The signatories to the letter on children’s lifestyles (Screen-based lifestyle harms children’s health, 26 December) make the usual error – compounded by your selective headline – of lumping an enormous variety of cultural experience into one category: “screen-based”, which is then labelled as merely “technology”. This makes about as much sense as lumping all printed matter together under the heading of “paper-based technology”. We know that’s a silly idea because we know that printed matter includes a vast range of cultural products, from novels to cereal packets. Screen-based content is just as diverse. Instead of wringing our hands over the long-established fact that children start to access this content during their first year of life, could we start to give some informed attention to how children begin to “learn about the culture they are born into” (to quote one of the signatories to the letter) and consider the possibility that some screen-based material may be enjoyed and valued by both parents and children, and may make a serious contribution to children’s social and emotional development?
Cary Bazalgette
Researcher on children and moving-image media, UCL Institute of Education
• The harmful nature of the screen was revealed in an experiment by neuroscientist Patricia Kuhl quoted in the National Geographic in January 2015. She taught Mandarin sounds to two groups of babies, with one group through personal interaction and with the other through video, and was astonished to find that while the first group learned extremely well, the second learned nothing whatsoever. The reason is that there was a subtle energetic exchange in the interaction between children and carer, whereas machines cannot register or transmit energy other than their own mechanical signals. This is detectable only by the new “quantum” science.
Grethe Hooper Hansen
Retired teacher, Bath
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