Sir, – There is a lot of discussion in the newspapers recently about teenagers and smartphones, but not nearly enough discussion about much younger children, who are too young to have their own phones, but are nevertheless spending far too much time staring at them.
As a primary school teacher, I see first hand every day that childhood in our country is in a state of crisis. My colleagues and friends who work in schools representing a cross section of society all agree with me.
Children are starting junior infants lacking many of the very basic skills we would have taken for granted 10 years ago, such as how to have a conversation, how to play with toys, how to pretend, how to focus on a task for more than two minutes.
We are having to teach them the physical skills they should have developed incidentally in fields and playgrounds from the moment they learned to walk, such as how to run, jump, balance, stop without falling over. Our nine and 10 year-olds lack the basic problem-solving skills necessary for living in the world, such as how to lift a latch to open a gate, or what to do when you spill something.
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What has changed so significantly in the lives of pre-school and primary school children in the last five to 10 years?
I am convinced that the culprit is the amount of time they are spending staring at screens.
They are not playing, they are not talking to other people, they are not developing their brains or their bodies as they should in the early years of life. And the result is a generation of children who are grossly ill-equipped for life in the real world.
While a national conversation about teenagers and smartphone ownership is very much needed, we must also urgently address the effects of excessive use of phones, tablets and games consoles on our young children. We are denying them their right to a childhood. – Yours, etc,
AISLING MULLALLY,
Dublin 16.
