In the past few years, the conversations echoing through school corridors have changed in unmistakable ways. A decade ago, the anxieties felt familiar. Teachers worried about attendance, examination pressure, bullying, and academic performance. Parent-teacher meetings revolved around marks, homework, and classroom behaviour of adolescents. The problems were not trivial, but they belonged to the known vocabulary of growing up.Today, educators confront a different landscape. Students arrive in classrooms after nights lost to gaming, scroll through social media with urgency, struggle to sustain attention, experiment with vaping, and display emotional volatility that is difficult to interpret. These concerns cannot be solved by stricter discipline, stern warnings, confiscated phones or an occasional awareness lecture. They are not merely adolescece issues. They are symptoms of a deeper social transformation.

Children and adolescents no longer grow up under the influence of family, school and neighbourhood alone. They inhabit an ecosystem in which smartphones, peer networks, social media and OTT platforms, recommendation algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and family environments interact. The child is shaped not by one institution at a time, but by friction between many worlds.

The boundary between physical and digital life has blurred. School interactions continue on messaging groups long after the final bell. Friendships, identity, validation, aspiration, entertainment and social comparison unfold online. Adolescence itself now stretches across screens. What appears inside the classroom is often the visible residue of what has happened outside it, or inside a phone.

Excessive gaming, for instance, is rarely........

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