Heather du Plessis-Allan: The screens are the problem

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

I don't know if you remember - but not long ago on the show we had a debate about screen time and how bad it is for kids.
The question we were asking is - are we all just having a moral panic over screens, or are they as bad as the experts say they are?
And I think we’ve just got more evidence that the latter is true - that screens are a particularly pernicious problem of our age for the little ones.
Teachers are saying there are kids turning up at 5, sometimes 6, at school - and they just can't put sentences together. One teacher said a 6-year-old might say, for example, 'Me go pee' instead of 'I need the toilet'.

And frankly, that's pretty alarming for a 6-year-old. That is what my 2-year-old talks like, a 6-year-old should be way past that situation.
The teacher said that they had been teaching for 24 years, and they've never seen this low level of language. And what they’re putting it down to is too much screen time. Just too much TV, too much iPad.
And apparently, it's gotten worse since Covid, where screens became baby-sitters during lockdown and parents haven’t snapped out of it.
I recently spoke to a grandmother who doesn’t think 3 hours of TV a day - on multiple days - is a bad thing for a toddler. And obviously, that's a bad thing.
The problem with that is no one’s talking to the kid for three hours, or reading them a book, or showing them how to properly structure a sentence about wanting to go to the bathroom.
I have no idea what’s going on here with parents if they don't understand that this is a problem, I don't know how you fix it if it isn't obvious to parents that their child, at 6, isn't talking properly.

But teachers are right to feel frustrated at this, this is not their job.

I argue a lot of stuff about what they need to do in the classroom - but this is not their job. They're right to expect a 5-year-old to turn up at school knowing how to string sentences together. This is squarely on parents.
The evidence is now overwhelming that too much screen time is bad for kids - and if we're being honest about it, parents have known this since the 1980s.
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