This week, I met a friend whom I have not seen for a while. She’s been pretty busy, having her second child, who arrived in December, and looking after her first daughter, who is now two and a half. In addition, she has a highly responsible job in a challenging school and (as I know from having worked alongside her) she has sky-high standards for herself, for her department and for the children she teaches.
It’s been a while since I spent any time with a child under three. According to my friend, the older child was having a significantly bad day, and there was some low-level wriggling, some occasional whingeing and one bout of crying. My friend was visibly mortified, stating that her child was “not normally like this,” while for my part, I was stunned at how advanced the child appeared to be for such a young age. She was so articulate that I genuinely struggled to believe how young she was. She could speak in full sentences and appeared to understand a genuinely remarkable range of vocabulary. It was only her size – which was, in fact, very small for her age – that kept reminding me that she was not even three years old.
It would be easy to assume that this child is some kind of prodigy, or at least that she is highly intelligent, way beyond her peers in ability: but who knows? Only time will tell. Some children (myself included) acquire language skills very quickly but then level off in terms of their academic attainment in line with their peers; my own experience teaches me that being labelled “remarkably bright” can actually be just as much of a lodestone around your neck as being labelled pejoratively, so I would always proceed with caution. In terms of her skills right now, I suspect (as does her mother) that this is simply a child who has not been given an iPad or similar device.
The use of iPads and similar tablet devices with very young children is now so embedded as the norm that, in the space of barely more than a decade, we have grown used to how toddlers are when they have access to them. Because most toddlers have access to them. A YouGov survey states that 85% of six-year olds have access to an iPad or similar device, and nearly half of them have their own personal device. An OfCom study from 2023 states that “Our tracking studies collect data in relation to children aged 3 or above. However, many children start their media journey at a younger age, including using devices. Childwise interviews parents of children aged up to 2 years old, and reports that children of this age may already be able to undertake certain activities using a touch screen, for example, 26% were able to open apps that they wanted to use and 22% were able to take photos with the device.” Ugh. “Their media journey” ?! The fact that this is reported with apparent celebration by OfCom makes me feel genuinely sick.
Sometimes, I cannot even bear to think about the consequences of digital exposure for this very young age group. As a secondary school teacher, I was always aware of the dangers awaiting the older students who spent time unsupervised online. But the impact upon the actual brain development for the very young has not been something that I have spent much time thinking about until recently; now I have reflected upon it, I genuinely tremble for the next generations of children. I have written before about my fears for young people who are permanently wired up to their devices and have shared my agreement with Jonathan Haidt’s findings in his work, The Anxious Generation, in which he argues that children have undergone what he calls a “great rewiring”. He blames the apparent surge in anxiety disorders on the ever-increasing amount of time that children spend on their phones and/or iPads and makes the case for a societal shift away from the expectation that children should be in contact with these devices from a very young age. I had taken on board the impact upon children’s mental health before but it was not until this week that it really hit me the extent to which these devices must be holding back our children’s basic brain and language development.
There is nothing worse than feeling like a pearl-clutching old fusspot, who blames the colour television for the behaviour of local youths. Yet I cannot help but question the wisdom of allowing our children to access a device that is so hell-bent on drawing them into themselves, on cutting them off from normal, day-to-day interactions with other children and with adults. Stories were emerging more than 10 years ago about toddlers becoming so addicted to the use of an iPad that it impeded their development; now, it seems, we just accept it as normal. I truly fear that we are sleepwalking into a crisis, with more and more children displaying apparent signs of neurodivergence, many cases of which may simply be the result of the fact that they have not received the constant stream of ordinary face-to-face human interactions that are required in order to develop their ability to articulate themselves and to socialise with others.
Just think how essential the smallest interactions are for tiny children if they are to develop their language skills, their social skills and their overall grasp of how to be a human. Now think about the fact that we are placing in their hands a device that is designed and built to distract and hold their attention, to divert their gaze and their conscious thought away from other humans and towards the screen. Now factor in the fact that some children find social interaction challenging anyway, that it takes a good deal of practice in their formative years to embed those essential skills. Is it little wonder that children are increasingly held back in these areas, to the extent that meeting one unimpeded by this new normal felt like meeting a savant?
