Ex-spy chief: Kids should spend more time online

CHILDREN should be encouraged to spend more time online to improve their cyberskills so they can ‘save the country’, a former spy chief said yesterday.

Despite warnings the internet could be bad for youngsters’ mental health, Robert Hannigan, former head of Britain’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ, told parents not to ‘despair’ if their children were glued to computer screens.

He said it was their duty to encourage more time in the virtual world as Britain is lagging behind other countries in online warfare.

‘If you are spending a disproportionate amount of your holiday unsuccessfully attempting to separate your children from WiFi or their digital devices, do not despair,’ said Mr Hannigan, who was GCHQ director until earlier this year. ‘Your poor parenting may be helping them and saving the country.’

He said the UK was ‘desperately’ short of computer scientists – and needed children who ‘have been allowed to behave like engineers’ by exploring, breaking and reassembling things.

‘The assumption that time online or in front of a screen is life wasted needs challenging. It is driven by fear,’ Mr Hannigan wrote in the Daily Telegraph. ‘We need young people to explore this digital world.’

His comments clash with those by Children’s Commissioner for England Anne Longfield this week. She said when social media was making children ‘stressed and out of control’, it meant ‘we haven’t got the balance right’.

Studies have found that children who spend large amounts of time at a computer risk mental health problems.

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