In Pixar’s upcoming movie Toy Story 5, the toys have a new problem to solve: technology.
After their child Bonnie receives a new tablet-like toy, Jesse, Rex, Forky, and the rest of the gang must fight to get her to play.
Director Andrew Stanton told Empire Magazine in November 2025, “It’s not so much a battle as it is a recognition of an existential problem: No one really plays with toys anymore.” “Technology has changed everyone’s lives, but we are asking what it means for us and our children.”
“Pixar is giving a name to something that parents feel but can’t express well,” said Susan Song, a child psychiatrist and author of Why We Suffer and How We Heal. “Children are not meant to grow up primarily in a world of algorithms.”
So will Toy Story 5, released June 19, finally help parents get their kids to spend less time on screens?
It depends on the framework, says Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable: How to Control Your attention and Choose Your Life and a former lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
“Teaching kids that screens are bad doesn’t make them any less appealing,” he says. “If anything, it makes them more appealing.” Instead, he says, if the film explores the loss of free play and the unmet need for genuine connection with other children, it could be a good conversation starter.
“Kids become more cooperative when they understand what the purpose is,” Song says. “Explain to your children that just like muscles need exercise, their brains need practice to get bored, get clumsy, and figure things out.”
As for the best way to incorporate screen time into children’s lives, Eyal says parents should stop thinking of technology as something that needs to be eliminated and start thinking of it as something that needs to be scheduled.
“There’s a big difference between a movie planned as a family event and a screen that just plays in the background because no one decided to do it,” he says. One makes this the active selection, and the other makes it the default mode for boring moments.
“Sit down together, watch it together, and talk about it,” he says. “It’s screen time that serves a human purpose.”
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