In a couple of weeks’ time, under Christmas trees across the country, many thousands of oblong packages containing smartphones, tablets and other internet-enabled devices will magically appear, waiting to be unwrapped by the eager hands of children, many of them under the age of 10.
Is this really a good idea?
There seems to be an assumption in some quarters that if a child doesn’t get her sticky fingers all over her personal iPad before she knows how to spell her own name, she will be doomed for life, forever playing catch-up with her more tech-savvy peers.
Modern touchscreen phones and tablets are essentially consumption devices for the global entertainment and advertising industries. They exist primarily to sell products, to advertise more products and to harvest user data for commercial exploitation. They are brilliantly designed to be so seductive, intuitive and idiot-proof that most of them don’t even come with an instruction manual. The idea that turning your young child into some sort of super-user on these things will give her an advantage over anyone else is akin to thinking that making her watch Sky Sports will turn her into a world-class athlete.
Yes, technology is part of modern life and of course children need to be allowed and encouraged to engage fully with that reality. The internet is an extraordinary repository of knowledge and information which parents and educators have a responsibility to introduce to children in a measured way.
But is it really a good idea for you to give a smartphone to an eight year-old? When, where and for what are they going to use it?
Will you take it from them at times or will they always have access to it? Have you researched which filters or monitoring software you should have on it? And would it not be more sensible to have a laptop or tablet for general family use in the livingroom or kitchen?
A survey in the UK by the parenting site mumsnet last year found that 30 per cent of parents allow their children to access the internet without any restrictions or supervision. The magical thinking which seems to impel some parents to put unimpeded access to personal technology into the hands of their children at as early an age as possible is bewildering, particularly when so much media coverage of young people in the digital world emphasises – often to the point of hyperbole – the threat posed by online predators, cyberbullying and pornography.
On the one hand, we're told the internet is a lawless jungle too dangerous for children to use. On the other, refusing access is a denial of children's rights.
No wonder parents are confused. The fact is, we're all living in a still relatively new world of always-on connectedness, where according to recent research, the average user unlocks their smartphone 150 times per day. In a few short years, we have developed extraordinarily intimate relationships with these things. We keep them closer than we keep our loved ones. There's no other physical object which we feel the need to have on our person at all times.
Ground rules on what constitutes appropriate behaviour for adults are conspicuous by their absence, so it’s no surprise that, when it comes to kids, confusion reigns. As in other areas – like nutrition and education – competing academic research, or commercially biased “surveys” refracted through the filter of a media keen to emphasise shock value often confuse more than they enlighten.
But we do know from our own experience that smartphones fill up the interstices between the bigger bits and pieces of our adult lives. We check them when we’re standing in a queue, sitting on the bus or stuck in a boring meeting. They are fantastic tools for distraction and avoidance and they have changed the way we behave – often for the worse – in all sorts of situations, at home, at work, in public and private. For many people, they’re the first thing we reach for in the morning and the last thing we see before we go to sleep at night.
Children see us doing all this. Not surprisingly, they want a piece of the action. Who knows what impact this transformation will have in the medium or long term, for us and for them? And if your child has her own personal touchscreen device by her side, always offering the promise of that little hit of dopamine when she unlocks the screen, how much less likely is she to pick up a book, engage in active play or even just daydream? There are plenty of other presents to put under that tree instead.