Screentime isn’t dangerous, it’s vital

Hours spent playing with computers can open a child’s mind for life

If you appear to be spending your holiday unsuccessfully attempting to separate your children from Wi-fi or their digital devices, do not despair. Your poor parenting may be helping them and saving the country.

The assumption that time online or in front of a screen is life wasted needs challenging. It is driven by fear. Some of those fears are rational: there are some bad things and bad people online, and children need protection. But we also fear an online world where we understand less than our children. This is uncomfortable: we are used to them overtaking us at sports – and much else – eventually, but even toddlers now seem intuitively to grasp technology faster than their parents.

Parental guilt is also driven by a failure to appreciate that life online and “real” life are not separate: they are all part of the same experience. Millennials understand this. Gaming and social media can be as sociable as mooching around the streets with a group of friends. “Augmented reality”, blending digital information into the physical world, trivially through “Pokémon Go” but in the future in medicine and many other disciplines, is natural for this generation.

We need young people to explore this digital world just as they explore the physical world. We worry about being over-protective when they leave the house; we need to have the same debate about the balance of risk in the world of the internet.

There is a serious point underlying this concern. This country is desperately short of engineers and computer scientists, and lacks the broad “cyber skills” needed now, never mind in the next 20 years. The baseline of understanding is too low and often behind our competitors. If we are to capitalise on the explosion of data that will come through the “internet of things”, and the arrival of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we need young people who have been allowed to behave like engineers: to explore, break things and put them together.

Arguably that is what children always did in their summer holidays. The difference today is that they will want to explore, experiment and break things digitally. Ask a teenager how to “jailbreak” a phone or use a virtual private network to avoid paying for their favourite show, and you will find they are already doing this.

The failure to nurture an inquisitive engineering mindset in the current generation of professionals is chronically illustrated in the gender gap. According to the Institute of Engineering and Technology, only nine per cent of our engineering graduates are women, half the figure for Germany and a quarter for Denmark. In short, half the population is not being inspired to see engineering as exciting and accessible to them.

Traditional methods will not solve this. There are many excellent computer science and engineering teachers, but not enough. Fortunately, today’s young people have become good at learning through seeing and doing online. They are teaching themselves in new ways. It follows that the best thing we can do is to focus less on the time they spend on screens at home and more on the READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion nature of the activity. The key is less passive watching and more inquisitive discovery, whether of the content of the internet or how it works.

Balance, of course, is good. But I do not recognise the moral concern about how the internet generation is turning out. Surveying the current chaos in the West, it is hard to argue that millennials might not make at least as good a stab at running things. And if they do educate themselves in the amazing possibilities of the digital era that is coming, which will make the progress even of the last half century seem slow, then they may be able to afford to buy a house and our social care to boot.

Finally, it is not too late for parents to catch up with their young. For the price of one of those impenetrable novels that you feel morally obliged to read on holiday, you could buy a Raspberry Pi (if you think this is a new summer dessert, please Google it). You could build it with your children and learn at least the concept of computer coding; there are plenty of free guides on the web. Leave aside your fears of being a nerd: that would be a problem to be proud of.

Robert Hannigan was director of GCHQ from 2014-17