Kids Are Hyper-Connected, But Quietly Alone: Some thoughts from a small town.

Author’s note

This essay sits slightly outside my usual writing.

I’m not approaching this as an expert on childhood, technology, or policy. I’m writing as a parent, and as someone who noticed a thread during a recent Davos conversation that wouldn’t let go once the stream ended. So I just had to write about it...

What follows isn’t an argument or a set of recommendations. It’s an attempt to name a tension that feels present in many households, including my own, and to explore it carefully, without blame or urgency.

TK

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Something has shifted in childhood, and most parents and educators can feel it even if they struggle to name it.

Kids are more connected than ever, yet more unsettled and easily frazzled. They are hyper-in touch with each other, yet quicker to feel left out. There is this constant interaction, however, they seem to be carrying a quiet edge of loneliness that doesn’t quite add up to the amount of contact they have.

That tension isn’t first showing up in policy papers or research summaries. It’s showing up in homes, classrooms, and everyday conversations, often as a vague sense that growing up has become subtly harder to inhabit.

It was brought to light even more, while watching a session at Davos titled An Honest Conversation on the Hyper-Connected and the Hyper-Lonely. The panel included Jenny Kim, Jonathan Haidt of NYU Stern Business School, Bill Ready (CEO of Pinterest), and the popular, Adam Grant.

The conversation didn’t introduce a new problem. It named one that already feels present.

When the livestream ended, it stayed with me, not because it changed my mind, but because it echoed patterns already visible much closer to home.

I’m a parent. And if I’m honest, most days of parenting don’t feel like the execution of any coherent philosophy. They feel more like running a live experiment, often on very little sleep, full of constant negotiations, where dinner choices feel like they carry global political repercussions, and all the other decisions.....well, they are made somewhere between wanting the best for them and just getting through the day.

And over time, gradually, almost without noticing, connection became constant, and being alone started to feel like a problem to be solved rather than a state to pass through. I can see that shift not just in my kids, but in myself.

That’s why this Davos conversation landed. It didn’t point fingers. It didn’t offer fixes. It simply named the paradox:

That paradox feels close to home in a place like Denmark, Western Australia. People say "living in the country is different, a bit like growing up in the '80s or early '90s", but this is just as relevant here as the city.

There’s about seven thousand people here. Almost four-hundred kids at the primary school and roughly another four-hundred at the high school.

That’s not an abstraction. That’s the whole cohort. Which means when something changes in childhood here, it doesn’t happen invisibly. There’s no anonymity buffer. You notice it in rhythms, in the energy and in how time gets filled.

It’s nothing necessarily dramatic. No single moment you could point to. Just a gradual sense that something has thinned.

Evenings feel shorter. Boredom feels sharper. Silence is filled more quickly. Being “out of the loop” carries a faint but real social cost.

And that’s where I want to be careful.

Because the easiest mistake to make in this conversation is to turn observation into accusation, to imply that parents aren’t doing enough, that kids are fragile, or that technology itself is the villain.

That framing doesn’t survive contact with real life.

What the Davos panel helped surface, particularly through Jonathan Haidt’s contribution, is that this isn’t primarily a story about individual behaviour. It’s a story about environments.

Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU Stern Business School, has spent much of his career studying how systems shape moral (ethical) and social behaviour. His recent book, The Anxious Generation, isn’t a rage against screens. It’s an attempt to understand what happens when childhood shifts from being play-based to screen-based without the surrounding social architecture shifting with it.

His argument is less about technology itself and more about timing.

Childhood and adolescence aren’t neutral phases. They’re sensitive windows. Identity, emotional regulation, and social confidence aren’t formed through instruction alone. They’re built through lived experience, boredom, friction, unstructured interaction, moments where there is no mute button and no instant exit.

But when those windows become saturated with constant stimulation and mediated connection, the developmental inputs change. Not catastrophically. Not evenly. But enough to matter.

Angela Duckworth’s work helps clarify why this matters without tipping into moral panic.

Duckworth, who heads up Behavioural Change for Good Centre at the University of Pennsylvania, is best known for her research on grit (the sustained effort and interest over time) and more recently for how those qualities develop in children. What’s often missed in popular readings of her work is that grit is not about toughness or discipline in hostile conditions. Again and again, Duckworth makes the same point: people don’t rely on willpower alone. They design environments that make effort sustainable.

That insight feels particularly relevant here.

Because when it comes to kids, attention, and connection, we’ve built environments that demand extraordinary self-regulation from developing nervous systems and then express surprise when they struggle.

Which brings me to the part of the Davos conversation that felt most clarifying.

The panel kept returning, implicitly, to the idea of collective action.

A collective action problem exists when an outcome would benefit everyone, but the cost of acting falls on individuals unless others act too. Acting alone carries a penalty, meanwhile acting together dissolves it.

We understand this logic in other domains, don’t we? Smoking bans, road rules, environmental policy, but we’re less comfortable applying it to childhood.

And yet, that’s where we are.

When families try to change defaults around connection, stimulation, or access, the consequences are rarely as simple as gaining or losing a convenience.

This isn’t about exclusion. It’s about alignment.

And kids are incredibly sensitive to rhythm, to timing, to what everyone else seems to know without explanation.

So, when that synchrony slips, even slightly, it shows up in ordinary moments.

Think about a child coming home from school talking about a joke everyone else seems to know already. Or a game they didn’t play, a message thread that moved on without them.

It is nothing dramatic. No one is being cruel. There is just a quiet sense of being half a step behind. It’s tiring in a way that’s hard to explain, especially to a child.

