WALSH: How To Lose Your Influence Over Your Child And Turn Him Into An Unthinking Zombie

Spoiler: give him a smartphone with internet access. That's the answer. And give it to him when he's young. The average child receives his first smartphone when he's 9 or 10, and getting younger. Soon we'll have a nation full of Snapchatting toddlers, no doubt. And their parents will look on contentedly, feeling no regrets about depriving their children of an actual human childhood. It's much more important, they figure, to stay up with the trends and keep their kids equipped with the latest tech gadgets.

I was thinking about this issue earlier in the week as controversy briefly raged over some guy named Logan Paul. Paul, if you recall, was so desperate for #content that he went into Japan’s “suicide forest” and filmed himself giggling over the corpse of a suicide victim. Paul eventually apologized and begged for forgiveness, and everyone has since moved on, but those of us above the age of 17 are left, still, asking one important question: Wait, who is Logan Paul?

As I discovered, Logan Paul is a “YouTube celebrity” with millions of young and devoted fans. He is one of many internet superstars who provide our children with hours of entertainment every day while we remain entirely oblivious of their existence. If Paul’s latest video hadn’t generated widespread outrage, your 11-year-old daughter may have spent 15 minutes watching a video featuring a dead man hanging from a tree in suicide forest without you ever finding out about it. Indeed, if your kid is like the statistically average kid, she spends about nine hours a day — nine hours — consuming media, mostly on the internet. And if you are anything like the statistically average parent, you have no clue about the nature of the images, sounds, and ideas she ingests during that span.

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