Our Kids, Our Responsibility: The Mental-Health Fallout of Industrialized Parenting

By The Insight Circle, 22nd October 2025

“To share is precious, pure and fair. Don't play with something you should cherish for life” – Marvin Gaye

Blood is on our hands

The small infractions, the quiet moments of neglect, the times we chose to look away — they only return to haunt us. Just two weeks ago, the attempted murder of a five-year-old in Ohio and the stabbing at a Bandar Utama school laid bare how the lives of children can be irreversibly changed in a single heartbeat. To call it a tragedy is an understatement; it was a smoking gun revealing a deeper, long-ignored quagmire — the silent yet complicit, cumulative failure of parents and community alike to protect, guide, and nurture the very children we claim to love.

Our collective failure as a society is now palpable. If we truly understood the essence of amor fati — we would realize that time is slipping away, and that it is futile to rely on the slow machinery of policy or diplomacy to repair what moral decay has already taken a foothold in our communities. The city burns, yet we continue to dig for a wellspring — searching for water to douse the flames of our indiscretion, mostly arising from the excuses we fabricated for our own misgivings. It is time for a reality check, an honest self-examination – for we must resist beginnings, lest the remedy come too late.

Outsourcing and compartmentalization of parenting

In a recent article published in CodeBlue (Sim & Thum, 2025), we see how the legitimization of industrialized parenting masks a profound misalignment of priorities. By sidestepping our own role in this tragedy and attempting to obfuscate responsibility, we betray signs of aversion and negligence — these are the telltale signs of unwillingness to confront our own transgressions. The familiar refrain of “doing our best under immense pressure,” though often rooted in genuine struggles with long working hours or financial strain, misses the point entirely. At best, it reflects a misappropriation of responsibility; at worst, it represents a darker form of superficial parenting — or more precisely, an unreadiness to parent at all.

“Shared responsibility” has now evolved into “diffused responsibility”. Parental unpreparedness has reshaped the social landscape of modern society — a world where nothing feels solid and everything remains fluid. This lack of crystallization in responsibility reveals what is arguably a core sociocultural pathology – parenting has become increasingly industrialized. In the pursuit of economic stability, parents have outsourced their role to others — schools (“let the teachers discipline”), tuition centres (“let them handle the grades”), government (“let them solve the mental health crises”), and digital ecosystems (“let the phone drown out their voices”). Beneath it all lies a dangerous deception – income generation has been mistaken for love and duty. Unfortunately, provision can never replace presence.

An Inconvenient Truth

At one of the most defining moments in the history of modern parenting, we must ask ourselves — earnestly — where did we go wrong? The truth may be a bitter pill to swallow – many parents, it seems, were never fully formed adults to begin with. In the seminal book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, we are reminded that many merely inhabit the vessel of adulthood in name, while in essence remaining psychological adolescents — ill-equipped for the emotional depth, introspection, and inter-generational empathy that parenthood demands. When children become victims — traumatized, brutalized, and left psychologically vulnerable — children are the only ones who end up in the therapist’s chair, licking their wounds and trying to mend the trauma inflicted by those who were meant to love them. Meanwhile, the true perpetrators of unexamined adulthood often remain unaware — or unwilling — to confront the consequences of their emotional deficiency. Perhaps, more than ever, it is the parents who now need to take that seat in the therapist’s chair — to unpack the psychological baggage of their own childhood.

Accelerated Maturity

It is now undeniable how profoundly the internet — particularly social media — has impacted our children. Ubiquitous and easily accessible, these platforms expose them to torrents of unfiltered information that their still-developing minds are ill-equipped to process. The sheer volume of content they consume far exceeds their cognitive and emotional capacity to comprehend, let alone integrate. This phenomenon has far-reaching consequences – children are taking in far more than they can digest. They feel overwhelmed, yet attempt to project an accelerated maturity that their minds cannot sustain. As a result, they become psychologically mature long before the legal age of consent — a reality often dismissed by adults who cling to outdated parenting models, overlooking the fact that today’s children, shaped by their circumstances, have effectively narrowed the child–adult gap. A costly and dangerous mistake.

What many parents fail to realize is how early exposure to the digital superhighway can alter a child’s mind in subtle yet profound ways. Research has shown that social media and prolonged screen engagement can modify the brain’s neurochemical balance — the very substrate that shapes personality, behaviour, and decision-making (Debasmita et al., 2025). In other words, the cycle of instant gratification — through doom-scrolling, violent gaming, and binge-watching — appears to rewire the brain’s reward centres to crave quick fixes and immediate pleasure. Over time, this disinhibition begins to override natural mechanisms of self-regulation, self-preservation, and moral restraint. In many respects, the process mirrors substance addiction (Maza et al., 2023; WHO, 2024). After prolonged and unsupervised exposure, the child begins to believe that “everything is permissible”. The consequences are chilling — for when someone feels they have nothing left to lose, restraint disappears. And that, in part, explains why some children are now capable of the most heinous acts.

Soul Searching and Finding Redemption

At the heart of the matter lies a failure to plan — which, as always, inevitably becomes a plan to fail. If parents truly wish to devote themselves fully — with the unconditional love and sacrifice that parenting demands — then it must begin with foresight. The right environment and circumstances must be created from the very outset; there should be no two minds about this. Unfortunately, a troubling trend persists — the equivalent of parachuting into a war zone without proper equipment. “Let’s have a child, and our situation will somehow resolve itself,” or the “water will find its level” mindset has become the unspoken axiom driving these choices. And when the inevitable chaos unfolds, shifting blame to work or financial strain becomes the most convenient escape from the piercing voice of conscience.

And so, it is time to call an end to subsidised parenthood — a culture largely responsible for the woes our children now face. More importantly, the next time we crowd our highways during school holidays, seeking yet another easy distraction to soothe our own parenting inefficiencies, we should pause to reflect on what these trivial indulgences truly bring. If, even in the comfort of our homes, we struggle to connect with our children — to quiet their restless hearts and meet their need for attention — that, in itself, speaks volumes about our appetite for real parenting. Until we grow up ourselves, we will continue to fail our children.