Emine Saner’s article on screen time and toddlers identifies a key symptom, but doesn’t pay enough attention to the deeper diagnosis (How screen time affects toddlers: ‘We’re losing a big part of being human’, 22 January). The problem isn’t simply that children are watching screens. It’s that they’re not creating anything meaningful.
For 11 years, Red Paper Plane has worked with more than 30,000 children in Bulgaria using a project-based learning programme we call Design Champions. As part of it, five- to 10-year-old children don’t consume content – they become park designers, car engineers and city architects. They work on “missions” lasting weeks, solving real problems with real materials.
The contrast with the children described in your article is stark. While reception teachers watch children make cardboard iPhones because “that’s what they know”, our children build models of their dream playgrounds and present them to their communities. Same age, radically different outcomes.
What your article describes isn’t a screen problem, but a purpose problem. Children who spend hours passively consuming are missing the serve-and-return interactions that build language and social skills. But the solution isn’t simply less screen time. It’s more meaningful time: hands-on projects, collaborative challenges, real-world problems scaled for small hands and increasingly large minds. Maria Montessori understood this a century ago. Children don’t need better content delivery – they need environments where they can act on the world, not just watch it.
The forthcoming UK government guidance on screen use should address not just duration, but purpose. The question isn’t how many hours children spend on screens, but what experiences they’re missing – and how we can design early years education to restore what’s being lost.
Georgi Kamov
Co-founder, Red Paper Plane
• Thank you for publishing this much-needed article about screen time and child development. I write as a psychologist who’s studied child development and the critical role of the early years in establishing a child’s sense of self, world, self-esteem, trust and attachment.
The brain is rapidly developing during the first five years, and that development is critical and dependent on the child’s interaction with its primary “object”, typically the mother. It sets the stage for that child’s life, relationships, ability to trust and attach to others, and its sense of self and of others. Basically, the child’s personal/emotional, psychological, social and cognitive development.
The “hard wiring” is being established and is not easily amenable to change.
I live, unfortunately, in the US, where we have a very sick society focused on money and power as success. There are many things wrong, but I’m often heartsick about child-rearing. We don’t really value child-rearing here and often look down on those who chose to be stay-at-home moms. But the critical obstacle is typically financial. We do not support child-rearing in any way that’s even close to what’s needed. Take some of the Scandinavian countries that offer long paid parental leave and child subsidies, plus other benefits.
What’s really lacking, profoundly lacking, is an understanding of child development and how the brain is growing and “hardwiring” the child’s experiences and establishing the foundations for its sense of self, self-esteem, trust and attachment etc, as I mentioned above. This has got to be understood by everyone in order to emphasise the critical importance of these early years. Or perhaps people don’t want to know, because it might mean making big changes in their lives, if they can even afford them.
I often recommend an excellent book called A General Theory of Love, which addresses the critical importance of these early years, child-rearing and brain development.
Lisa Harms
St Petersburg, Florida, US
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