From the chapter ‘Digital‘
Nicholas Carlisle, Child psychotherapist and founder of No Bully and Power of Zero
Childhood is undergoing its most significant transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Widespread access to internet-connected devices has resulted in children spending much of their waking hours in front of a screen. Children’s online use accelerated rapidly in the first two decades of this century, with the introduction of the tablet in 2000, the arrival of the iPhone in 2007 and popular social media platforms such as Instagram in 2010 and TikTok in 2016.
For children living in the more developed cities of the world, their first interactions with screens typically begins when they are just four months old.[i] By the time they are eight, children in these regions average five hours of screen time each day, not including schoolwork.[ii]
The unintended consequences of childhood going online
Many of us who work with children are concerned at the unintended consequences of a child’s increasing screentime.
My first encounter with the shadowy side of the Information Revolution was in the early 2000s. I had created and was running an anti-bullying program called No Bully through which we heard heart-wrenching stories of online bullying. There are many similarities between cyberbullying and face-to-face bullying, and it is often the same students being bullied online who are the target of school-based bullying during the day. But cyberbullying is particularly devastating. When a bully goes online, and they can no longer see the whites of their victim’s eyes, their empathy – which generally serves as a brake on aggression – can all too easily fade to zero. And when a post goes viral, it is often extraordinarily difficult to remove it.
The fact that children are spending so much time interacting with a screen also appears to have real impacts on their mental health. One study suggests that screen time beyond an hour a day is associated with reduced psychological well-being in children, including less curiosity, lower self-control, more distractibility, more difficulty making friends, less emotional stability, being more difficult to care for, and inability to finish tasks.[iii]
As a former child therapist I was not surprised by these results. Anything that you spend hours doing each day is going to have a significant influence on your life. Sitting and staring at a bright screen for many hours can harm physical health. Childhood myopia (that is, short sightedness) among American children has more than doubled over the last 50 years,[iv] and a strong correlation has been established between increased screen time and childhood obesity.
How do we ensure children’s well-being in an online world?
Several years ago I invited colleagues from various United Nations agencies responsible for children, big tech companies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) around the world to join me in answering this question: how do we ensure children’s well-being in an online world? We recognised the extraordinary potential of the internet, and that the online world exposes children to the risk of disturbing content, unwanted contact and commercial exploitation.[v]
Our conclusion was in engaging the influence of education, and in particular, the power of early learning. Strong early learning translates into higher levels of skills at later ages, because skills beget skills.
Increasingly governments around the world have seen the importance of educational systems focusing on a ‘breadth of skills’ approach and teaching more than literacy and numeracy[vi] by including social and emotional skills.
Social competence and positive social behaviour depend on a child’s ability to self-regulate attention, emotion and behaviour. Self-regulation involves the ability to actively and flexibly direct one’s own behaviour, emotions and attention through effortful internal control, and involves the ability to inhibit the expression of a behaviour, emotion or focus of attention when this is required.[vii] This needs to be a vital part of education to ensure children’s well-being in an online world.
Children’s success in navigating their online lives will require them to regulate their inner world and understand the feelings and needs of others as they form friendships online. Similarly, their ability to self-regulate online will impact their offline lives. They will need critical thinking skills to identify whom they can trust and what they can believe in a time of growing misinformation and deepfakes.[viii] They will need to develop resilience and learn to problem-solve as they deal with the exponential levels of risk that the online world affords. Values of respect, kindness and inclusivity will be as important in this new world as they have ever been, given, as seen above, the internet’s tendency to allow disinhibition, hate speech and blunting of empathy. Children need to learn how to focus their attention and make wise choices about where they place their attention.
However, the skills education that children in the UK receive today looks little different than it did two decades ago. In particular there has been little adjustment to the fact that children are online from their earliest years, and that many of them will spend the majority of their lives interacting with a screen.
My recommendations to governments and policy makers are two-fold:
- Provide every young child with access to quality early education programming that includes social and emotional learning. The UK needs to ensure that the early educators who operate the early learning centres are trained how to teach social and emotional skills, and to give them free and easy access to learning activities, books and games that can support their teaching.
- Ensure that social and emotional programmes teach the skills that children need to navigate their increasingly online lives. Young children are online from their earliest years, but the statutory guidelines for their education[ix] make no mention of their online worlds. We need to reach children early in life (when their online journey is beginning), and ensure that educational programming includes teaching the competencies and skills that address the reality of their online–offline lives.
If we are serious about a future where all children can thrive, we need to implement these changes now.
Notes
[i] Christakis, E. (2017) The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups, New York: Penguin Books.
[ii] Common Sense Media (2017) The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Age Zero to Eight, San Francisco, CA: Common Sense Media.
[iii] Twenge, J. and Campbell, W.K. (2018) ‘Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study’, Preventive Medicine Reports, 12: 271–83.
[iv] Keek School of Medicine of USC (University of Southern California) (2016) ‘Too much screen time is raising rate of childhood myopia’, Keck School News, 22 January, https://keck.usc.edu/too-much-screen-time-is-raising-rate-of-childhood-myopia
[v] Livingstone, S., Davidson, J., Bryce, J., Batool, S., Haughton, C. and Nandi, A. (2017) Children’s Online Activities, Risks and Safety: A Literature Review by the UKCCIS Evidence Group, October, London: UK Council for Child Internet Safety, Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, LSE Media and Communications, Middlesex University and UCLan, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/759005/Literature_Review_Final_October_2017.pdf
[vi] Brookings Institute (2016) Visualizing the Breadth of Skills Movement Across Education Systems, Skills for a Changing World, http://skills.brookings.edu
[vii] Getting Ready (2005) ‘School Readiness Indicators Initiative: A 17 state partnership’, Kids Count, www.gettingready.org
[viii] Deepfakes are videos, photos and audio created by a form of artificial intelligence called ‘deep learning’ to make images of fake events, hence the name, ‘deepfake’. This phenomenon is on the rise.
[ix] DfE (Department for Education) (2021) Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage: Setting the Standards for Learning, Development and Care for Children from Birth to Five, 31 March, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/974907/EYFS_framework_-_March_2021.pdf