The Times on Saturday yesterday did a great article called ‘I can’t walk yet, but I know how to work an iPad’.  It is a great article talking about the affects of ‘screen time’ on children.  The front page even goes so far as to state “Daddy won’t give me a cigarette, so why does he think a tablet is OK?’  Yikes!!

You know kids love looking at screens.  According to a 2015 study, British children between 5 and 16 years old spend an average of 6.5 hours a DAY looking at screens!  The article is pretty in-depth and is listening to the thoughts of psychologists and their concerns of how the escalation of children (both young and old) using ‘screens’ is affecting their wellbeing.  In November, the American Academy of Pediatrics reduced the recommended screen time for children of under five by half to just one hour a day.  Babies under 18 months, they advised, should avoiddigital media altogether.

There is a best selling New York author has just released a new book ‘Why we can’t stop checking, scrolling, clicking and watching’.  This kind of says it all.  There are many über clever people in Silicon Valley (and all over the world) with a huge and detailed understanding of what drives us as humans and they have made it ‘their’ business to make sure we cannot put down their hardware or apps.

This has prompted a boom in what Alter (a psychologist) calls “behavioural addictions”.  And Facebook and the like have not even got started yet.  They are gradually building bigger and greater portfolios about us all so that we can become even bigger targets of digital media.

Where it becomes more dangerous is when kids get bored and use the devices as a mental crutch!  Turn to the device….  What shall I do next?  Turn to the device….. I have a bit of time…. turn to the device.  Children have not yet developed developed self control.  So they are an even bigger target as future users.  Relationships of all kinds will suffer too.

There was some recent hard research out about the use of social media and its links to depression.  We need to be careful.

So I think my point of this is do we need to stop giving very young children tablets and phones? I think we probably need to think a lot more about it than we do and then decide.  Steve Jobs would not allow his kids to use an iPad at home!

Blog post by James Dodd