Screenshot of the video clip shows the girl walking alone ahead of her mother. (Web pic) 
 
 BEIJING, Oct.31 (Xinhua) -- The death of a toddler last week has triggered outrage over parents who are obsessed in smartphones and neglect their duty of parenting. 
 
 
 
 A 2-minute video clip, widely shared on the Internet, captured a horrific scene of a 2-year-old girl being hit and then crushed by a car. When the accident took place, the girl was walking alone ahead of her phone-engrossed mother. The girl didn't survive. Police investigation said that the girl walked into the driver's blind zone. 
 
 
 
 Netizens expressed their anger over the mother, saying that she should have kept an eye on her child. They said that parents should keep their responsibility and duty in mind. 
 
 "If the mobile phone was so much fun, then why had you given birth to the child?" asked web user "Xiaodingdangmaimaijimiqiu". 
 
 "It is a bloody lesson. Everyone should be alerted not to play with a smartphone while walking. God knows how regretful the mother is," a netizen in the username of "freeermiao" wrote on China's twitter-like microblog Weibo. 
 
 
 
 The accident was not a single case. In April this year, a two-year-old boy ran into the center of a road while his mother was mesmerized by her mobile phone in east China's Anhui province. The boy was hit by a car and died. In August last year, a similar tragedy happened in central China's Henan province when a boy was hit by a car in a parking zone. His mother was checking phone somewhere else when the boy was knocked down. 
 
 
 
 Parents have been urged to curb their smartphone addiction. In China, more than five in 10 adults own a smartphone. Over half of the people questioned in a poll conducted by Deloitte check mobile phone for 1 or 2 times per hour, and one fourth of the interviewees check their mobiles for over 50 times a day. 
 
 
 
 Child Accident Prevention Trust, a UK children's charity, has warned that parents obsessed in their mobile phones are putting their children in danger of serious accidents. 
 
 
 
 Almost a quarter of parents were engrossed in their devices when their children suffered an accident or had a near miss, according to a new research it released. ||||| “Heart-wrenching!” the Shandong provincial prosecutor’s office wrote on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. “Put down your phone. Save the children!” 
 
 The death of Tutu, as the girl was identified in Chinese news reports, is just the latest example of how “distracted walking” can threaten public safety. 
 
 In August last year, a 2-year-old boy in the central province of Henan died after being struck by an S.U.V. near a shopping mall while his mother was engrossed in her phone. And in April, another 2-year-old boy with a phone-addled mother was run over and killed in the eastern province of Anhui. 
 
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 Liu Qinxue, an expert on smartphone addiction at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, said the Yueyang accident could serve as a warning of the risks of overusing the devices. 
 
 “People normally do not think about the potential dangers it might bring,” Professor Liu said. “There’s not enough discussion or awareness.” 
 
 Officials in China have documented and publicized the risks of calling or texting while driving. 
 
 In 2014, for example, the Shanghai police said that calling or texting while driving had caused nearly 30 percent of 690 fatal automobile accidents between January and October of that year, according to a report in China’s state-run news media. The city’s police installed high-definition traffic cameras to identify motorists who use smartphones while driving, and offenders are fined 200 renminbi, or around $30, and penalized through a points system. 
 
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 In March, a lawmaker from the central province of Hubei proposed in the national legislature that drivers who use phones while on the road be criminally charged. 
 
 But policy makers in many countries have paid far less attention to the problem of “distracted walking,” according to a 2015 study in the Journal of Traffic and Transportation Engineering. The study added that pedestrian-crash data was not yet detailed enough for researchers to determine a link between distracted walking and safety problems. 
 
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 In Hong Kong, subway stations have signs that warn commuters not to stare at mobile phones on escalators. Officials in Seoul, the South Korean capital, announced recently that the city would install outdoor signs that warn pedestrians of the dangers of texting while walking. 
 
 But such signs are rarely, if ever, seen in mainland China. 
 
 Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the relationship between humans and digital devices, said in an email that a declining capacity for solitude and self-reflection had given rise to a dependence on smartphones and created a need for phone-free “sacred spaces.” 
 
 “Talk to your co-workers, talk to your family,” she said. “Never bring a phone to a meal. No phones in the car. No phones at meetings or in classrooms. We can find our way back to each other.” 
 
 Many Chinese social media users have echoed that sentiment since the death of the 2-year-old in Yueyang. 
 
 “Head-down tribe, it’s time to lift your head now,” one commenter wrote on Weibo, using a popular Chinese nickname for smartphone obsessives. ||||| An Internet cafe in Beijing in 2015. (How Hwee Young/European Pressphoto Agency) 
 
 By all accounts, Li Ao, an 18-year-old man in Anhui province, was well-behaved but for the fact that he had seemingly lost interest in everything except the Internet, according to his mother. 
 
 So when Liu Dongmei read about an Internet-addiction treatment center in Fuyang city and the success stories it touted, she was hopeful it would help her son. The center promised gentler approaches, such as physical activity and psychological counseling, instead of the extreme treatments for which some of China's other Internet-addiction “boot camps” have gained notoriety. 
 
 On Aug. 3, Liu and her husband checked their son into the center. They had agreed to pay 22,800 yuan, or nearly $3,500, so Li Ao could stay 180 days. 
 
 Two days later, they received a phone call. Li Ao had been taken to a hospital, where he died. 
 
 [Video games are more addictive than ever. This is what happens when kids can’t turn them off.] 
 
