Childhood wasted before screen

Simon Rowley. Picture / Kenny Rodger

Meet Sarah who is battling to keep control of 13-year-old Will's electronic life. That's far from easy. Both parents are working and there are three children, aged 17, 13 and 9. Among them they have three PCs, two laptops and a tablet, three TVs, two DVDs and countless PlayStations, Gameboys and Nintendos.

They keep the PCs in their downstairs "homework room" and TV and computer games are allowed only at weekends.

Trouble is, it is difficult to distinguish between legitimate online research and games.

Will* also has his own laptop, which was compulsory at school in Year 6 to 8. He is meant to use it for homework, but 43-year-old Sarah* says: "We'll wake at midnight, hear a sound, and he'll be sitting up in bed watching a DVD."

Similarly in the homework room: "I'll hear certain noises, go in, and he's slipped in to Neopets.com or snuck into the office to play games with someone online in America."

And then there is plain old TV - sitting, snacking and watching bro'Town, and more, for hours on end. That can wreck kids in a different way.

It is all part of a pattern which 110 British teachers, psychologists and children's authors want their Government to stop. Speaking out last month, they called it "the death of childhood" - the end product of major social, cultural and technological changes that are making children more depressed, stressed and pressured than ever before.

They wrote: "Children still need what developing human beings have always needed - real food (as opposed to processed "junk"), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), firsthand experience of the world they live in, and regular interaction with the significant adults in their lives."

They also need time just to be children.

Dr Peter Watson, of child and adolescent health services in South Auckland, says there are worrying signs here too.

As principal investigator of the first large-scale national survey of those aged 12 to 18, he is alarmed by their high levels of depression and the violence and graphic sexual content on TV, DVDs and electronic games.

"Solid research shows that watching violence desensitises young people to pain and suffering," Watson says.

In other words, if they see people beaten up often enough on TV they're less likely to take it seriously, and more likely to kick someone in the head - and probably, on some level, expect him to get up afterwards.

Other research shows that today's children are more fearful - unsurprising when an average night's 6pm news shows scenes of car crashes and disasters such as houses teetering on the edges of cliffs.