By skyforbes 
By: Rooz Aliabadi, Ph.D.
When I was growing up in Iran in the 1980s, we didn’t have the latest gadgets, but we had stories. My parents, like many in our community, prioritized conversations, storytelling, and books — when we could get them. That was our window to the world. Fast forward to today, I lead an organization called ReadyAI, and I travel the globe helping young people learn how to think, not just how to use tools like AI, but how to ask the right questions, how to reason, how to understand themselves and the world around them. But here’s what keeps me up at night: despite all the promise of technology, I’m worried we’re raising a generation that’s losing the capacity to think deeply.
This isn’t some romantic yearning for the past. It’s a deeply personal and professional concern. I’ve been in classrooms from Pittsburgh to Riyadh, refugee centers in Portugal to rural schools in Asia. I’ve seen eight-year-olds explain neural networks with more fluency than some grad students. But I’ve also seen kids who can’t make it through a paragraph without reaching for their phones — or worse, kids who no longer find reading, reasoning, or reflecting even remotely enjoyable.
It’s not their fault. It’s ours.
Somewhere along the way, we mistook access to information for intelligence. We handed our kids the most powerful devices in human history and told them they were “digital natives,” as if being born into a tech-saturated world gave them the instincts to navigate it wisely. It didn’t.
What we’re seeing is a kind of cognitive inequality that mirrors — and compounds — economic inequality. Just as junk food created a health gap between those who could afford organic quinoa and those who couldn’t, the digital landscape is shaping our brains along class lines.
Here’s the analogy I’ve been using with parents lately: Imagine if your child were raised on a diet of potato chips, candy bars, and soda, and you expected them to run a marathon. That’s what we’re doing cognitively. We’re giving kids a steady drip of dopamine-optimized, algorithm-curated, attention-shredding content — and then wondering why they can’t focus in school, why they can’t read long texts, or why they struggle with mental health.
And let me be clear: it’s hitting low-income families hardest. I’ve seen it up close. The same kids who can’t afford violin lessons or coding camps are spending two, three, even four more hours a day on screens than their wealthier peers. In a recent study in the US, kids from families earning under $33,000 a year had double the screen time of kids from families making over $150,000. That’s not entertainment — that’s digital babysitting.
And it’s not just time spent. It’s the kind of content. I’m not talking about Zoom classes or AI coding projects. I’m talking about endless TikToks, clickbait YouTube videos, and a growing sea of AI-generated slop designed not to educate or inspire, but to hook and distract.
At ReadyAI, we try to flip the script. We show kids how to use AI to solve real problems in their communities. We invite parents into the conversation. We treat kids not as passive consumers but as creators, learners, and thinkers. And you know what? They rise to the occasion every time.
I’ve watched a 12-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia build an AI model to help people with autism navigate malls. I’ve seen kids in Portugal use machine learning to identify fire hazards in their temporary housing. I’ve seen middle schoolers in North Carolina present AI ethics arguments that would make some policymakers blush.
But these moments don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur when we curate the cognitive environment, just like we would a healthy diet. We need to start thinking of our kids’ minds like gardens. You can’t just dump data on them and expect growth. You need soil, sunlight, water, time — and yes, pruning. Sometimes that means saying no to screens. Sometimes it means reading aloud at dinner, even when they roll their eyes. Sometimes it means choosing the hard thing — like insisting on finishing a chapter — over the easy scroll.
I’ve seen the other side of this, too. The kids who’ve lost the muscle of attention. Who tells me flat out, “I don’t read.” Those who feel anxious the moment there’s silence. Those who believe the only measure of intelligence is how quickly they can respond to a prompt or generate a meme.
And increasingly, I worry that this gap — the cognitive one—is becoming the most critical inequality of all. Because in a world where AI is democratizing access to tools, the most significant advantage won’t be who has the best tech. It’ll be who has the best habits of mind.
Deep reading. Focused attention. Rational analysis. Ethical reasoning. These aren’t luxuries. They’re necessities. They’re the foundation of a functioning democracy, a humane economy, and a sustainable society.
But here’s the problem: those capacities are no longer evenly distributed.
We already see elite schools doubling down on long-form reading and critical thinking. Classical academies are booming. Parents in Silicon Valley are paying $37,000 a year to keep their kids off devices. Even the engineers designing these apps are limiting their own children’s access to them. That should tell us something.
Meanwhile, many public schools are assigning fewer books because students are struggling to finish them. Teachers are overwhelmed. Parents are exhausted. The system is hemorrhaging bandwidth.
And this brings me back to parents — because at the end of the day, that’s where the battle will be won or lost. We can’t outsource this. Not to schools. Not to the government. And certainly not to tech companies.
We need a new parenting literacy for the AI age. One who understands not just how tech works, but how brains work. One that makes space for boredom, for depth, for discussion. One that invites kids not just to ask “what’s the answer?” but “why do we think that way?”
That’s why at ReadyAI we’re now developing guides and dinner-table discussion prompts for families. We want parents to feel empowered, not overwhelmed. We want them to know: You don’t need to be a programmer to raise a thoughtful, tech-savvy kid. You just need to be present.
We need to raise a generation that can dance with technology but doesn’t bow to it.
A generation that can wield AI not just for convenience but for conscience.A generation that understands that not everything valuable can be summarized in 280 characters or a 10-second clip.
Because if we don’t, we risk building a world where those who can read deeply will rule, and those who can only scroll quickly will follow. And that’s not the kind of future I want to help build.
I believe kids are ready. I’ve seen it. But they need us to be ready too.
This article was written by Rooz Aliabadi, Ph.D. ([email protected]). Rooz is the CEO (Chief Troublemaker) at ReadyAI.org
To learn more about ReadyAI, visit www.readyai.org or email us at [email protected].