A generation of Nepali children is growing up healthier, better schooled than any before it and also the loneliest. This paradox belongs at the centre of our new government’s thinking, yet it is entirely absent from national conversation. We count enrollment, literacy and remittances, but fail to ask whether the web of caring adults, on which every childhood depends, is holding or fraying.

My four decades of work on child development across three continents revealed one pattern: Development brings survival and schooling, then inadvertently and quietly strips away the human bonds essential to children’s wellbeing. The Nepal I grew up in was desperately poor by most economic measures, but its children were rarely alone. Families were extended, cousins filled courtyards and neighbours claimed the right to scold a misbehaving child, an extension of what Donald Winnicott called a ‘safe holding environment’. That web was an infrastructure, as real as any road or health clinic.

40 years of development transformed survival. A Nepali child born today will live 20 years longer than her grandmother. But the courtyards are quieter now. More than 3.5 million Nepalis—one in eight—work abroad; remittances exceed a quarter of GDP. According to UNICEF, in any classroom of 30, six children have a parent abroad and two live with neither parent. The familial structures and networks that once held us are hollowing out.

Some will call this the price of progress. Common sense might agree until one examines the evidence. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, after eight decades of following thousands of lives, concluded, in Robert Waldinger’s words: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” Not income or achievement. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy prices disconnection in terms no economist can wave away: A toll rivalling 15 cigarettes a day. There is evidence that left-behind children in Nepal, China and the Philippines show more loneliness, anxiety and weaker school performance. By 2015, a third of Nepali adolescents reported frequent loneliness, and 13.6 percent had seriously considered suicide. None of this is the fault of parents who leave; most board that flight out of desperation and love. But cash wired from Doha is no substitute for a father’s presence at dinner. That loss is immense, yet uncounted. It belongs on the same scale as GDP because it is development, or its undoing.

Nor is this a symptom that wealth and growth will cure, as some economists continue to espouse. In the US, children living with two parents fell from 85 percent in 1968 to 70 percent. Adults with no close friends tripled between 1990 and 2020. In 2023, 40 percent of American high schoolers reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, a record. Prosperity did not protect American children. It masked their crisis. In 2025, the World Health Organisation called teenagers the world’s loneliest age group. Karl Polanyi named the mechanism 80 years ago: When market logic expands into every corner of life, it erodes bonds no market can price. In wealthy nations, that erosion took generations. In Nepal, we are compressing it into one. This is no argument against markets, which have lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in history. It is an argument for setting their boundaries.

Nowhere are the stakes sharper than in digital space and social media, which have added steroids to adolescents’ loneliness and fragility. A clumsy ban on it helped ignite the Gen Z uprising of September 2025. Our young people rose to defend their right to connect, and they were right to. Yet, that technology is reshaping childhood in ways barely reckoned with. Mobile ownership exceeds 90 percent of households. A child in a remote village sees the same algorithmic feeds as a teenager in Kathmandu or Chicago, engineered to hold attention whatever the cost to a developing mind. Research increasingly links heavy social media use to adolescent loneliness and isolation. Those online for more than three hours daily face roughly double the risk of poor mental health. We are raising a generation more connected and, at once, more fragile.

The lesson is not the false choice between banning technology and surrendering to it. Digital access opens learning, opportunity and voice. But digital progress without care for children is no progress at all. Nepal holds a rare advantage—we need not wait two decades for others to tell us what to do after the damage is done. By early 2026, 114 countries, over half worldwide, restricted smartphones in schools, up from a quarter three years before. Finland, for example, has legislated device limits and is restoring teacher-led instruction. Australia sets a minimum age for social media usage. Childhood is being reclaimed as a public interest, not a design choice left to profit-driven platforms.

Beneath the screens lies a deeper reform: the purpose of school itself. Education in Nepal, as elsewhere, has narrowed from forming citizens to producing workers, leaving children rarely taught to navigate loss, listen across differences, manage conflict or sustain relationships. Yet, James Heckman has shown that social and emotional skills yield returns exceeding narrow academic instruction. Singapore, Japan and Denmark now embed character, moral reasoning, civic education and life skills into the school day. Nepal should do the same, urgently, not as a foreign import but as a modern expression of wisdom our society has carried for centuries.

We have a young government, born of a youth movement, in a country where 40 percent are under 35. For those seeking a reform that costs little and matters enormously, here is one: Put childhood’s relational foundations at the heart of the mandate. Markets are necessary but not sufficient. They have no instinct for what children most need: presence, consistency, unhurried attention and the sense of being held by people who are not going anywhere.

That work is harder than any road or hydropower project. For generations, we have asked our children to carry our burdens, sending them first to fight real battles and now our economic insecurities. In doing so, we have weakened the very fabric that sustains us.