The Quiet Invasion: What the Algorithm Is Doing to Our Children

A PERSONAL PONDERING

The Unseen Guest

I used to think I knew what it meant to protect my children.
When they were little, it was the ordinary things — traffic, deep water, crossing the road, the stranger who lingered too long. The dangers of childhood were visible then, and I could stand between them and harm.

Now they’re older, the dangers are invisible. They arrive not through doors or windows, but through screens — glowing softly in their hands, whispering through headphones, shaping their thoughts while I’m unaware of what they’ve heard.

The other night, one of my boys said something that stopped me cold. It wasn’t rude, exactly — just certain. A big opinion in a small voice. It carried the kind of conviction that only comes from repetition. When I asked where he’d heard it, he rolled his eyes and said, “Everyone knows that, Mum”.

Everyone doesn’t.
It was something the world had delivered to him — packaged, polished, persuasive — and I had no idea it had arrived.

That’s the new shape of parenthood. You can feed them, teach them, love them — and still have no idea what’s being poured into their minds each day. Their devices have become little portals of influence, endlessly learning what makes them stop, laugh, worry or react, and feeding them more of it.

It isn’t a conspiracy; it’s a business model. The algorithm doesn’t care whether it’s teaching them truth or nonsense, kindness or cruelty. It only cares that they keep watching.

That’s what frightens me — the sheer indifference of it.
If a stranger sat my children down and showed them hours of anger, vanity, self-doubt and despair, or whispered to them about identity, victimhood or vengeance until they started to believe it, we’d call it grooming.
When an app does it, we call it “content”.

For children, the line between information and belief disappears quickly. They’re still learning how to think, how to question, how to weigh an argument. Algorithms don’t wait for maturity. They feed conviction before comprehension — which is why you can have a twelve-year-old telling you the world is burning, that everything is corrupt, or that their country is evil.

Sometimes it feels like I’m competing with something I can’t see — something cleverer, faster, more patient than I am. It doesn’t sleep. It never tires. It knows exactly which clip will keep them watching.

I can talk to them about kindness, courage and curiosity, but those things move slowly. The feed moves at the speed of impulse. It doesn’t ask for understanding; it offers reaction.

I sometimes hear them laughing in their rooms — that perfect sound of childhood — and then I catch the rhythm of it, the clipped bursts of the videos they’re watching, and I feel a pang of unease. Who’s talking to them now? What tone is being normalised? What values are being stitched into the rhythm of that laughter?

The world that reaches my boys through those screens is tireless and it’s shaping them in ways I can’t always see. It tells them what to find funny, what to fear, what to admire. It tells them they need to look a certain way, talk a certain way, be a certain way.

We would never leave our children alone with someone who wanted to exploit them. Yet every day, we hand them a device that studies them more closely than any human ever could, and we call it normal.

I don’t think my boys are in danger of becoming radicals. They are, however, growing up in a world that rewards shallowness and outrage — a kind of radicalisation in itself. Not towards violence, but towards cynicism. Towards believing that nothing’s true, that adults are hypocrites, that everything is performative.

The algorithm doesn’t care whether it breeds an activist, a nihilist or just another distracted consumer. It only cares that they stay.

We — parents, schools, governments — have let it happen. We’ve allowed technology companies to become the quietest and most persuasive educators our children will ever have. They don’t lecture; they suggest. They don’t argue; they nudge. They don’t impose; they seduce.

I can’t shut the world out. I can, however, keep showing them the parts it can’t monetise — the quiet, the real, the steady things. The backyard at dusk. The smell of rain on the road. The sound of people talking without trying to go viral.

Some nights I pass their rooms and listen to the stillness. Their faces, finally, are peaceful again — boys, not targets.
I think to myself: how strange that we’ve built a world so connected, yet so careless with its children.