidable student, once said, "We [humans] are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Poor tech habits form vice, whereas mindful tech habits reflect excellence and self-control.
“Excessive exposure can lead to decreased attention, trouble focusing and potential impairments in cognitive function, particularly memory and executive processing.”
Moderation is Key
Parents and educators should encourage moderate and mindful use of smart devices, balancing demands for screen time with more holistic activities, especially outdoor and physical.
Much of what children encounter on their screens amounts to an impoverished version of the human experience. Technological overstimulation of the developing brain must be balanced with healthy doses of discovering reality.
Children require a broad menu of both online and offline experiences, including the chance to let their minds and imaginations wander. Part of developing moderation in one's character is the ability to be bored once in a while, so that the imagination is free to roam into uncharted territory.
Learning how to modulate and moderate one's wants and desires requires the brain's reward centres to be trained by some regular cooling-off time. Or, as Aristotle put it: "It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken."
Courage is Required
Aristotle also said, "I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self." If Gen Alpha is to learn how to be fully human and alive to their humanity, it is essential that they develop the courage to say no to themselves once in a while and to learn to withstand a little self-imposed hardship.
Courage is the virtue that helps us push through our difficulties when we don't want to – including times of restlessness and boredom. Courage will become the sturdy seat propping up moderation in the testing moments when doom-scrolling beckons.
However, parents also need courage to battle with their kids at critical moments when the dark clouds of imminent temper tantrums threaten. At these times, we have to remember that we are the adults and know what's best for their long-term flourishing.
Parents have access to another truth Aristotle formulated in highly pithy terms: "Through discipline comes freedom." An unruly soul is no joy to be around precisely because it is enslaved by its impulses—another way of describing childhood and infancy.
"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self."
The “V” of Love
To help a child gain personal discipline is to love that child rightly. It is not out of some perverse sense of control, but precisely so that they can grow up to express the full panoply of their gifts through a secure freedom born of good character. A thief may be gifted, but cannot be good. The kind of excellence we seek is pro-social, born of self-control and self-rule.
The so-called "V" of love is the essential route to good parenting. It starts narrow, offering limited freedom at the base, where character forms and wisdom is not yet present. As the child matures in virtue—moderation, courage, justice and wisdom, the "V" widens, offering more freedom and autonomy.
The goal is not to be parenting a thirty-year-old in your basement, but to raise a young adult who can manage themselves with courage, self-restraint and wisdom.
The V of love is a parenting metaphor that encourages parents to pass character and wisdom to their children. But that is all too hard to do when a child's brain is addled by the temptations to brain-rot that technology foists upon our homes. Like a Trojan horse within our walls, devices linked to the world-wide-web are kryptonite to the executive functions in kids' brains.
Join our Substack for instant access to more articles like this:
As the child matures in virtue—moderation, courage, justice and wisdom, the "V" widens, offering more freedom and autonomy.The "V" stands for virtues; passing them on is our greatest parenting task.
Engage Your Brain
It's not just our kids' brains that need minding—we need to engage our own. We must take up the challenge that Jonathan Haidt (in his wonderful book The Anxious Generation) offers us when he says that we need to parent less in the real world and more in cyberspace. It begins with setting boundaries for tech use at the bottom of the V, where Alphas are developing an addiction for tech-time that has a similar effect on neural development as crack cocaine or raging hormones.
Engaging our own brains, therefore, means recognizing afresh our role and authority as parents. This is not easy because we live in a "Peter Pan" society where none of us is encouraged to grow up.
Parents who have lived well have access to the kind of moral knowledge that Aristotle turned into the truisms of his virtue theory: "We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage." To salvage our kids' brains means recognizing they must develop adequate habits and skills for life.
Engaging our parent-brain means understanding the changes that occur in us when we become parents. After childbirth, women experience a loss of "grey matter" and a transformation of the cortex, which impacts emotion, undoubtedly to the benefit of the newborn's emerging needs.
For men, testosterone levels drop, particularly when they're actively involved in caregiving—almost as if men are designed to move from fearsome warrior to nurturing father, teacher and life coach.
Just as a house prepares for a new infant's arrival, the parental brain is also remodelled by child-rearing. Men lose some of that risk-taking and ambitious conflictualism actualized by the rocket-fuel of testosterone and begin to become teachers capable of handing on tradition, skill, and wisdom.
Earlier, I said Gen Alphas need courage to support the virtue of moderation. Now I want to say, parents – especially fathers – need courage just as much or even more than their Gen Alphas do.
This is because children don't always know how to self-regulate and conflicts emerge very easily between parents and children when technology has taken possession of the spiritual energy of the home. Courage requires parents to say no when children can't help themselves, running the gauntlet of conflict and the field of fight.
"Courage," said Aristotle's great teacher Plato, "is a kind of salvation." That remains true of family and home when dad steps up.
Courage requires parents to say no when children can't help themselves, running the gauntlet of conflict and the field of fight.
Fun Time = Teaching Times
The best time to talk about big ideas—faith, character, life—is when you're having fun with your kids. When kids play, they are preparing for life. In most contexts, fun and learning go together. This is because fun involves an element of surprise, and we are most wide awake and attentive when faced with surprise.
My suggestion is that our kids are battling for their brains, and the statistics show this to be true. It is a unique battle involving cellular gadgets with corrupting powers we barely understand. Its ability to form our kids' brains is hidden, and we can't see the scar tissue forming amidst the neurons.
I have also suggested the antidote lies in parents' hands – or, more accurately, in our brains. Just as tech forms our kids' brains, the hormonal reality of parenting shapes ours. Every brain in my family is undergoing continual, ongoing stimulation and change, including my own. We need to lock in and engage, recognising we have a role to play in helping our kids to develop the virtues necessary not just to manage a relationship with the equivalent of digital crack cocaine but beyond the tech, with every pleasure and desire in life.
For dads, the lowering of testosterone levels allows patience and wisdom to flourish. The ability to teach life skills, habits and virtues emerges from the treasure trove of your life experiences and hard-garnered wisdom.
A good way to teach is not by lecturing but by storytelling, because the brain loves nothing so much as narratives. Psychologist and author Brene Brown writes in Rising Strong:
"The idea that we're 'wired for story' is more than a catchy phrase. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story—a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end—causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathise, and make meaning. Story is literally in our DNA."
The best stories that teach virtues are those that display examples of courage, self-control, wisdom, and their opposites. Sometimes, just telling kids about bad decisions we made – if expressed sensitively and in the right way – can be enough to help.
Have fun raising your Gen Alpha. And remember: their tech—paid for by you—is not always their friend. Nor is it yours.
Dr Craig Heilmann
07 July 2025
Join our Substack for instant access to more articles like this:
