When My Niece Missed the Zoo
Last summer, during the school holidays, our families decided to have a day out together — me, my husband, our daughter, my son, my sister-in-law, her husband, and their three kids. We picked the zoo. It’s been a family favourite for a while and the kids are obsessed with the penguins! I imagined a day of the kids running wild and free, and me succumbing to a glass of wine after the chaos was over. It didn’t play out that way.
My 13-year-old niece barely looked up from her phone the entire time. From the car ride there to the penguins’ pool, her eyes were locked onto TikTok. She wasn’t rude or grumpy, she was just gone, lost somewhere inside that endless scroll. At one point, a monkey decided to climb overhead in the transport bridge connecting 2 cages,, but my niece “C” was so engrossed in the screen that she barely acknowledged the excitement and chaos of the rouge chimp.
It hit me more than I expected. Because I remember when she was little, a beautiful girl full of energy and curiosity, always pointing things out, asking questions about everything……and she had a really big love of snails! And now, at this stage of her life, the sparkle in her eyes has turned into a kind of vacant focus, like she’s present, but not really there.
I’ve tried to bring it up gently with my sister-in-law a few times, just to say I’ve noticed the changes, how distracted she has become, how she stays up half the night scrolling and then sleeps half the day away. But she usually just brushes it off, saying, “Oh, I let them get on with their own thing now, they’re older.” And I understand that, I do. My girl is the same age after all, so I get the deal with being a “big kid mum”. Parenting teens isn’t easy, and sometimes picking every battle just feels impossible. But it still hurts to see it dismissed, because what I see isn’t independence, it’s disconnection. There’s this quiet distance around her now, the kind that makes you want to reach in and pull her back before she slips too far.
What really got me that day at the zoo wasn’t just how disconnected she was from the world around her, it was how that disconnection rippled through everyone else. My daughter tried to talk to her, as did her siblings. But my niece barely looked up, more engrossed in the addiction of short form video. . Eventually, my daughter gave up, and the other kids set their own agenda with the animal whilst “C” came along scrolling.
As an aunt, it genuinely scares me. I see this bright, loving girl losing herself to something that isn’t real, to a world that tells her she’s not enough, that she needs to compare and seek and scroll to feel something. And I see how it’s slowly eroding her connection to the people who love her most.
What frightens me even more is how quickly we, as adults, brush this off. When kids struggle, when they’re moody, distracted, anxious, or explosive, we rush to talk about behaviour, hormones, even diagnoses. ADHD. Anxiety. Depression. But almost no one pauses to ask the simplest question: how much time are they spending on a screen?
What we call “behavioural issues” might sometimes be symptoms of something far more modern, a brain that’s overstimulated and under-rested. A child who’s been quietly swallowed by a feed that never ends.
I know my niece isn’t the only one. I see this everywhere in so many children. Kids zoning out behind screens while their parents try to reach them through a haze of distraction. And it’s easy to blame the child, but the real culprit is the system built to keep them hooked.
That day at the zoo was supposed to be fun,and in many ways it was,but it also became a wake-up call. A painful reminder that childhood is slipping through our fingers while we scroll and post about “making memories” we’re too distracted to live.
I love my niece more than anything, and I just hope one day she’ll look up again, really look, and see that the world waiting for her is so much bigger and more beautiful than the one lighting up her phone.
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