Are Kids Really Getting Older, Younger?
Children's lives are saturated with screens allowing the tech industry to commercialize childhood for the sake of profits.
You may have seen the acronym, “KGOY” or “kids getting older younger”. It is the idea that since our world is changing rapidly mostly due to technology, children are growing up faster and are more sophisticated and mature than the generation before. Marketers like to take advantage of this phenomenon by pushing their products to profit from younger and younger children. Sadly, this sinister narrative has infiltrated many aspects of our children's lives.
Take for example this photo I received from a friend of a pair of shorts she saw while she was out shopping with her young daughters. If you look closely, you can see the shorts are a child’s size 5 and there is a sticker that boasts “I have a Cellphone Pocket”. You read that right, these are shorts made for young girls and they are being designed to include a cell phone pocket! Why stop there, how about a pack of cigarettes or a flask pocket?
It was not that long ago that pediatricians were warning us not to put a computer or a TV in our child's bedroom. Yet now clothing is made purposefully for a young girl to carry one around in her pocket. Have we really passed the point of no return? Would parents really look at those shorts and think “I need to buy them for my young daughter!”?
Surely, marketing and advertising geared toward children is not a new concept. I remember watching Saturday morning cartoons in the 80’s and seeing commercials like this one…
I definitely wanted to be a “Toys R Us” kid! But commercials from the 80’s for age appropriate toys are very different from the screen saturated commercialization of childhood in 2025.
According to Merriam Webster, childhood is “The state or period of being a child.” We know from a myriad amount of research spanning decades the importance of this stage in life for healthy brain development. This should be a sacred time in life, untouched by greedy corporations yet the abundance of technology creates access to children as soon as they are handed an internet connected device.
With the bombardment of technology in the daily lives of children, girls and boys are being intentionally targeted in different ways. The techniques that are being used today to market to children are much more nefarious than the commercials of the 1980’s.
In the new book, Better Than Real Life, Dr. Richard Freed exposes the powerful “persuasive design” developed by neuroscientists that the tech industry employs to create products to keep children “using”. With more children “using” these devices, there are more opportunities to profit off of them and destroy their childhood in the process.
This psychological warfare on our youth that Freed describes taps into extensively studied human nature in order to maximize profits at all human costs. Boys are often spending hours a day playing online video games while girls scroll endlessly on social media platforms. Both virtual worlds shrink their childhood and expose them to harmful content well before they are developmentally ready.
As described in Better Than Real Life, this is exactly by design. The tech industry is intentionally targeting our children and their psyche and we are left to wonder why our youth is struggling with their mental health, physical health and performance in school.
I recently watched a disturbing Netflix documentary called “Bad influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluence” (as if there is a “bright side”). The series highlights a group of teens and their experience as “kidfluencers” on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram starting when they were only 11 or 12.
Although child actors have been exploited in the entertainment industry for a long time, there are some standards and laws to protect them on TV and movie sets. With the evolution of social media, any child can become a star and it seems even more morally corrupt with how these children are “used”.
Parents typically place these “kidfluencers” in front of cameras at young ages with the ultimate goal to grow their audience. The larger the audience reach an influencer has, the greater the profits they make. Brands are more than willing to create partnerships while children push their products onto other children. It is estimated that approximately 40% of toddlers have their own device, the commercialization of childhood starts young.
“Kidfluencers” is a hard to watch series that shows the adults behind the camera encouraging the preteens to engage in behaviors that they are obviously uncomfortable with. The twisted world online celebrates this by racking up more views and ultimately profits. All the while, adolescent children are modeling products and behavior that would be more appropriate for individuals in their 20’s and older.
Another disturbing example of toxic commercialization from online influences comes from the term “Sephora Kids”. This phrase is used to describe the disturbing number of preteen and teenage girls that are flocking to Sephora to purchase various beauty products created for older women. Not only are these products unnecessary, they often are harmful and toxic to not only their skin but also to their self esteem.
Why on earth should 10 year old girls even be thinking of wrinkles? The impossible beauty standards engrained at younger ages are heartbreaking and social media platforms that use a persuasive design to keep kids “using” are more than happy to sell out childhood without care to the harms.
If this is the type of childhood you want for your own 5 year old girl, then buy those shorts and give her a hand held computer to put in her pocket. Let her scroll Instagram and SnapChat and idolize the artificial world and toxic content created by a tech industry that willfully designs their product to be “Better Than Real Life”.
The tech industry has pushed many narratives to deflect blame for the erosion of childhood. They may want you to believe that kids are getting older younger, but in reality they are not. In fact, the harm created from this narrative is disrupting their ability to grow up and the real world consequences are leading to worse outcomes.
Boys are forgoing college or trade school to living in their parents' basement addicted to gaming. Girls are increasingly enduring unnecessary beauty procedures typically reserved for much older women when they are only in their 20’s. And many are complaining about the work ethics of Gen Zer’s. Much of the evidence shows that rather than growing older younger, the infusion of tech in their lives actually just makes it harder to grow older.
Fortunately, the real world is a much better place to live and grow up in. Thanks to recent trends like the phone-free schools movement and the success of Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, many are waking up to the lies sold through technology and are pushing for changes to improve childhood.
We can not forget that we have agency, we can unplug and ground ourselves in our actual real surroundings. As adults we need to create a barrier between our children and the wars waged on their innocence and childhood online. Just like we would never hand a cigarette or an alcoholic drink to a child, we shouldn’t hand them a device that is connected to an online world designed to steal their attention, their childhood, their "real” life.
Ultimately, children should have the basic human right to grow up in a world that values their social, emotional and cognitive development. As adults and a society, we need to make it a priority for this to happen!