 Several days after his death, the distraught parents appeared on Anhui Television to describe what had happened to their son — and the shocking discovery they made when they saw his body at the mortuary: scars and bruises on his torso, arms and legs. 
 
 “His entire body was bruised,” Liu told AHTV, weeping uncontrollably. 
 
 Li Ao's father sat stone-faced on the edge of the bed during the interview, clutching a single tissue. 
 
 “It hadn't even been 48 hours since we dropped him off,” Li Tao told the news station. “After a day-and-a-half, our child was gone.” 
 
 (Note: The video below is in Mandarin and includes images some viewers may find graphic.) 
 
 Chinese media outlets have said that the Fuyang center has been shut down while authorities investigate how the teenager died, according to BBC News. But Li Ao's death is the latest high-profile incident involving Chinese Internet-addiction “boot camps” and the controversial measures some have taken to try to break teenagers’ Internet habits. 
 
 In 2009, a 15-year-old in Guangxi province died two days after checking into an Internet-addiction center, having been beaten by his trainers, according to the South China Morning Post. In 2014, a 19-year-old woman named Guo Lingling died at a center in Henan province after suffering head and neck injuries; her “training” had consisted of being repeatedly picked up, dropped and kicked on the ground, the newspaper reported. 
 
 [Chinese teen starves mother to death in fury at brutal Internet addiction boot camp] 
 
 Last year, a 16-year-old girl from Heilongjiang province made national headlines after she tied her mother to a chair for a week and starved her to death, reportedly as retribution for being sent to an Internet-addiction treatment center against her will. As The Washington Post's Simon Denyer and Gu Jinglu reported, the girl had suffered beatings and other abuses at the camp: 
 
 In February, the girl was forcibly taken away by two strange men in a car and driven to the camp in faraway Shandong province, only escaping four months later, the paper reported. In an online journal, she later complained that trainers had beaten students for no reason and ordered those who did not behave to eat in front of the pit latrine. In a journal post published on Aug. 25, she wrote: “When you mentioned it to your relatives, they all said: ‘Isn’t it all in the past? We love you, you should forget all those things.’ ” “I am angry. People point at my nose and call me unfilial and worse than a beast,” she wrote. “It was them who sent me there. It was them who cursed me and beat me, it was them who sabotaged my life and libeled my character; but it was also them who said they loved me. My friends here, if it were you, what would you do?” The girl shot photographs and video of her mother tied up in the chair, demanding thousands of dollars from her aunt to release her, ostensibly so she could go to a physics school in the city of Harbin. The money was sent, but by then the girl discovered her mother was already dying. She called an ambulance, but it arrived too late to save her mother. 
 
 In 2008, China formally declared “Internet addiction” a clinical disorder. “China's Web Junkies,” a 2014 short documentary published by the New York Times, went into the Daxing Internet-Addiction Treatment Center and found staff there using military-style tactics to treat the uniform-clad “patients.” Those at the camp slept in bunk beds and were ordered to wake up for physical drills. 
 
 “Normal people can't imagine how these teenagers in our center use the Internet,” Tao Ran, director of the Daxing Internet-Addiction Treatment Center, said in the documentary. “Some kids are so hooked on these games. They think taking a restroom break will affect their performance at these games. So they wear a diaper. That's why we call it electronic heroin.” 
 
 That short documentary later became “Web Junkie,” a full-length PBS documentary released in 2015, following three Chinese teenagers from the beginning of their stint in Internet-addiction treatment centers to when they were released. 
 
 “We decided to go to China because China is where this phenomenon is in the extreme, but it's also really a mirror to what's happening in the world because this is a global phenomenon,” documentary co-director Hilla Medalia said in an online interview released with “Web Junkie.” 
 
 In 2009, China's Health Ministry advised a ban on electric shock treatments at the Internet-addiction “boot camps,” though many questioned whether the centers would comply. Early this year, state media reported draft regulations that would prohibit “electric shock therapy, beatings and other abusive methods” at such camps, according to the Telegraph. 
 
 Read more: 
 
 This dark side of the Internet is costing young people their jobs and social lives 
 
 An Audi commercial in China compared women to used cars. It didn’t go well. 
 
 A woman threw coins at her plane for luck. One landed in the engine and caused a 5-hour delay.
– A 2-year-old girl was killed last month in China while her mother stared at her smartphone, leading many Chinese social media users to call for a change, the New York Times reports. Surveillance video (Warning: graphic content) posted online on Oct. 20 shows the toddler walking near an SUV while her mother is on her phone a few steps behind her, reports McClatchy. The SUV starts moving, running over the little girl as she walks in front of it. The mother doesn't appear to look up from her phone until her daughter had already been hit. The girl, identified as Tutu, died before an ambulance could arrive. Police determined the driver wasn't at fault because Tutu was in his blind spot. The video spread all over the Chinese web, leading to outrage, New China reports. "If the mobile phone was so much fun, then why had you given birth to the child?" one person writes online. "Everyone should be alerted not to play with a smartphone while walking. God knows how regretful the mother is," writes another. A local prosecutor's office calls it "heart-wrenching." "Put down your phone. Save the children!" it posts online. At least two other 2-year-olds were killed by cars while their mothers were looking at their phones in the past 15 months in China. "There's not enough discussion or awareness" of "potential dangers," a smartphone addiction expert tells the Times. (Two women go blind in one eye after using their smartphones.)