A video has been doing the rounds, and it stopped me mid-scroll. A thirsty crow lands beside an outdoor tap that is already running. It simply puts its beak under the stream and drinks. No searching. No experimenting. No problem to solve. Just an open tap.
It is hard not to think of the other crow—the one from our childhood story.
That crow finds a jar with water too low to reach. It doesn't fly away. It doesn't wait for someone to help. It doesn't give up. Instead, it picks up pebble after pebble and drops them into the jar until the water rises high enough to drink.
One crow needed ingenuity and persistence. The other needed only access. And perhaps that is a surprisingly useful metaphor for childhood today.
Today's children are growing up beside an open tap. They have access to something previous generations could barely imagine: almost instant solutions to almost everything.
A question can be answered by Google, YouTube or an AI chatbot. A meal can arrive at the door with a few taps. Entertainment begins instantly. A boring moment can disappear behind a screen. A difficult assignment can be searched, explained, translated or increasingly even generated.
None of this is inherently bad.
Technology has enormous benefits for children. UNICEF's 2025 report on childhood in a digital world stresses that digital technology can help children learn, build skills, communicate and explore opportunities. At the same time, it warns that the effects depend heavily on how technology is used, what children encounter online and whether digital experiences displace healthier developmental experiences.
The issue, therefore, is not whether children should use technology. The bigger question is: What developmental experiences are disappearing because technology makes everything easier?
Previous generations encountered frustration almost automatically. You waited for the television programme you wanted to watch. You waited for a letter. You waited for a bus. You looked through an encyclopaedia when you wanted an answer. You got bored because there was nothing else to do. And boredom often forced children to invent something.
A broken toy could become a science experiment. A cardboard box could become a house. A few neighbourhood children could turn an empty field into a cricket ground. We didn't necessarily understand what those experiences were teaching us. But developmental science gives us a better vocabulary today: executive function, self-regulation, persistence, attention and emotional regulation.
Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child explains that executive-function and self-regulation skills help children focus, plan, manage information, control impulses and adapt to changing circumstances. Crucially, these abilities are not simply something children are born with fully formed. They develop through practice and supportive environments.
That makes the pebble story more relevant than it first appears. Every pebble represents an opportunity to practise effort.
It is important, however, not to turn this argument into another simplistic "screens are destroying our children" story. The evidence is more complicated. UNICEF explicitly notes that digital technology can produce both benefits and risks. The problem is not merely the existence of screens, but the balance between digital experiences and other essential parts of childhood.
The OECD's PISA 2022 data, however, show why attention deserves serious consideration. Across OECD countries, about 30 per cent of students reported being distracted by digital devices in most or every mathematics lesson. Students who experienced this frequent distraction scored, on average, 15 points lower in mathematics than those who rarely or never experienced it, even after accounting for socioeconomic and school factors.
The message isn't "throw away the smartphone." It is that children need to learn how to use powerful tools without allowing those tools to control their attention. That is a very different parenting goal.
Consider how dramatically childhood has changed. Pew Research Center's 2024 survey of 1,391 American teenagers found that 96 per cent use the internet daily, while 46 per cent say they are online almost constantly. In 2015, that "almost constantly" figure was 24 per cent, while another Pew survey found that 95 per cent of teenagers had access to a smartphone.
Interestingly, the relationship isn't simply one of children loving technology without reservation. Seventy-two per cent said they often or sometimes feel peaceful when they don't have their smartphone, while 44 per cent said being without it makes them anxious.
That contradiction tells us something important. Children can benefit enormously from technology while simultaneously becoming dependent on its constant stimulation. Our job is not to choose between the digital world and the real world. It is to teach children to live intelligently in both.
This is where the pebbles matter.
A child who struggles with a puzzle for 20 minutes before asking for help is practising persistence. A child who has to save pocket money before buying something is practising delayed gratification. A child who waits for a turn instead of demanding immediate attention is practising self-control. A child who gets bored on a journey without being handed a phone is learning to tolerate boredom and find ways to occupy the mind. A child who completes a household chore even when there is no applause, reward or entertainment attached is learning responsibility.
