Don't Let Your Child Become a "Dopagaki" Who Only Watches

At a Digital Kodomo BASE computer class, there was a child whose eyes lit up as they moved a game they had built with a mouse and keyboard. Just as they were getting the hang of it, their parents bought them a smartphone. From then on, they spent more time gazing at the phone than sitting at the computer.

Even children who come to us because they want to learn the computer are pulled away by the quick pleasures in their hand, until they can no longer put the phone down. We have watched it many times in our classes: an interest that was just finding the joy of making drifts back to the ease of watching. It is a waste, and it stings every time.

A word is spreading: "dopagaki"

"Dopagaki" is Japanese internet slang, short for "dopamine-addicted kid" (gaki is a blunt word for a child). It mocks a young generation so used to short videos, games and other strong, instant-reward stimuli that they cannot stick with one thing for long. This article focuses on one part of that picture: the short-form video habit. The word has appeared in magazines and newspapers this year, and in September the ABEMA news program Watashi to News interviewed a father in his forties who described his two daughters, one in the second year of junior high school and one in the third grade of elementary school, as dopagaki. The older daughter plays games while scrolling short videos on a phone beside her, and falls asleep with the phone still in her hand.

Nearly half of junior high students are online five hours a day

In the latest survey released by Japan's Children and Families Agency in February 2026, 48.0% of junior high students and 63.3% of high school students use the internet for five hours or more on a weekday. In sheer hours, the father's household is not an exception.

"It makes kids less sharp" is not a scare story

In September 2025, a team at Griffith University published a meta-analysis in an American Psychological Association journal that pooled 71 studies and 98,299 participants. The more people used short-form video, the lower their attention (correlation coefficient −0.38) and inhibitory control (−0.41). Inhibitory control is the ability to tell yourself "not now" when a temptation appears. This is correlation, not proven causation; children who already struggle to concentrate may simply drift toward short videos. Still, once you are used to a reward arriving every few seconds, activities where the reward comes late, like anything you have to build to completion, start to feel dull.

A Japanese longitudinal study, though not limited to short-form video, goes further. Hikaru Takeuchi, Ryuta Kawashima and colleagues at Tohoku University's Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer followed 224 children aged 5 to 18 for three years. Children with a habit of frequent internet use showed a relative decline in verbal intelligence three years later, along with smaller increases in gray and white matter across wide brain regions tied to language, attention, executive function and reward. The result held after adjusting for sex, age, parental education and baseline intelligence. The more frequent the use, the less growth in verbal intelligence and in the brain that supports it. That is not a scare story. It is the trend the tracking data shows.

The dividing line is output, not hours

Even so, there is no need to keep children away from digital devices. Today's children will learn and work with AI and digital tools as a given, and you cannot master a tool you never use. Watching video is not the problem either. Sitting through a twenty-minute tutorial to learn the steps of a craft, a recipe or a program is input, the same as reading a book. The problem is when the habit hardens into passively streaming a few dozen seconds of stimulation at a time, with no purpose and no choice. So the thing to look at is whether what a child watches connects to anything they do or make.

On the program, Mai Uchida, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a child psychiatrist, said the focus should be "not how long they watched, but what is being lost because of it." Judge by whether sleep, school attendance or relationships are suffering, and do not rate a child by the screen-time number alone. Then, she said, look at "whether the input connects to output in the real world."

Check for harm first, then look at the kind of use that hours alone cannot show. The younger daughter on the same program, a third grader, is the example. She watched short videos on felt crafts, went out and bought the materials herself, and made an apple tree with animals gathered around it. The same short videos can end in "watch and done" or in "watch and make," and those are different acts. Dopamine itself is not the villain; it fires when a piece is finished, and when a program finally runs the way you wanted. The problem is when the reward is wired to nothing but the next video. What separates a "dopagaki who only watches" from a child who makes things is not viewing time. It is whether there is a channel for what they watch to come back out.

That is what happened to the child at the start of this article. A hand that was reaching toward making switched, the moment a watching device arrived, to watching.

Three things parents can do

First, ask rather than confiscate. One question, "Of what you watched today, was there anything you'd like to try yourself?", turns consumption into an entrance. Second, put tools for making within reach before the smartphone. A phone is designed for watching and a computer for making, and whichever is at hand gets used. Change the order in which you hand them over, and the after-school habit changes with it. Third, have them make in the same genre they watch. Show a child who watches game streams how to build their own game; show a child who watches short videos how to shoot and edit one. Fuel that already exists is the path of least resistance.

Fingers reach for a phone in "nothing to do" time, and that is as true for adults as for children. Rather than policing the boredom, it is more realistic to give it somewhere to go. Shoot and edit a video, or tell an AI what game to build. Today an elementary student can finish a first piece of either in a single class. The appetite for stimulation does not change, but if its destination shifts from "the next video" to "my own work," the hours that were called dopagaki become a maker's hours. Junior high and high school students who feel they are "total dopagaki" can choose the same path starting today.

This is part of why Digital Kodomo BASE in Ota, Tokyo deliberately teaches children on computers rather than smartphones or tablets. To keep more children from letting whole days pass in nothing but consumed stimulation, we put tools for making in their hands and run free classes where a child who watched games moves to the side that builds them. For children with no computer at home, we continue to deliver refurbished used PCs.