Parents first…

Our children are being mentally scarred by their obsession with social media, according to Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary. He has given outlets such as Facebook and Google a week to come up with a plan to deal with it or face legislation, though to do what is not entirely clear. They are required to show the steps they have taken to cut underage use, prevent cyber-bullying and encourage healthy screentime, and what more they intend to do.

Mr Hunt said their failure to prevent young children using social media was “unacceptable and irresponsible” and that they were turning “a blind eye to a whole generation of children being exposed to the harmful emotional side-effects of social media prematurely”.

Meanwhile, as we report today, the President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health is worried, as many are, about the obesity epidemic among young people. His idea for dealing with it is to ban all fast-food outlets within 400m of schools.

There is a pattern here. If young children are being harmed by being on their phones or computers, then the first line of defence is not the Government but their parents. Similarly, children buying junk food on their way to school can only do so with money given to them by their parents – unless they are old enough to have earned it themselves. We know the difficulties parents have in getting their offspring to eat well or ration their social media use. Mr Hunt said parents were being put in an “intolerable” position by the social media giants. Arguably, fast-food outlets are doing the same. But these are social and cultural problems that it is easy to blame others for perpetuating, when the solution is often in our own hands.