These moments may appear insignificant. Collectively, they are not.
Research on young children has linked persistence with executive-function abilities such as cognitive inhibition and flexibility. A study of kindergarten children found that these cognitive skills predicted persistent behaviour on challenging tasks.
More recent research also reinforces the idea that persistence is not simply a personality trait children either possess or lack. A 2026 review by Yale researchers Julia Leonard and Reut Shachnai argues that caregivers help shape children's beliefs about whether effort is worthwhile and whether they are capable of succeeding.
In other words, we can teach children to become comfortable with effort.
Perhaps one of the most important things parents can give children today is the experience of being bored without immediately rescuing them.
A bored child may initially complain: "There's nothing to do."
Our instinct is often to fix it. Give them a phone. Put on a cartoon. Find a game. Turn on YouTube.
But sometimes the better response is simply: "That's okay. Figure something out."
The American Academy of Pediatrics has emphasised the developmental importance of play. Its clinical report, reaffirmed in 2025, notes that developmentally appropriate play with parents and peers supports social-emotional, cognitive, language and self-regulation skills that contribute to executive function.
The World Health Organization similarly recommends that young children spend less time in sedentary screen activities and more time in active play, while highlighting interactive non-screen activities such as reading, storytelling, singing and puzzles.
Boredom, therefore, doesn't necessarily need to be eliminated. Sometimes it needs to be allowed to do its job.
There is an important distinction here. We should not romanticise hardship. Children don't need deprivation, humiliation or unnecessary suffering to become resilient. They need manageable challenges within a safe and supportive environment.
A child struggling to tie shoelaces may need encouragement, not someone who immediately does it for them. A teenager struggling with homework may need guidance, not an instant AI-generated answer. A child who loses a game may need empathy, not a rule change designed to guarantee victory.
A young person who makes a mistake may need the opportunity to repair it rather than having an adult immediately intervene. Harvard's developmental research makes a similar point from another direction: responsive relationships with caring adults are fundamental to healthy development. Children need support and connection while developing the capacity to manage challenges themselves.
Resilience isn't the absence of help. It is learning when and how to use help.
So, does your child need the pebbles?
Yes—but not because the old days were better. They weren't. And children today aren't weaker simply because their world is more convenient. They are growing up in a different environment.
The world has removed many of the small frustrations that once forced us to practise patience, persistence and problem-solving. Parents and educators may therefore need to deliberately recreate some of those developmental opportunities.
Give children chores. Let them wait. Let them solve age-appropriate problems. Let them experience boredom. Let them play without constant adult direction. Let them fail safely. Let them struggle before stepping in.
And, above all, resist the temptation to make every difficult moment disappear.
This is precisely the challenge explored in Two Worlds, One Childhood—raising children who can genuinely thrive both in the world we grew up in and in the world that is rapidly emerging around them.
The goal isn't to raise children without technology. It isn't to recreate our childhood. And it certainly isn't to make life unnecessarily difficult. The goal is to ensure that convenience doesn't come at the cost of capability.
A child should know how to search for an answer but also how to think when there is no obvious answer. They should know how to use AI but also how to struggle through a problem themselves. They should enjoy instant entertainment but also be comfortable sitting quietly with their own thoughts. They should benefit from an open tap but still know how to find the pebbles when the tap runs dry.
Grooming a child well has never meant raising them exactly as we were raised. It means understanding the era they are actually growing up in—and deliberately building the qualities that era may no longer build for them automatically.
The crow doesn't need the pebbles anymore.
Perhaps our children do.
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Mohd. Ziyaullah Khan is a freelance content writer and editor based in Nagpur. He is also an activist and social entrepreneur, and co-founder of TruthScape, a team of digital activists fighting disinformation on social media
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