British children are being "poisoned" by a culture of processed food, computer games and over-competitive education, a group of academics and authors claimed today. The Guardian quotes a letter to the Daily Telegraph, in which 110 teachers, psychologists and children's authors have called on the government to prevent the death of childhood. But they don’t really analyse why children’s lives have changed like this and whether turning back the clock is any kind of possibility.
British children are being "poisoned" by a culture of processed food, computer games and over-competitive education, a group of academics and authors claimed today. The Guardian quotes a letter to the Daily Telegraph, in which 110 teachers, psychologists and children's authors have called on the government to prevent the death of childhood. But they don’t really analyse why children’s lives have changed like this and whether turning back the clock is any kind of possibility.
The authors of the letter - who include children's writers Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson, the former children's laureate Michael Morpurgo and the director of the Royal Institution, Baroness Greenfield - warn that children need to develop as human beings.
"Since children's brains are still developing, they cannot adjust as full-grown adults can, to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change," the letter says.
"They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to 'junk'), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives," they write.
The experts condemn Britain's increasingly "target-driven" education system and urge the government to recognise children's need for more time and space to develop, demanding an urgent public debate on child rearing in the 21st century.
"They also need time. In a fast-moving, hyper-competitive culture, today's children are expected to cope with an ever earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum," they say.
I feel that many parents today are more concerned about their children’s lives and upbringing than children in earlier generations – they are more focussed on them and spend more time with them than my parents did, for example. On the whole I believe the clock cannot be turned back – the Pandora’s box of computer games and the internet and processed food are already here and nobody is going to push them back again. They will not fail to develop into human beings –they’ll just be different to the previous generations and will have to cope with a new range of pressures.
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