DENIS KILCOMMONS Kid needs right balance of play and screen time
TODAY’S children aged between six and 16, spend an average of four and a half hours a day on digital devices and only 40 minutes a day outside. Sixty eight per cent of parents claim their youngsters are addicted to screens.
At their age I was out all day. In the winter playing football on the field at the top of the road, then under the glow of street lamps, or out chumping for bonfire night.
The summer was a dawn-todusk adventure, walking fields and hedgerows with a jam sandwich and a bottle of liquorice water for sustenance, until driven home by hunger for tea, then out again until dark and wandering back to bed to the hoot of an owl. You get the idea.
As well as day-long safaris to the outer reaches of your home district, children’s rights of passage included eating dirt, picking scabs from knees and falling out of trees, or at least from the wall that divided one backyard from the next, and it never did me any harm.
Well, that’s the theory.
Indoor entertainment ranged from black and white TV to a compendium of games, Dandy and Eagle comics to library books, and games of Owzthat, which was a type of indoor cricket played as a game of chance. A bit like the way I played actual cricket, to be honest.
As the decades passed there was never a great incentive for children to hog the home fire and Horlicks, and they continued to stay out on bikes, with Hoola Hoops and skipping ropes, or to play kerby. Simon says, hopscotch and hide and seek.
It was with the advent of video games – who remembers playing screen tennis? – followed by myriad TV channels, computers, laptops, mobile phones and all the social connections of the internet, that youngsters started staying indoors. And let’s face it, that was a better choice than the Dandy every Tuesday.
If I’d had a computer back in my childhood, plus an e-book reader that meant I didn’t even have to go to the library, I would have abandoned many childish pastimes to explore the planet.
There is, of course, a balance to be found. The internet and gaming can be both interesting and educational as well as purely entertaining.
My grandchildren are all involved in sport and athletics, enjoy country walks and outdoor activities as well as modern technology. And I can hardly complain about the seduction of screentime: I spend at least four and half hours a day at my computer or Kindle.
And if anyone wants to introduce a younger generation to Owzthat, you can get a modern version of the game on Amazon for £7.99. It comes with the assurance: “Low tech – no need for computer or batteries.”
Just the active imagination that all kids still have.