PROTECTED CONTENT

If you’re a current subscriber, log in below. If you would like to subscribe, please click the subscribe tab above.

Lost your password?

Username and Password Help

Please enter your email and we will send you a password reset link.

← Back

Let’s talk…Mental Health:
The Loneliest Child May Be Sitting In Your Living Room

By Jean Davenport-Niles

As summer begins and school doors close for a few months, many parents immediately feel pressure to keep children entertained, scheduled, active, and busy. Camps are booked, vacations planned, sports arranged, and screens often become the easiest solution during long afternoons. Yet beneath all the activity, a quieter question may deserve our attention:
Are our children emotionally connected — or simply occupied?
We live in one of the most technologically connected generations in history, yet many children quietly struggle with loneliness, anxiety, and emotional isolation. Ironically, a child can sit not across town, but sitting silently in the living room scrolling through a phone while everyone else scrolls through theirs.
Children rarely announce emotional loneliness directly. Instead, it often appears through withdrawal, irritability, endless screen time, emotional outbursts, or simply becoming unusually quiet. What many children truly long for is not nonstop entertainment, but connection. Eye contact. Conversation. Shared laughter. Feeling emotionally important to someone.
Years from now, children may not remember every expensive outing or perfectly planned summer activity. But they often remember simple moments that made them feel loved: card games around the kitchen table, late-night ice cream runs, walks together, family jokes, sitting on the porch talking, or hearing a parent genuinely ask, “How are you really doing?”
Perhaps one of the healthiest things families can do this summer is intentionally create moments where phones are set aside and people become fully present with one another again. Even small rituals matter — evening board games, cooking together, reading aloud, backyard conversations, making cookies or ice cream sundae’s or simply sitting together without rushing somewhere else.
Children do not merely need supervision. They need emotional presence. And honestly, adults do too.
In a world overflowing with noise, schedules, notifications, and distraction, perhaps the greatest gift we can offer one another is the feeling of being fully seen, fully heard, and emotionally valued. My daughter says that a fondest memory was saying evening prayers together. Let them hear what your heart communicates with God is way to build a connection.
This summer may not require perfect planning. It may simply require a little more attention to the hearts quietly living under our own roofs. Find time with your loved ones.

Now available: “Past Due: The Emotional Cost of Not Letting Go”. Visit Amazon.com. Jean’s background: Silicon Valley executive, business consultant, life coach, inspirational speaker, author …with focus on ministries. Contact [email protected] or [email protected].