Spending long periods of time in front of it affects their mental health

British expert: Screens should not control the present and future of our children

Sonia Livingston is the author of several books on children and technology.

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Dr. Sonia Livingstone at the London School of Economics, one of the world's leading experts in the field of minors and technology, spoke about the challenges children and parents face due to digital transformation.

During the past two decades, she has authored 20 books and written hundreds of scientific articles in this regard.

The following are excerpts from an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais:

■ Is there any evidence that digital education for children will make them different adults from us?

■■ There is a lot of growing evidence about their deteriorating mental health.

■ You mean teenagers?

■■ People think it's worse than that, but now it's more visible, and people can talk about it more.

And the boys talk about it more.

The boys were never used to mental health problems. Previously, they were just angry.

Now, they have mental health issues.

But there isn't much evidence that they pay less attention or that their brains work differently.

In fact, when I talk to young people, I find them wonderful.

■ Parents' fear of technology is overwhelming.

Why?

■■ We have always been afraid of technology and change.

But in the '80s we were very optimistic about computers.

There was an old talk about push and pull.

It's the tug of television and the tug of computers.

And people thought that everything was on the computer, and it could be used to find friends and information.

■ We haven't stopped using it, either.

■■ Can we imagine a world without it?

We lived there for years.

Do we really want to go back 30 years?

I think most people don't want that.

They like that Google can know the answers to a lot of questions.

And there are a lot of things it offers that we are not sure enough of.

In fact, people like to be able to find other people, their own hobby or their niche identity.

They love to have very diverse and streaming content.

■ But when we talk about children, everything looks bad.

■■ There are a lot of benefits for children, but we need to take a step back from the screen and think about the balance in a child's life.

And what I'm saying is that we focus too much on screens, when there's a lot of other stuff.

There is a lot of social inequality, and there is a really unclear future in many ways.

Not many problems were resolved.

And so we focus on screens, because we think we can control that.

■ You have written that Internet use presents “opportunities and risks” for children.

What would you say to parents who put off screen use for as long as possible?

Do they delay opportunities too?

■■ Some of them.

There are a lot of parents who don't really know how to provide their children with great educational and creative opportunities.

And the internet is full of them, if you know where to focus.

There are a lot of parents whose jobs don't give them any time to play with their kids, and there are great opportunities to play online.

■ Why is it difficult to identify evidence of a relationship between screens and children's behaviour?

■■ There are a number of reasons.

The first is that we don't use good language about digital technologies or what they have to offer;

Nor do we have a way to describe what's on screen, and the types of digital content we're watching.

We've put that up for TV, but we haven't done that now.

There are also some real ethical problems.

We can't do experiments on children that might harm them, and it takes years for many of the results we care about to emerge.

It is, too, an underfunded field.

We need to step back from the screen, and think about the balance in a child's life.

There are a lot of parents who don't really know how to provide their children with great educational and creative opportunities.

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