A stand has been taken in the UK by leading academics, teachers, authors and charity leaders who have come together to urge the Government against what they say is an attack on children’s wellbeing and mental health due to the pressures of modern life.

They have written to British newspaper The Telegraph asking the Government to address issues which allow children “too much too soon”. The letter was signed by 228 experts involved in children’s wellbeing.

Their suggestions include banning all forms of advertising aimed at the youngest children, the establishment of a play-based curriculum for infants, a public information campaign warning of the dangers of screen-based entertainment and they want to let people know of the dangers of a “consumerist, screen-based lifestyle”.

The lobby group includes Philip Pullman, the children’s author, Baroness Greenfield, the Oxford University neuroscientist, Lord Layard, emeritus professor of economics at the London School of Economics, and the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Rev Tim Stevens.

The letter says “Although parents are now deeply concerned about this issue, the erosion of childhood in the UK has continued apace since 2006. Our children are subjected to increasing commercial pressures, they begin formal education far earlier than the European norm, and they spend ever-more time indoors with screen-based technology, rather than in active outdoor activity and play… The time has come to move from awareness to action.”

These leading experts say that Britain has the “lowest levels of children’s wellbeing in the developed world” and is regularly placed “at or near the top of international league tables on almost all indicators of teenage distress and disaffection”.

Dr Richard House, senior lecturer at Roehampton University’s Research Centre for Therapeutic Education told the Telegraph “The inexorable momentum of modern ¬technological life is such that despite the awareness raised through the September 2006 Telegraph open letter on ‘toxic childhood’, matters have improved very little.”

“We also live in an age of seemingly ever-mounting anxiety; and when the adult world is unable to contain and process its own anxieties in a mature way, they inevitably get projected on to children, resulting in countless well-intentioned but often highly inappropriate intrusions into children’s experience that leave children’s true needs misunderstood and neglected.”

Sally Goddard Blythe, the director of the Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology in Chester, said “Increasingly, I am seeing children with no single, obvious cause but general lifestyle issues that seem to be contributing to the fact that they are not developing motor skills in the way they did 20 years ago. They are spending more time in front of computer games and electronic media, meaning they have less opportunity to go out and play, explore and take risks.”

Writer Helen Splarn. Editor Dr Ramesh Manocha.
Source: The Telegraph (UK)