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IMAGINE discovering Mr Kellogg had barred his cereals from his family’s breakfast table. Or the makers of Calpol wouldn’t give it to their own feverish youngsters. Well, that’s exactly what’s happening now among the super-rich technology titans who develop the phones, tablets and apps our children are glued to. These are the people who’ve witnessed first-hand how much ingenuity goes into engineering devices and games to make them as addictive as possible to young minds – and the damage that can do.
Naturally, they don’t want their own precious little ones frazzling their brains hour after hour, so they’re banning them from using the screens they’re selling to everyone else’s children.
Remarkably, a school that trumpets traditional teaching – blackboards, text books, pencils, paper and outdoor play – has become the most sought after destination for the offspring of the digital elite in America. Waldorf School is a proudly tech-free institution right in the middle of Silicon Valley.
Because the growing consensus among those at the heart of the tech revolution is that trawling endlessly through phones – they call it ‘zombie scrolling’ – or spending hours staring at screens, stunts young minds and destroys attention spans. Not to mention causing sleeplessness, social isolation and depression.
While delighted to hook your children and mine, those gliding up to the Waldorf’s school gates in Teslas and Range Rovers each morning are choosing not to risk it with their own.
Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire former Facebook executive, refuses to let his three youngsters use mobiles or tablets. He says: ‘I do not want children that only know how to interface with the world through a screen.’ Well, neither do the rest of us.
I rue the day I absent-mindedly let my children – aged five and 14 – kill time playing on my phone. It’s now our number one source of friction, often turning bedtime and homework into a battleground.
The full impact of this screen addiction is not known, but research suggests limited periods exploring the internet with a parent is fine, as are things that stretch the mind, such as writing code. Building-type games are better than zombie scrolling. Yet, when I asked a child psychotherapist to recommend a safe number of minutes a day, she shot back: ‘How about zero?’
A former Google executive has revealed how tech companies employ the world’s brightest minds to engineer their apps to be as unputdownable as possible. YouTube THE Labour Party is agonising over how to make Jeremy Corbyn more attractive to women after a poll revealed twice as many of us think Theresa May’s a better PM than he would be. Perhaps not calling us ‘Comrade’ would be a start? learns the videos your child likes – then queues up a stream of similar ones to play automatically.
Snapchat has a feature called Streaks which shows the number of consecutive days children send snaps to each other. An hourglass pops up if you’re close to 24 hours without a snap and then bang, your score is back to zero. I was in the car with a friend when her 11-year-old became hysterical, squealing ‘my streaks’,’ as she realised we had no signal and she was close to the 24 hours cut-off point.
THE favourite in our house is an online game called Fortnite. It’s so insidiously clever that my eldest says abandoning a game before the end is ‘like ripping up a book manuscript in front of the author as he’s on the final paragraph’. To him and his buddies, it’s that bad. Psychologists say these games release the pleasure hormone dopamine – the same one that gets people hooked on drugs. ‘Think of the pleasure as more akin to cocaine than sweeties,’ said one.
To me, this all feels like a repetition of the multi-billion-pound marketing strategies once employed by big tobacco companies to snare the young, knowing they’d be hooked for life.
Learning that the very people who brought us this technology are shunning it in their own homes is galling beyond words. The hypocrisy is as outrageous as their bank balances. IT WASN’T the giant Must-Have Fancy Little Knickers slogan – or the fact that it was right next to a display of David Gandy in a suit with the label Must-Have Outfits To Impress – that made me feel a man’s less-than-light touch was behind last week’s window display fiasco at an M&S in Nottingham. No, it was the fact that the knickers were RED. NYLON. LACE. Only a man would think chafing, scratchy red lace would fill his beloved with anything but horror at Christmas – or any other time of the year.