{"id":63,"date":"2026-08-19T14:11:23","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T14:11:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/locustherapy.ie\/blog\/?p=63"},"modified":"2026-08-19T14:11:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T14:11:24","slug":"we-guard-our-front-door-why-dont-we-guard-our-feed-or-teach-our-children-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/locustherapy.ie\/blog\/we-guard-our-front-door-why-dont-we-guard-our-feed-or-teach-our-children-to\/","title":{"rendered":"We Guard Our Front Door. Why Don’t We Guard Our Feed \u2014 or Teach Our Children To?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When someone knocks on our door, we don’t fling it open on reflex. We pause. We check who it is, what they want, whether we have the time or energy for them right now \u2014 and only then do we decide whether to let them in. It’s an instinct built to protect something valuable: our home, our time, our peace of mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now compare that to what happens the moment we, or our children, unlock a phone. There’s no pause, no filter, no “who’s there?” Every notification, video, opinion, and stranger’s crisis gets instant, unquestioned entry \u2014 into the one resource none of us can get back once it’s spent: attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The skill hiding inside this habit<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In occupational therapy, that pause at the door has a name: inhibitory control<\/strong> \u2014 the executive function skill that lets us stop, evaluate, and choose a response instead of reacting automatically. It’s one of the core building blocks of self-regulation, and like any skill, it develops through practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trouble is, a lot of what children interact with today is engineered to remove exactly that pause. Design ethicist Tristan Harris has compared the infinite scroll to a slot machine \u2014 a mechanism built to keep pulling you back for one more round, with no natural stopping point. Unlike a front door, the feed was never designed to make anyone ask “should I let this in?” It was designed to make sure they never do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why this matters for developing brains<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cost of skipping that pause is measurable, and it isn’t small. A widely cited 2019 neuroscience review, “The Online Brain” (Firth et al.), found that heavy multitasking online is linked to weaker attention control and reduced density in the brain regions responsible for sustained focus. A 2023 meta-analysis in BMC Psychiatry<\/em> went further, connecting excessive social media use to measurable declines in short-term memory and executive function \u2014 the same skills OTs work to build through play, routine, and structured challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a developing brain, every skipped pause is a missed rep. The gatekeeping instinct at the door doesn’t build itself; it’s practised, thousands of times, until it becomes automatic. If a child’s main daily interaction with information is a feed with no gate at all, that practice simply isn’t happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modelling the pause, on purpose<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news: this is trainable, the same way any executive function skill is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n