When I was a nipper, a staple of children’s television was a show called Why Don’t You? The full title, as the theme song made clear, was: “Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?” Very “meta”, as we didn’t then say. And, of course, generations of children sat on the sofa gormlessly drinking Um Bongo while we watched the show’s cast demonstrate all the wholesome arts-and-crafts activities we could have been doing instead of watching TV. This was a few years before our parents discovered the joys of eating microwave TV dinners while watching Master Chef.
A previous generation feared that the rise of television would put an end to children reading. It didn’t
I start with this to give a bit of context. A nagging sense that children are losing their childhoods to screen-based entertainments – that they are passively consuming a mediated version of the world rather than actively participating in it – isn’t a new thing. It was well enough established that children’s television could make a knowing joke about it half a century ago. That’s why I think the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce – interviewed ahead of a lecture he’s delivering on Thursday titled “The Kids Are Not Alright” – is right to temper his concerns about screens a little. He says he’s an optimist. “I don’t think AI and technology is going to bulldoze us. We have to learn to master it, and I think we can.”
We have, after all, been here before. A previous generation feared that the rise of television would put an end to children reading. It didn’t. As long ago as 1954, the Himmelweit Report discovered that contra the doomsayers “book-reading comes into its own, not despite television but rather because of it.” In some ways TV helped bring children to books, through adaptations and book content such as Jackanory.
But at the same time, the screen-based entertainments of today aren’t the same as television. They are precision-engineered to be neurologically addictive. And Cottrell-Boyce puts his finger on something when he says: “There’s a big difference between happiness and distraction, and quite a lot of the time that we spend in leisure online we’re in a kind of suspended state. It literally passes the time, but that’s not what happiness is.” He describes the YouTube and TikTok content that so absorbs our children as “sedation” rather than entertainment. Shades of Soma in Brave New World.
Take Cocomelon, the bewilderingly successful YouTube channel, not much noticed in adult media, which Cottrell-Boyce talks about in his forthcoming book A British Childhood. It’s a ceaselessly stimulating primary-coloured narcotic slop: “like crack” for preschoolers, as one critic put it. Some toddlers start school never having encountered a book and pinch the pictures to try to zoom them. And many kids (or adults) don’t feel they’ve had an experience unless it’s mediated through a device. Out on a walk, if my kids see a pretty butterfly, they’ll immediately demand a phone to photograph it (photo to vanish into the iCloud vault never to be seen again). Cottrell-Boyce describes watching Liverpool at Anfield and seeing the live audience around him watching the match through the screens on their phones as they film it.
As the Anfield example and countless others like it – been to a concert lately? – show, it’s not just reading but unmediated human experience that the digital ecosystem is chiselling away at. ChatGPT does our reading and writing for us; our phones do our experiencing for us; distraction, rather than engagement, becomes the default mode of passing the time. That’s existing, rather than living.
So how do we counteract all this? We have to start early. Cottrell-Boyce rightly emphasises the “invisible privilege” of being read to as a child. The statistics already show what a difference this can make to educational outcomes; and it’s not doing just cognitive but emotional work. Brain scans show the way reader and read-to connect. And common sense tells us that when you read to a child, it’s not just that you have the child’s undivided attention, but that the child has yours. If they’re reading The Gruffalo, Mum and Dad for a few precious minutes aren’t scrolling their phones. Early exposure to the music of language, and to the ancient satisfactions of narrative storytelling, can set the hook for life. (And, I gather from talking to booksellers, that hook once set stays in place: children who do drift away from reading in their tweens often return to it later.)
I’d add: let’s not panic unduly about screens or make the futile attempt to eliminate them from childhood altogether. The digital world is the world into which these children are growing up. Screens should supplement rather than replace analogue life; just as television did. There’s a world of difference between searching the internet for reliable sources to expand your understanding of a given subject and letting the AI idiot-machine do your thinking for you. As Cottrell-Boyce suggests, it’s not technology itself that is the problem: it’s how we use it. “We need to be in charge of it, we don’t need it to be in charge of us.” Amen. And if you can keep your phone in your pocket during that Liverpool game, you really will never walk alone. So why don’t you?
