I spent more than 40 years watching how environments shape soldiers. Put a man in a foreign culture long enough, and his instincts begin to change — his sense of danger, his habits, even what he considers normal. What American parents are watching happen to their children follows the same pattern.

Gen Z entrepreneur Adnan Alkhalili describes his own upbringing as “scarily online.” By his early teens, he was waking in a dark room, rarely going outside, living on processed food and energy drinks just to function. At 14, he said he felt like a man in his 70s with nothing left to live for. Today, working with hundreds of college students, he says he has yet to meet a young person untouched by this lifestyle. His full account appears in a recent interview on American Thought Leaders.

Parents recognize the pattern even when they can’t name it: the teenager who is always tired but never rests well, the child who prefers a screen to a conversation, the household where everyone is present, but no one is truly engaged.

Young people today are not simply online. Many now retreat into digital worlds designed to capture their attention, build habits, and connect them with strangers — often as an escape from real-life challenges. What used to be ordinary boredom — a normal condition of growing up, is now filled instantly, leaving almost no space for reflection, sustained effort, or growth. Young people themselves call the condition “brain rot,” and the term fits.

Parents are not simply competing with a phone. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, has pointed out that smartphones are shaped by thousands of engineers constantly refining how to keep users engaged. When a parent asks a teenager to put the phone down, that request goes up against one of the most sophisticated persuasion systems ever built.

A California jury answered that charge on March 25, 2026, finding Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately designing their platforms to addict children, awarding $6 million in damages — the first verdict of its kind in more than 2,000 pending cases. The legal argument tracks exactly what parents witness at home: these are not neutral tools but engineered environments, and internal Meta documents shown at trial confirmed the company knew the harm it was causing.

Neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testified before Congress that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to underperform their parents across every key cognitive measure — attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, and general IQ — despite more years of schooling than any generation before them.

Artificial intelligence has compounded the problem by giving students a way to bypass the work of thinking entirely. A RAND Corporation study found student use of AI for schoolwork jumped from 48 to 62% in just seven months, with 67% acknowledging it is weakening their critical thinking. As I described in a recent column, a middle schooler I interviewed summed up the calculation plainly: why spend hours struggling when a machine produces the answer in minutes?

A college student I spoke with put the deeper problem in a sentence that stayed with me: “I’ve seen people consult AI like a pastor.” A generation already shaped by an escapist digital world is now turning to machines not just for answers but for guidance on identity and meaning. As I examine at length in “AI for Mankind’s Future,” unchecked reliance on algorithmic systems erodes the very human judgment it was meant to supplement. These systems have no conscience, no moral responsibility, and no accountability before God or man — and for all their fluency, they cannot be wise.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). Information is not wisdom, and speed is not judgment. A child who never learns the difference will not discover it on a screen.

This is a national concern, not just a family one. In “The New AI Cold War,” I argue that future competition will depend as much on the character and discipline of a nation’s people as on its technology. A generation that avoids struggle, depends on shortcuts, and cannot sustain independent thought will not maintain a capable military, a productive economy, or a stable society. Defense analysts who have identified excessive screen immersion as a strategic liability have it exactly right.

Alkhalili calls for restoring what the body and mind were designed to receive — light, movement, nourishment, and real human connection. He launched a grassroots campus effort he calls Touch Grass Together, not with lectures but with simple physical activities: snowball fights, jumping into piles of leaves, anything that puts bodies in motion and in the same space.

After significant weight loss, Alkhalili saw his anxiety and OCD symptoms recede — experience that underscored a truth the virtual world obscures: the body and mind are inseparable, and when one is neglected in a sedentary, screen-dominated life, the other suffers.

Scripture understood this long before smartphones existed. From the beginning, human beings were created to live within God-ordained limits — to work and steward creation (Genesis 2:15), to observe rhythms of labor and rest (Exodus 20:9–10), and to be shaped through the discipline and struggle that produce maturity (Hebrews 12:11). Life itself unfolds within divinely ordered seasons and boundaries (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Remove those conditions, and something essential in a person does not develop as God intended.

Parents are the first line. Clear household limits — no devices at meals, no screens before bed, an expectation that effort precedes shortcuts — communicate something technology cannot: that some things require human work and will not be outsourced. More consequential than any rule, though, is presence. Where parents disengage, the screen takes their place.

Pastors need to address this with the same directness they bring to any other threat to spiritual formation. This is not a side issue; it is shaping how young people think, relate to authority, and understand where truth comes from. Policymakers, meanwhile, need to move beyond symbolic phone bans and confront the structural incentives that make these platforms addictive by design. Removing a phone from a classroom does not fix a platform engineered to recapture that student’s attention the moment school ends.

Alkhalili said it simply: we must maintain our humanity. The digital world resists that at every turn because it profits from the alternative. “Whoever walks in integrity walks securely” (Proverbs 10:9). That security has never come from an algorithm, and it never will.

AUTHOR

Robert Maginnis

Robert Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, senior fellow for National Security at Family Research Council, and the author of 14 books. His latest, “The New AI Cold War,” releases in April 2026.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permisison. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

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