This is the part that’s difficult to hold as a parent.

In those moments, you can sense that something isn’t quite right, that constant connection doesn’t necessarily translate into felt belonging and still see the immediate problem in front of you. Your child is the one missing context. They’re the one asking why everyone else seems to know something they don’t.

So what happens? Well, adaptation tends to take a familiar form.

A device appears earlier than planned with Roblox (or the preferred social gaming app of choice). Access widens a little. Rules soften at the edges.

Not because parents suddenly believe this is ideal, but because, in that moment, it feels kinder than asking a child to carry the social cost of a decision they didn’t make.

That’s the uncomfortable truth. Adaptation often looks like permission.

And it isn’t permission born of indifference, but permission born of care, care that’s responding to the world as it is, not as we wish it were.

This is where the idea of a collective action problem stops being theoretical and starts feeling personal.

Diagram caption - A collective action problem isn’t solved at the centre. Pressure moves through layers, family, peers, school cohorts, town norms, and wider culture, shaping what feels possible long before anyone makes a deliberate choice.

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The diagram doesn’t tell you what to do. It simply makes the pressure visible, how intention at one level is shaped, softened, or overridden by the layers around it.

When I look at it, what stands out isn’t leverage. It’s limitation.

No single layer is in control.

• Parents feel it when their child looks at them and asks to be let back in.

• Schools feel it when they’re asked to manage social dynamics they didn’t design and can’t fully regulate.

• Kids feel it when connection starts to feel like something to keep up with rather than something to inhabit.

• Platforms respond to incentives far beyond any one town, let alone any one classroom or household.

This is where the conversation matters for educators and leaders.

Because schools, councils, and institutions often end up absorbing the tension created elsewhere in the system. They’re asked to fix outcomes they didn’t cause, with tools that were never designed for this level of social saturation.

When we frame this as a question of discipline, resilience, or compliance, we miss the deeper issue.

We treat a systems problem as a behavioural one and place the burden on the least powerful actors in the room: children, parents, teachers. We need to recognise that no one has to be doing the wrong thing for things to drift off course. It’s what happens when different pressures pull in different directions.

And once you see it that way, the tone of the conversation changes.

The urge to moralise eases. What takes its place is something quieter, a kind of stillness with weight. A sense that this isn’t about weak boundaries or failing families, but about environments drifting just far enough from human rhythms to create constant, low-grade pressure: tired kids, stretched parents, schools carrying more than they were built for.

I’ll be honest: some days I’m tired of thinking about it.

Not because I don’t care, but because living inside a ‘collective action problem’ is exhausting. It asks you to hold contradiction. To know your choices matter, but not enough on their own. To feel responsible without being fully in control.

I still compromise. I still second-guess. I still catch myself using the very tools I’m uneasy about to manage my own attention and overload.

One of the most striking moments in this Davos session was a statistic that’s easy to skim past and hard to sit with: around half of young people say they wish social-media didn’t exist.

That doesn’t sound like rebellion. It sounds like ambivalence. Fatigue. A sense that the trade-off, connection for constant availability, stimulation for presence, doesn’t quite add up.

When I hear that, I don’t think of fragility. I think of attunement.

Kids are responding to the world as it is, not as we remember it.

This is where adult development quietly enters the picture.

Mature systems don’t rush to fix. They learn to see. They resist the pull to assign blame when the problem is structural. They tolerate ambiguity long enough to understand what’s actually happening.

Immature systems personalise structural issues. Mature ones redesign conditions, or at least name them accurately.

I don’t think we’re at the redesign stage yet.

I think we’re still learning how to talk about this without collapsing into urgency, denial, or ideology. Without turning observation into instruction. Without mistaking discomfort for a call to arms.

That feels especially important in small communities.

In a town of seven thousand people, everything is relational. Conversations travel. Interpretations stick. If this turns into a debate about who’s right or wrong, it will miss the point entirely.

What feels more honest is to stay with the unease.

To notice that connection and belonging are not the same thing and recognise that constant stimulation can crowd out the very capacities we say we value, attention, resilience, presence. And to accept that children are not failing to adapt; they are adapting exactly as expected.

The question, for me at least, isn’t what should we do next??

It’s whether we’re willing to see the environment clearly, without rushing to defend it or dismantle it, and to admit that some of the things we’ve normalised may be quietly working against the kind of development we hope for.

That’s not a conclusion. It’s a posture.

Endnote

I don’t pretend to have clarity on where this leads.

What I do have is a growing sense that some of the pressures showing up in childhood are not problems to be fixed in isolation, but signals worth paying attention to, signals about environments, timing, and the unintended consequences of systems we’ve grown accustomed to.

My writing here is simply an attempt to notice those signals without rushing past them.

That feels like the right place to stop.

TK

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Final Essay Here:

I’ve decided to move my essays to Substack. Over the past few years, my writing has slowly changed. Not in subject matter, I’ve always been drawn to leadership, systems, human behaviour, culture, work, desire, discipline, effort, collapse, renewal, but in weight. The essays have become longer. Slower. Less interested in reacting to the day’s noise, more interested in naming the deeper patterns underneath it.

Substack feels like the right place for that kind of work: quieter, more direct, and built for continuity. If these essays have meant something to you, subscribing there is the simplest way to stay connected as the work continues.

Subscribing isn’t about loyalty to me. It’s about choosing depth in an age that’s forgotten how much it steadies us.

If you want writing that doesn’t shout, doesn’t rush, and doesn’t pretend to have easy answers, this is where it will live.

https://tomkooy.substack.com/