Visit a typical McDonald’s restaurant in the United States and you will most likely encounter a side room teeming with ecstatic children crawling up staircases, tumbling down slides, and burrowing through plastic tunnels on repeat. This is the “PlayPlace,” the franchise’s built-in playground that undoubtedly makes McDonald’s an even more popular option for dining out families.

The PlayPlace is a cultural staple. It’s something we all take for granted when we walk into a McDonald’s. I can remember going to McDonald’s as a child more excited about playing than eating cheeseburgers! So, it was jarring when an image of a modern McDonald’s PlayPlace appeared on my X feed. This new playground does not include any actual physical objects for children to play on. It does not have a door. It is not, alas, a room at all. The viral image, posted by Nancy French, who was visiting the restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee, shows two screens on a wall with a couple of chairs facing them. The PlayPlace is essentially a console for kids to play touch screen video games.

The image was quickly reshared by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose latest book The Anxious Generation is all about the rise of “virtual childhood” in which kids no longer physically play with each other but spend most of their waking hours in front of screens. This particular image at McDonald’s simply reflects the sad condition of modern childhood: all screens, no real play.

The irony is that a lot of kids in such a McDonald’s might already be too absorbed in their iPads to even bother with any sort of playground, whether real or virtual. Screens are everywhere, and many kids already have constant access to them. Parents, therefore, need to be intentional about ensuring their children get the outdoor playtime they need to simply be kids.

Play is key to human development, and kids’ screentime engagement is correlated with cognitive difficulty, fragmented attention spans, and poor emotional regulation. When kids grow up on screens, they struggle to process written language. The first few years of a person’s life is essential for language learning and comprehension. Excessive screentime is shown to handicap kids’ ability to learn, retain information, and communicate effectively with others.

Hopefully the McDonald’s corporation will realize that the PlayPlace is a big part of what makes its restaurants so appealing.