iPad kids speak up

If there’s one word that’s most associated with Gen Alpha right now, it might be “brainrot.”

According to countless trend pieces and innumerable TikToks, kids from this generation, born between 2010 and 2024, have purportedly “rotted” their brains by scrolling too much on their devices.

“Brainrot” has become a way to describe anything associated with young people’s online culture. But it’s based on the idea, promulgated largely by adults, that children 14 and younger are addicted to their technology and that it has fundamentally destroyed their ability to interact in the real world.

Instead, they’re obsessed with “brainrot slang” such as “Ohio” and “Fanum tax,” and they can’t even read because they’re on their iPads all the time.

It’s certainly true that young people today are, as a group, extremely online.

Sixty-five percent of 8- to 12-year-olds have an iPhone, and the same percentage have an iPad, according to a recent survey of tweens by the market research group YPulse. (For comparison, millennials got their first smartphones at 16, on average.) A full 92 percent of 8- to 12-year-olds are on social media, according to the survey, and kids this age tend to prefer short-form videos on social platforms to longer movies or shows.

But does this mean their brains are decayed? In scientific terms, no. Research on the impact of screens on young people’s development is mixed, and there’s an ongoing debate about whether smartphones and social media actually affect kids. So, as of now, there’s no hard evidence that being online is bad for young people’s mental health. And, of course, a phone or iPad cannot literally rot someone’s brain.

In talking with kids and experts, though, I’ve come away with the impression that young people also worry about the impact of technology on their lives. Their concerns, however, are more nuanced than some doomer headlines might suggest. And sometimes they have more perspective than adults do when it comes to what a healthy relationship with technology looks like — and how theirs will evolve in the future.

Gen Alpha kids “see themselves as misunderstood, and the content that they make, and the content that they are enjoying or consuming, is also misunderstood,” said Jess Rauchberg, a professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University who studies social media.

One thing Gen Alphas want adults to know is that they’re not a monolith.

Fiona, a Brooklyn 11-year-old, told me over hot chocolate that the amount of time she spends on her phone is “very concerning.” She’s not alone — 38 percent of teens in a recent Pew survey said they spent too much time on their phones. But Fiona said her screen time is nothing compared to the behavior of her 5-year-old sister, Margot, who she says is basically chained to her iPad. “It’s holding her captive,” Fiona says.

For Fiona, kids are best understood not as a single generation but as a “ladder,” with each rung a little more tech-obsessed than the one above it. She worries about kids on the rungs below her, younger Gen Alphas who aren’t “focusing on the world around them.” She told me about a time when she asked her little sister for a hug, and Margot distractedly stuck her arms out while continuing to watch her iPad.

Their mom told me this might be a slight overstatement; who among us has not exaggerated our siblings’ foibles to make a point?

But younger Alphas aren’t just generally more online than their elders, Fiona says. They’re more likely to use “brainrot slang” like “skibidi,” which comes from Skibidi Toilet, a wildly popular web series about toilet-head guys fighting camera-head guys that is incomprehensible to adults and even older teens (I find it scary and apocalyptic, like Brazil).

Skibidi essentially means everything and nothing — “You don’t really use it in sentences, you kind of just say it randomly,” one 11-year-old told NBC. Other brainrot terms include “Ohio” (which means weird), “Fanum tax” (stealing food), and “rizz” (charm or charisma).

Older Alphas do sometimes use such language, but they’re being sarcastic, Fiona says. She recently called her friend “Skibidi Ohio rizzler” in a text message, for example: “We use brainrot in a funny way.”

I wasn’t totally surprised to hear that Fiona wanted to distance herself from some stereotypes about Gen Alpha. After all, who wants to be associated with iPad addiction and mental decay?

But “brainrot” culture is actually a sophisticated response to the world as Gen Alpha knows it, Rauchberg says. Today’s tweens and younger children spent some of their formative years in the depths of the Covid pandemic, when once-predictable routines like school and playdates were upended, and many families experienced disruption and danger.

“Memes that might be really absurd and abstract and weird and surreal to older generations — that’s Gen Alpha trying to make sense and find some humor in growing up in some pretty chaotic times,” Rauchberg says.

Older people’s censorious reaction to young people’s language and culture is nothing new. When millennials were growing up, adults used to worry about teens spending too much time at the mall, Rauchberg said. Today, however, as platforms such as TikTok have replaced Hot Topic and Cinnabon as “third places” where kids hang out, adults can see everything that happens with young people — and comment on it, sometimes relentlessly.

That means kids, too, can see their lives — or at least stereotypes about their lives — constantly turned into content. On any given day, they can watch a TikTok creator joking about Gen Alphas in nursing homes (they demand iPad time, of course) or a compilation of teacher complaints about their generation (they “cannot read, they cannot write, they’re ill-mannered”).

And adults owe Gen Alpha a little grace when we’re eavesdropping in their spaces, Rauchberg said. “If kids see too many TikToks making fun of their generation, they might worry that the adults in their lives are judging them as well.”

Contrary to the worst stereotypes about iPad kids, today’s tweens are actually quite busy in the physical world, according to YPulse. Eighty-eight percent have a hobby, and while some play video games, others are interested in sports or crafting. Fiona, for her part, loves art — her dream job is to work backstage at Lincoln Center one day.

Her fellow Alphas also care about the world around them, according to YPulse, with 75 percent of 8- to 12-year-olds saying they’re passionate about a cause like animal rights or cyberbullying. And despite adults’ concerns about them, 84 percent of tweens have positive feelings about the future.

Meanwhile, some see potential upsides to younger Alphas’ comfort level with their screens. Fiona thinks kids her sister’s age might be better at spotting AI-generated content because they’ve been exposed to it from such a young age. Many Gen Alphas don’t perceive a stark difference between online and offline interactions, Rauchberg said — it’s all real life to them.

That might sound unnerving to people who grew up without smartphones, but if you’re a millennial, you might remember the days when our elders were warning us that the internet was real, and that our online profiles could follow us through college applications or job searches.

For better or for worse, Alphas are natives of a world to which the rest of us had to adapt.