«GI took it off for just one evening and my son went crazy. He was shaking, crying, screaming at me that I was ruining his life. I just wanted him to study and sleep… and instead I found myself in front of a boy I no longer recognized.” For Maria, 47 years old, that evening was a watershed moment: she thought she was giving an educational lesson and instead she saw her son collapse in an emotional storm so intense that she feared a real withdrawal crisis. «I had never seen a reaction like that. I felt like I was touching something that I didn’t have the tools to understand” he says. In recent years, as episodes like this become more and more frequent, a complex debate has opened up on what it really means to talk about “digital addiction”. There are those who consider smartphones and social media to be real levers capable of generating a behavioral disorder; those who, on the contrary, invite us to look beyond the device and focus on the emotional needs of children; and those who place the phenomenon in a gray, complex area, where there are no univocal definitions or immediate solutions.
A way to regulate anxiety
It is in this scenario that Adele Minutillo, researcher at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità and member of the National Center for Addiction and Doping, intervenes. His invitation is to be cautious: «It is misleading to talk about addiction as a defined clinical category. There is not yet an international agreement on diagnostic criteria for digital behaviors. This requires caution, because we risk applying labels that do not help us understand.” Minutillo highlights two decisive elements: the purpose for which the devices are usednot the amount of time, and the perception of indispensabilitythat is, that moment in which the smartphone becomes perceived by the child or adolescent as indispensable. “When it interferes with school, relationships, sleep or daily life, then we are beyond a simple habit.” But the aspect that Minutillo considers most important is another: the device does not explain everything. «Many minors who develop problematic use of smartphones, gaming or social media have pre-existing emotional fragility, more marked than that of their peers. Digital use often becomes a dysfunctional way to regulate anxiety, tension and feelings of inadequacy.”
A point of view shared by Loredana Cirillo, psychotherapist at the Minotauro Institute in Milan, who has been working with children and families for years: «For me it makes no sense to demonize cell phones, nor to ban them a priori. The really useful question is: why does my child find so much pleasure in being online? What emotion are you trying to get away from?” Cirillo invites us to shift our gaze: «Many digital behaviors do not arise from the need for connection, but from the need to regulate difficult emotions. Dispersing your mind online offers apparent relief from painful feelings such as anxiety, sadness, fear of growing up, sense of emptiness or loneliness.” For the expert, digital is a lens that magnifies already present fragilities. “The device does not create suffering, but its sudden absence makes it visible.”
Reward generator
At the other extreme is Giuseppe Lavenia, psychotherapist, president of the National Association of Technological Addictions – Di.Te (addictions.com). His position is clear: «For me it is correct to talk about cell phone addiction. It is a behavioral addiction, with concrete effects on the ability to self-regulate, just as happens with food or gambling.” The expert insists above all on the neurobiological dimension: «Social media, video games and notifications activate the reward circuits involved in substance addictions. Every like, every message is a micro-discharge of dopamine. And when that stimulation disappears, anxiety, irritability and a strong need to get back online can emerge.” For Lavenia, the device is not a simple neutral container: it is an active generator of gratificationand can, for some people and in moments of fragility, produce a true mechanism of addiction. «“Immediate” technology fits perfectly where there is absence or profound sufferingwhere connections, meaning and recognition are missing. That’s where the screen becomes an emotional shortcut: it doesn’t cure, it anesthetizes. And when desire is extinguished, when there is no longer something to go towards in real life, then the risk grows that addiction will take its place.”
What is the line between excessive cell phone use and the impossibility of doing without it for a few hours? Experts debate whether it is a real disease (Getty)
Bring the discomfort to light
Beyond the theoretical differences, there is one shared fact: the relationship between children and digital is never the same from one young person to another. For some it is a refuge, for others an incessant attraction, for others still a simple pastime which however risks getting out of hand. A variability that is also reflected in the work of the clinical services, called to interpret very different situations. «The line between overuse, Emotional escape and true pathology present themselves differently for every kid» says Federico Tonioni, psychiatrist and founder of the Clinic for Internet Addiction and Web-mediated Psychopathology, founded in 2016 at the Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome. «In most cases we are not faced with it to kids “addicted to technology” in the technical meaning of the term. Problematic digital behavior is almost always the tip of the iceberg of something else: developmental struggles, deep insecurities, difficulties with peers, school pressures. In these cases it is not the device that generates the problem, but a deeper anguish that digital attempts to anesthetize. It is precisely that discomfort that the therapeutic process must bring to light.”
For this reason, at Gemelli, individual interviews are accompanied by rehabilitation groups designed to reactivate “live” communication skills: the look, the blush, the pauses, the smell, the laughter, everything that young people, immersed in the digital world, risk losing. «And it’s not enough to work on the boy» adds Tonioni. «You must also accompany your family. Digital addiction arises within relationships: in silences, in the difficulties in saying things to each other, in the daily fragilities that remain in the shadows until something goes wrong.”
The parents’ dilemma
Experts agree on another point: there are no universal recipes. The relationship with digital changes with each person’s age, sensitivity and history. Rather than choosing between prohibition and laxity, it is a question of building a mobile balance, capable of adapting to the phases of growth. In some phases, clearer limits are needed; in others a discreet accompaniment is more useful. The quality of the relationship matters more than the rule: the boundary works if it is shared, not imposed. It is in this context that parental control, often perceived as an invasive tool, finds its place.
«It is not a means of espionage, but of education» explains Cirillo. «It serves to gradually introduce limits, protect against inappropriate content and teach children self-control. It works when it supports their autonomy, not when it replaces it.” Notifications about usage time or visited apps thus become an opportunity to talk, not to monitor: «The message must be clear: I don’t control you to punish you, but to protect you, until you know how to protect yourself». And this balance, psychotherapists observe, is only possible if the relationship remains based on trust, listening and the adults’ willingness to question themselves.